Culture and Religion Conversion Rates

[w4ntedm4n92]

I'm having a hard time converting provinces and was wondering if anybody had some good solid tactics they use to speed this up in early game. So far all I do is turn on the edicts and build temples and theaters in cities. It's almost not worth the effort until mid-late game doing what I'm doing.

[Ericus1]

At the moment, that is literally the only thing you can do. Building a road connection is a slight bump, and if you really want to micromanage you can try shifting around slaves to give you the majority religion/culture in the province to remove that penalty to the rate, but it's such a hassle it's usually just not worth the effort. Oh, and try to get precious metals surplus in your capital/exporting it. That's a slight boost as well.

The governor policies have the largest effect. Set it to convert religion first, then switch to convert culture once you're around 80% your religion.

It just really irritates me/makes me sad because the whole system could have been so much deeper and more engaging, and instead they just went with the "spend mana to insta-covert" garbage under Johan's idiot leadership, then when they needed to gut that because the entire community said it sucked they replaced it with the boring, uninteresting system we have now.

Religion at least is getting some slight rework, but the system they are implementing for syncretism does not impress me in the slightest, nor does bear any resemblance to what syncretism actually looked like in this time period.

[w4ntedm4n92]

Yep just about everything I'm doing wouldn't even phase me if it weren't for the colonial restrictions to culture. Sucks when you have a mission to control area and you need to colonize 10 settlements to get it done.

[Ericus1]

Best way to knock those out is to do the slave truffle-shuffle. Migrate enough slaves in to a province to colonize, bringing them in from neighboring provinces if needs be. Colonize the province, then immediately shuffle the slaves to the new province. Colonize from that province. Shuffle to new new province. Colonize from it. Repeat until you've colonized everything, snaking your way through the land, using the same 6 or 7 slaves to "colonize" huge tracts of land.

Is the system stupid as frell: yes.

Is it tedious, unrealistic, and micromanage-y as hell behind an inconvenient and frustrating UI: also yes.

Are those the hallmarks for everything Paradox did in Imperator: most definitely yes.

[Twelvefield]

Classical Roman religion was far too complex for the system that's in the game, or the one that's planned. I'm not sure how you could do it justice without making an entire game just out of the religious castes. I guess as an oversimplification, the Romans were willing to live and let live unless there was something they could appropriate for themselves or there was something that damaged Roman stability overall. That's kind of what the game does, although the controls we have aren't suitable. Better than what they were at the beginning, though.

To the point, though, in the early game I find it's best to avoid taking provinces that are too different if that's at all possible. You want to have your own culture and religion be solid before you try to acquire someone else's. From a cost:benefit outlook, do you save more in the long run waiting to take a more or less willing province, or do you take it early and then have to bleed resources until they comply?

[Ericus1]

EU4 already has a perfect system for it: Confucian's harmonization mechanic. It would need tweaking of course, but the basic mechanic would be such that once you hit some threshold of pops, you can choose to over a period of time merge the two religions, with various penalties and negative effects and events while that merging is happening. After it's successful, then you fully "accept" that religion, and combined with the new static bonuses planned for gods what would make sense as a reward would be the ability to fold in some number of the passive traits of the harmonized gods with your own.

For example you harmonize with Kemetic and now you can choose to fold Set's passive tolerance to arid conditions into Mars as one of your fused traits rewards. This would actually give you the choice to strategically "evolve" your religion as you play into something with a lot more variety and interest, rather than the stupid as hell "just swap out one of your four gods durrrrrrr" system they are planning. Because you know, pantheonic religions only had like four gods max and they just rededicated all the old temples to the new god when they encountered a new religion. "Whelp, sorry Nepture, it was fun, but we worship Yam now."

[w4ntedm4n92]

Well I'm playing as Bosphorus so there is no Greek expansion its all Scythian and I'm taking on enough slaves to change my primary culture in my capital. I'm doing a slaver play through, so all my edicts are constantly running one of the 2 conversion edicts and I'm spending more time checking my edicts than slaving.

[Twelvefield]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

EU4 already has a perfect system for it: Confucian's harmonization mechanic. It would need tweaking of course, but the basic mechanic would be such that once you hit some threshold of pops, you can choose to over a period of time merge the two religions, with various penalties and negative effects and events while that merging is happening. After it's successful, then you fully "accept" that religion, and combined with the new static bonuses planned for gods what would make sense as a reward would be the ability to fold in some number of the passive traits of the harmonized gods with your own.

For example you harmonize with Kemetic and now you can choose to fold Set's passive tolerance to arid conditions into Mars as one of your fused traits rewards. This would actually give you the choice to strategically "evolve" your religion as you play into something with a lot more variety and interest, rather than the stupid as hell "just swap out one of your four gods durrrrrrr" system they are planning. Because you know, pantheonic religions only had like four gods max and they just rededicated all the old temples to the new god when they encountered a new religion. "Whelp, sorry Nepture, it was fun, but we worship Yam now."

