Allow Trade Company land to be converted

[dynalon]

A small suggestion - the title is already the full extent of it, but I think it would make a big impact on QoL in a wide, conversion-heavy campaign.

Converting land that you want to give to a trade company is currently a lot of busywork. You can't use the "TC-fy all provinces" button - instead, you have to either individually assign freshly converted provinces to the TC or wait until you've converted the entire trade node (which also means that you'll have to carefully compare religious mapmode and trade mapmode to make sure that you have), which is extra annoying if any provinces still have religious zeal present.

Similarly, TC provinces that convert via event (Weeds in the Garden; Oromo settlers; that Fulo event) add another bit of annoyance because of the TC cooldown - after you un-TC and convert them, you can't even re-assign them to the TC before 5 years have passed.

Even though my suggestion is technically a buff to Trade Companies, I do not think that it would require any counterbalancing, since it only makes a suboptimal choice slightly stronger. One of Trade Companies' advantages is that you don't need to convert them anyway, unless you do it for roleplay, memes, achievements, or because you don't like stripes in your religious mapmode. In that case, the player can reap the extra money from their potential TCs earlier - but if you're playing "optimally", you would be able to do so just as early anyway.

Come to think of it, since TC land would be low priority to convert, I would suggest a TC toggle for the Religion tab, so that you don't accidently waste your missionaries on land that doesn't really need them.

 

[leodrake]

To balance it out and avoid half of india being catholic by 1700 i would propose to tie this abilty to religious ideas and adding a 3% conversion malus to counterbalance religious idea 4.
From an historical point of view this would make sense due to the fact that the philippines became catholic while india remained hindu due to the difference between spanish and english religious policy (we could say spain took religious ideas while britain did not).

P.S. sorry for my english

 

[Zohtun]

To balance it out and avoid half of india being catholic by 1700 i would propose to tie this abilty to religious ideas and adding a 3% conversion malus to counterbalance religious idea 4.
From an historical point of view this would make sense due to the fact that the philippines became catholic while india remained hindu due to the difference between spanish and english religious policy (we could say spain took religious ideas while britain did not).

P.S. sorry for my english

That's...actually a really good point. Every trade company currently, regardless of owner (England, Spain, Portugal, whatever minors had the courage to try compete with the big dogs...) will ALWAYS just leave it as-is religiously. The only places in ROTW which get converted are the provinces that begin with 0 natives.

 

[dynalon]

To balance it out and avoid half of india being catholic by 1700 i would propose to tie this abilty to religious ideas and adding a 3% conversion malus to counterbalance religious idea 4.
From an historical point of view this would make sense due to the fact that the philippines became catholic while india remained hindu due to the difference between spanish and english religious policy (we could say spain took religious ideas while britain did not).

From a gameplay / quality of life perspective, I'm fundamentally opposed to the -3% conversion malus. It would practically keep things the same - even if you can convert through the penalty, it's big enough that you'd still be heavily encouraged to do the same "convert first, then individually add provinces to TC" cycle that you're forced to do right now.

Keep in mind that I'm not suggesting to make religious conversion quicker. In the current ruleset, converting half of India to Christianity is something that you can do by 1600 without problem, if you put your mind to it. It's just (1) a waste of money and missionary time and (2) a huge pain in the butt because it adds a lot of clicks to add converted provinces individually instead of clicking the "TC-fy all" button.

(1) is not what this suggestion is targeting - it will be impacted to a degree, since being able to TC-fy earlier means that you get the monetary benefits earlier, but converting would still be a (smaller) waste of money and time.

The IRL differences between the agencies of GB in India and Spain in the Phillipines are interesting and translating that into a game mechanic could be interesting, no doubt. But it's beyond the scope of what I'm suggesting - I really just want to reduce the number of unnecessary clicks which, to be honest, plague large parts of EU4's user interface.

 

[leodrake]

From a gameplay / quality of life perspective, I'm fundamentally opposed to the -3% conversion malus. It would practically keep things the same - even if you can convert through the penalty, it's big enough that you'd still be heavily encouraged to do the same "convert first, then individually add provinces to TC" cycle that you're forced to do right now.

Keep in mind that I'm not suggesting to make religious conversion quicker. In the current ruleset, converting half of India to Christianity is something that you can do by 1600 without problem, if you put your mind to it. It's just (1) a waste of money and missionary time and (2) a huge pain in the butt because it adds a lot of clicks to add converted provinces individually instead of clicking the "TC-fy all" button.

(1) is not what this suggestion is targeting - it will be impacted to a degree, since being able to TC-fy earlier means that you get the monetary benefits earlier, but converting would still be a (smaller) waste of money and time.

The IRL differences between the agencies of GB in India and Spain in the Phillipines are interesting and translating that into a game mechanic could be interesting, no doubt. But it's beyond the scope of what I'm suggesting - I really just want to reduce the number of unnecessary clicks which, to be honest, plague large parts of EU4's user interface.

Remember that tc don't have wrong culture penalty so a -1% over converting and then adding would be balanced