Welcome to another development diary about Europa Universalis IV. Today we’ll go into details about mechanics for some religions, that will become available with the next expansion.


Protestanstism
Each protestant church will have their own name in the interface, like Church of England and so on. You can then customise the benefits of your church, and also change it over time whenever you need. To change the aspect of your church, you have to spend Church Power.

Church Power is accumulated each month, depending on your current religious unity, and your monarchs abilities.

Adding an aspect to your church costs 100 church power, but you can remove an aspect at any time, but that will lower your stability by 1.

A Church can have up to 3 different aspects, and there are 12 different ones to pick from. Some of these include.

• Holy Sacraments: +2.5% Discipline
• Individual Creeds: -5% Idea Costs
• Adult Baptism: +1% Missionary Strength.

Buddhism
The Buddhist Faith gained the concept of Karma. Karma needs to be balanced, because if it goes too positive or negative, you end up with penalties. If you go too positive you end up with penalties to your diplomatic abilities, and if you go too negative, you end up with penalties to your military abilities.

However, If you keep a balanced karma, you gain bonuses to both diplomatic and military abilities.

Some examples on how you gain Karma include: Starting wars decrease Karma, while honoring defensive alliances increase Karma.

While adding the Karma mechanic and its related events it also became clear that the game setup could benefit from splitting the existing religion into Vajrayana, Mahayana and Theravada. These three religions will all use the same Karma mechanic but don't all share the same events related to it and can in some cases have different event options in the events they do share. Events related to Lamas are for instance reserved for the Vajrayana faith while only Theravada countries can turn to Ceylon for spiritual inspiration. The three religions also differ in what bonuses they provide.

Next week we will talk about about subjects and how to interact with them...

 

[fooze]

BTW, I feel I should make a comment on something important.

The concept of "Karma" – you should probably try to find a better name for this.
Karma, as I understand it, is something that has to do with individual's virtues. It does not apply to the whole of society.

Buddhism is rich in its vocabulary, so I'm pretty sure that there is something that is more accurate and fits better to what you want to achieve. "Karma" kind of sounds like a misunderstood and "John Romeroesque Quake-engine '98"-take on a philosophical subject, and Paradox should be better than that.

I'm not an expert (you should consult one), but have you checked in the concept of "Dharma"? It's more about the order of the universe and resembles the stuff you did for the South American religions in El Dorado.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma

"In Hinduism, dharma signifies behaviors that are considered to be in accord with rta, the order that makes life and universe possible,[10][note 1] and includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and ‘‘right way of living’’.[7] In Buddhismdharma means "cosmic law and order",[10] but is also applied to the teachings of the Buddha.[10] In Buddhist philosophy, dhamma/dharma is also the term for "phenomena".[11][note 2] In Jainismdharma refers to the teachings of the Jinas[10] and the body of doctrine pertaining to the purification and moral transformation of human beings. For Sikhs, the word dharm means the "path of righteousness"."

 

[Wizzington]

Protestant base -10% idea cost will be replaced with +1 tolerance own

 

[Atilla 'The Hun']

Wauw! Its finally worth it to go for Protestanstism.

Question,

Will Confucianism and Shinto get mechanics too? Kinda sad to see that other East Asian religions don't get any love at all...

 

[omega20056]

Why would positive karma have a diplomatic penalty and negative karma have a military penalty? Surely they should be the other way around?

Honouring alliances would surely increase your diplomatic reputation, while declaring war would decrease it and boost your military abilities?

 

[laijka]

Each protestant church will have their own name in the interface, like Church of England and so on.

Can we change the name or will it always be a default "Church of CountryName"?

 

[abotkin]

Excellent, more variety in religions is always welcome, especially when it involves interactive mechanics of some sort and not just a completely passive system.

 

[Wizzington]

What's the deal with the Refineries in some of the provinces? Sure, manufactories still exist (just that they're now normal buildings), but most of these provinces don't have Wine trade goods.

Placeholder models for 3D forts.

 

[Zak Preston]

Very nice changes to Protestantism.

Will Orthodoxy get any interactive mechanics instead of "gain\lose Patriarch Authority"?

 

[Nyrael]

The karma deal sounds bad. Worst thing about Orthodoxy is the single slider and no real interactivity. Dumbing down another religion is not an improvement.

Also, all of this is cool and all - but I want DLC that makes the game run better.

How is a change of nothing to slider dumbing down? You need something changed to less/simple for it to be categorized as such.

