Alternate Reformation

Incompetent · Sep 16, 2007

I've just been looking at the Alternate Reformation events for the first time, and overall they look good, especially the early ones. But one thing I don't think is a good idea is using Protestant religion to represent the Pope, even if it is Martin Luther. For one thing, they're not really breaking away from the Church; the old Catholic hierarchy is still more or less intact, national rulers haven't seized church assets, they have no affinity for the radical Reformed churches and so on, and as such, the reformed Catholic countries should still be getting basically Catholic religion bonuses. Secondly, if the reformists win, that means almost the whole of Europe goes along with them, along with their colonies. Do we need to subject them all to conversion events, leading to broken alliances and relations everywhere, and mess around to ensure the new religion 'sticks' for AI countries? (I saw a failure of this for Eire - they backed the 'Protestant' Pope, then flipped back to Traditionalist Catholic a few years later simply because they had too many TC colonies.) Finally, it's good to have that Protestant tag available for genuine Protestants - they'll be fewer of them, but they'll still exist.

What I suggest is the following:

During initial period of turmoil, everyone is Catholic. Loyalties to one side or another wouldn't be set in stone at this point, especially as one side tends to largely win over the other, and the business of converting provinces back and forth is not a good model. Dissent can be represented by bad relations and RR.

If the conservatives win, that's obviously the end of the alternative Reformation, and we get a conventional one instead, with Protestant churches popping up in a lot of former reformist areas.

If the reformists win, they get to say what Catholicism means. It's the die-hard conservatives who will be seen by history as the schismatics and heretics. But as for the conservatives who become permanently estranged from the main Catholic church, they're likely to form their own churches, but with strong hierarchies, colourful ritual and a lot of practices based on tradition. (In a way, this has happened in real life - consider Traditionalist Catholics like Mel Gibson.) In other words, they'll be rather like the Orthodox church, or rather the collection of autonomous conservative churches we represent as Orthodox. As such, I suggest we use that tag.

Avernite · Sep 16, 2007

One problem I see with that immediately:

The teutons. Likely conservatives, and would benefit tremendously from going Orthodox religion.

edit: for the rest, makes sense. I dislike the back-conversions too.

MattyG · Sep 17, 2007

Incompetent said:
I've just been looking at the Alternate Reformation events for the first time, and overall they look good, especially the early ones. But one thing I don't think is a good idea is using Protestant religion to represent the Pope, even if it is Martin Luther. For one thing, they're not really breaking away from the Church; the old Catholic hierarchy is still more or less intact, national rulers haven't seized church assets, they have no affinity for the radical Reformed churches and so on, and as such, the reformed Catholic countries should still be getting basically Catholic religion bonuses.

When the Alternative Reformation triggers and Luther is Pope (or an influential cardinal) it is not the start of that sequence, it is the end of it. You argue later here for a period of conflict from which the Reformists or Conservatives might win, but the point is that this has been going on for almost a century. The election of Luther represents the victory of the reformists already. (While we have an event to later give victory to the conservatives, this is a military victory, not a theological and political victory: the reformist Pope is captured and has capitulated. And it's very unlikely to happen, really.)

Not a complete victory, of course, only a narrow one, but it splits the Catholic world. Having both sides as Catholic religion not only doesn't make flavour sense at this point, it also doesn't make game function sense. There's been a split, shaking the religious and political sphere's of Europe to their foundations and this needs to be reflected in game mechanics. (If we could change the name of the religions to Reformist Catholic and Traditionalist Catholic we would, but we can't.)

Keeping them all Catholic - whatever text you might give it - is the status quo. No breaking of dynastic alliances, no removal of the -1 to stab for attacking someone of the same religion. This is no way to represent a religious split.

Secondly, if the reformists win, that means almost the whole of Europe goes along with them, along with their colonies. Do we need to subject them all to conversion events, leading to broken alliances and relations everywhere, and mess around to ensure the new religion 'sticks' for AI countries? (I saw a failure of this for Eire - they backed the 'Protestant' Pope, then flipped back to Traditionalist Catholic a few years later simply because they had too many TC colonies.) Finally, it's good to have that Protestant tag available for genuine Protestants - they'll be fewer of them, but they'll still exist.

Yes we do need to subject them all to conversion events. Absolutely. Broken alliances everywhere? Absolutely. The church has split and everyone has to chose whom they support. As for the flip-backs, this is a matter of tweaking the events, not discarding the concept. And we no longer need the protestant flag for true protestants as we don't have any. Protestantism no longer exists, the churches own reformism has sidestepped the matter of protestantism, or at least the protestantism that emerged following Luther in the RW. And we still have the Reformed tag and will have refomed countries.

If the conservatives win, that's obviously the end of the alternative Reformation, and we get a conventional one instead, with Protestant churches popping up in a lot of former reformist areas.

