Tinto Talks #59: the Catholic Church

[Marquoz]

The link to today's dev diary is: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-59-16th-of-april-2025.1735622/

Today's topic is the Catholic Church, EU4's strongest religion by a significant margin. In Project Caesar, the Church will be both a religion and an international organization. The organization will be controlled by the cardinals of the curia:

In Project Caesar, Cardinals are represented by a special building, called Cardinal Seat, available to be built by Catholic countries higher than county rank in any location where they already own a large religious building. Each Cardinal Seat will grant its owner country a Cardinal, which the country can use to influence the decisions of the Curia (more on that later). Countries can have more than one Cardinal Seat and thus more than one Cardinal

The Church will have both doctrines (the tenets of its faith, and hard to change) and papal bulls (measures passed by the curia). Excommunication, saints, and holy sites will also be important. Reform desire and the Reformation itself are mentioned in this DD, but details won't be given until a later date.

I like what I've seen so far--Catholicism will be more complex and potentially more interesting than its current iteration.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

I mostly just hope that we see game balancing that affords Protestantism and the other various Reformation faiths to actually be worth flipping to when it starts, rather than a pointless downgrade that's only taken when an achievement or nation formation demands it. Something like a Literacy bonus to non-Catholic nations (or penalty to Catholics that slowly grows stronger over time) probably wouldn't be enough on its own, but would be highly appropriate given the nature of the Reformation itself.

[Marquoz]

A good analysis, Chatbot. You should post it on the official forums.

[grognardgary]

The Reformation sparked or at least laid the ground work for the industrial revolution by disabling the RC churches ability both for better and for worse to interfere in science and technological advancements in the west for that reason alone the current over powered RC Church needs to come to a screeching halt.

[Fatty Slonker]

Originally posted by grognardgary:

The Reformation sparked or at least laid the ground work for the industrial revolution by disabling the RC churches ability both for better and for worse to interfere in science and technological advancements in the west for that reason alone the current over powered RC Church needs to come to a screeching halt.

That is true, but Catholic countries continued to be powerful well into the 18th and 19th century, like France, Austria, Spain, and the Italian states -- not to mention that these countries also provided a lot of the military advancement of the time as well (formations and tactics, firearm progression).

[bri]

Nerf the interactions and/or how laughably easy it is to generate influence and the protestant faiths will become much more attractive. Permanent +3 stability, etc. is just too much for the others to compete with.

[grotaclas]

I think the -100% max tax for the clergy estate for catholic countries is a reason to switch to protestant.

[HotB]

BASED

[Dumah]

Originally posted by bri:

Nerf the interactions and/or how laughably easy it is to generate influence and the protestant faiths will become much more attractive. Permanent +3 stability, etc. is just too much for the others to compete with.

- -3 to +3 stabilty is gone. This game is a total remake of EU, better not to think about its mechanics in EU4 terms at all.

[bri]

Originally posted by Dumah:

Originally posted by bri:

Nerf the interactions and/or how laughably easy it is to generate influence and the protestant faiths will become much more attractive. Permanent +3 stability, etc. is just too much for the others to compete with.

- -3 to +3 stabilty is gone. This game is a total remake of EU, better not to think about its mechanics in EU4 terms at all.

That was just listing the most obvious and oft-mentioned of the currently available powers that would need to be reined in for catholicism to not be the clearly strongest. IMO it's not even the most powerful one which somewhat tells you how broken the current version is...

[aloup.saipuol]

Originally posted by bri:

Originally posted by Dumah:

- -3 to +3 stabilty is gone. This game is a total remake of EU, better not to think about its mechanics in EU4 terms at all.

That was just listing the most obvious and oft-mentioned of the currently available powers that would need to be reined in for catholicism to not be the clearly strongest. IMO it's not even the most powerful one which somewhat tells you how broken the current version is...

Except that as Dumah said, everything is getting reworked from the ground up.

Curia powers are not nerfed or buffed, they are replaced by a completely different set of mechanics. Papal bulls are making a return, but seem pretty different (with countries having to vote for them).

That's not to say you can't criticize the current EU4 mechanics, or the new EU5 ones, but criticizing one basing yourself on the other is like saying you prefer your oranges sweeter to someone who grows apples.