So previously I had made a post on a potential strategy on reviving the Hellenic faith in here:
forum.paradoxplaza.com
I have then tested it as the Byzantine Emperor starting in the 867 start date and I have eventually successfully converted to Hellenism, and I will give a run down of my strategy and how I did it:
We are not reviving Hellenism with our starting ruler, but with our heir. Converting from a reformed to a dead unreformed religion costs 100k+ piety and even from unreformed to a dead unreformed religion still costs around 40k piety which is near impossible to get using normal ways. However, the Norse religion has human sacrifice which gives them piety whenever they execute prisoners and also the raid for captives CB to get prisoners. With prior testing its seems that you can keep raiding the same target for captives without them ever running out. With the flexible truce perk that gives free truce breaking, we can farm piety by constantly raid for captives on neighbouring single counties and executing them.
VERY IMPORTANT:
If your heir is Just he would gain stress from executing prisoners which means just heirs can't do this strategy so try to prevent that at all costs.
I educated my heir with diplomacy education hoping he would unlock the diplomat tree, and if not we can still reset his perks to get that tree and then immediately start on other focuses when he succeeds our initial Emperor. Now before he takes over, the job of the first Emperor is to strengthen the realm and his own demesne, upgrading the buildings and saving up money for the new Emperor. Through multiple wars and sieges, the first Emperor accumulated a healthy amount of money and previous ruler opinion bonus for the new Emperor, and most importantly, 54 prisoners to be executed for piety.
When my heir succeeded his age is 33, I had just enough time to farm enough piety for the conversion by save-scumming his death, but in hind-sight I should've just disinherited heirs when they start to get old. Also unfortunately my heir picked the August tree so I had to reset the perks. Ideally you want to be able to unlock the health tree to stay alive by getting health bonus and reset the perks for Apostate and Prophet once you earned enough piety, or if the heir succeeded at a young age we can have him get learning education rather than diplomacy and wait for the free truce break perk at the early years for maximum efficiency since most of the perks needed are actually in the learning focuses.
After waiting another few years for the Bellum Justum perk, I released 6 counties near Aleppo and started to repeat truce break declare raid for captives on them to execute prisoners for farming piety. The early wars you would gain slightly more prisoners, but at the end you would just gain the minimum 3 for each county, plus any bonus captives you gain in battle and winning the sieges. The captives are worth at least 25 piety each, so even at worst case scenario you would gain 25 x 3 x 6 = 450 piety for each cycle. You can also see that I got around 4k piety head start from executing the initial Emperor's prisoners.
I made a mistake of not trying to convert my vassals before I start truce breaking, because I didn't realize that my vassals would get the offensive war opinion penalty, it was an oversight as I just thought Norse has warmonger so they don't need to care about being at offensive wars, forgetting that my vassals not being Norse would still care about it. This made me had to stop mid-way and wasted a few years to convert some of my vassals and have the opinion penalty tick down to prevent factions, though most vassals couldn't join factions because I was constantly at 100 dread by executing prisoners, but I wanted them to have high opinion so they would convert to Hellenic with me when I convert.
After 10 years from succeeding I accumulated roughly 10k piety from farming prisoners and taking every option that gives piety as well as going on pilgrimages etc. At this point I was pretty certain that my strategy is viable in general, like if you start 10 years early with a 23 year old heir succeeding or him having more ideal stats and perks etc it would be do-able without save-scumming his death.
In CK2 if the Byzantine Emperor is not Christian or if lands like Germany or Italy is hold by pagans it will trigger an early Crusade and similarly for Jihads for other lands. I didn't know what are the triggers for them in CK3 but I assumed it will be something similar so I was hesitant to get lands in more sensitive regions with the initial Emperor, and I was also afraid that this wouldn't be do-able as Byzantine Emperor if it would trigger early crusade and get killed by the Christians. However for some reason the early Crusades only got unlocked sometime around 910 even though my Norse Emperor succeeded more than 10 years ago, and no Crusades had ever happened after it has been unlocked.
At the age of 64, having ruled the Empire for 33 years, the new Emperor had finally executed enough prisoners for enough piety to convert to Hellenism. However considering there is still a cost to reforming Hellenism, I continued farmed for some more piety so that I could immediately reform the religion too.
I then conquered the 6 farming counties and instead raided and fought other countries for prisoners to execute and waited out the 3 year truce breaking penalty so my vassals would be much more willing to convert to Hellenism with me later. After save-scumming death a few times throughout the game, I have farmed 40k piety for both the conversion and the reformation, and at the age of 67 (Which is actually not that high, like I'm not save scumming some 90 year old character and the piety farming only required 30 years so it is very doable in a general basis, like I am not bragging about me doing this but this game is more of an experiment to see if it is possible to convert to Hellenism), Basileus Konstantinos VII 'the Annointed' of the Byzantine Empire converted to Hellenism along with his loyal vassals and made it into a reformed religion, and with his high level of devotion he became a Paragon of virtue, consecrating his dynasty's bloodline. For some reason, converting the Hellenism actually didn't use the 37k piety cost, allowing me more freedom with picking the tenets and doctrines for reforming Hellenism than I initially anticipated. In honour of our old Norse ways, the reformed Hellenic faith would still practice human sacrifice and be warmongering in nature.
From then on, it is up to his successors to bring back the former glory of the Roman Empire under its traditional faith and repel the Abrahamic infidels from rightful Roman lands.
