Just a thought...I like the game, but I find one thing game-breaking...if you take careful note, you'll see that every single ethnic (but not religious) minority disappears from the game within literally ten years. And yes, I raised this issue before...
My point is that, for the most part, the major cities in the Near East, for example, were THOROUGHLY Greek. They operated like Greek cities, etc., to the best of our knowledge, for centuries (in some cases, particularly Antioch, for more than 500 years by the time the game started!). Yet, suddenly, they all start speaking Aramaic/Syriac within ten years of game start. That's messed up
Is there any way to at least mod this and slow down assimilation?
EDIT: It is very worthwhile to note that in the Near East, from 1 AD to 300 AD, the real trend was, in fact, towards assimilation of the *majority* to Greek cultural norms. We have no evidence of any Hellenistic city populations suddenly turning "Semitic". It was almost universally the other way around - provincial territory slowly spread, native languages went out of use, and in some rural areas, there was a change from Aramaic and other Semitic languages to Greek in this period.