Promote culture

[AfArSeMoN]

Guys... I am suffering with the Iberian struggle. Is there a faster way to promote culture in counties, I have befriended my steward, I have placed Castilian nobles, it all takes generations to convert.

Help

[kasatov01]

The only thing that matters is steward's stewardship skill. Try to have a steward with 30+ skill.

[PostalGibbon]

Bad news is that your kingdom will de jure drift new titles faster to your kingdom than you can promote culture to fulfill the Iberian struggle ending requirements.

i guess "75% of your Kingdom has to be your culture" is the problem you are trying to fulfill in order to end the struggle?

And if you have not done promote culture from day1 it is not going to ever success because of the de jure title drifting.

In my Iberia run moment where i noticed requirement, my kingdom of Leon was de jure drifted to more than half of the Iberia.

It was impossible to convert culture because new titles did drift faster to my kingdom than i did promote culture. (taking average 10-15 years/per county)

It would literally take 800 years and whole Iberia to turn and the game would end at somewhere at 1900 if it would go that long.

[PostalGibbon]

Only way you can end the struggle if you have gone normal map paint mode and you have conquered all Iberia is to change your primary behemoth drifted title to something smaller inside Iberia and hope that it fulfills all the requirement.

[mutantmuppet]

even speeding up the convert culture speed in options only reduces it to around 5 years per county (give or take a year subject to steward skill level)

[jpcerutti]

Converting takes a long time. If you want to convert an area the size of Spain it SHOULD take a long time.

The only way I've found to successfully play the Iberian struggle is to look at the requirements for everything and carefully plan your route to the ending you want from the very start. It is near impossible to luck your way into it, or just conquer your way into it, or convert your way into it.

IF you do not plan it all out you will have to do very 'gamey' things like grant independence to vassals and reconquer them repeatedly, or quit building ANYTHING once a phase changes, etc. The bonuses when you are done are good, but not world changers. If you're working it for achievements you just have to plan it out.

There are Youtube videos you can watch for various ways to work it and the forum is a great place to ask with specific questions.

[Half-lidded Bruiser]

A few things, some of which other posters have already mentioned. Unlike them, I'm reading directly from the game files, and have a few other things to point out.
1 - Your Steward's Stewardship stat. "Duh," I hear you say.
2 - Development of the target county DECREASES culture promotion speed; prioritize lower-dev counties.
3 - Game rules. These can go in either direction. Unless you want to start a new run, this won't help you.
4 - Iberian struggle ending effects. You're still trying to end the struggle, so again, this won't matter to you.
5 - "Contextual bonuses", as the game's scripting calls it, which is a long list. I'll go through some of them, until I get bored/annoyed.

-If your Steward is your friend, they get a bonus. If your Steward is your best friend, they get a bigger bonus.
-If your Steward is your rival, they get a malus; bigger malus if they are your nemesis.
-There is a bonus if the councilor liege (that's you!) has the dynastic legacy perk Bureaucrats, from the Erudition track.
-You get a bonus if your culture has the Family Business tradition, and your Steward is a relative that qualifies (ie, brother).
-There is a bonus if the following conditions are met: your culture is a hybrid/divergent, your culture was formed recently enough so that the cooldown hasn't ended yet, and the county whose culture you are trying to change is a "parent" of your hybrid.
-Your faith has the Communal Identity tenet, and the targeted county has your faith.
-Your faith has the tenet Cthonic Redoubts, and the targeted county has at least one province where the terrain is mountains or desert mountains.
-Your culture has the East Settling innovation. You don't; that's an East Germany thing.
-The county was affected by a certain Hold Court event (6210), which provides a bonus.

There's more, but it's all "contextual", and mostly won't apply to you. The best advice I can give is to befriend your Steward.
Other than that, you can give counties to duke vassals OR vassals whose culture is a hybrid or divergent, and the county you give them has a "parent" culture of their own. This won't make the culture promotion any faster, but NPCs are a bit picky about which cultures they'll promote to; those conditions satisfy their quirks. IF you do that, however, they will only promote to counties that border counties of their own culture. Also, keep in mind that they will (probably) eventually adopt the local culture, if their realm culture capital does not match their personal culture.

tl;dr: lmao bro just mod the council task so it goes sanic fast

[mr_pan7s]

i don't know exactly how but playing with the ummayad i almost had the whole of andalusia my culture before drift was even close. i did convert to a hybrid culture and all my vassals came which normally without the struggle would yield a few counties but unlike other games it seemed like the vassals were actively trying to convert maybe i'm not entirely certain as i wasn't paying attention i just noticed years later

[Razorblade]

The Struggle wasn't designed around making super-kingdoms. In fact, the Unite the Kingdoms decision used to make the Struggle literally impossible to complete.

If you're Castilian, your main kingdom should be Castille, and you shouldn't do anything to merge it with the other kingdoms. That's sabotaging yourself.

As how to rectify the issue, if there are any small kingdoms left in Iberia, I'd move your capital there. A smaller de jure kingdom means less counties to convert. Especially if that kingdom has a dominant culture, which you can easily convert to.

If you're otherwise stuck in the situation you have created, my best suggestion is to yoink a Holy Site to get a Holy Legend Seed, convert to/create a faith with the Communal Identity tenet for the extra cultural conversion rate (preferably with the Fundamentalist doctrine for religious conversion speed), get your Legend to level 2 and complete it, then use the "Evangelize to the Realm" decision to mass-spread your normally difficult to spread faith. Then get another Holy Legend Seed and repeat if possible.

As for why the conversion is going so slow, that's because vassals rarely convert county culture. Once every 50 years, a duke tier or higher vassal may choose to convert one county's culture if it is within 2 sea zones of a county of their culture, and has low Cultural Acceptance with their culture. Read: if you're going to spread your culture, you're going to have to do it yourself.

The only exception to this rule is if your vassal belongs to a recently hybridized culture, as they will promote the new child culture aggressively in counties belonging to its parent cultures.