More missionaries and better conversion, but slower tech and ideas... Really worth it?
What do you think?
What do you think?
Embrace the Counter-Reformation... Yes or no?
- Thread starter Vityviktor
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As with most things, it's circumstantial. It depends on which nation you are, how aggressively you're expanding, where you're expanding, etc. Most of the time you don't really need the better conversion as there are plenty of other ways that are enough(policies, religious ideas, inquisitor, etc), also if you go Humanism you don't need to bother with conversions anyway as Humanism mitigates the penalties of having different religions while increasing your religious unity. However occasionally embracing the counter-reformation can prove handy, for example if you're playing Castile and go on a conquering spree that includes extremely high base tax provinces like Ile de France, Lombardia, Constantinople, etc, which are pretty difficult to convert.
That's right, but i'm afraid of losing technological advantage which can affect my military strength...
I only embrace it if my neighbors get converted, so I can conquer-convert their lands, but the tech loss is too great, so i guess it depends: if you want to expand to protestant/reformed lands yes, if not no.
+5% tech costs is only 30MP. If you're a european country, you won't even notice, whereas the +2 missionaries and bonus conversion strength is a huge effect.
If you haven't yet westernized in other parts of the world, or if you're still far behind after westernizing, it's a much harder decision. Your MP pool is much more stressed than Europe's, so the minor tech cost increase is more noticeable. OTOH, most of your neighbors aren't going to be heretics, but heathens, so you won't even get the bonus missionary strength.
If you haven't yet westernized in other parts of the world, or if you're still far behind after westernizing, it's a much harder decision. Your MP pool is much more stressed than Europe's, so the minor tech cost increase is more noticeable. OTOH, most of your neighbors aren't going to be heretics, but heathens, so you won't even get the bonus missionary strength.
If you're western europe AND in the HRE then you often are teching up with the ahead of time penalties anyway, so it won't really kill you, IMO.
Still though I often find it irritating to take penalties, so I don't.
Still though I often find it irritating to take penalties, so I don't.
NEVER. If I find myself in a situation where I'm torn apart from heretics, I'd just convert.
Nah, it's too easy to do that, I prefer to fight the reformation, the game is more chalenging when you have to reconvert your provinces.
It's sometimes worth it if a) you don't have religious ideas and b) you're conquering a lot of wrong-religion stuff. For instance, if you're Portugal conquering big chunks of Asia, it really speeds things along to have 3 missionaries working instead of 1. If you're conquering heretics, so much the better (except that rates of expansion tend to be a bit slower in Europe due to coalitions and whatnot).
I still cannot fathom how accepting the Counter-Reformation increases the cost of technology. I don't want to paint Paradox as ignorant, but the Jesuits definitely weren't the cackling insurrectionists and fire-happy inquisitors of Protestant myth.
The other big thing is the increase in papal influence. If you're outside of Europe, it's one of the few ways you can get increased influence. Without religious ideas, it doubles the rate that you gain influence, so it really depends also on how many of those you want to use. My take is that if you want to stay Catholic, you probably should embrace it if outside of Europe.
It's not about the stereotypes. The catholic church really did oppose major programs of study or results in the sciences, like the use of cadavers for medical research or Galileo's heliocentric model of the solar system. Binding yourself more closely to the Catholic church comes at a price in ideological conformity. A multitude of faiths where none of them hold political power ('protestantism' is not one thing) doesn't tend towards suppression of 'heretical' thought, because religious movements disagree, and none of them holds a majority of political power.
half of the reason is probably game-balance, since making a decision that has only pro's is just a win button. by playing along to pop culture's half-truth (that renaissance era religiousness was against scientific progress), they can make that decision something you need to think about (if for a little bit)
The decision bonuses/penalties are fine, it's just that it should be called something other than 'Counter-Reformation'. The misconception seems to be that the Counter-Reformation was just an 'anti-Reformation', i.e. a purely reactionary move, when really it was a process of reform within the Catholic church (albeit much less radical than the Protestant Reformation). If you actually wanted to simulate the Counter-Reformation, it should probably be a modifier that gives resistance to province-flipping (the church is better organised and abuses of power are curbed, so people who are still Catholic are less likely to feel the urge to break away) in return for a significant expenditure of monarch points.
