Europa Universalis IV

[what am i doing]

tl;dr EUV will be balanced and MP-ready on release

So the thing you have to understand - or maybe you are already aware - is that in mainstream leftist thought, there is no inherent IQ difference between races. This either comes from a bizarre belief that evolution does not affect the human brain or aspects of humans that pertain to it, or the equally bizarre belief that human IQ is not biological and is unaffected by the processing substrate that a mind is running on (the brain). According to leftists, if you control for things like economic circumstances, every race has the same average IQ, and there's certainly no difference in creativity and ability for abstract thought. So the idea here is that Europeans just happened to be lucky in the way their society formed, to be very conducive to technological advancement, and if European society had happened to be different then they would not have had massive technological advancement and, similarly, if society in, say, Africa had happened to be different than it was historically, Africa would have been just as advanced as Europe.

Paradox is leftist. As such, they adhere the doctrine that IQ is not correlated in any way to race. This idea in Paradox games actually goes back a long way. Look at Vicky 2 for example, you'll note that research (and thus inventions which are made available by research) is tied to literacy, and while literacy varies by country to mainly be in line with historical literacy rates, it's not actually tied to race. Which makes sense for literacy in a vacuum (learning to read is not hard), but not for Vicky 2 where literacy is used as a proxy for intelligence and actually enables you to bring any African nation up to the "intelligence" of many European nations if you manage your country exceptionally well and/or extend the end date. So Paradox has been at this for quite a while when you get right down to it, it's just that they used to make Grand Strategy games so they had to have somewhat realistic outcomes, and that meant that even if the method of simulation was somewhat mechanically unrealistic, it still had to produce fairly plausible/historical results within the game's designed playable time period. So it was on the "down low" so to speak.

Take this view of intelligence and technological advancement a step further and you can see how Paradox would justify that if inventions and technology were all down to Europeans being "lucky" rather than for deterministic reasons like environmental pressures selecting against low intelligence and creating populations with different mental capabilities and optimisation, then there's no reason to tie inventions and technology to Europe in the first place, and Paradox continues its downward spiral towards becoming a maker of 4X games.

 

[thesecret1]

Yeah, this is the official narrative, and maintaining that different races have different IQ is asking to be branded a racist and possibly arrested (we're talking europe, after all).

Paradox continues its downward spiral towards becoming a maker of 4X games.

They haven't made as GSG in years. HoI4 is a meme mockery rather than any serious attempt at a wargame, and Imperator a fully 4X game by design.

 

[AwesomeButton]

You don't need to give different races different ingame IQ to represent Western Europe's development since the end of the 15th century

 

[attackfighter]

IQ variation wouldn't explain why Europe hit the industrial revolution before China, Japan, and so forth even if it did exist (note: I do believe it exists). Institutions -- legal, political, economic -- surely played a big role in that. You also have stuff like geographical factors leading to trade and thus technological diffusion across Eurasia, especially parts of it with access to rivers and seas.

One theory for why the IR started in the West rather than East is that, since European populations were always collapsing from plagues, that incentivized development of labor-saving technologies to compensate for scarcity in that resource. China, by contrast, was both populous and stable.

Another theory is that coming out of the chaos of the early middle ages, Europe's industries were concentrated in a network of small towns where professionals could easily communicate with each other and share discoveries, whereas the more politically stable and competent Chinese East had its industries more diffused across villages and stuff. Capital became geographically concentrated in Europe in order to contend with the threats posed by political disorder.

One interesting theory pertaining to Human Bio-Diversity is that it's actually only African Americans who have a post-Flynn effect IQ of 85 and that African natives are perfectly fine. There's some evidence to support this.

Another thing to account for is that IQ in the past was likely hugely suppressed by the prevalence of malnutrition, parasites, and other harmful environmental influences. My guess would be that hunter-gatherers who have lower populations due to chronic warfare and who have greater variety and nutritional value in their diets would have higher IQs than agriculturalists who largely subsist on grains, are at the carrying capacity of their environment much of the time, and whose population density makes them vulnerable to disease and other scourges.

