Pagan Reformation Guide

Want to maximize your potential as a reformed pagan? Bewildered by the amount of options when it comes to reforming? Want to find out neat combos to do? Here's the guide for you. This guide will go through each and every pagan reformation option, their utilities or lack thereof, and strategies with reforming specific pagan religions.

Introduction

Hey guys, and welcome to this guide. This guide is specifically about the Pagan Reformation that comes with the Holy Fury DLC, this is NOT about how to play as a pagan or religions in general. If you want to learn more about playing a pagan or religions in general, I suggest you check out these guides: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=646117458&searchtext=Pagan
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1567211965&searchtext=Pagan

In addition, a lot of the information referenced in this guide will come from the CK2 wiki pagan page[ck2.paradoxwikis.com]. If you want to learn more about the specific things mentioned in this guide, do refer to that.

After all, this guide is all about reforming your religion as a pagan, so if you're reading this, I'm going to assume you already have some knowledge about the reformation system and playing a pagan.

Without further ado, here we go.

Inherited Traits

Before we go into the specific details of reformed religion and the features you can choose, I think it's important to establish first the bonuses from the unreformed religion that you get to keep in the reformed religion. This will be important to refer to later on when we get into the nitty gritty.



Keep in mind that in addition to these, pagans with garrison bonuses still do keep their garrison bonuses, it's just not shown in this table. That means African and Bon both still have their +40% garrison size.

Natures

As you probably already know, when you reform a pagan religion, you get to choose 1 nature. These natures not only provide you some kind of bonus, but also affect the way the AI behaves, which is something important to keep in mind when making your decision.

In the following sections, I go over each and every nature, describing their strengths and weaknesses, including situations in which they can be used effectively.

Natures - Peaceful

Strengths

Being basically the Jain bonus, Peaceful provides a lot of similar advantages as Jainism. Having higher demesne limit gives you more flexibility, whether you're building a stronger centralized government by having more demesne levies, or simply holding onto provinces you plan on handing out. It also makes it far less likely that you'll go above the demesne limit and incur an opinion penalty with your vassals.

Having +15 vassal opinion ensures a lot of realm stability as well, as vassals with higher opinions of you are less likely to join factions and plot against you. This is also a minor military and economic bonus, since vassals with higher opinions of you provide more levies and pay higher taxes. This, combined with the fact that your vassals will be more docile, improves realm stability and makes it easier for you to build a more prosperous empire.

Weaknesses

Losing out on the most powerful CBs, the Holy War CB and the Great Holy War CB, will severely restrict your ability to expand, if that is part of your agenda. Peaceful, unlike Jain, at least still allows the county conquest CB, so you will still have some way to wage war. But not being able to acquire large swaths of land at once with easy CBs means you will have to get creative if you really want to expand, such as acquiring and landing title claimants to foreign kingdoms and pressing their claims.

Having a restriction on raiding can really hurt as well, since for pagans, most of the income comes from raiding, due to how poor pagan provinces tend to be. You would have to really take advantage of the prosperity Peaceful brings to improve your provinces to make up for the lost income.

The AI not converting their provinces can definitely be a weakness if you want to stamp out heresies and infidels for better taxes and levies, since you would have to handle all the proselytizing yourself. However, this is something you can take advantage of if you also go for the Infidel Tax doctrine, since it would mean that you would always have a +25% tax rate on infidel provinces.

The warrior lodge thing isn't really a weakness, by the way. It only really affects Hellenic, since Hellenic is the only pagan religion that needs to create its own warrior lodge anyways.

Natures - Warmongering

Strengths

Removing the vassal raised levy opinion malus makes it a lot easier for you to wage war for extended periods of time without hurting your realm stability due to heavy opinion penalties. This can be especially helpful if your find yourself hurting from having -35 opinion with all your vassals for fighting for so long.

Not to mention, having more aggressive AI means your vassals will wage war more frequently as well, conquering land on your behalf. This means you yourself do not necessarily have to wage war yourself in order for your realm to expand, which can be very helpful if you're currently preoccupied managing domestic affairs.

If this is paired with Enatic Clans or Agnatic Clans, you also gain access to a unique casus belli, the Matriarchal/Patriarchal Deposition War CB, allowing you to enforce a female or male ruler in a foreign realm. While this CB doesn't actually acquire you more land, it can be useful if you have a title claimant on their kingdom, but can't press their claim due to gender restrictions with inheritance laws.

Weaknesses

You lose prestige if you've been at peace without raiding or an active truce for 2 years, at a flat rate of 2 prestige a month. This is actually not very significant, since once your realm is at a certain size, you're going to still have a net gain of prestige despite that. If you're big enough to reform your religion, you likely gain much more than 2 prestige a month anyways. This affects lower-ranking rulers more than it will affect you.

The biggest weakness is perhaps the fact that AI rulers will only convert same-group provinces if they are zealous. As a pagan, this means your vassals will only convert other pagan provinces, which there might not be a lot of, if you started on a later start date, or a lot of pagans have already mass converted to one of the organized religions. The zealous restriction also means you will have to specifically groom your vassals to grow up zealous, or create zealous vassals, if you really want them to proselytize.

Natures - Unyielding

Strengths

Having a +20% levy size bonus and a +30% garrison bonus makes your realm a military powerhouse, especially if you did not originally start out with a levy bonus to your religion. It can make your realm a lot more militarily competitive with other hostile realms around you, simply by expanding the size of your military and making your provinces harder to siege down.

The defensive bonus you get on right religion provinces you own can be incredibly powerful as well. +80% defense and morale means that if you are able to trick your enemies into attacking your armies on home territory, you can easily score a victory even against armies much larger than yours. If this is put to good use, it can really help you turn the tides against an enemy more powerful than you.

Weaknesses

The resistance to proselytization is neat, but it's very seldom useful. When you reform your religion, other independent rulers of your religion are not guaranteed to convert to your religion, neither are provinces under your command. If they do not convert to your reformed religion, they will not benefit from this, and will be still just as susceptible to hostile proselytizing as before. The only time this is really useful is if you lose territory and vassals to infidel invaders, but that's a really bad situation to be in, one that you wouldn't want to ever land in to begin with.

Since this replaces the military bonuses you would normally inherit from the unreformed version of your religion, it means that the usefulness of this nature is limited if your religion is an offensive pagan religion, which already gets a +30% levy size bonus. While the garrison and defensive combat bonuses are enticing still, it is simply not as drastic of a bonus for offensive pagans.

AI vassals only converting if zealous can also be disadvantageous to you, since you would have to make sure you groom vassals to be zealous or create zealous vassals if you want to see more conversions. Unlike Warmongering though, Unyielding will convert provinces of any religion, so at least that means that over the course of a long game, you should still see many of your realm's provinces flipped to your religion. So this is not as bad as Warmongering's AI conversion, and can in fact still be manageable.

Natures - Proselytizing

Strengths

This is your best bet at converting the world to your religion, or at least just stamping out infidels and heretics. This is not shown in the tooltips, but it makes your provincial conversions take x0.6 the amount of time it normally would, so you can proselytize even more effectively than organized religions can, which is very powerful for reducing the amount of infidel revolts and improving taxes and levies.

Your AI vassals doing their best to convert their provinces also speeds up the process at which you spread your religion. Without any restrictions on whether or not they convert, unlike every other nature, you can expect to see your religion's blob on the religious mapmode grow very quickly.