Both of your points are the baseless, pop-culture nonsense that the current tech malus from Counter-Reformation appeals to. Let me break it down. First of all, regarding medical cadavers:
"...virtually all of the early work on anatomy took place at Church-sponsored universities throughout the period that he claimed dissection was condemned, 1300 to 1500. In fact, no historical evidence exists of any widespread dissection ban by the Church. Guy de Chauliac, a fourteenth-century surgeon and doctor who is considered one of the "fathers" of anatomical studies, served three popes as personal physician. He openly encouraged the use of dissection in the study of human anatomy and would hardly have been allowed to do so if such practices were condemned by his employers. Rather than serving as some kind of obstacle to medical advancement, the Church was the source of medical research for centuries." (Lockwood, 2007)
As for Galileo, the Church's opposition to Galileo's heliocentric model of the solar system was also voiced by many secular scientists, many of whom would have no reservations about criticizing the Church. His theory was not opposed because of its objection to theology, but because he lacked sufficient evidence to prove that his model was superior to the prior Ptolemaic and (original) Copernican models.
Furthermore, the point that actually brought about Galileo's conflict with the Church wasn't his 'free-thinking' or whatever buzzword historical revisionists like to bandy about, but because he essentially threw an incredibly ill-conceived tantrum after being denied and immediately began publishing works that belittled and ridiculed not only the Pope, but also the clergymen who had helped him attain his fame and position in the first place!
It would not be until Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton added onto the heliocentric theory with their own findings that it found acceptance among the Church and scientific community. Despite the assertions of fedora crowd today, the Bible is not nor ever was considered an unimpeachable science textbook by the Catholic Church. When clear evidence was provided proving the heliocentric model with elliptical orbits, the Church adopted it with little issue.
Yet, despite all this supposed 'tolerance,' it was the Protestants who burned the most 'witches' and held the most deep-seated devotion to anti-scientific Biblical literalism. True, tarring all sects with the same brush is dishonest, but to say that their multitude of 'faith' somehow produced tolerance is an absurdity when you look at how much the various Protestant and Reformed sects bickered and fought with one another.
And don't even get me started on the atrocities that Protestants committed against Catholics in countries where they gained control. For all the hate and vitriol that the Spanish Inquisition gets, the centuries of British oppression, execution, and forced conversion of Catholic priests and laymen alike go blithely ignored.
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I can see a 50-100 point cost for adm and dip for embracing the reformation, but it shouldn't be something that everyone does automatically if they're not strapped for points. It also can't be so expensive that no one would ever take it.
Well said. If there really was a systematic oppression of science like some people are led to believe, we'd have more examples than just Galileo. But there were a lot of scientists who supported heliocentrism and the church never went after any of them. From a gameplay perspective I suppose the game takes a 'more equals better' approach, although like you said protestants weren't exactly more enlightened anyhow. Many things we take for granted like the rotation of the Earth, heliocentrism, and so on weren't provable with the technology of the time, and in fact one can argue that the evidence they had actually stacked up against it.
For example, stars appear bigger than they really are with the kinds of telescopes they were using at the time (look up airy disks), and so to explain the lack of parallax with the stars, one would have been forced to conclude that the stars were much, much larger than they really are, bigger than the solar system itself (which we know to be false today).
Anyway, I think people overreact to the 5% tech cost. 30 points per tech... that's not even a full tech by the end of the game, especially for non-admin tech.
+1 A very good summary of the incident. Just last week, I read a similar examination of the Galileo Affair by an *drumroll* atheist. I wouldn't mind the tech penalty so much if Catholics still got a tech boost for controlling cardinals.
+1, and i think the malus should be changed, because making it harder to get tech and ideas is arbitrary.