Cardinals and Catholicism Seem Worthless

[yerm]

I'm really not sure why the Center of Religion buff doesn't just block conversion from Center of Reformation. It seems like such a trivial change and no reason not to have it.

In any case, Catholicism is awful for a few reasons:

- Rome gets converted to a heresy ALL the time, for reasons discussed here to death.

- Cardinals are the only good way of generating influence, not conversions, which means catholic is one of the worst religions outside Europe. If you are a primitive savage and you convert to catholic for some reason, there is no good reason to stay catholic and not flip to protestant or reformed.

- Papal control is both random and all-or-nothing. You cannot gain some kind of sliding degree of papal favor like you can with someone like orthodox; you either control the pope and have the best bonuses, or you don't control the pope and get nothing good day sir. The random nature means that if you REALLY want to, you can scum your way into control if you're willing to reload on a pope's death enough, with minimal in-game cost.

- The Pope engages in diplomacy like any other AI, which means all his neighbors get marked as rivals because the ai just poops out rivals for no strategic reason, which leads to an Italy full of small pope-haters. You have nations like Tuscany which have a papal influence bonus yet are always rivaled/hated by the pope.

- The PI caps at 100, and most of the things you want cost 100, which means you have to just buy when you get there or lose points. If you want to sit on 100 and wait to buy stability for when you need it, you're losing points.

Catholicism really needs a thorough overhaul. Currently, protestant has nice passives (mp savings on ideas is handy) to make it ok as a fire-and-forget for someone totally apathetic towards religion, while reformed has really powerful tools that you can use for the players who do care and want to master it. Meanwhile, catholic is awful in the places it historically spread to (central and south America in particular), awful for the nations who should be staunch catholics (small Italian powers), and in my opinion the single best beneficiary of the new system is Poland, who (unless I'm way off) wants humanism over religious and isn't carpet converting to one faith anyway.

 

[Pornek]

- Rome gets converted to a heresy ALL the time, for reasons discussed here to death.

Has nothing to do with the strength of the religion at all.

you either control the pope and have the best bonuses, or you don't control the pope and get nothing good day sir.

There are currently 8 ways to spend PI apart from papal control, do they not count at all ?

- The PI caps at 100, and most of the things you want cost 100, which means you have to just buy when you get there or lose points. If you want to sit on 100 and wait to buy stability for when you need it, you're losing points.

If you dont want to spend the points at 100 how about you spend the PI on papal control once you cap it? You would waste them anyways...


The other things I agree with, though incase of the Italy point that was already the case pre-rework.

 

[yerm]

Has nothing to do with the strength of the religion at all.



There are currently 8 ways to spend PI apart from papal control, do they not count at all ?



If you dont want to spend the points at 100 how about you spend the PI on papal control once you cap it? You would waste them anyways...


The other things I agree with, though incase of the Italy point that was already the case pre-rework.

The problems with Italy were a problem pre-rework and are still a problem. Now we just have non-Europe added to the list. The parts of the world that should really want to be catholic the most, such as South America and Northern Italy, are all disadvantaged by not going Protestant or Reformed. This is a glaring design flaw; Catholicism should be built around the idea that Italians and new world converts should WANT the religion, not suck it up unless a better option becomes available.

I am not ok with saying the other ways to spend PI count as semi-control, because they are separate. As it stands, IF you spend points on papal control, you get nothing unless you win. It's all or nothing if you put the points there; any points spent that don't result in you winning control are effectively lost. This was true before with cardinal control, and even then you got partway bonuses for controlling some of the curia but not overall, and more acceptable because it was a controllable situation where you could manage it and spend points in a meaningful way and hold control through strategy and only somewhat based on luck of who moved on. Now, it's just RNG luck, which means the player has no control outside of save scumming, which is awful. If you want to control the papacy, your only options are to either cheese reloads, crush every other catholic so there's no option but you, or get lucky. That's a bad system.

