Compliance as a replacement for assimilation

[Gosling 9]

Please forgive me if someone has already posted this exact same idea before. I often don’t read all of the posts on the forum.

My suggestion is to change the primary way province stability is permanently increased to increasing the ‘compliance’ of the province’s population instead of assimilating the population to your own culture.

One of the most popular requests it seems is the addition of a culture system. One of the main reasons for this is that in AOH II it is virtually impossible to create long term multi ethnic empires. If one, for example, wanted to add a 1900 scenario with a realistic Austro-Hungarian Empire where the Austrian(-Hungarian) culture is only a majority in Austria (and Hungary) and the rest of the provinces are 80/90 percent Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, etc. this would not work. The AI would immediately begin assimilating the provinces which would eventually cause all of them to become majority Austro-Hungarian culture within 100 turns at most. The empire would now be permanently stable with very little chance of parts of it rebelling and becoming independent and it would be as if those provinces never had any large minorities in them.

If instead, the stability of a province could be increased by increasing a separate ‘compliance’ level of the population then creating long term multi-ethnic  empires in scenario’s becomes possible. Such a ‘compliance’ system could also allow for much more variation than the assimilation system. The simplest form of this system would be to replace the assimilation button with an ‘increase compliance’ button that raises the ‘compliance’ level during a period equivalent to what would be 50 turns in AOH II. ‘Compliance’ could also be increased however with certain decisions or laws that could apply to specific cultures (quick examples would be: permit schools to teach in the language of [culture X] or increase religious freedom for [culture Y]).

'Compliance' would be less permanent than assimilation which would mean that catastrophic events such as, wars, diseases, oppressive laws or the rise of ideas like nationalism could drastically lower 'compliance' and cause previously stable lands to become a problem once more. This would add much more variety to the game and result in a much more realistic break up of large empires.

I want to also make clear that assimilation should NOT be removed outright but that it should be reworked into a much more costly and expensive  process that can also cause extra unrest in a province. I think that @OwmM3Z0 suggestion to use settlers for assimilation, combined with a very slow passive assimilation caused by people intermarrying or adopting the ruling culture would work well with this system.

[Gosling 9]

I think I need to clarify a few things about this post:

With 'Culture system' I meant a system in which a civ's culture and can be different from its name, different cultures can be grouped together depending on their similarity in larger groups (for example Germanic cultures). The system I'm proposing would work well with a culture system but is NOT a culture system and would not require the implementation of a culture system.

I also want to give a more concrete example of how population stability would be calculated with this new system:

In AOC II population stability is more or less the percentage of your population increased by a factor of about 1.5. For example if 20 percent of the population is your own population then stability will be somewhere around 30 percent.

In the system I'm proposing every single population group would have its own default 'compliance' level and the total stability would be the average of these levels. For example:
Your pop (population 45%, compliance level 90%) 0.45 x 0.9 = 0,405
Pop A (population 35% compliance level 20%) 0.35 x 0.2  = 0,07
Pop B (population 20% compliance level 30%) 0.2 x 0.3 =0.06
Total population stability = (0,405 + 0.07 + 0,06) x 100% = 53,5%

Where there is now an assimilate button in the menu, there would be a button to increase the 'compliance' level of certain populations in a province. By default this button would increase compliance for all populations except your own but you could also choose to increase the compliance of only a single or a few specific populations.

The reason I put compliance in between quotes everywhere is also because I don't know if it's the best name for this system.