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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.

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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.

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Next week we will talk about about subjects and how to interact with them...
 
I love it. Both stuff for Protestantism and Buddhism looks brilliant. Though balanced karma could give 1-2 more modifiers, like +1 prestige and -0.05 war exhaustion, what do you think?

I also like dividing Buddhism on Mahayana, Vayrayana and Theravada though I am not sure gow exactly geographic spread looks like.

So now only boring faiths remaining are confucian, shinto, coptic, pagans. For pagans I'd suggest 'generic' personal deities, for shinto cult of ancestors? and for confucianism meritocracy. Don't know anything about copts.
 
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Protestantism changes: yay!

Karma: I'm not sure. Sounds odd but might be interesting to play in the end.

Have you taught the AI how to use it/act accordingly?
 
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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"."
 
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This is still Alpha build. The bonuses will no doubt be changed or nerfed before the release.

Are there any countries that start as Mahayana? Like Korea or Jianzhou? Maybe Japan isn't Shinto anymore but Mahayana?

Hopefully they are still Shinto. Japanese Buddhists, including the clergy, were kinda different from the mainland Asian ones.
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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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?
 
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I love it. Both stuff for Protestantism and Buddhism looks brilliant. Though balanced karma could give 1-2 more modifiers, like +1 prestige and -0.05 war exhaustion, what do you think?

I also like dividing Buddhism on Mahayana, Vayrayana and Theravada though I am not sure gow exactly geographic spread looks like.

So now only boring faiths remaining are confucian, shinto, coptic, pagans. For pagans I'd suggest 'generic' personal deities, for shinto cult of ancestors? and for confucianism meritocracy. Don't know anything about copts.

That would make not much sense since ancestor worship is not a defining element of Shintô but is a Confucian(!) thing. Anyway, Shintô as a "religion" is technically out of the timeframe of EU4 since its a late 19th, early 20th century invention. The only impact Shintô had on a national level were a couple of imperial ceremonies and ideology which pretty much only the court knew and cared about (and the court was powerless until 1868...so, yeah...).
Local rites and traditions are what most people probably mean when thinking of Shintô, but that, essentially, is not much more than a glorified Animism and thus no religion, and is fused with Buddhist beliefs and philosophy (->syncreticism). This actually holds true for every "Buddhist" country, since Buddhism is an inclusive, not an exclusive concept, so its kinda weird that Japan is not, well, Buddhist, even though thats by far the most dominant theological and philosophical spiritual framework during EU4's timeframe.
 
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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.
 
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