Never got very far into EUIV, should do that some year.

My understanding of Roman religion is that it's a bit like today's: the devout don't have much say in policy, but those that are fanatical do. The Roman state was as pragmatic about religion as possible. The Pontifex Maximus, the equivalent of the state Pope was a political appointee, much like in the game. Major religious decisions had a foundation in finances and rulership. If Set worship would consolidate grain shipments from Egypt, then there would be a Roman temple to Set, or some equivalent as Romans did like to put their own stamp on things. For the rank-and-file Roman, obeisance to the gods would be something a step above superstition (if even that much), but below orthodoxy.

Would Roman religion really evolve that much over the time scale of the game? The lines of cultural communication in Europe during the Renaissance and Baroque eras would be much stronger than anything the Romans could develop. My guess is that Roman religion would be far more conservative than in the era of EUIV, I mean witness the rise of Protestantism and the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire.

Still in terms of game mechanics, I feel I am as well equipped to judge the system in EUIV as you are to judge a system that has yet to be implemented. There's nothing we can discuss, there's not enough shared reliable information. I agree that the present and previous systems in IR need a lot more work, though. At least it's not as bad as the Civilization series of games. I just can't play those anymore.

[Ericus1]

No, the Romans literally merged gods[en.wikipedia.org] with the other religions they encountered, told the natives they were the same thing, and moved on. Their religion evolved quite a bit until Constantine and the official adoption of Christianity.

I honestly don't know what you're talking about with the Renaissance and Protestantism and whatnot, as none of it has anything to do with the system I was suggesting. I merely brought up EUIV because Confucian has an already existing mechanic for merging religions that could be reimplemented into I:R as a reasonable system.

And we know what the new system is going to look like from the dev diaries about it, so it is very easy to discuss. And I think a system that collapses you down to 4 gods and represents syncretism as simply dropping one of your gods for another, essentially having religious tolerance be a 100% bar you have can only divide up among your religions in 25% increments makes it pointless, boring, and completely ahistorical; you're only going to go for full conversion anyways.

[Mikey]

The Roman republic had religious freedom and the roman pantheon was massive... like the greeks each city had their own deity and local legendary people were revered as gods as well. Eventually they all merged into a handful of gods that were worshiped such as Mars by soldiers, Ceres by farmers and Mercury by the traders.
However new lands that were "conquered" were left with their own religion to follow, a Roman colonia would bring in roman gods in that city but the natives around it still did their gods. As long as you payed your taxes Rome didn't care what you believed in. The colonia did of course sugest a link between the religions in all but name, but this was done more to find common ground to affect trade and suppression than an attempt at converting the populace.
It wasn't until Christianity was adopted that Rome gained an official state religion and actively persecuted other religions or ideologies.

The pontifex maximus was indeed a political figure. He was tasked with overseeing and perfoming the ritualistic side of Roman politics to appease the gods as was tradition, this is the position that morphed into the pontif (aka Pope) in the christian times

[Not Applicable]

So, for converting religions and assimulating culture, if you have high unrest in a province, it will convert slower, if it isn't dominant religion and culture, this high unrest can actually reduce the conversion rate to 0, so if you have high AE, you're governers will convert provinces faster with local autonomy than with convert religion or culture. I find the best way to convert religions for a large empire is to try and keep unrest low, or to have periods of 5-10 years where I have low AE, (for me rn less than 25 sually works.) the amouint of AE isn't important for the actual conversion/assimulation rate, it simply acts as a modifier to pop happiness, and unhappy pops cause unrest, and unrest slows/stops the rate of religious conversion and cultural assimulation.

Personally I love this system. I micromanaged it when my empire was barely a kingdom, but I realized that although my governers usualy have a stupid policy in atleast one province, they also usually do good for the majority of their provinces, and will convert them over time. I love this because it simulates that unhappy and rebellious subjects are less likely to assimulate into an empire. The slave shuffle which was a tactic commenly played by the assyrians roughly 600-800 years before this game took place is a commen way to fight this, but requires massive administrative oversight. By satisfying your pops, and waiting a dozen years, enough of my pops convert that they are able to keep converting during my next conquest.

This means that if I expand my empire too fast, it will become unstable because a large % of my pops will be recently conquered, and will want to rebel, but if I expand a little slower, and take the time to appease the conquered peoples, and make them comfortable in my empire, than I'm a lot more stable. The larger my empire, the more conquered people I can have because it's the ratio that's really important. This means as I get bigger, I can go on longer and longer conquests, as long as I don't overdo it. I really like this system. If I am patient, it manages itself, if I micromanage it, the game becomes tedious, and less fun, but I can get more done in a shorter time.

Historically empires taht expand too quickly tend not to last very long, while the empires that lasted for 100's of years had periods of time where they were "at peace" which is to say that they weren't expanding too much due to either a peaceful ruler (not common) or having trouble conquering nearby peoples including having a rival empire that stopped expansion.