Seriously, although the events are there for someone to use them, the likelihood of a Conservative military victory (or a reformist one ) is pretty small.

If the reformists win, they get to say what Catholicism means. It's the die-hard conservatives who will be seen by history as the schismatics and heretics. But as for the conservatives who become permanently estranged from the main Catholic church, they're likely to form their own churches, but with strong hierarchies, colourful ritual and a lot of practices based on tradition. (In a way, this has happened in real life - consider Traditionalist Catholics like Mel Gibson.) In other words, they'll be rather like the Orthodox church, or rather the collection of autonomous conservative churches we represent as Orthodox. As such, I suggest we use that tag.

We do not want all these traditionalist catholics becomming orthodox. If we ever get around to doing religious schism/iconoclasm/heresy events for the orthodox faiths this will just muddy the waters.

Garbon · Sep 18, 2007

They do make a good point though, that it is strange for the Pope to be protestant. If you're making a split, it makes more sense that those who refuse to follow the pope are the ones leaving the Catholic fold.

MattyG · Sep 18, 2007

Garbon said:
They do make a good point though, that it is strange for the Pope to be protestant. If you're making a split, it makes more sense that those who refuse to follow the pope are the ones leaving the Catholic fold.

I don't believe that they do, and this matter has been debated in other forums (and on the phone) at some length.

We have available to us realistically only the Catholic and Protestant tags for use in this matter. Now, there are two elements to each tag, one is the semantic and the other is the game-settings.

Protestant, I realise, does carry the connotations of 'being opposed to' or of not being orthodox. This sesne could apply to either of the two sides in the schism. The other sense is of moving away from tradition/orthodoxy in theology. In this sense, the word Protestant beloengs clearly to the side of the Pope in Rome.

Then there is the game-settings side of the matter, which is by far the more significant. Now, remember that we still have the standard reformation which ought to occur most of the time (I am hoping it happens about 80%). Each religion has different attributes definied by the religion.csv and these cannot be changed during the game, just like the names of the tags. The setting for Catholic and Protestant are different, with the latter trying to model a cultural different dues to having challenged tradtional thinking in religion and what it must mean for a society that does that. This critical value of the Protestant tag clearly should belong to the Pope in Rome.

Making the arch-conservative Bavarians get the tag Protestant and the religious modifiers that come with it are not appropriate. Nor, for that matter, is having the conservatives suffer all the broken alliances that come wth changing religion.

The conservatives are not leaving the Catholic fold. They see themselves as the true Catholic church and have elected their own Pope. The others are the heretics. Both undoubtedly call themselves The Roman Catholic Church.

Finally, the Pope being Protestant is not only more appropriate, it also has a lot of cool flavour

LordAumerle · Sep 23, 2007

MattyG said:
Making the arch-conservative Bavarians get the tag Protestant and the religious modifiers that come with it are not appropriate. Nor, for that matter, is having the conservatives suffer all the broken alliances that come wth changing religion.

The conservatives are not leaving the Catholic fold. They see themselves as the true Catholic church and have elected their own Pope. The others are the heretics. Both undoubtedly call themselves The Roman Catholic Church.

Finally, the Pope being Protestant is not only more appropriate, it also has a lot of cool flavour

Not really weighing in with any opinion, I've just been browsing about and been very impressed, but I would say that surely that whilst the Prot tag may need to be used to represent the Reformed Catholic Church, from what I've read, it'd bear no real resemblance to the two main Protestant traditions - Lutheranism and Anglicanism.

If land was still held by the Church, the Throne of St Peter remained paramount, and the only differences were removal of corruption and, perhaps, issues of clerical celibacy, surely they are just enacting the Council of Trent (plus a few codices) early? They're CRC, not Prot, in nature.

Of course, given the gameplay issues and available tags, Prot may well be what you want to use anyway - not questioning that. Just talking from an ecclesial history POV.

MattyG · Sep 24, 2007

LordAumerle said:
Not really weighing in with any opinion, I've just been browsing about and been very impressed, but I would say that surely that whilst the Prot tag may need to be used to represent the Reformed Catholic Church, from what I've read, it'd bear no real resemblance to the two main Protestant traditions - Lutheranism and Anglicanism.

If land was still held by the Church, the Throne of St Peter remained paramount, and the only differences were removal of corruption and, perhaps, issues of clerical celibacy, surely they are just enacting the Council of Trent (plus a few codices) early? They're CRC, not Prot, in nature.

Of course, given the gameplay issues and available tags, Prot may well be what you want to use anyway - not questioning that. Just talking from an ecclesial history POV.