 

[BFTeixeira]

@Johan
(I'm sorry if this sounds rude in any way.)
I've had the opportunity to try EU4 a few times, and from what I see, this is one of the few games I would like to acquire.
However, as a principle, I only acquire games when they are as complete as possible as well as available at an affordable price.
EU4 is still being updated through DLCs/expansions, would you be able to mention a very rough date as to when the game should reach its final stages of development? Also, it seems that right now EU4 costs around 100€. However, in my current situation and as I usually see it, 20-30€ can be a lot when invested on games.
All in all, is there any way to know if the game will be completely "finished" and affordable before 2017-2018? But then, the game will be 5 years old, will it still be able to compete?
So, the feeling I get is that Paradox is just trying to get as much €$£ out of it as it can. Now, I think that's fully understandable to a great extent, however, my feeling is that Paradox might have crossed the line to which this is understandable, as in putting more weight on the profit than on the raw quality and availability of its product, thus leading to a decay on the later.

You can look at it in another way. Instead of having to buy a new game every year, you just update the game through time. If you don't mind waiting for sales, and you dig online, you'll find out that you can keep up with the developments at a much more cheaper price than the €100. I bought the main DLC's (Conquest of Paradise, Wealth of Nations, Res-Publica, Art of War), for about €30 total.
But if you really want the game only when it's "finished", buy everything when they announce EU5.

 

[King Leto]

Very nice!

Given that Orthodox Christianity has a decentralized nature but each Church in a state having common but different practices, will there perhaps be an Orthodox equivalent of the new Protestant mechanics?

 

[Nyrael]

Now that each Protestant church is represented, what is the justification/utility of reformed?

It is because the Calvinists and Lutherans weren't really on the same ground per opinions. One of major differences is that Lutherans believe that Church and state should stay connected (so many Lutheran denominations are "Church of State X") whereas Calvinists believe that Church and state should be fully separated (so there are various independent Protestant sects that spread around multiple countries) so merging Calvinists with the new Protestant system, or giving them their features, would not make any sense.

 

[Darkath]

Having to play balancing scales has never - ever appealed to me.

Oh no! I can't declare war on this nation, because it would throw my Karma too deep into the negatives! Oh noes! It ruins a plethora of my nation!

No. Just.... No.

Well as they say, karma is a bitch, heh.

 

[mudcrabmerchant]

EDIT: If one tears down, one must also try to build up. Will soon follow up with suggestions.

Keep the slider, but rename it to Dharma. Have it instead represent the way that your state is remodeling Buddhism to support its goals. If you wage aggressive war frequently, you are trying to mold Buddhism into a philosophy that can support war (Japanese Buddhists were particularly good at this at certain times), while if you abstain from war, you will gradually be molding Buddhism as a tool to keep the populace in check, and buff up the legitimacy of your dynasty's rule. A balance between them will represent that you are more willing to let Buddhism govern itself and/or that you support doctrinal diversity, increasing diplomatic relations because other rulers don't mistrust you for warping your religion or being a narrow-minded zealot (or something, seems less historically plausible but for gameplay, allows for a choice between ADM-DIP-MIL).

There should also be specific mechanics to each branch of Buddhism:

Vajrayana: As your Dharma meter moves up the peaceful branch, lamas and monasteries get more power (historically, IIRC, they grew in power after Tibet and Mongolia stopped waging war frequently), while a war-happy Buddhist country will avoid this. In game terms, the effects from having ADM-focused dharma will be greater (both benefits and penalties), due to the massive effects that lamas and monasteries had in late-early-modern Tibet and Mongolia.

Mahayana: Pick a school of Mahayana to patronize: Zen, Pure Land, and Tiantai. Tiantai would increase ADM-dharma gain, Pure Land would increase MIL-dharma gain, Zen would be neutral (unsure about how to divide them up, particularly Zen and Pure Land, if you have more knowledge of the political history of these schools and think they should be switched, explain why and I'll do so)

Theravada: I know less about the political history of this than the other branches, but IIRC there was a stronger influence from Hinduism in the Siam-Khmer region, and more from local paganism in Burma. So perhaps it could receive a special tolerance for heathens. Perhaps the changes to the dharma-meter could occur faster, based on how the Taungu empire went rather quickly from being an aggressive expansionist empire to an efficient, localized, mostly peaceful state.

 

[Nyrael]

Finally all three Western Christian faiths have unique mechanics... and with that said, Protestantism's mechanic seems awesome!

Will Confucianism and Shinto get mechanics too? Kinda sad to see that other East Asian religions don't get any love at all...

All in it's time, young Padawan. Designing and implementing a brand new mechanic ain't so cheap and easy that it can be done too many times per expansion.

 

[qbln]

Protestant changes look promising but i can't say same about karma thing.

 

[joe9594]

first
On a more insightful note these changes to protestantism look great. I can now justify going protestantism from a max mining as well as role playing perspective

 

[Moranic]

Cool changes to Protestantism. Also looking forward to subject interaction! Hopefully we get to force our religion on them or something.

 

[BarskiPatzow]

I hope orthodox church gets a rework soon and coptic gets some mechanics... Even norse is more detailed.