Nonsensical culture assimilations

First of all, I want to say that as a baseline, I think EU5 is a great game. Ever since I bought it, I have been kind of addicted. I think in terms of immersion and commitment, EU5 is second to none. It really makes you feel a connection to the country you play because of its insane attention to detail and slower pace.

However, I’ve noticed that the game tends to weirdly result in extreme cultural assimilations that make no sense historically and at the same time underrepresent actual demographic changes that happened and made sense at the time. In my Russia playthrough (late 1500s), the Baltics got wrecked. There are maybe 80k non Baltic German pops in all of Livonia. At the same time, Königsberg is still 50/50 pruthenian and Prussian. Even more extreme, the duchy of Athens has obliterated Greek culture and Greece proper is split in Francien and Catalan. The Silesian German settlement has been stamped out pretty easily by the Silesian primary culture as well and the Finnish are just Swedish now.

Maybe I just got extremely unlucky here but i do think this is indicative of a greater problem. The medieval rulers of EU5 seem to act like they are leading nationalist 1900s nation states and (at relative ease) get monocultural relatively quickly. Obviously, there are cases of this sort of happening in real history, eastern Prussia, Russian move south, etc. etc. but I do think that is not a valid argument to bring up as to why it should be able to eradicate the fins from history, let alone have Greece be what amounts to a French colony. Imo, besides the cultural tradition system (which needs an overhaul anyways I think), a lot of this is down to the weird way pop growth is handled, where it becomes all to easy to assimilate locations with migration of peasants, something that, as far as I know, didn’t really happen except for rare cases of dealing with depopulation following war or the ostsiedlung. During the polish lithuanian commonwealth, for example, ethnically polish middle and upper class citizens moved to the cities of lviv and vilnius but the surrounding rural areas were still heavily indigenous. I do think limiting these mass assimilations to events only and tweaking the current system so that rural areas are way more resistant to assimilation (provided they have a lot of pops obvs) would solve all of this pretty easily.

I’d like to hear other thoughts on this, maybe I’m the only one bothered by it but I do find it pretty jarring and it takes me out of the immersion of the game a lot.