This is absolutely right, but here in EU2 we are trapped. There are only 10 tags for religions. Obviously we can't and don't want to get rid of Confucianism, Buddhism or Hinduism. If anything THEY all need extra diversity too. Pagan and Counter-Reform Catholic are tags with very specific conditions attached to them that cannot be altered by us, and are really only good for being exactly themselves. We are already using Sunni and Shiite tags well. That leaves us with just Protestant, Reformed and Catholic tags. The Reformed tag we need for religions that are Reformed or Reformed-like (Lollards, Hussites and the post-Calvinists). So, the best we can do is play around with Protestant and Catholic.

I wish we could have more religions. It has been the top of the EU2 wish list for Johan for ... a very long time. I don't think he'll add more to this old game, though.

Avernite · Sep 24, 2007

To be quite honest...

Maybe CRC could work for the conservatives.

If they win, catholics are the conservatives, and the other guys break from Rome.

If, at the end of the struggle, they haven't won, they essentially break all ties to Rome and become protestant.

Of course, they'd only get bonus CB's against Calvinists at that time, but I really don't see all of Europe get locked into bloody conflict over a papal schism. A war here and there, some vicious fighting, but most would likely just carry on and try to mend the split.

But that of course depends on thinking the church ISN'T wholly torn apart when the anti-pope is chosen. The anti being attached to whoever you dislike most

MattyG · Sep 25, 2007

Avernite said:
To be quite honest...

Maybe CRC could work for the conservatives.

If they win, catholics are the conservatives, and the other guys break from Rome.

This one we did debate and maybe we could look at it again. But as I understand it, CRC is only for a country, not for provinces, which means that we would HAVE to do the next bit ...

If, at the end of the struggle, they haven't won, they essentially break all ties to Rome and become protestant.

But then this means that the conservative faction gets the Protestant tag, with the stats for Protestant that come with it, which tries to model a more questioning culture.

Of course, they'd only get bonus CB's against Calvinists at that time, but I really don't see all of Europe get locked into bloody conflict over a papal schism. A war here and there, some vicious fighting, but most would likely just carry on and try to mend the split.

I don't see it as being any different from the standard Reformation in that regard. They tried to mend the split with the nations which went protestant IRL: mend it with guns, burning people and nothing that could be considered very civil. So why should this be different?

Avernite · Sep 25, 2007

Because in the 1400's there had been a big papal schism, and it didn't involve such a huge amount of fighting, although you could see the 100YW as affected by it.

MattyG · Sep 26, 2007

Avernite said:
Because in the 1400's there had been a big papal schism, and it didn't involve such a huge amount of fighting, although you could see the 100YW as affected by it.

But the premise was different. This is a huge theological rift, like that between Lutheranism and Catholicism, ergo ...

Incompetent · Sep 26, 2007

MattyG said:
(While we have an event to later give victory to the conservatives, this is a military victory, not a theological and political victory: the reformist Pope is captured and has capitulated. And it's very unlikely to happen, really.)

Fair enough. But in that case you accept that in the initial stages of the argument (ie, in the 15th century), everyone is Catholic on the surface.

Not a complete victory, of course, only a narrow one, but it splits the Catholic world. Having both sides as Catholic religion not only doesn't make flavour sense at this point, it also doesn't make game function sense. There's been a split, shaking the religious and political sphere's of Europe to their foundations and this needs to be reflected in game mechanics. (If we could change the name of the religions to Reformist Catholic and Traditionalist Catholic we would, but we can't.)

Of course, assuming the split is more or less permanent and no longer contingent on the politics of the day.

Yes we do need to subject them all to conversion events. Absolutely. Broken alliances everywhere? Absolutely.

It should be the losing side that bears the cost of this, not the winners. As I say, it's the losers who will be regarded as being heretical, and the winners will frame themselves as continuing in the ancient traditions of the Church and protecting it from unwelcome innovations. This is true whether or not we regard the winners as 'traditionalist' from an outside perspective (for example, if the reformists win, indulgences will be presented as a recent invention, lacking in traditional/theological justification).

Also, it appears from playing a game as the Maya that actually most countries stay 'Traditional Catholic', so that for instance Galicia is 'Protestant' while Mecklemburg is 'Catholic' (this is in 1566). Eire went 'Protestant' for a bit, but quickly got overwhelmed by the Traditionalist majority, so Eire is a Traditionalist state even though Meath province is Reformist. This all seems nonsense to me. So something is incomplete or not working here, if the reformists are supposed to have 'won'.

And we no longer need the protestant flag for true protestants as we don't have any. Protestantism no longer exists, the churches own reformism has sidestepped the matter of protestantism, or at least the protestantism that emerged following Luther in the RW. And we still have the Reformed tag and will have refomed countries.

