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"game balance" is the excuse given, but when the end result is making the most powerful nation in the game even more powerful it most definitely is not for "balance".
Turkish being in the Levantine group is a big reason why AI Ottomans used to be so strong (Cultural Union on conquest of Constantinople). (I am not going to talk about player-controlled nations because a player is always much better at making a nation strong than the AI.)
Nowadays, Ottomans are much weaker (partly because their neighbours got stronger), taking away their Culture advantage will further weaken them.
And, speaking generally:
What is Culture in EU4 anyways?
According to the Wiki (https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Culture) "culture represents the combination of the local language, customs, ethnicity and nationality of the people".
Culture groups consist of "multiple cultures which have similar customs, have a similar language or have a shared history".
There is no single "check"where to put a culture. E.g. if we would only go for language (or at least similar language roots) many Culture placements don't make sense (e.g. Welsh in the British group, Basque in Iberian group, Finnish in Nordic group, ... Some would even argue that Northern German dialects were different enough from Southern ones to justify a separate group).
There have to be other criteria.
Note that the example Culture Groups I gave (as well as "Levantine") are (at least partly) geographical names instead of "linguistical names".
If there would be a Culture Group called "Western European" combining the British Isles, France and Iberia there wouldn't be much to argue because those regions are located in Western Europe the the name only alludes to that.
For me Cultures are (at least somewhat) based in history with things like same language, same traditions, same customs, ... making up one culture whereas Culture Groups are a (more or less) arbitrary gameplay concept which exists solely to "encourage history" (e.g. Finland firmly being a part of Sweden for the majority of EU4's timeframe - no reason to put Finnish in a different Group (but enough reason to make FInnish a distinct Culture)).
And most Levantine provinces were part of the Ottoman Empire during the majority of EU4's timeframe (though not in 1444). Even though they don't share much history previous to 1444 they do so in 1821 (at least "is/was Ottoman (and not "was Turkish") for a long time").
I think it is best to approach EU4 Culture Groups as something that only exists in EU4 and has no real world equivalent.
After all, EU4 is a game and each design decision must be taken from a gameplay perspective. If it also fits history the better but "historical accuracy" should always be second to "fun gameplay".
That does not mean that I am always content with how Cultures and Culture Groups are handed currently but for me the system is "good enough" for most parts.
Agreed. Personally, I'd like a bit more nuance, maybe a kind of continuum where cultures are more or less akin to each other instead of accepted/same group/nothing. It never made much sense to me that, say, Danish was exactly as foreign to a Pomeranian as to a Manchu. But overall I see the point in what they're trying to do, and the inaccuracies that are there (e.g. Prussian being a German culture in 1444) don't seriously bother me.
The Ottomans are far from OP, and they are also far from the most powerful nation in the game. Austria, the Timurids, Ming, and England with the early French PU are much stronger. Others are about the same level of power.
I'd love it if some other AI nations were able to outdo the Ottomans and be the world power, but nope it's just the Ottomans every single time and it's boring.
In this patch, the Ottomans are horribly weak. They almost never manage to even take over Anatolia. They get wiped out over and over again without any player help. When they do survive, they practically never conquer a fraction of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Balkans, Hungary, Tunis, and all the other territory they should grab.
Frankly, they've never been OP. Even in version 1.0, they rarely came close to historical levels of power. They've always been too weak, and currently they're the weakest they've ever been.
Not really. In recent patches, at least in my experience, the Ottomans rarely even reach their historic extent. They take a bunch of the Balkans and maybe a bit of Syria, consolidate Anatolia, but reach the Persian Gulf and tend to spend most of the game making angry faces at the equally large Mamluks and Commonwealth. And that's when they don't get exterminate entirely.
And yet every game I play the unless in the vicinity the field between 250-300k army in the mid 1500, far above anyone else besides Ming. If thats considered horribly weak then whats decenetly strong around the same period? 600k? 900k?
Interesting thing about Albanian culture. Back then the Albanian people were heavily influenced by the Serbians and were a part of the Rascian eparchy. A lot of the Albanian lords used Serbian titles such as "despot", spoke Serbian and had were married with Serbian nobility. The reason for this is that with the fall of the Bulgarian and Byzantine Empires there was a power vacuum in that region which was filled up by the Serbs so the smaller Albanian principalities were influenced by them.
Same can be said about the Wallachians and Moldavians. They were for a very long time under the influence of Bulgarians and took Christianity from them when they themselves did it in 864. Wallachian and Moldavian lords used Old Church Slavonic as their Lingua Franca and Cyrillic was used as their alphabet. And most traditions stemmed from the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity so realistically, they had a lot more in common with the South Slavic nations than they did with the "Carpathian" culture group as they are in game.
Also at that time there wasn't really any strong distinction between Bulgarian and Serbian so for even more realism one could just lump those in a single culture.
To summarise, it's not particularly weird to put the Albanian culture from the 1444 time period into the South Slavic culture family given how close they were by all the criteria that Paradox has given for their definition of "Culture" in the game.