Every country in EU4 has a primary culture and are part of a culture group. You can see it at your government screen or by looking at the culture map mode. Culture Shifting is the technique of changing the primary culture of your nation. This is considered an advanced game mechanic. And it may seem daunting to newer eu4 players, but in reality it can be done very easily. All you need to do is make states in your target culture provinces have 50% or more development among your stated provinces.

The Why

Now why would you want to switch your primary culture? Turns out some nations need to be a specific culture to form that nation. Such as to form Germany your country needs to have one of Germanic cultures as the primary culture. Similarly you need to be in Iranian culture group to form Mughal; Muscovite, Novgordian or Ryazanian culture to form Russia; Turkish culture to form Rum and so on.

Another reason could be that you want to be part of a larger culture group so you have more accepted culture provinces and you can promote more cultures as accepted. And some people like to culture shift just for role playing purpose.

The How

You can shift to another culture if that culture has more than 50% development in stated provinces. You can check that percentage amount from the government screen.

Preparation Phase

Before you start the process of culture shifting, make sure you have plenty of admin and about 100 diplo points. You are going to need a ton of admin points. Time it so that you don’t have any admin idea groups going at the time.

Have a bit of a bank- very likely you won’t be able to full core all new provinces because you won’t have enough admin points. And you are going to lose some income for a few months.

Culture Shift

1. Accept the culture you want to shift to
2. Then unstate provinces that are not the right culture and state the provinces you want to shift to. Do it few at a time and keep an eye on the percentage. If you are lucky, the new culture you are shifting to will have high dev so you get to 50% faster.
3. Keep in mind, you cannot unstate if one of the provinces is assigned to an estate. You will have to unassign the estate. This might bring some estates below the threshold level and they may become disloyal. And removing a province from a disloyal estate leads to rebel outbreaks. These outbreaks are fairly minor and shouldn’t be a big deal. But have your armies on the ready.

Also, you can’t unstate your capital province. So hopefully you don’t have to unstate your capital to get to 50%. In case you do, you’ll have to move your capital to one of the provinces with target culture which costs a lot of monarch points. 200 admin plus more depending on the difference in dev between the two provinces.

When you reach the 50% mark on a culture, this button becomes active. Click it and you have changed the primary culture of your country! Now go make a new country like you always wanted to.

Aftermath

It’s going to take a few years to full core all new stated provinces. I would advise not to go full expansionist for a little while, restrict yourself to smaller conquests or feed conquered provinces to your vassals.

Caveats

Empire- if you are an empire and you want to culture Shift to a culture that’s in your accepted culture group, you will have to culture Shift twice. As of game version 1.25, you can’t culture shift to another culture in your culture group. So you will have to culture Shift to a culture out of your culture group, then culture Shift back to the culture you wanted to.

Another way to culture shift is by converting provinces to the culture you want, but that’s a painstakingly long process and I wouldn’t recommend it.

I hope this guide helps out EU4 players who are looking to get into some advanced tag switching.