 

[HeroMarine]

learning to read is not hard

nice humblebrag there brah

You don't need to give different races different ingame IQ to represent Western Europe's development since the end of the 15th century

True, you don't NEEEED... but where is the fun in that.

Let me shill for this mod for the nth time, let me see if it's still available (it's very problematic (and disgusting!)):

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=840179139

I still everytime I see this live.

 

[thesecret1]

IQ variation wouldn't explain why Europe hit the industrial revolution before China, Japan, and so forth even if it did exist

There are naturally other factors to consider, especially compared to Asia. Namely the fact that stable societies in bountiful areas tend to technologically stagnate (example: ancient Egypt, which saw little innovation throughout its lifespan, compared to ancient Mesopotamia, which enjoyed a lot more of it thanks to its far less hospitable environment), which is the case of China - while an invasion happened here and there, little changed for the vast majority of the populace, and there was no force really forcing them to adapt (hell, even today's China has countryside basically on par with middle ages in many places). Similar goes for Japan - while there were many periods of infighting, it was just that - fighting against other Japanese. Isolationism led to stagnation (as can be further corroborated by the rapid techologial advancement of Japan after it dropped its isolationist stance). Europe gained its primacy chielfy due to frequent warfare with many, many different peoples - suffering drove the need for adaptation, and meeting various cultures (thorugh warfare or trade) provided the ideas needed to fuel it. Meeting different flows of thought is useless without the incentive to actually utilize them (case of China), and suffering alone without something contesting your view of the world and inspiring you will lead to staying in the old tracks, just trying to go bigger with more troops and thicker walls rather than inventing new weapons for them (case of Japan).

Of course, none of this applies if you are literally retarded, which is the case of Africa.

 

[Tigranes]

Usually, any difference like "X kids get lower test scores than Y" is the outcome of multiple historical factors, it's not the single cause that explains history. It doesn't make the resulting difference any less significant to say that it possibly happened due to a mix of geographical, epidemiological and other emergent factors. That's how history works. And with something as massive as the puzzle of European modernisation, well, I suppose armchair folks will always think they know exactly what happened with humanity across the globe over thousands of years to precisely explain it.

The stupidity with EU / Institutions is that the game has no theory of what it would look like for any nation to get on a path to industrial revolution, or early modern science / natural philosophy, etc, etc. So the earlier system of built-in penalties & 'Westernise' button doesn't offer any theory of how modernisation happens, but it just decides to follow what happened in history - that for whatever mix of complicated reasons, Europe made a surge ahead of the rest of the world during this time period. That was fine, the game is all about the age of European domination to begin with, a real period in history. Now, you have a system that wants to let you go for truly alternative histories, but the entire game mechanics are utterly incapable of supporting it in any sensible way. Instead it's just an even more blatant reduction to "earn points, spend points".

 

[Sergiu64]

Maybe there's some kind of goldilocks combination of strife vs stability that drives innovation? Cause Europe had the same situation of many small countries competing vs each other for well over a millennia - and instead of improving on Greek inventions they regressed. Hell they were behind the middle east in tech advances for much of that period.

Or maybe Europe just got lucky? Managed to get the right invention at the right time. Drove the next right invention, then the next and it snowballed in a true 4x fashion?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

nstead of improving on Greek inventions they regressed. Hell they were behind the middle east in tech advances for much of that period.

it's called "christianity".

 

[Sergiu64]

it's called "christianity".

Sure, Theocracy also ended up stifling Middle Eastern advances as well. But Christianity stuck around for a while - why did it prevent advancement for a thousand years and then suddenly stopped doing so in Europe? Why was China not advancing despite the absence of Christianity?

Seems like there are a number of factors that either promoted advancement or stifled it. And the balance needed to firmly tip in the side of advancement for advancement to actually start happening. So add: competition, trade, exposure to multiple cultures. What else? Republics? People with free time and access to education? Subtract - Strong religion, isolation, strong homogeneous countries, depopulating events?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

"inquisition" vs "renaissance".

 

[fantadomat]

nstead of improving on Greek inventions they regressed. Hell they were behind the middle east in tech advances for much of that period.

it's called "christianity".