Weaknesses

You lose 2 piety/month while at war against another independent ruler of your religion, just like Muslim rulers do. It's not exactly significant though, and for certain pagan religions, like African, Bon, Romuva, or Zun, by the time you reform, you should be the only independent ruler of your religion anyways. So under the right situations, this weakness more or less will never affect you.

Natures - Dogmatic

Strengths

Your religion gets +15 morale authority, which slightly improves your conversion strength, as well as reduce the chances of heresies (namely, the unreformed version of your religion) from emerging. It also increases the strength of your holy order.

If you pair this with Divine Marriage or Dawnbreakers, and Temporal leadership, you become the High God of your religion. What that means basically is that whoever holds the religious head title is the main deity of the religion. It doesn't do anything mechanically, but it's always neat seeing tooltips and events mention your ruler's name as the deity.

Weaknesses

I'm not going to beat around the meat, this bonus is really weak. The x0.6 conversion time bonus from Proselytizing nature is much greater than the conversion bonus granted by +15 moral authority. Not to mention, it isn't hard to cap out your moral authority at 100 if you win enough holy wars and raid enough infidel temples anyways, and once that happens, the +15 from Dogmatic nature no longer has anymore use.

The decreased chances of heresies emerging isn't even that big of a deal, since there is only one heresy, the unreformed version of your religion, and it usually has 0 moral authority once you reform religions anyways, so it's unlikely to emerge as a heresy.

Not to mention, you also get a heavy penalty to study technology. Your spymaster will study technology at 2.5x the rate they originally do, which hurts a lot as a pagan, since as your provinces are likely to start out with low technology anyways. So not being able to play catch-up with technology as well can really put you behind and limit your potential.

You also lose piety when at war against another ruler of your religion. While this normally isn't a big deal, the fact that this is a penalty slapped onto a nature without very good bonuses to justify it just feels like an additional slap to the face.

It's honestly better to spend your nature slot on something else unless you really want to become a High God.

Natures - Cosmopolitan

Strengths

Being able to marry regardless of religion is a very underrated bonus. It allows you to make alliances, or at the very least non-aggressive pacts, with infidel kingdoms and empires, giving you better chances at securing your place in the world. This can be especially helpful to pagans who, even after reforming and conquering all religions of their religion, won't be particularly powerful due to how small they are, like Suomenusko and Romuva. Securing powerful alliances as a struggling power means you'll have a way better chance at succeeding.

This can also ensure that if you have infidel vassals, you can still marry them for the non-aggression pact to keep them out of factions, which can vastly improve realm stability.

You can also use Cosmopolitan to marry infidel title claimants as a way of getting them into your court, since infidel courtiers never accept invitations to your court. Being able to get infidel title claimants in your court means you can land them and press their claims, acquiring large amounts of territory at once. Just make sure that the gender of the title claimant matches your target title's gendered succession laws.

Cosmopolitan AIs do not convert their provinces, which would normally be disadvantageous, but this is something you can take advantage of by choosing Infidel Tax, since that means that the infidel provinces that give you +25% tax is always going to remain as infidel provinces. This is especially good for pagan religions that do not start with any provinces of its religion, like Aztec and Hellenic, since that means basically every single province in your realm will provide +25% taxes.

Weaknesses

The -15 moral authority is definitely a weakness, since that means weakened ability to proselytize and more frequent heresies, as well as a slightly weaker holy order. Obviously, that's something you can make up for by winning 5 holy wars, so it's not too terrible in that regards, but it's still definitely something that hurts.

The penalty to proselytizing also hurts, since it makes converting a province take x2.5 times longer than it normally does. Not to mention, Cosmopolitan AI rulers don't convert their provinces either, so if you choose Cosmopolitan, it's pretty much guaranteed that your religion isn't going to spread very far, if at all, so prepared to fight lots of infidel rebels.

Having the Religious Control Mandate law disabled can be problematic as well, since it means you can no longer freely revoke titles from infidel vassals. This can be especially annoying if they're a true believer, and refuses to accept demand religious conversion. So overall, choosing Cosmopolitan basically means your religion is going to be extremely decentralized.

Doctrines

As you probably already know, when you reform your religion, you get to choose two doctrines with which to customize your religion. Some doctrines are incompatible with others, and some doctrines overwrite bonuses from others. Each religion also has its own unique doctrines that you can choose, but don't necessarily have to.

The following sections will include groups of doctrines, as I once again go over their strengths and weaknesses. I'll also rate each one with a number of smiley faces, with ☻☺☺☺☺ being the worst and ☻☻☻☻☻ being the best, so you'll know best how to customize your religion when you reform your pagan faiths.

For a quick overview of the ratings, here are them:

Doctrine	Rating
Syncretism	☻☻☺☺☺
Astrology	☻☻☻☺☺
Stability	☻☻☻☻☻
Meritocracy	☻☻☻☻☺
Enatic Clans	☻☻☻☻☺
Agnatic Clans	☻☺☺☺☺
Equality	☻☻☻☻☺
Polygamy	☻☻☻☺☺
Divine Marriage	☻☻☻☺☺
Monasticism	☻☻☺☺☺
Religious Tax	☻☻☺☺☺
Ancestor Veneration	☻☻☻☻☻
Pyramid Creation	☻☺☺☺☺
Unrelenting	☻☻☻☺☺
Animistic	☻☻☺☺☺
Haruspicy	☻☻☻☻☺
Daring	☻☻☻☻☺
Sea-Bound	☻☻☺☺☺
Bloodthirsty Gods	☻☻☻☺☺

Doctrines - Syncretism, Astrology

Syncretism
☻☻☺☺☺

Strengths
Being able to gain sympathy with another faith can be really nice. It removes the infidel opinion malus with the religion group you have sympathy with, and can be very helpful, especially early on when tolerance technologies is low.

Weaknesses
You can only take this decision once, so you can only voluntarily pick up sympathy with one religion group. That feels kind of lame, not gonna lie.

Not to mention, most of the time you're going to want your vassals to convert anyways. And outside of your realm, you're unlikely to care about what infidels think of you, unless you have Cosmopolitan and can actually form diplomatic relationships outside of your religiosphere. So you're unlikely to get much mileage out of this doctrine unless you're tailoring your run to befriending infidels.

One last weakness is the fact that this makes it hard to detect secret religious cult members. Characters inducted into religious cults typically have a sympathy trait related to the secret religious cult's religion, so that usually makes cult members really easy to detect. But with sympathies becoming the norm, it can really mask that, and makes it that much harder to tell who's in a cult and who's not. It also makes characters easier to induct into secret cults, since the recruiter doesn't always have to evoke sympathies in the characters before inducting them, removing an extra step.

Of course, if you don't actually mind religious disunity, then it probably isn't that big of a deal to you. But otherwise, having secret cults hiding so well can be quite a nuisance.

Astrology
☻☻☻☺☺

Strengths
Being able to have astrology signs can be really fun, and can influence the way you build your relationships with people. Having these signs and events associated can often give you minor bonuses too, which is really nice. It's not too big a deal, but it is fun.

