Corruption hate - why??

[Mike1984]

Corruption due to religious unity isn't that hard to counter. No nation I could find while browsing through the various starts can't afford to fully counter it at start with money left over in ai hands. QQ, the favored poster child in that argument, would lose money in player hands countering it but that is due to the 4 starting forts more than anything else (3 are free for ai due to being border forts). Ethiopia similarly would have to mothball/delete forts in player hands but not ai to run a surplus until getting their RU up. Religious unity causing corruption isn't any sort of serious nerf to anyone, and certainly not Religious unity < 100%.

Who mentioned nations that start with high religious disunity? Yes, that can be countered (although at the cost of losing money you could spend on other things) until you can convert the lands. It's a nerf nevertheless, but not an insurmountable one, although it's pretty awful in a few cases (Timurids, for example) where conversion is difficult or impossible. The problem comes if you are consistently expanding into wrong-religion lands (Russia, for example). In that case, you suffer corruption from overextension and corruption from religious disunity. The two cannot be countered at the same time and, unless you have high missionary strength (or bonus religious tolerance), it's likely to take you some time to deal with the religious disunity at all. It simply makes that sort of expansion absurdly slow unless you have absurdly high conversion rates, humanism or a religious tolerance national idea.