Not really,the innovative progress was lost due to german barbarians not being big on books.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

nigga please https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei

 

[Sergiu64]

nstead of improving on Greek inventions they regressed. Hell they were behind the middle east in tech advances for much of that period.

it's called "christianity".

Not really,the innovative progress was lost due to german barbarians not being big on books.

Meh, the Romans themselves did not progress much and in fact their empire became Greek due to the superiority of Greek culture. And you can't blame only the Germanics - there were a whole host of nations that could have opened some books. But most of them decided they were too busy surviving to look around themselves and try to figure out what the world was and how they could improve their lives.

Speaking of which, the Greeks did have something special in them for a bit - so much progress in a few hundred years.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Let me shill for this mod for the nth time, let me see if it's still available (it's very problematic (and disgusting!)):

Crude but effective.

Seems I have to post this a second time in the span of two weeks. So much the better:

 

[HeroMarine]

Meh, the Romans themselves did not progress much and in fact their empire became Greek due to the superiority of Greek culture. And you can't blame only the Germanics - there were a whole host of nations that could have opened some books.

 

[Tigranes]

I mean, what I wanted to see was them go the Historical route after EU2, and really try to model in finer detail some of the things that we know had a major, major impact. It's all well and good for random Codexers to rant about their personal theory of civilisation and race and culture, but there are things that we know were a major deal that the game just doesn't model at all.

Why not learn from CK2 and implement the massive spread of vermin, disease and population killing epidemics when colonisation happens? Why not have event chains where your entire European landing armies are decimated by unknown diseases, and/or cases where half the native population is wiped out? What about the risk of all that being brought back to Europe on ships?

Slaves are already a commodity in the trading system, so why not expand on that - e.g. provinces get a % to flip to trading slaves instead of their original good, because the settler demand for slaves suddenly fucks up the economy and any sense of value and everybody just wants to sell slaves to white man? What about building in small risks for slave mutinies and such for the slaver side?

It doesn't really make sense to make a game where you say "it starts in 1452, but maybe within 200 years Upper Mongolia could invent Western Philosophy instead". If you wanted to really model such altenrative paths properly you'd need a radically different design. (Hell, you could argue that kind of stuff is better done with something like Civ, and EU should have stuck to being a follow-the-history-book game.)

 

[Preben]

nigga please https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei

Galileo literally personally insulted the Pope, who happened to be vindictive enough to have him punished on any available grounds.

Nowadays they plant weed or child porn before arrest for the same purpose.

 

[fantadomat]

nstead of improving on Greek inventions they regressed. Hell they were behind the middle east in tech advances for much of that period.

it's called "christianity".

Not really,the innovative progress was lost due to german barbarians not being big on books.

Meh, the Romans themselves did not progress much and in fact their empire became Greek due to the superiority of Greek culture. And you can't blame only the Germanics - there were a whole host of nations that could have opened some books. But most of them decided they were too busy surviving to look around themselves and try to figure out what the world was and how they could improve their lives.

Speaking of which, the Greeks did have something special in them for a bit - so much progress in a few hundred years.

Ahh i am not solely blaming german barbarians about the fall of the roman empire,but about the lost of technological progress done in the empire. Also saying that muh the romans became greeks is retarded lol,they are very different people with different achievements. You can't just generalize them in such a way. Romans did have an enormous progress when it came down to architecture and engineering,mainly because it engineers had big field experience. Also you are ignoring time lines,at apex of the roman empire,the greeks were just shadow of what they were in their golden age. And that technological degradation was mainly in the west,the rest of the world did kept its knowledge.....which was kind of useless when it came down to war. For example Bulgaria we heavily influenced by the Byzantines and we had shitters and public bath centuries before the west stop shitting on their streets.

 

[Sergiu64]

Ahh i am not solely blaming german barbarians about the fall of the roman empire,but about the lost of technological progress done in the empire. Also saying that muh the romans became greeks is retarded lol,they are very different people with different achievements. You can't just generalize them in such a way. Romans did have an enormous progress when it came down to architecture and engineering,mainly because it engineers had big field experience. Also you are ignoring time lines,at apex of the roman empire,the greeks were just shadow of what they were in their golden age. And that technological degradation was mainly in the west,the rest of the world did kept its knowledge.....which was kind of useless when it came down to war. For example Bulgaria we heavily influenced by the Byzantines and we had shitters and public bath centuries before the west stop shitting on their streets.