But perhaps the most powerful of Astrology's bonus is access to the Hermetic Society. For most pagans, their only society is the warrior lodge. For Aztecs, they straight up do not have a warrior lodge at all. (Unless you count the Assassins, but that's only if you're near a Shia character). But either way, it makes having access to a second society that much better. And it's not just any second society, it's a society that gives you good science bonuses, something pagans desperately needs, given how pagan provinces typically start with few technologies.

What else is really nice about Astrology is the synergies it has with other doctrines. With Haruspicy, you get to interpret signs for a gamble on buffs every 10 years. With Stability (or any unique doctrines with Stability), you can interpret the stars under which your child is born in hopes of giving them a good buff. Both of these can be a gamble with a potentially negative outcome, but it's still a really nice minor bonus to have.

Weaknesses
Asides from the Hermetic Society access and from minor bonuses here and there, it feels like this doctrine doesn't really have much else to offer asides from fun flavourful events and zodiac signs. So while it does add a lot of fun mechanics and provide a science society to be in, it really doesn't feel as game-changing as other doctrines you might choose over this one.

It certainly doesn't mean that it's not worth trying out, since the bonuses it offers can be really nice. It's just that unless you have a slot open without anything else you're interested in getting, you're unlikely to prioritize this doctrine over others.

Doctrines - Stability, Meritocracy

Stability
☻☻☻☻☻

Strengths: Most pagans start with really harsh short reign penalty, making succession always a scary situation to be in. It's for this reason that Stability can be incredibly powerful, since it completely removes the short reign penalty, and makes succession a lot smoother process.

Not to mention, you get to spend prestige and piety to increase one of you or one of your courtiers/vassal's attributes once every 5 years. This is a really nice bonus, especially once you reach a point where you have way more prestige and piety than you know what to do with. It's a really good way to push your Diplomacy high enough to increase your vassal limit, or Stewardship high enough to raise your demesne limit, or simply to help you build up your Martial and combat ability. If you don't plan on keeping your current ruler for long, you can even use it to buff up your heir so you'll inherit strongly.

Weakness: For African and Bon, whose short reign penalties aren't as harsh as other pagans', it's not as big of a bonus.

Not to mention, if you use Stability to improve stats too many times, you can get an event in which your character actually suffers from extreme stress and burnout. This can end up taking a real toll on your character and end up inflicting negative traits upon you. This is something to be aware of when using Stability to improve stats.

Meritocracy
☻☻☻☻☺

Strengths
Being able to designate which of your children to be heir without having to go through granting titles like open succession or appeasing electors to vote for your preferred child is an incredible perk to have. It lets you choose whichever one of your kids have the best stats, or the best traits, so that you can ensure your succession will be a smooth transition into a great character to play. It really is an incredible ability.

Combined with the fact that you can take concubines or consorts, you can easily have plenty of kids and a wide gene pool to select from. So with a bonus like this that gives you the flexibility of heir decision, you have plenty of leeway to deciding who you want to play next.

Weaknesses
There are certain restrictions on the heirs you can designate and the ability to designate heirs at all that you will have to work within. You can only designate heir if you have gavelkind, primogeniture, ultimogeniture, or open succession, which can suck if you have a better succession law available to you, like Eldership (although I imagine you wouldn't choose two doctrines that give you succession bonuses).

If you have gavelkind, by the way, having heir designation effectively turns it into elective gavelkind, since your titles will still split apart, and that can suck.

Besides, unlike Eldership, once you run out of children, you lose the ability to designate your heir, and will just have to take whoever's next in line, since you can only designate heir from amongst your children. So if you're in a bad spot, you can find yourself losing the flexibility this doctrine offers.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can only designate heirs in accordance with your gender succession laws. That means that if you have agnatic-cognatic, as long as you have at least one son, you can't designate a daughter as an heir, and that can suck if she has really good traits and stats. And if you're ever in the uniquely bad situation where you have one son but a ton of daughters, then you basically have no choice.

Doctrines - Enatic, Agnatic, Equality

Enatic Clans

☻☻☻☻☺

Strengths: One big strength that Enatic Clans people often talk about is the ability to build up a lot of bloodlines, and that certainly is a big appeal of it. Being able to get matrilineal marriages with people with desirable bloodlines means you can easily stack up a lot of bonuses for your heir, breeding a line of superpowered matriarchs. You can do this by raiding and making people your consorts, but if you have Cosmopolitan, you can easily just arrange marriages with infidels to make it happen. Honestly, this alone makes it an incredibly powerful bonus.

If you pair this with Bloodthirsty Gods, you also get the Matriarchal Deposition War CB, which allows you to force other rulers to have matriarchs instead. This can be very useful if the target ruler's title is agnatic, since women's claims can't be pressed against an agnatic title. So forcing the target title to be enatic instead will make it easier for you to press a woman's claim against that title.

Weaknesses: Transitioning into a matriarchy can be an extremely rough process, with a lot of male title claimants extremely mad and likely to want to assassinate you. Not to mention, if you previously had agnatic succession, and don't have any matrilineal marriages, you can find yourself quickly at a dead end running out of dynastic heirs due to the lack of women whose children belongs to their dynasties. So this is something you're going to have to prepare for.

Not to mention, with enatic succession, you can't land men anymore. This can suck, since most of the time, men are the ones whose claims you can press to acquire large swaths of land, so the inability to land male claimants can definitely be something that limits your ability to blob.

Agnatic Clans

☻☺☺☺☺

Strengths: Enforcing agnatic succession means you can effectively neutralize a lot of title claimants - namely, women with strong or weak claims on your titles. It's a good way to ensure that women's claims can never be used against you nor anyone within your realm.

Open succession is also not bad. It's an easy way for you to control who inherits, since all you have to do is give your preferred son a holding, and they'll be your new heir, as long as you keep your other children unlanded.

If you get Warmongering with Agnatic Clans, you can also get the Patriarchal Deposition War CB, a neat CB you can use against female rulers.

Weaknesses: You genuinely do not need this. You can just get agnatic succession without getting this doctrine. If you want a succession law that allows you to choose which child to inherit, then Meritocracy is a way better choice, since you don't have to go through the trouble of giving your preferred child a piece of land. If you want to choose which dynastic member to inherit, then Ancestor Veneration's Eldership is way better. Nothing this doctrine offers is anything you can't get without it.

The Patriarchal Deposition War CB isn't even useful, since by default most rulers are agnatic or agnatic-cognatic. The only time this is not the case is in randomized/shattered world, but even so, it's not actually that useful of a CB. The Matriarchal Deposition War CB's advantage doesn't even apply here, since men's claims can normally be pressed anyways.

Equality

☻☻☻☻☺

Strengths: Having absolute cognatic succession and full status of women instantly enforced can open up lots of possibilities, giving you a lot more possible heirs and counselors. It also makes having female rulers and/or heirs a lot less punishing with your vassals as well. This can be especially helpful, since normally, you aren't able to get full status of women early on, since it does require a fairly high level of Tolerance law, something you might want to invest points into early on. So being able to just get absolute cognatic and full status of women instantly early on can be very nice.

But even just beyond that, it makes it a lot easier to land claimants whose claims you can press, since absolute cognatic allows you to grant landed titles to both men and women. This can be great if you're going expansionist. Paired with Cosmopolitan, you can even get infidel claimants via marriage, land them, and press their claims.