 

[Less]

Catholicism should have some kind of boost the larger and more far-reaching the religion is. The goal of Catholicism should be spreading Catholicism, not killing every other Catholic nation on the planet. Make it something like how the HRE bonuses work (stronger bonuses the more countries follow Catholicism) and give countries papal influence for fighting heretics and take it away for fighting followers of the true faith (similar to how Muslims work).

Papal controller should be more predictable. Most of the perks it gives you are highly circumstantial and therefore it is only really desirable to pay for papal controller in very specific situations, therefore it should be less up to the roll of the dice and more up to who influences the most. OPMs in the HRE aren't going to get much use out of it, they shouldn't be getting it and they shouldn't be going for it in the first place. The increasing cost for each attempt to pay for tickets into the papal controller lottery should be removed, make it a flat cost.

 

[Viperswhip]

Catholicism isn't wonderful until later, being the last hold out you become papal controller, have a great CB against everyone else and it's pretty great. That's why, because at the most difficult stage of the game you get a huge boost. It's actually pretty balanced, but I always stay Catholic when I play as Castile.

 

[yerm]

Catholicism isn't wonderful until later, being the last hold out you become papal controller, have a great CB against everyone else and it's pretty great. That's why, because at the most difficult stage of the game you get a huge boost. It's actually pretty balanced, but I always stay Catholic when I play as Castile.

So basically catholic is good if you aren't near the pope (or force him to be your subordinate subject), aren't converting to it from a less developed region of the world, and/or there aren't any other Catholics? That sounds like exactly the opposite of how the faith should be working! The fact that you'd want as few other Catholics as possible and gain absolutely nothing but possible penalties (from lower unity) for taking and converting pagans, means that the religion is currently a purely game-based setup designed for catholic powers to use and world conquerors to exploit, and not in any way a reflection of either history or game balance.

 

[Tacticus101]

Well, you basically can get +1 stability every 8 or so years if you have 7 Cardinals and good papal relations (plus the other things you can get). The advantages are not weak.

 

[Squirrelloid]

- Cardinals are the only good way of generating influence, not conversions, which means catholic is one of the worst religions outside Europe. If you are a primitive savage and you convert to catholic for some reason, there is no good reason to stay catholic and not flip to protestant or reformed.

- Papal control is both random and all-or-nothing. You cannot gain some kind of sliding degree of papal favor like you can with someone like orthodox; you either control the pope and have the best bonuses, or you don't control the pope and get nothing good day sir. The random nature means that if you REALLY want to, you can scum your way into control if you're willing to reload on a pope's death enough, with minimal in-game cost.

Yes, the failure of conversions to give Papal Influence is really jarring. Even in the 'worst case' balance scenario, where you go conquer much of the non-catholic world as a major european catholic power, that extra PI doesn't really help you control the Pope more, it just gives you more side benefits. And the side benefits are hardly so overpowering as to be game-breaking at that point anyway.

And with how hard it is to secure control of the papacy, the hard limit of 7 cardinals is really glaring. I'm tempted to say there should be no limit at all. Cardinals are generated in provinces, and whomever owns the province gets them. If that means you have *all* the cardinals, other nations could convert some heathens to make some investments in papal control anyway.

The hard limit on cardinals is especially glaring when one of your neighbors gets the event to steal one. You should have had like 20, but your cardinals keep poofing for being at more than 7, and now you're at 6 because of an event.

- The Pope engages in diplomacy like any other AI, which means all his neighbors get marked as rivals because the ai just poops out rivals for no strategic reason, which leads to an Italy full of small pope-haters. You have nations like Tuscany which have a papal influence bonus yet are always rivaled/hated by the pope.

To be fair, this is reasonably historical. The papal state did historically fight a lot of wars in Italy, although admittedly Tuscany wasn't the target. The papal state should have an historical rival modifier with Milan though.