You're very right on Engineering. Romans were masters of that and Administration. War too I guess.

But here's the problem:

In a few centuries the Greeks made great advances in Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine, Philosophy. Probably Art too. Then they get run over by Rome and... all those fields do not move forward much. Yes Engineering improves, but what about our understanding of the world? And Romans were ascendant for far longer.

Yes, Byzantines held on to the technologies that they did have and were more advanced then the western kingdoms - but again - they had well over 1000 years to advance on stuff the Greeks came up, but instead they held on to what they had and tried to survive. Clearly Empires are not conductive to technological advancement.

 

[fantadomat]

Ahh i am not solely blaming german barbarians about the fall of the roman empire,but about the lost of technological progress done in the empire. Also saying that muh the romans became greeks is retarded lol,they are very different people with different achievements. You can't just generalize them in such a way. Romans did have an enormous progress when it came down to architecture and engineering,mainly because it engineers had big field experience. Also you are ignoring time lines,at apex of the roman empire,the greeks were just shadow of what they were in their golden age. And that technological degradation was mainly in the west,the rest of the world did kept its knowledge.....which was kind of useless when it came down to war. For example Bulgaria we heavily influenced by the Byzantines and we had shitters and public bath centuries before the west stop shitting on their streets.

You're very right on Engineering. Romans were masters of that and Administration. War too I guess.

But here's the problem:

In a few centuries the Greeks made great advances in Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine, Philosophy. Probably Art too. Then they get run over by Rome and... all those fields do not move forward much. Yes Engineering improves, but what about our understanding of the world? And Romans were ascendant for far longer.

Yes, Byzantines held on to the technologies that they did have and were more advanced then the western kingdoms - but again - they had well over 1000 years to advance on stuff the Greeks came up, but instead they held on to what they had and tried to survive. Clearly Empires are not conductive to technological advancement.

Meh,maybe because technology is not that important. History has shown that highly advanced societies tend to be fucked by the primitive and more barbaric ones,as long as there is not a huge difference. Good example for future studies is the modern western society.

 

[Sergiu64]

Meh,maybe because technology is not that important. History has shown that highly advanced societies tend to be fucked by the primitive and more barbaric ones,as long as there is not a huge difference. Good example for future studies is the modern western society.

Well... I guess the question ends up being: what good is fucking the more advanced society if you don't get lasting benefits from it?

 

[fantadomat]

Meh,maybe because technology is not that important. History has shown that highly advanced societies tend to be fucked by the primitive and more barbaric ones,as long as there is not a huge difference. Good example for future studies is the modern western society.

Well... I guess the question ends up being: what good is fucking the more advanced society if you don't get lasting benefits from it?

Ahhh none,maybe more loot for the barbarians. People get rich and fancy,forget how they got their money,then some brain dead thug comes along,beat the shit of them and takes their shit. Cycle of life and all that garbage.

 

[HeroMarine]

Cool

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It really needs to be stressed that the Western Roman Empire was not destroyed by invasion of barbarians, or by a singular event. It was a gradual decline that lasted centuries, centered around the political instability, withering ability to administrate a military reserve (this is one of the single most important things in Rome's rise to power, the ability to not win battles with recover from defeats, an ability none of their enemies could do), and failure to make allies and entice new arrivals (or accept them, the Gothic War is a great example of something that just didn't happen before because Romans were good at absorbing new arrivals, for a long time being a Roman subject and Roman was a desired prospect; and of a real life "LOCAL MAN RUINS EVERYTHING" incident).

In the end Western Roman Empire didn't collapse in a big conflagration, it simply withered away until eventually the latest warlord to hold the keys to the empire... Simply didn't bother naming a new emperor.

Clearly Empires are not conductive to technological advancement.

The common parlance among historians today is that the problem appears to be that hegemony and presence of absolute advantage aren't conductive to pursuit of comparative advantage.