The absence of province level culture is a design choice, not a performance necessity

I noticed a lot of comments in this [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/wy4ax2/culture_map_comparison_victoria_3_vs_tgc_victoria/) talking about how the choice to not have any representation of pops/culture on a province level is necessary due to performance concerns but I think that is a bit misguided.

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The Victoria 2 engine is a mess. It has no multithreading, graphical elements lag the CPU, the internal coding language is inconsistent with some commands being outright broken, and many effects that are trivial in modern Paradox games need weird performance heavy workarounds to implement. Moreover, since its release in 2010 there have been [\~6 iterations of Moore's law](https://i.ibb.co/dGD50rd/cpu.png).

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Most Vic2 fans I have talked to favor keeping the economic systems on a state level, but storing pops and performing migration calculations on a province level. Victoria 3, released in 2022 on a modern engine, could do this. Maybe not on a 13k province map (its not like the player can maneuver the army anyways), but certainly on a much larger map than Vic2 if map size was the goal.

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Paradox has chosen not to go down this route, with the aim that players be focused the economic aspect of the game. This is a fine choice, but there is a reason many fans of Vic2 aren't happy about it. What is given up by this approach is the ability to represent the driving motivation for many historical conflicts of the period; the securing of ethnic minorities in border regions. And conversely, efforts by nations to disrupt areas with majority minority populations. Without this representation most of the conflict in the Balkans, and the relationship between the United States and the Native tribes, for instance, doesn't make sense.

The joy of modded Vic2 for many fans and modders, was that there was a game event for every war, session, and treaty (both historical and proposed). Victoria 3 seems to have the goal of being less event focused and more dynamic which I like. However, personally this seems meaningless if the actual driver of conflict isn't represented in the game.