 

[yerm]

To be fair, this is reasonably historical. The papal state did historically fight a lot of wars in Italy, although admittedly Tuscany wasn't the target. The papal state should have an historical rival modifier with Milan though.

Going to war with the pope, kicking his ass, taking his money and making him give Avignon away doesn't anger him even close to as much as just living next door and him thinking you're his rival. On the other hand, making the pope your inferior subject vassal is a sure way to earn his undying love.

There's really nothing wrong with the papal states and the fact that they engage in gameplay like any other state, the problem is that they're tied to the catholic faith which seems to be balanced entirely around being really cool and fun and not in any way around being either historical or remotely balanced. Whoever designed the new Catholicism system was clearly interested in making it interesting, but could not have had any sort of overarching goal or purpose in mind other than really interesting. It is so contrary to history/reality in every way that it's mind-boggling! Bad for nations who conquer non-catholics due to lack of unity without a bonus for conversion, bad for tiny nations like irish OPMs who won't get 7 cardinals, bad for the other Italians that the pope tends to hate, and worst of all, strongly encourages any catholic to want as absolutely few other catholics, if possible zero others, as is possible.

In short, it's fun and a really cool design, but a fundamentally terrible implementation. It is overpowered in the hands of a snowballing player who's conquering the rest of the Catholics, terrible for tiny or non-European nations, and half of the design is completely controlled by luck (RNG) that can be exploited via saves.

 

[WeissRaben]

To be fair, this is reasonably historical. The papal state did historically fight a lot of wars in Italy, although admittedly Tuscany wasn't the target. The papal state should have an historical rival modifier with Milan though.

Yup. Italy is probably one of the areas where the coalition system works better, too - almost all nations hated each other's guts, and the Renaissance is a long string of expansion/dissolution by coalition from various nations (mainly Milan and Venice).

 

[Atlanteax]

Idea for resolving the 7 cardinals 'cap' :

a) uncap the # of cardinals you may have (so you can have 20, for example)
b) each cardinal gives diminishing influence for balance purposes
1st = 1 full point, 2nd = +0.9, with each additional being 0.1 less, so you hit the +0.1 mark on the 10th (+5.5 total) with the 11th and beyond all each +0.1.

 

[yerm]

Separate papal influence and the curia system. Make PI accumulate without regard for the pope's opinion of you. Make conversion give PI, and adjust it (possibly lowered, possibly based on base tax) so it's not too much. Being a good catholic gets you these piety bonuses regardless of whether you're in Europe and/or the pope's buddy.

Then, have your papal elections be based on the cardinal system, which IS heavily dependent on controlling cardinals. This aspect should be tied to cardinals, which no longer need to be capped (because they aren't generating PI for the other benefits anyway), and should function in some kind of semi-controllable manner, which the old system sorta did but the new one does not at all.

Finally, and most importantly, add a flat modifier to the power of being controller, and possibly also to PI accumulation both, based on the relative strength of Catholicism. The bonuses should be higher or lower based on how the Catholic faith is doing - perhaps higher for more Catholics and especially more Catholicism as a % of world religion - which makes being Papal controller when nobody is actually Catholic extremely limited in its power. Finally, add modifiers to this - small bonus of Thrace is catholic, big bonus if Jerusalem is owned by and/or converted to Catholic, small penalty if Pope is a vassal and/or doesn't own Rome, huge penalty if Rome isn't catholic.

Really, just separating the Papal Controller and Influence would open the door to massive improvement. The fact that they're tied together, and therefore to cardinals, seems to be the cause of most if not all of the absurdity of the system, from hard caps on cardinal numbers to no use for non-euro Catholicism.

 

[Oepfel]

I don't like the new system because it's just so random. when I'm a strong, big and rich catholic country I want to control more cardinals and even the curia with an Iron fist. it needs a lot of work and conquering to get to that point but it doesn't come from nothing. now it's just some random thing and some buffs you can buy if you care enough. now I rather spend all that money to for defender of the faith, that's pretty good.