Two more partial solutions:
1) Swap the penalties for high and low karma around. As it stands, you get worse at war for fighting wars, and worse at diplomacy for being peaceful. This contradicts a lot of other game mechanics. Instead of forcing you to use a "balanced" approach, it causes you to always be losing out on something, such as army tradition, even if you keep karma around 0.
2) Reset karma to 0 on ruler death. Not 25% closer to 0. Zero.
Though to be honest it seems like the goal here is to make the system as irrelevant as possible, which touches on what I think the real problem is; the mechanic is fundamentally not fun. I would have liked to see something like Protestant Church Aspects for the Buddhist sects, with selectable bonuses (some of which would be locked to different cultures or sects) based on historical and religious facts rather than a highly abstract and uninspired "karma" system that punished the player no matter what they do.
Ah yes, I remember how Bayinnaung, after creating the greatest empire South-East Asia has ever known through a series of bloodly conquests, was relentlessly condemned as un-Buddhist by monks and peasants alike. Oh wait, that didn't happen.
Buddhist conquerors were not seen negatively. If they were successful, and if they used the spoils of war to promote the faith, they were as revered as they were in every other religion.
1) Swap the penalties for high and low karma around. As it stands, you get worse at war for fighting wars, and worse at diplomacy for being peaceful. This contradicts a lot of other game mechanics. Instead of forcing you to use a "balanced" approach, it causes you to always be losing out on something, such as army tradition, even if you keep karma around 0.
2) Reset karma to 0 on ruler death. Not 25% closer to 0. Zero.
Though to be honest it seems like the goal here is to make the system as irrelevant as possible, which touches on what I think the real problem is; the mechanic is fundamentally not fun. I would have liked to see something like Protestant Church Aspects for the Buddhist sects, with selectable bonuses (some of which would be locked to different cultures or sects) based on historical and religious facts rather than a highly abstract and uninspired "karma" system that punished the player no matter what they do.
Ah yes, I remember how Bayinnaung, after creating the greatest empire South-East Asia has ever known through a series of bloodly conquests, was relentlessly condemned as un-Buddhist by monks and peasants alike. Oh wait, that didn't happen.
Buddhist conquerors were not seen negatively. If they were successful, and if they used the spoils of war to promote the faith, they were as revered as they were in every other religion.
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