One motive for Protestantism is completely undiminished: the desire of princes to control the church in their lands, and as long as there is some dissent against Rome (even if it's just from the likes of Calvin) it gives room for rulers to make a bid for control, even if there's not much doctrinal motivation on their part (eg Henry VIII of England). I think the Roman church vs state church vs anarchic church differences are the main reason the three Christian tags deserve different bonuses, rather than questions of 'progressiveness' in doctrine, which in any case varied widely from one Protestant sect to another and even between different supposedly 'Catholic' churches. And even if Luther becomes Pope, Catholicism will only be a state church in the Papal States itself - everywhere else it should continue to provide the strengths and weaknesses of a pan-European church outside the control of local rulers.

We do not want all these traditionalist catholics becomming orthodox. If we ever get around to doing religious schism/iconoclasm/heresy events for the orthodox faiths this will just muddy the waters.

If you're talking about doctrinal differences or shared history, Greek Orthodoxy is much closer to Roman Catholicism than it is to many of the churches we've been forced to lump in with 'Orthodox', such as the Nestorians. Also, without the Fourth Crusade I don't think the Great Schism would have quite the same resonance in the Inter world. So in a way it's no more unreasonable that Byzantium should have religious compatibility with parts of Iberia say than having the same with parts of Central Asia. Whatever happens with the Alternative Reformation, I see nothing wrong with using the Catholic tag to represent heretics within the Orthodox world (they're unlikely to be ultraconservatives anyway). In any case, I don't think it will really matter if places on opposite sides of Europe happen to have the same religion.

The TO is a tricky one, to be sure; but with no Pope and few Germans who share their beliefs, could the TO really go on as they are anyway? Maybe the supposedly Catholic Balts are actually ambivalent about the differences between Traditional Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy?

MattyG · Sep 26, 2007

OK, I am swayed by some of these arguments, and now I can see the advantage of the use of Orthodox.

On the matter of which nations went Protestant and which stayed Catholic this is both a) exactly what was intended for someone like Eire, with a split in the people/polity/state between convention and following the 'true' pope in Rome. But on the matter of quantity, I also am happy to see a majority of courties go with the German pope on occasion, that's variety. If it is a case of countries 'flipping' back to Catholic, that's a matter of coding more province conversions when the event first strikes. I admit I was stingy.

I now rather like the idea that at the time of the Schism, the conservatives become CRC for 40 years or so, after which the break becomes too solid (assuming no military vistory) and then the conservatives become Orthodox.

I think you and Avernite are right that this will work more smoothly and then also permits us to have the Protestant tag for use with 'true' protestants, as one might say.

So, OK, I concede.

unmerged(16159) · Oct 7, 2007

I too see some sense in this. I am desperately disappointed not to see the Papal States with a 'protestant' tag, but I can live with it, especially since we have a game in which Luther is a potential Pope.

I also like what this does to Europe. Suddenly the east/west divide becomes smaller, and with potentially far more 'orthodox' states, places like HUngary and Byzantium have the opportunity to become massive players in the west.

It'll be an interesting dynamic.

Incompetent · Oct 8, 2007

mikl said:
I also like what this does to Europe. Suddenly the east/west divide becomes smaller, and with potentially far more 'orthodox' states, places like HUngary and Byzantium have the opportunity to become massive players in the west.

Well, potentially. The traditionalists will be a minority in the 'Catholic' part of Europe, more a province religion than a state religion. However, it could have huge consequences for the Teutonic Order and the Balkans. I think it should be somewhat random who converts and who doesn't, but we could perhaps say that Christians in Iberia, northern Scandinavia, most of the Gaelic provinces (but not necessarily Eire as a state), the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Sicily, and parts of the Balkans, the Baltic region and southern Germany would go traditionalist more often than not. The Teutonic Order needs a whole new event sequence to deal with the internal fallout of the AltRef schism.

Hungary starts Catholic, so they can already play a big role further west. The question is whether they would stay Catholic state religion in the Alternate Reformation.

Avernite · Oct 9, 2007

Having Sicily go counterreform is tricky, since it turns the military victory of the conservatives into a likely result, rather than a difficult option for a human player.

In essence, Sicily is THE most likely country to conquer Rome militarily (I think, maybe Genoa or the hanse has a shot), so if it's also likely to be counter reformed, the military victory conditions might need reworking.

Incompetent · Oct 9, 2007

Avernite said:
Having Sicily go counterreform is tricky, since it turns the military victory of the conservatives into a likely result, rather than a difficult option for a human player.

In essence, Sicily is THE most likely country to conquer Rome militarily (I think, maybe Genoa or the hanse has a shot), so if it's also likely to be counter reformed, the military victory conditions might need reworking.

Well, Sicily may not go schismatic immediately. Same goes for the others. A lot of individual provinces will go, but whether countries do so depends on how strong they are and so on.

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