Weaknesses: One thing that is a shame is that all the bonuses this doctrine offers is something you can unlock normally even without it. Even without this doctrine you can still eventually unlock high Tolerance tech, and get full status of women laws yourself. You can even just educate your heir with Basque or Sumpa culture or whatever to get absolute cognatic right away. So while this doctrine gives you a leg up at the time of getting it, at a certain point it stops being an actual bonus, purely due to the fact that you would have been able to get its benefits with high enough Tolerance tech anyways.

Doctrines - Polygamy, Divine Marriage

Polygamy
☻☻☻☺☺

Strengths
Being able to have proper wives instead of concubines means you can make a lot more non-aggression pacts and alliances. This can be extremely useful in keeping your vassals out of factions, keeping big empires from attacking, or even forming powerful allies outside of your realm. For the latter two, just make sure you have Cosmopolitan so the marriage will actually be accepted. But either way, this is a very good way to build a large network through marriage.

One thing polygamy has as an advantage over concubinage is the fact that your children will not be born with the "Child of Concubine" modifier, which gives a very minor diplomacy penalty. It's minor, but it's still there.

Weaknesses
This disables women being able to take consorts, which can reduce female dynasts' ability to produce large amounts of heirs. You also will no longer be able to take concubines, who are a lot easier to acquire and move around without having to arrange divorces, so you will be missing out on that level of convenience.

Another weakness is the inherent instability that comes with polygamy. Secondary wives will compete to become the first wife, and this can mean a lot of court intrigue. It may not be that significant, but it is definitely something that concubinage has over polygamy: there not really being a competition amongst partners.

Divine Marriage
☻☻☻☺☺

Strengths
Making a divine marriage will improve your relations with your vassals, which is always nice. Combined with the Peaceful bonus, or even the Bloodthirsty Gods bonuses, this can mean a lot of stability with your vassals due to higher base opinion. This is nice.

Not to mention, when you make a divine marriage, you get a boost in piety, which, as a pagan, means you get to declare even more holy wars and whatnot. It's not that big of a bonus, but it's still a nice bonus.

Perhaps most practical though, is the ability for you to breed good traits well. If you get some Attractive Genius kids, divine marriage means you can better breed those good traits in your grandchildren, ensuring generations of good stats.

Weaknesses
With incest comes the obvious concern for inbreeding. That is how major historical dynasties fell apart after all, so you will have to be careful about maneuvering around inbreeding, such as marrying a half-sibling instead of a full-sibling, or having plenty of concubines/consorts to expand the gene pool. Stuff like that to avoid ending up with inbred children.

This ties into the traits breeding things as well. While it's nice to have Attractive Genius children and grandchildren, if you instead have Ugly Imbecile children, you can likely expect to see those traits in your grandchildren as well, and that can be frustrating.

While divine marriage can be good for improving relations with your vassals, if you have vassals whose religions do not support divine marriage, this can have the opposite effect, getting -15 opinion with them. This can suck, which makes it pretty important for you to ensure that you centralize and strengthen your religion.

Doctrines - Monasticism, Religious Tax

Monasticism
☻☻☺☺☺

Strengths
Being able order unlanded courtiers who aren't heirs to any titles and aren't married, or any unlanded characters who's imprisoned by you, to take the vows can be a useful way of eliminating title claimants, especially those pesky ambitious or envious dynasts who're likely to become adventurers against you. It's a really nice way of eliminating dynasts and making sure they'll never be able to threaten you again without actually getting the kinslayer trait.

There's other good applications to this ability too. You can use it to eliminate your vassals' heirs if you're able to get them in your prison, if you don't like a certain vassal's heir and want to get rid of them before they become a threat.

Weaknesses
The conditions that come attached to ordering to take vows can make this ability somewhat restricted in its utility. If the person you want to get rid of is married, you're going to have to have them imprisoned before you can order them to take vows. If they're not in your court, you can't touch them. If they're a relative, you're going to need them in your prison unless you have a Papal bloodline, which you likely aren't going to have as a pagan. All of these restrictions just makes this doctrine's special ability really unwieldy.

Although, one way to get around arbitrary imprisonment you can do is using the devil worshiper's or the assassins' ability to abduct someone as a way of getting them into your prison. That's definitely something you can do to make better use of this ability.

Religious Tax
☻☻☺☺☺

Strengths
This works just like the Muslim jizya tax, it gives every infidel province a +25% tax modifier. It gives this bonus regardless of religion of the one who holds the province if the top liege's religion has this feature, so even if you have infidel vassals, you're still going to get the extra cash. And that's pretty nice. Even if you don't directly benefit from this tax money, your vassal benefits from this, and that will in turn benefit the tax your vassal pays you. That's nice.

You can really get the most out of this bonus by going Peaceful or Cosmopolitan, since those natures will have AI rulers never convert their provinces, thus always keeping them as infidel provinces with +25% tax. This is especially powerful for religions with little to no right religion provinces, like Aztec, Hellenic, etc., since that means basically every single one of your provinces will give you +25% tax.

Weaknesses
It's kind of an underwhelming bonus if I'm going to be honest. More money is all it gives, no special abilities, no game-changing mechanics, no nothing. Just little more cash.

Doctrines - Ancestor Veneration, Pyramid Construction

Ancestor Veneration
☻☻☻☻☻

Strengths: This is a powerful doctrine, mostly for the fact that you get to have the best succession law in the entire game. Eldership is like tanistry, in that you can elect anyone from your dynasty to be your heir, allowing you to elect that Ambitious Strong Attractive Genius as heir, but instead of having vassals as electors, there are 7 'elders'. These elders are often landless or baron-level temple vassals, so they're incredibly easy to bribe, so it's really not hard to get whoever you want elected. You don't get opinion penalties with anyone either.

In addition to that, you also get to venerate saints, giving them the Blessed bloodline. Those who benefits from having their ancestor venerated will have an opinion bonus with the religious head. If you go for Temporal leadership, you are the one who gets to decide if someone gets venerated.

The ancestor worship decision is hardly worth mentioning, but it is a cherry on top.

Weaknesses: With Eldership, title splits can still happen, but it only ever happens when elders of different realms vote for different heirs. There's also some events that can fire that requires you to give out land to someone lest you anger the elders, but if you have excess land to hand out, or have enough ways to improve relations with elders, it's really not hard to manage. It's still something to be aware of though,

With ancestor veneration, if you go for Temporal leadership, you can't venerate your own ruler, which is a shame, but you can venerate someone within your dynasty, so you can still get that Blessed bloodline in your dynasty.

Pyramid Creation
☻☺☺☺☺

Strengths: This allows you to build and upgrade pyramids even if you're not Egyptian. Pyramids have unique upgrades that gives really nice bonuses, like +same religion opinion. Not to mention, pyramids are just cool.

Weaknesses: Pyramids are amongst one of the most expensive wonders to build and upgrade, and they take an extraordinarily long time to build and upgrade too. It's definitely way more worth it to spend the gold building other wonders instead, since the pyramid's unique features aren't really worth the trouble of going through getting a pyramid for it.

Besides, you can just switch to Egyptian if you really really want to build pyramids that badly. There's genuinely no reason to spend a doctrine slot on this.

