Questions on the new Holy Orders

[Afonso de Albuquerque]

The latest dev diary introduced the new Holy Order mechanic, restricted to Iberian Catholic countries. Here is the relevant part:

These are inspired by Jesuit Reductions in the new world but an Iberian nation can put them anywhere as long as the nation own the entire state and that it is fully cored and stated. The available orders are: The Society of Jesus, The Order of Preachers and The Order of Saint Francis.

When an order is selected for a state these following effects are applied to all provinces in that state.

• Jesuit Order
  • +1 Tax Development
  • 1.5% Local missionary strength
  • -10% Local Build Cost
• Dominican Order
  • +1 Production Development
  • Removes slaves if trade goods and replace it with something else
  • -30% Culture Conversion Cost
• Franciscan Order
  • +1 Manpower Development
  • -3 Local Unrest
  • -0.05 Local Monthly Devastation

Each of these costs 50 monarch power to put in place, 50 of the type that order represents. Administrative for Jesuits, Diplomatic for Dominican and Military for Franciscan. As an overlord of a colonial nation you can still place these in their land. The AI will know if a player is involved and restrain itself from placing these orders themselves letting the player optimize their usage.

So I have some questions about how this new mechanic is going to work and how it will affect the game in practice. Things I still don't know regarding the rules are:
- Once you assign an Order to a State, do they stay until the end of the game?
- Can you remove them? Can you switch them?
- If some other country takes a province in a state that had a Holy Order, does it immediately get removed from the entire state (since it no longer satisfies the requirement to own the entire state)?
- If the Orders can be removed (by the means mentioned above or others I missed), what happens to the bonus development? Does it immediately get removed from every province from the state? For example if I, as Aragon, place a Holy Order in the state of Catalonia but then lose Roussillon to France, do I also lose development in all my remaining provinces? Does the Roussillon that France payed for in the peace deal actually have one less dev?
- It is stated that if an AI Colonial Nation that is Iberian Catholic (so could use Holy Orders) has an Overlord controlled by a player, it won't actually use the Holy Orders leaving that to the player. Does that mean that we can force the CN to use them? Or that we have to spend our own Monarch Points to use them in the CN? What if the Overlord is not Catholic/Iberian? What if the Overlord is Catholic Iberian but the CN isn't?
- Are the Holy Orders available from the start of the game? Are the Jesuits (created in 1540 IRL) available in 1444 before even taking the decision to create them (which requires Admin tech 10)?

Now regarding the actual impact to the game of the mechanic, and I hope other forum members who understand way more about the game than me can help me with this. To me it just looks like a stealth buff to the development of Iberia (locked behind a paywall) and little else. So say I start as Portugal, and lets assume that the Holy Orders are available from the beginning. I could easily grab my 150 adm points from the Clergy and spend 100 of them on my two fully owned States which have 9 provinces as of 1.28, and grab an additional 9 base tax, so I gain nearly 10% more development on the first day (plus -10% build cost (permanently?) which is actually quite nice). 9 dev for 100 MP is getting close to the base 'efficiency' of coring conquered provinces, except you don't have to actually win a war, deal with AE, OE, years of separatism, higher autonomy, etc. So it looks to me like there is absolutely no reason why every Iberian country shouldn't use these basically as soon as they can (the AI doesn't use Estate interactions so it would take them longer, but still). So the "effective" dev of Iberia if you buy the ImmPack is actually higher in proportion to the total number of provinces there.

On the other hand, in your Colonial Nations, and assuming it would cost your own MP, it seems to me that you would almost never want to use them. There are very few occasions I would want to spend MP on a subject at all, and CNs are especially bad since you can never integrate them, only get half their trade power, only a fraction of their income through tariffs (and nowadays none of the tax income, which makes the Jesuit Order particularly useless), their armies can't support you in wars outside the New World, etc. The only edge case I could imagine being 'worth' it, is if you are flooded with dip and your subject has a state with a lot of gold mines so you might bump their production a bit to get slightly better treasure fleets. In fact, even if they don't cost me any MPs, the income from CNs is so bad with the current tariff nerf (I am still hoping the 0.5 factor is a bug...), that I might not even want to bother with the micro to use the Holy Orders.

So in conclusion, it looks to me that for a player the Holy Orders would be pretty good in Iberia (and anywhere else you conquer and State) and irrelevant in the New World. Which seems backwards to their design justification. What am I missing?

 

[Afonso de Albuquerque]

Really, no one has any thoughts on this? Not even just to tell me I am getting way ahead of myself worrying about a feature that won't be in the game for another couple of months?

 

[Dunya]

Really, no one has any thoughts on this? Not even just to tell me I am getting way ahead of myself worrying about a feature that won't be in the game for another couple of months?

I also thought about many of your points. But you gave yourself the only answer i can give you: i don't know.

 

[Gyrvendal]

This mechanic seems pretty boring to me as well. I would prefer if the jesuits were some kind of estate, which conflicts with the clergy somewhat (like Rajputs and regular nobles). And if it opened up some more internal politics rather than just "press button buffs".

As for the OP's questions, I don't know the answers, but here is what I guess would be sensible:
- The holy order probably won't be lost so long as you hold at least one province in the state.
- The extra development will be lost on conquest, or if you somehow revoke the HO from the state.

 

[Afonso de Albuquerque]

I also thought about many of your points. But you gave yourself the only answer i can give you: i don't know.

Well, at least it's good to know I'm not the only one scratching my head at this new mechanic. For the other new feature in the dev diary, the expel minorities thing, the devs clarified how it worked more in the thread. For the HO though, they didn't say anything beyond the opening post. Maybe this is still very much a work-in-progress and that's why there are still these open questions.

This mechanic seems pretty boring to me as well. I would prefer if the jesuits were some kind of estate, which conflicts with the clergy somewhat (like Rajputs and regular nobles). And if it opened up some more internal politics rather than just "press button buffs".

As for the OP's questions, I don't know the answers, but here is what I guess would be sensible:
- The holy order probably won't be lost so long as you hold at least one province in the state.
- The extra development will be lost on conquest, or if you somehow revoke the HO from the state.

It is boring and doesn't seem to serve for the purpose it is claimed, reproducing the Jesuit reductions in the New World. I think your guess for what happens when provinces are lost might be right, it certainly sounds less messy than what I was imagining.