Settlement Culture Drift

Land you hold long enough becomes your own: the culture of your settlements slowly turns to that of your realm, and the loyalty penalty for a foreign culture fades away with it.

In the base game a captured settlement carries the owner-culture loyalty penalty forever, and a governor of the wrong culture carries one too. There is no cultural assimilation, so no amount of good rule ever lifts either of them. A realm built on foreign land therefore runs a permanent loyalty deficit, and pays for it in taxes and building projects. With this module every village, castle and town holds a mixture of cultures that shifts day by day — towards its neighbours, towards the villages it trades with, towards its governor, and above all towards the realm that holds it.

Features

• Culture is a mixture, not a label — every settlement holds a share of each culture, and the largest share is the culture the game shows for it.

• The map shapes the pace — nearby settlements, bound villages, the settlement's own inertia and the governor all pull on the mixture. A town pulls harder than a village, and a settlement that is strongly of one culture radiates more of it.

• The realm gets there in the end — the realm's weight grows with every uninterrupted day of tenure, so the switch arrives wherever the settlement sits on the map. Geography decides how long the mixture stays interesting, not who wins.

• The realm, not the lord — a settlement drifts towards the culture of the kingdom that holds it, whatever culture the lord of the fief was born into. A clan without a kingdom is its own realm. Granting the fief to another lord of the same kingdom changes nothing: the clock runs on.

• Conquest still costs — a freshly taken settlement keeps its own culture and its neighbours', and the full penalty with it. The clock restarts whenever the land passes to a realm of another culture, so a border that keeps changing hands never turns.

• The penalty fades day by day — the loyalty penalty follows the realm's share of the settlement instead of the owner's birth culture, so it falls a little every day and does not jump when the leading culture flips. A lord born abroad is no longer penalised forever on his own fief.

• Governors earn their place — a governor starts unaccepted and grows into the full loyalty bonus by serving; culture only sets how long that takes. Appointing one costs loyalty at first, and swapping governors resets the clock.

• The notables come over — as a settlement fills up with its new culture, its notables adopt it one by one, the least powerful first, and the troops recruited from them change with it. On the frontier, where the change never gets that far, the old families keep their own ways.

• The stones stay, the people change — the walls, the streets and the settlement's look on the map remain those of its builders. What turns over is who lives there: the militia on the walls, the shopkeepers and the tavern crowd of a town, the villagers who defend their homes and drive the carts to market.

• Visible on the map — the settlement's nameplate shows the current mixture and how much it moved today.

Compatibility

• Game version — v1.4.8. It works with or without the War Sails DLC: the module builds only on base-game settlements, cultures and loyalty, so it neither needs the DLC nor gets in its way. Development and testing happen on the base game.

• Saved games — safe to add to an ongoing campaign. Everything the module knows lives in the campaign save; it writes no file of its own. Remove it and every settlement returns to its original culture, since the game never saves a settlement's culture; notables that had already come over keep the culture they adopted.

• Other mods — only the loyalty model is touched, and that one is decorated rather than replaced; on top of it there is a single Harmony postfix on the settlement nameplate. Recruitment and hero creation are left entirely to the game, so a module that changes the troops on offer keeps full control of them. No native behaviour and no XML file is overwritten. Another module that writes settlement culture will compete for the same field, so run only one of those at a time.

• Cultures added by other mods — a culture takes part only if it is a full main culture. Bandit and auxiliary cultures neither vote nor become a target, and settlements of such a culture are left alone entirely.

• Total conversions and custom maps — nothing is hardcoded: settlements, their neighbours and the cultures are read from whatever map is loaded, so an overhaul's own world is picked up the same way as Calradia. Development and testing happen on Calradia.

Configuration

Everything is set in the Mod Configuration Menu, takes effect without a restart, and every slider explains itself in its hint. The settings come in four groups:

• Pace of assimilation — how long a settlement has to be held, how hard the realm pulls, and how stubbornly the land resists. This is what decides whether the map turns over in a few years or in a lifetime.

• Who shapes a settlement — how much towns, castles, villages, trade ties and the governor each weigh in the mixture.

• Governor acceptance — how many days a governor serves before earning the full loyalty bonus, at home and on foreign land.

• Notables following their settlement — how much of a settlement the new culture has to fill before its notables come over, and the troops they offer with them.

To keep the old troop trees around, raise the two values in the last group: the old families then hold on far longer, and on the frontier they never come over at all, so recruitment there stays mixed for good.

Bug reports

Please report bugs at github.com/adamturbuk/bannerlord-mods-issues — every report for every one of my modules lands there, so nothing gets lost in a comment th