Reformed Pagan vs. Orthodox Christian....

[MythTrip]

I am playing as Norse Germanic Pagan Feudal King, have three kingdoms. Am on the verge of major expansions, want to own the world. Have to decide between organized religions of Reformed Pagan or Orthodox Christian.

1. Pagan seems better, as I get Holy War CB's vs. all surroundiing Orthodox kingdoms.
2. I'm not that familiar with basic mechanics of Orthodox Christian, can anyone explain the advantages of orthodox vs. reformed pagan?

[six-P-]

Not an expert on this subject by any means, but here are my thoughts:

1) If you reform the religion yourself, it converts a ton of your land and I think all vassals to the reformed pagan. In all cases, this is way faster to reform a pagan religion and fully convert everyone than you could do so with either just a ruler conversion or missionary conversion to orthodox.

2) Orthodox can send out missionaries to other pagan nations outside of your borders, reformed pagan can't (only islam and christianity can send out missionaries basically).

3) I'm pretty sure Holy War exists for all reformed religions and can be done versus all nations with different religions.

4) Reformed pagan still lets you have 3 concubines, which makes managing children easier (if you marry an old wife).

5) Reformed Germanic lets you raid, which is huge for income and for weakning an enemy or testing an enemy before a formal declaration.


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If I was doing a world conquest, I'd probably stick to a reformed pagan religion that allows raiding, to abuse the raiding mechnic before formal declarations of war.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

Orthodox can't call Crusades unless it Mends the Schism (which gives it all of catholicisms holy orders and crusade powers).


The main advantage of Orthodox is that pretty much everyone gets their own anti-pope with no negative downsides. Any vassal bishop of duke or higher is effectively a Orthodox Pope (the only unique power the head gets is granting invasions and later Crusade powers)

they do have reduced powers compared to the Catholic Pope, but get a lot of the more useful ones, like grant divorces or excommunicating people.

[MrBonkers]

Mending the schism simply renders catholicism a heresy of orthodox...
No transfer of holy orders and no crusade cb...

[Azunai]

reformed germanic is *far* more powerful than orthodox. takes more effort of course - you pretty much have to either own all the holy sites or at least 3 of them and get the moral authority to 50% (which requires lots of looted infidel temples and/or lots of county conquest wars against infidels). and then you need 750 piety to actually reform it. and you have to beat down a few "old germanic" revolts until all your vassals adopted the reformed faith and converted all their counties.

here's the advantages:

-if you are the one who reforms the germanic faith, you become fylkir (the equivalent of pope). ie. *you* can declare great holy wars (equivalent of crusades/jihads) on whole kingdoms. plus of course the normal holy wars (against duchies).
orthodox doesn't even have a kingdom level holy war.

-your vassals can still use the prepared invation CB (if they are small enough)

-you can still use concubines to produce lots of children.

-you can still use raids to weaken your infidel neighbors without formal war declaration and make tons of money in the process.

-you can still use the great blot every 10 years to kill off some prisoners (and get some pretige and piety for it)

-you get to use cool artifacts like mjolnir (if you have the monks and mystics DLC)

imo, reform your faith and hunt down those weak servants of the nailed god. for odin.

[pi73r]

Well, playing as pagan is definitely way more fun so I'd go with that.

[MythTrip]

Thanks, you guys are the best, great!!

[Edge]

I never do that reformed pagan nonsense because it's simply absurd.