Doctrines - Unrelenting, Animistic, Haruspicy

Unrelenting

☻☻☻☺☺

Strengths
Being able to ignore defensive attrition makes your armies powerful against defensive pagans, especially tribal pagans. For tribal pagans, defensive attrition is really the only thing they have going for them defensively, since tribal holdings are very easy to assault, but if you don't have to worry about attrition, it makes it easy to take down tribal pagans rulers quickly.

This defensive attrition bonus is mostly situationally useful for pagans surrounded by even more defensive pagans. In particular, it's mostly useful for Suomenusko, given the fact that they are surrounded by pagans and have very poor provinces, and thus can't really afford to lose troops to attrition. This can be useful to Tengri too, since much of the attack targets appealing to Tengri rulers are Slavic and Suomenusko lands.

Weaknesses
It's a real shame that this cancels out any prior levy or attack bonuses you have, doesn't stack with Animistic, and is incompatible with Unyielding. This basically means that whatever military bonuses you had before, you are now trading for this. This can make this doctrine feel especially unappealing for offensive pagans with +30% levy size bonus. And when compared with Unyielding, which gives +20% levy size and a number of other combat bonuses, Unrelenting certainly feels lukewarm as well.

Not to mention, defensive attrition will eventually become overcome with Military Organization tech 4 anyways, so the usefulness of Unrelenting will eventually die out. So unless you're in a unique position where you're surrounded by lots of defensive pagans, you're probably going to want to spend that doctrine slot on something else.

Animistic

☻☻☺☺☺

Strengths
Rite of Passage upon reaching adulthood allows you to spend money on giving your ruler a buff upon reaching 16 and finally ending regency. This variety of buffs can be very useful in helping you with various strategies, allowing you to set yourself up for success on whatever plan you have in mind for your character.

Weaknesses
The +5% morale of armies is an incredibly minor bonus to be trading your preexisting military bonuses, Unrelenting, or Unyielding for. If you want a strong military doctrine, this is definitely NOT what you would want, since whatever bonus you started out with is probably better. And even if it's not, you can always go for Unrelenting or Unyielding instead, or even Haruspicy.

The rite of passage event is also one you're likely not going to actually see if you never die before your heir reaches adulthood, so it's not a feature you'd have too much control over. If you're playing as African, and want to go for Eldership succession (which you should, since it's the best succession law), you're likely never going to see the rite of passage event at all, ever, since you're likely going to always elect an adult heir with good traits instead of a child and landing yourself in a regency.

Not to mention, actually receiving the rite of passage bonus costs gold, and for kids who do not hold land, they probably do not have the gold to spend on a rite of passage bonus. That means most of the time, kids with Animistic doctrine will not have a rite of passage bonus unless they inherited a landed title from their parents. This makes it really tricky for you to benefit from it directly unless you land your heir and give them money before they grow up.

So while rite of passage is a neat bonus, it's not one you're likely ever going to get to benefit from, and if you are in a position where you can benefit from it, you've likely been through a rough regency anyways.

Haruspicy

☻☻☻☻☺

Strengths
Every time you declare war, you get to gamble some gold in hopes of getting a good morale bonus. You can gamble up to 500 gold (or 400 gold plus a live sacrifice if you have Bloodthirsty Gods), and get up to +20% army morale for it. This bonus lasts for the entire duration of the war, and if you are involved in multiple wars, the buff will remain with you until you are finally at peace. So if you get lucky and get a critical success, it's a good idea to declare another war before ending your current one to keep the morale boost.

As Haruspicy is a gamble, there is a chance you can get a failure, resulting in a morale debuff. However, if you spend enough gold, critical failures will be disabled, and failure chances will be decreased. Asides from spending gold though, there are other factors that go into your chances of success. Being zealous and having high piety will increase your chances at critical success, as will having a pious court chaplain with high learning. If you can get those things down, you should be able to win lots of wars with powerful army morale bonuses.

This is a powerful military bonus, since unlike Unrelenting and Animistic, it does not replace any existing military bonuses you have, and can be stacked with Unyielding, Unrelenting, or Animistic. This makes it very versatile.

This also has a synergy with Astrology, giving you an omen once every 10 years. This can be a really good bonus that provides army morale, taxes, and lowered revolt risks.

Weaknesses
Every bonus offered by Haruspicy, even the synergy with Astrology, is a gamble. As such, you can always get hit with a bad debuff that can seriously mess up your plans. This is definitely something that can repel you from wanting to pick it up, since it's a feature that will not be consistent with how well it strengthens your military, since even on your best days, you can get hit with a -10% army morale.

Not to mention, this is something you have to spend money on, every time you break the peace and declares a new war. This can be difficult to pay for if you don't have a consistent source of income, and if you end up choosing the cheaper options to avoid going into bankruptcy, you are more likely to get hit with a morale penalty. So unless you keep your coffers full with gold by raiding, you're going to find this to be more restricting than helpful. This also gets tedious if you're just declaring a bunch of little wars, since you have to do this every time you declare a new war, unless you're already in another ongoing war.

Doctrines - Daring, Sea-Bound, Bloodthirsty Gods

Daring

☻☻☻☻☺

Strengths
Prepared invasions are a very powerful way for small rulers to conquer enormous swaths of territories at once, which can be instrumental in rapid blobbing. Getting Prepared Invasion would make it possible for any of your small vassals to conquer huge pieces of territory in your name and blob for you without you actually having to lift a finger.

Another advantage to this is if your vassal wins a prepared invasion, chances are, they will vassalize whatever holdings within the target de jure kingdom they did not occupy themselves. This means that if there are any title claimants within those vassalized holdings, they're yours now, and you can press their claims to gain even more territory.

Weaknesses
Prepared Invasions only really work for small rulers, and reforming your religion usually requires you to expand to be very big, making it so that you can't actually benefit from Prepared Invasion that much. Sure, it works great for unreformed Germanic, but once you've reformed, that's a different story. So you yourself may not be able to make much use of the CB at all.

Sea-Bound
☻☻☺☺☺

Strengths
Being able to navigate through major rivers can expand your raiding potential. It allows you to raid the wealthy heartlands of Europe, of the Near East, etc., and vastly extending the range of your raiding so you can bring home a lot more loot.

Having an extended range of raiding also enables you to capture courtiers from vastly differently cultures and religions. You can take advantage of this to abduct concubines and consorts of a desired religion or culture, so you can get that culture that enables raiding, or that culture that enables absolute cognatic succession. This can be used to get achievements like ruling the Empire of Britannia as an Indian.

Another advantage to being able to navigate rivers too is the ability to quickly transport your troops across the continent. It makes it much easier for you to get your demesne troops or your retinues to the frontlines to reinforce your vassal levies there, or to get your new mercenaries there before it's too late.

The ship maintenance cost reduction can be fairly useful if you rely on your demesne ships, and don't have particularly wealthy provinces. In particular, this works well for Suomenusko and Romuva rulers, moreso Suomenusko, due to how poor the Finnish provinces are.

If you combine this with the Daring doctrine, you can unlock Viking raiding traits (if you're not Germanic, it's Pirates instead), which can be a really nice reward. Just keep in mind that the opinion bonus it provides applies only to Germanic pagans, so if you're not Germanic, having a Pirate trait isn't going to improve relations with pagans of your religion, which is a little odd.

Weaknesses
The ship maintenance cost is very conditionally useful, not just because you could be landlocked, but also because if your vassals' ships are enough, then you'd likely never use your demesne ships. And if you use your vassals' ships, you aren't even the one paying for their maintenance, in which case how high the maintenance cost is doesn't really matter to you whatsoever.