Potential Hellenic revival strategy
Ok so I’ll make it straight forward: Requirements and strategy: the requirements are you need to be a Norse character with as many individual men at arms as possible, and have them all be siege weapons. Then you need to set up a rally point...
I have then tested it as the Byzantine Emperor starting in the 867 start date and I have eventually successfully converted to Hellenism, and I will give a run down of my strategy and how I did it:
We are not reviving Hellenism with our starting ruler, but with our heir. Converting from a reformed to a dead unreformed religion costs 100k+ piety and even from unreformed to a dead unreformed religion still costs around 40k piety which is near impossible to get using normal ways. However, the Norse religion has human sacrifice which gives them piety whenever they execute prisoners and also the raid for captives CB to get prisoners. With prior testing its seems that you can keep raiding the same target for captives without them ever running out. With the flexible truce perk that gives free truce breaking, we can farm piety by constantly raid for captives on neighbouring single counties and executing them.
VERY IMPORTANT:
If your heir is Just he would gain stress from executing prisoners which means just heirs can't do this strategy so try to prevent that at all costs.
I educated my heir with diplomacy education hoping he would unlock the diplomat tree, and if not we can still reset his perks to get that tree and then immediately start on other focuses when he succeeds our initial Emperor. Now before he takes over, the job of the first Emperor is to strengthen the realm and his own demesne, upgrading the buildings and saving up money for the new Emperor. Through multiple wars and sieges, the first Emperor accumulated a healthy amount of money and previous ruler opinion bonus for the new Emperor, and most importantly, 54 prisoners to be executed for piety.
When my heir succeeded his age is 33, I had just enough time to farm enough piety for the conversion by save-scumming his death, but in hind-sight I should've just disinherited heirs when they start to get old. Also unfortunately my heir picked the August tree so I had to reset the perks. Ideally you want to be able to unlock the health tree to stay alive by getting health bonus and reset the perks for Apostate and Prophet once you earned enough piety, or if the heir succeeded at a young age we can have him get learning education rather than diplomacy and wait for the free truce break perk at the early years for maximum efficiency since most of the perks needed are actually in the learning focuses.
After waiting another few years for the Bellum Justum perk, I released 6 counties near Aleppo and started to repeat truce break declare raid for captives on them to execute prisoners for farming piety. The early wars you would gain slightly more prisoners, but at the end you would just gain the minimum 3 for each county, plus any bonus captives you gain in battle and winning the sieges. The captives are worth at least 25 piety each, so even at worst case scenario you would gain 25 x 3 x 6 = 450 piety for each cycle. You can also see that I got around 4k piety head start from executing the initial Emperor's prisoners.
I made a mistake of not trying to convert my vassals before I start truce breaking, because I didn't realize that my vassals would get the offensive war opinion penalty, it was an oversight as I just thought Norse has warmonger so they don't need to care about being at offensive wars, forgetting that my vassals not being Norse would still care about it. This made me had to stop mid-way and wasted a few years to convert some of my vassals and have the opinion penalty tick down to prevent factions, though most vassals couldn't join factions because I was constantly at 100 dread by executing prisoners, but I wanted them to have high opinion so they would convert to Hellenic with me when I convert.
After 10 years from succeeding I accumulated roughly 10k piety from farming prisoners and taking every option that gives piety as well as going on pilgrimages etc. At this point I was pretty certain that my strategy is viable in general, like if you start 10 years early with a 23 year old heir succeeding or him having more ideal stats and perks etc it would be do-able without save-scumming his death.
In CK2 if the Byzantine Emperor is not Christian or if lands like Germany or Italy is hold by pagans it will trigger an early Crusade and similarly for Jihads for other lands. I didn't know what are the triggers for them in CK3 but I assumed it will be something similar so I was hesitant to get lands in more sensitive regions with the initial Emperor, and I was also afraid that this wouldn't be do-able as Byzantine Emperor if it would trigger early crusade and get killed by the Christians. However for some reason the early Crusades only got unlocked sometime around 910 even though my Norse Emperor succeeded more than 10 years ago, and no Crusades had ever happened after it has been unlocked.
At the age of 64, having ruled the Empire for 33 years, the new Emperor had finally executed enough prisoners for enough piety to convert to Hellenism. However considering there is still a cost to reforming Hellenism, I continued farmed for some more piety so that I could immediately reform the religion too.
I then conquered the 6 farming counties and instead raided and fought other countries for prisoners to execute and waited out the 3 year truce breaking penalty so my vassals would be much more willing to convert to Hellenism with me later. After save-scumming death a few times throughout the game, I have farmed 40k piety for both the conversion and the reformation, and at the age of 67 (Which is actually not that high, like I'm not save scumming some 90 year old character and the piety farming only required 30 years so it is very doable in a general basis, like I am not bragging about me doing this but this game is more of an experiment to see if it is possible to convert to Hellenism), Basileus Konstantinos VII 'the Annointed' of the Byzantine Empire converted to Hellenism along with his loyal vassals and made it into a reformed religion, and with his high level of devotion he became a Paragon of virtue, consecrating his dynasty's bloodline. For some reason, converting the Hellenism actually didn't use the 37k piety cost, allowing me more freedom with picking the tenets and doctrines for reforming Hellenism than I initially anticipated. In honour of our old Norse ways, the reformed Hellenic faith would still practice human sacrifice and be warmongering in nature.
From then on, it is up to his successors to bring back the former glory of the Roman Empire under its traditional faith and repel the Abrahamic infidels from rightful Roman lands.
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