A somewhat simple suggestion to improve the experience of religious league wars

[CharlesTheBald]

Historically the Thirty Years' War could be devided into four major phases:

1618-1625: The Bohemian revolt and the continuation of the Protestant cause in Germany by von Mansfeld, Brunswick et al. This was basically a HRE civil war.

1625-1629: Danish intervention. The king of Denmark took up the German Protestant cause after the original rebellion had been crushed.

1630-1635: Swedish intervention. When Denmark was defeated Sweden intervened with French financial support, doing so they practically prolonged the war by 18 years.

1635-1648: French intervention and the continuation of the Swedish participation. France went from being a financial backer to an active participant after Sweden had its setbacks, thus ensuring that the Habsburgs would not end up triumphant.

As you can see from this breef summation, the TYW was a complex conflict evolving from rebellion to civil war to international conflict and finally to a sort of proto-World War.

In the game however, this is portrayed by the league mechanics where roughly one half of Europe fights the other half, throwing everything they got into a huge meat grinder going on for a decade or so.
My problem with it is that it fails to represent the evolution of the conflict, making it too big and too chaotic from the start and too often ending with Catholic victory.

So here is my suggestion to make it more interesting without over complicating gameplay:

1. Inititally, league membership should be exclusive to HRE states, as was the case historically. This will make the initial conflict more limited in scale when it breaks out.
2. While the conflict is active, the Elector votes should be locked in favour of the Emperor, at least those of Electors not participating or fighting on the Emperor's side.
3. When the Protestant League Leader has enough negative warscore fighting the emperor (-25% for example), he has the option to call to arms any non-HRE nation that's Protestant or Reformed. This will usually happen since the Catholic League will be stronger internally in the HRE, in the most cases.
4. If this third nation accepts the call, the League Leadership relays to that nation. So in gameplay terms: the Warleader has been changed. This can happen only once, to keep it simple.
5. The new participant gets a huge prestige bonus for accepting the call and a morale modifier. It will also get a reduction in AE for annexing land in the HRE.
6. There should also be some general League Leader bonuses, to war exhaustion reduction and mercenary maintenance, to keep them engaged long enough.
7. To perpetuate the conflict further, I suggest a new "Support League" CB that's open to any country with the right faith, or in a rivalry with the enemy League Leader. It should give malus to province war score cost and AE and the AI should be reluctant to use this CB unless a rival is active in the conflict as League Leader.

As you may understand by the above, point 2 is roughly a equivalent to the Scandinavian interventions and point 6 would allow France to enter.

The most usual outcome in these wars should be the Peace of Westphalia with some minor territorial adjustments going with it. Only in rare cases should a side be completely triumphant in Religious Wars, such as when Protestantism either fails to entrench itself in the HRE or vice versa.