Another thing about navigating rivers is that later on in the game, it becomes less and less usable, as fort levels increase, so its usefulness definitely wears off later into the game. It's really unfortunate, cause river navigation is a really useful ability for transporting troops.

One downside to the synergy with Daring to get the Pirate traits is that getting both Sea-Bound and Daring means you have no more doctrine slots left for anything else. So that means that if you want to do this combo, you really have to be dedicated to being a coastal raider if you really want to make the use of your reformed religion. It makes it even more of a shame that being a Pirate improves only Germanic opinion, not the opinion of your religion.

Bloodthirsty Gods
☻☻☻☺☺

Strengths
The traits you gain from sacrificing a lot of prisoners, the Haemo traits, have 3 tiers, each giving more of its bonuses than the last. While the bonus offered by these traits seem minor, they do improve relations with other characters with the Bloodthirsty traits. That might not sound like much, but once you have taken this doctrine, your vassals will tend to sacrifice lots of prisoners as well, so they'll likely have the traits too. So having these traits is sort of a way of bonding with your vassals, improving up to 15 opinion with your vassals, depending on your tiers of the traits.

Perhaps most importantly though, having these Bloodthirsty traits unlock more actions and decisions you can take. The Blood Tournaments you unlock at tier 1 is basically a mini-tournament you can host. Regardless of its results, it improves your relations with your vassals. At tier 2, you get the Mass Sacrifice decision, letting you hit your own demesne provinces with some penalties in order to give your army up to +30% army morale, depending on how much you're willing to sacrifice. It's a pretty powerful boost at the expense of some economy. But funny enough, depleting the population of your provinces with Mass Sacrifice improves the local disease resistance, so that's something you can take advantage of.

Tier 3 has other bonuses but it's not significant. What is significant is the actions you unlock at tier 1 and 2, since being able to further improve your relations with your vassals, and being able to get a military morale bonus, is pretty nice. It's a fairly wide array of bonuses bundled into one single doctrine.

Asides from that, Bloodthirsty Gods also has neat synergy with Haruspicy. With Haruspicy, you can sacrifice a person as a sacrifice for predictions of war. Reformed Hellenic already has Haruspicy, so Reformed Hellenic gets this too. It lowers the costs of sacrifice, but that's about it.

Weaknesses
The traits do give you a relationship penalty with castle and republic vassals. Well, at least that's what the tooltips say, but I don't think I've ever actually seen that penalty in an actual game before, I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's a glitch, maybe the penalty is gone if the vassal also has the traits, not sure. Either way, it's never impacted me much, but if it does affect you, then damn. That sucks.

Another thing that sucks is that unlike the "mass execute" button, there is no "sacrifice all prisoners" button, so you will have to manually click that sacrifice button for all of your prisoners. This can be super tedious if you have a lot of them. Not to mention, every time you or someone else sacrifices someone, an event pops up. Having to click through all of it can also be tedious. But this is really just a nitpick to be honest.

Unique Doctrines

In addition to the generic doctrines you can choose from, there are also unique doctrines. Each religion has its own unique doctrine they can select. These unique doctrines typically combine the effects of two or more generic doctrines, so they're typically better than the generic stuff. For this reason, this section will use a different rating system, since these are almost always going to be better than the generic stuff anyways.

In this section, instead of using a ☺☺☺☺☺ 5-smiley rating system, it will use a ☺☺☺3-smiley rating system.
☻☺☺ means this unique doctrine is underwhelming, only slightly better than the generic doctrines.
☻☻☺ means this unique doctrine is fairly decent, something you'd likely choose due to its efficient use of the available doctrine slots.
☻☻☻ means this unique doctrine is very powerful, and offers a lot for being a single doctrine.

For a quick run-down of each religion's unique doctrines' ratings:

Religion	Rating
Slavic	☻☻☺
Romuva	☻☺☺
Suomenusko	☻☺☺
Aztec	☻☺☺
Tengri	☻☺☺
Germanic	☻☻☺
Bon	☻☻☻
Zunist	☻☻☺
Hellenic	☻☻☻
African	☻☻☻

Doctrines - Slavic, Romuva, Suomenusko

Slavic: Children of Perun
☻☻☺

Stability combined with a good portion of Sea-Bound makes the Slavic unique doctrine fairly decent. Being able to transport troops rapidly across East Europe through river navigation can make both raiding and reinforcing frontlines very efficient, and being able to enjoy the benefits of Stability as well just makes this doctrine really nice.

Romuva: Defenders of Dievas
☻☺☺

I'm not gonna lie, this unique doctrine isn't... really great to be honest. I might have mentioned in the Unyielding nature section, but resistance to proselytizing isn't really that useful of a bonus. And as good as Eldership succession is, simply having resistance to proselytizing slapped on... I dunno, it honestly feel like you're better off going for Ancestor Veneration instead. Being able to venerate ancestors is just so much more useful than resistance to proselytization.

Suomenusko: Survivor of Ukko
☻☺☺

Like the Romuva unique doctrine, resistance to proselytizing is really underwhelming. Although at least Suomenusko's bonus also provides Stability, but even then, it's like... it's only a bit better than the regular Stability doctrine, and for that reason you'd probably always choose this over the generic Stability. But still, it's just honestly kind of underwhelming.

Doctrines - Aztec, Tengri, Germanic

Aztec: Invaders
☻☺☺

Now, before you get excited about all those texts, let's break this down for a moment. You remember that Inherited Traits table? Aztecs, reformed or unreformed, always has access to the Bloodthirsty Gods effects, no matter what. This means that that Bloodthirsty Gods bundled in this doctrine is completely redundant.

Unrelenting? That's not bad, except you lose your +30% levy size for it. So it's not as much of an outright buff as it is just a trade, exchanging your +30% levy size for +10% attack and ignoring defensive pagan attrition. How useful that is is up to you.

The only thing in here that's an actual buff is Sea-Bound, which... it's alright. It's not bad, but it's a shame that it's the only part of this doctrine that's actually an outright buff. This makes Invaders extremely underwhelming, and very much not an attractive choice for reforming doctrine.

EDIT (Nov 1 2019): Okay, so I thought this doctrine was underwhelming at first, until I considered the possibility of unlocking the Sea King/Queen Bloodline through it. As Aztecs, you already have access to the Bloodthirsty Bloodline, so the Bloodthirsty Gods aspect of this doctrine is still redundant, but it DOES provide you access to the Sea King/Queen Bloodline if you manage to get either trait through coastal raiding. On top of that, neither the Bloodthirsty Bloodline nor the Sea King/Queen Bloodline requires you to not have a created bloodline yet, so you can create a bloodline prior to achieving either of those bloodlines, and then pursue the two bloodlines for a total of 3 whopping created bloodlines. That's actually pretty decent.

Tengri: Eternal Riders
☻☺☺

Similar case to Invaders: once again, you're trading +30% levy size for +10% attack and ignore defensive attrition. While it's arguable that the ignoring defensive attrition is more practical for Tengri than it is for Aztecs, since Tengri is way closer to defensive pagans than Aztecs are, Tengri does inherit +30% light cavalry attack and defense in addition to +30% levy size. So you're trading even more for Unrelenting. Whether or not that's worth it is definitely going to be a judgment call you're going to have to make. It's just a shame that this isn't that much of an outright buff.

And of course, that leaves Polygamy as its only real buff, which, it's not bad, especially since Tengri intermarries with Buddhist and Zoroastrian. It's just a shame that this unique doctrine is only slightly better than the generic thing.

Germanic: Sons of Ragnorak
☻☻☺

This definitely isn't bad, having both Daring and Sea-Bound. It basically lets you keep the cool parts about being a Viking using only one doctrine slot, and is not bad, especially since neither of those things are things inherited from the unreformed religion. This basically allows you to continue Viking away the same way you always have.

Well, maybe except for the fact that by that point you're probably not going to get a lot of mileage out of Prepared Invasions due to your realm size. But at least your vassals can still do it.

Doctrines - Bon, Zunist, Hellenic, African

Bon: Harmonious
☻☻☻

Both Meritocracy and Equality are really great features on their own, and combined together make this doctrine incredibly good to have. Not only can you select whichever children you want to be your heir, you can do it without gender restrictions, AND your female heirs won't get you an opinion malus from your vassals. It's really great for ensuring good succession.

There is also the penalty on disallowing avunculate and cousin marriages, which is... kind of odd, to be honest? I'm not really sure why this penalty is here, but it's honestly super negligible, so it's not even worth fretting over.

Zunist: Dawnbreakers
☻☻☺

Divine Marriage is neat, Polygamy is neat, them combined together definitely gives a sum greater than the combination of its parts. What's nice about this is that you only have to spend one of your marriage slots doing incest, you have three more to spare making alliances and non-aggression pacts with people outside of your dynasty. So it definitely allows for some flexibility.

Hellenic: Civilized
☻☻☻

This is incredibly powerful, I'm not gonna lie. This is the only doctrine that offers a bonus that only a nature would offer, and not only that, it takes only from the good parts of Warmongering, the raised levy opinion thing. This means you can enjoy the good parts of Warmongering, while having a completely different nature that doesn't suffer Warmongering's downsides. And that's pretty good.

Meritocracy's really good too, and combined with Warmongering, that's just a very well-rounded amount of bonuses. There's Syncretism too, but honestly that's just a cherry on top. A nice little thing slapped on to make this bundle even more appealing.

African: Totem-Guardians
☻☻☻

This is such a nice combination of effects. Monasticism and Religious Tax are both nice doctrines, but they're both underwhelming on their own, so much so that it's usually not likely you'd want to take either of them without forming your strategy around it. However, bundled together with Eldership succession, all three doctrines in one, it just makes this such an attractive and diverse doctrine. You get to enjoy having the best succession law, AND Monasticism, AND bonus taxes on infidel provinces. And that's hella nice.

Of course, coming out of West Africa, you're unlikely to get much mileage out of Religious Tax, since the majority of your provinces will be the right religion, unless you push out of West Africa and into the Muslim world. But it's one of those bonuses that's quietly helping you out in the background.

Leadership

Lastly, once you have chosen your nature and your doctrines, you're going to have to choose a mode of leadership for your reformed religion as well. This basically decides who the religious head is going to be, as well as what powers the religious heads are going to have, and how much influence they have over the religion. Check it out.

Temporal

This is typically the most attractive choice of leadership for you, since it basically turns you into a caliph. As it says, you get an artifact and a boost to prestige and piety to your dynasty, which is obviously something you'd want.

But most importantly, you get to declare your Great Holy Wars. Not only do you get to declare your own GHW, you also get to acquire every single holding in the de jure kingdom you declare for, all to yourself. It vastly enhances your ability to blob aggressively, since every 30 years you can just eat up an entire de jure kingdom. And that's incredibly good, it's so good that it's hard to pass up on.

Actually I dunno if it's supposed to just give all the holdings to you, but that's just what's happened every time I did it. But that's probably because I always play a big empire, so every time I win a GHW, I'm always the greatest participant, so.

Hierocratic

This basically just makes a pope for your religion, and the pope is the one who controls when and where GHWs are declared. This can kinda suck, since you won't necessarily always be prepared when it happens. But the upside is that since the religious head is just a pope guy, he's likely not going to be the most war participant, so as long as you're doing well, you should still be able to win the crusaded lands.

Anyways, there's also the excommunication and request claims thing, and that can be pretty nice. Excommunications give you an easy excuse to get rid of anyone you want, and request claims lets you take whoever's titles you want. Well, whoever is the same religion as yours, but you know. It can be really nice, which is what makes this leadership mode attractive.

Autocephalous

Ah, yes, autocephaly, the most confusing and hard to understand mode of religious leadership. It's got the same powers as Hierocratic, but instead of having just one religious head, each de jure kingdom has its own religious head, if the de jure monarch has a court chaplain appointed.

This is pretty nice. Since you can appoint your own religious head, you can pretty much easily get whatever excommunications or claims requested you want. The only downside is that since every de jure kingdom has its own religious head, you can't use any of the religion powers against anyone not sharing a religious head with you, which can definitely limit the usefulness of the religious head powers.

Still nice though. And GHWs do still happen, called by the ultimate religion head, so.

Update: I gave it a shot and tried various things. It seems like as the supreme ruler, even though you can't excommunicate vassal kings who has their own patriarchs, you CAN still request claims on their lands, giving you a reason to revoke and instigate them into revolt, which brands them as a traitor and gives you the desired result of being able to do what you want without incurring tyranny anyways. However, your vassal kings DON'T have the same level of privilege, their religious powers confined to their realm. This means you can actually have more religious power than your vassals, giving you a stronger grip over your empire. That is the one advantage Autocephaly has over Hierocratic - limiting your vassals' powers.

Autonomous

This is definitely an interesting choice. Sacrificing the most powerful CB in the game, and 100% decentralizing the religion you worked so hard to reform means you're really going to have to make the most use of the bonuses offered by Autonomous. So what are these bonuses? Well it's on the wiki page, but I'll put it here anyways.


What attribute bonus you get depends on what your religion you have, and behold! Aztecs get nothing. Well, that certainly is one strike against getting Autonomous as an Aztec. Poor guys.

But yes, these bonuses aren't particularly big, but they're definitely something to help out. You can even stack this with Monasticism to get another +2 Learning.

In addition to that though, you can also choose from 4 religious branches.

Honestly? These 4 branches give pretty decent bonuses. I personally can see myself getting a lot of mileage out of Tribalist if I ever decide to give Autonomous leadership a spin.

But yeah, there's not much to discuss about these bonuses. The main point is just, whether or not you feel like these attribute and religious branch bonuses add up enough to justify sacrificing the GHW CB and any other powers available to religious heads, like excommunications and whatnot, that's absolutely up to you and what you're interested in playing. If you ever don't feel like playing expansionist, Autonomous leadership should definitely offer a decent change of pace.

Reformation Strategies

There's lots to take into account when reforming your religion, and it entirely depends upon what specific situations you're in, and how the rest of the world has changed by the time you've reformed your religion. Each religion starts in a different position as well, and that can affect the decisions you make to reform your religion.

Offensive Pagans

As a Germanic pagan, there are many challenges unique to you in your position. You're likely to have conquered a lot of land, or maybe even formed the Empire of Scandinavia, by the time you've reformed, so the biggest challenges facing you might be holding onto the land you have conquered. It's in situations like these where you might find doctrines for realm stability and marriages to be more useful to you in securing your realm.

Or maybe your biggest challenge isn't that, but rather the fact that you're trying to expand into Russia, and face hordes of defensive pagans with defensive attrition that you're going to need to overcome, that Unrelenting looks like a delectable option to go for.

Of course, if you're Aztec, you're unlikely to reach those defensive pagans before reaching military organization tech 4, but instead struggle with the fact that everyone you've conquered is an infidel, in which case you might instead prefer Syncretism to better secure realm stability, or even Infidel Taxes to take advantage of it. You could even go Polygamy + Cosmopolitan so you can secure non-aggressive pacts with your countless infidel vassals.

Besides, if you're Aztec, or maybe even Tengri, by the time you're ready to reform, you've likely blown up to an incredibly substantial empire anyways, one that has reached a critical mass where absolutely no one can threaten you. In which case you might even feel comfortable completely forgoing any military bonuses at all, or exchanging +30% levy size for Unrelenting so you can eat up Russia more easily.

Defensive Pagans

Suomenusko and Romuva pagans are in a uniquely difficult situation, where even when you're ready to reform your religion, you might not be particularly powerful. In fact, if you're Suomenusko, you're likely to be fairly weak even after reformation, due to being unable to create any Empire titles and having dirt poor provinces. Romuva have a little better, but the Wendish Empire title is still really difficult to create without destroying the Christians to the west. These are situations where military bonuses will seem really desirable to you, to give you a leg up in the hostile world. Besides, you're going to need to survive Mongol invasions too, so you're going to want to bulk up.

Slavic pagans have to face the Mongol invasions too, of course, but Slavic pagans are in a slightly better position, with how vast the Slavic world is, and how much more likely you're going to be a respectable power by the time you reform your religion. Even so though, the Mongols will invade, and you will have to be prepared to face them.

It's just a shame that the East European pagans' unique doctrines are so mediocre. It basically means you're going to have to get really creative with your combination of doctrines, as well as the unique powers offered by your warrior lodge, to really change the tides of war.

If you think about it, Africans are really lucky in that they don't have to bother with the Mongol Invasion at all, being incredibly far away from the steppes. If you don't have plans of breaking out of Africa, you can even just forego military bonuses or your unique doctrine, in favour of choosing doctrines that favour a more realm-administrating focus.

But of course, sooner or later you will have to face the Muslim world. As African pagans, you're right next to powerful stretches of the Muslim Empire, and you'll have to be ready to face them in inevitable war. Whether or not that warrants getting a military doctrine is entirely up to you to decide.

Zunist

Zunists start out in such an incredibly difficult situation, being a tiny duchy right next to the mighty Caliph, that it's an absolute challenge to even survive, especially since you can't even raid your neighbors for an extra wad of cash. This means that if you're able to reach a point where you're able to reform your religion, you've probably reached a point where very little can threaten you, as you've already destroyed your most powerful neighbors, so you might not even particularly care to get a military doctrine.

Although it's important to remember that unlike Offensive Pagans, as a Zunist, you do not inherit the +30% levy size upon reforming your religion. So if you don't take Unyielding, you should expect to see your total army size drop by an unfavourable amount (although at that point you might be at a critical mass where losing that bonus doesn't mean too much.)

Bon

As a Bon ruler, you're actually in a fairly easy position. By the time you're reforming your religion, you should already have the Empire of Tibet title, if it didn't previously exist, making you already a powerhouse ready to compete with your Indian and Central Asian neighbors. As such, you might find that you don't really need any military doctrines at all, due to how powerful you already are by the time you reformed.

Not to mention, as a Monastic Feudal ruler, you already have access to primo/ultimogeniture, reformed or not, so you might find yourself not even needing any of the succession doctrines. With military and succession doctrines low on your priority list, this gives you lots of leeway into trying out other fun doctrines you might not otherwise feel comfortable going for in a more precarious situation. Stuff like Astrology, Divine Marriage, etc. Stuff to have fun with.

Hellenic

Hellenic is definitely one of the harder pagan faiths to reform, since it's hard to unlock to begin with, having a number of prerequisites attached to it. But as a tradeoff, by the time you reform the Hellenic faith, you're probably in command of the Roman Empire anyways, and you get access to one of the more powerful unique doctrines. It's hard to imagine not going for a world conquest from here on out.

But I'm going to be honest, I've never played as Hellenic before, so there's honestly not much advice I can give on reforming tips here. But I'd imagine that you'd have a lot of leeway with what you wanna get, since if you've reformed the Roman Empire, you've probably reached a critical mass where you're unstoppable anyways, so there likely isn't going to be much urgency in what specific doctrines you absolutely need.

Conclusion

The ability to customize your religion with reformation is incredibly powerful, and makes playing pagans a very rewarding experience. Being able to tailor your religion to your playstyle or your specific agenda is a privilege only pagans get to have as well, but that also means you really have to know what you're doing if you want to get the most out of it.

Of course, that doesn't mean just choosing the best nature and the best doctrines every single time. Every religion starts out in a uniquely different position, and every game is completely different from the last, so it's important to be flexible with what you feel like you will make the most use out of. After all, adapting to whatever surprising developments and RNG the game throws at you is part of the fun of playing as a pagan.

Good luck, and have fun bolstering your pagan faith against the ravages of time!

[BenvyaGhurlik]

Thank, very informative guide!

[Cowcubus]

@Solii
Oh thank you for pointing out that out! I had missed that

[Solii]

nice guide. helped alot. just one thing to add on nature part: only proselytizing nature can send missionaries abroad. dont think it's clear on this post.

I initially thought maybe I could if zealous on other natures - not. haha

[CidDaBird]

Thanks for the guide

[wf1675]

i want a mod to increase ai convert same group provinces for most natures

[Alex Jones]

The benefit of Agnatic/Enatic Clans open succession is not that you can choose your heir, it's that your heir gets all titles - so you can escape Gavelkind which tribal pagans are usually limited to.
Even if you choose Meritocracy you are only able to designate your top level heir.

[JCDenton]

Great guide, very informative! I know I went with Sons of Ragnarok first time I played a Norseman and I was kinda disappointed since it's kinda redundant if you're already Norse since you already get -90% ship upkeep.

[Cowcubus]

@Oblivion
I think I'd like to get a few hundred more hours into the game before I'm confident with making another guide like this!

[Oblivion]

If either of you two is playing it, a guide like this for the CK3 tenets would be AMAZING.
I'd be willing to help out if you're interested.

[Cowcubus]

@Rayan2033
Hmm, I can definitely see that being an issue. Usually I try to counter that by demanding gavelkind amongst my vassals or forcing them to white peace whenever they try to press their claims. To make sure they don't try to get a favour out of me for it, or if they do do that, what I usually do is using a wonder's Intimidate ability, assassin's intimidate, or through events like the monastic order ones.

Or, if too much is going on at once, just enforce realm peace.

It's a lot of work, and it can get frustrating at times, but if you feel like the payoff of being able to get multiple bloodlines stacked into your dynasty is worth it, or if you don't foresee being able to get absolute cognatic inheritance through any other methods, it could be worth going for Equality. Otherwise, the other methods for creating a bunch of bloodlines could be more favourable.