Make (catholic) church buildings relevant again

[Emre Yigit]

At present, most buildings that are built by Catholic church vassals are irrelevant.

1. Following SoA, the election process for the Pope changed. Various (positive) traits contribute to the likelihood of being elected, first as Cardinal, then as Pope, so instead of the proud, lustful, etc Popes that used to be generated randomly, you get humble, chaste, etc ones. In addition, these positive traits generate piety.

2. Therefore, due to positive "church views on" these traits, Popes now have an inherent, crushing advantage (coupled with the "rightful head of religion" modifier of +30) relative to relations with a bishop's or archbishop's liege.

3. In the event of great (i.e. +100) relations with both the Pope and the liege, the Pope always wins out.

4. This overrules both the church tax and church levies laws.

5. As a result, temple vassals tend to generate no taxes and, surprisingly, no troops.

If a theocratic barony (or county or (rarely) a duchy) generates neither taxes nor troops, then what is the point of having them in the game?


Suggestion:

More importantly: Allocate troops from Church vassals based on their opinion of the Liege alone (i.e. +60 view of Liege, he gets 60% of the theoretical/legal amount)

Less importantly: Divide the income between Pope and Liege (i.e. Pope +100, Liege +90, Pope gets 100/190 of taxes, Liege the remainder, or some such system)


PS: The law of unintended consequences

Furthermore, I can think of at least three things that arise (unintentionally, I assume) from the non-existence of taxes and troops from church baronies

1. inherently weakens Catholicism (and, I imagine, the Fraticellis) relative to other religions;

2. inherently weakens Catholicism relative to its heresies - if a realm has gone Cathar, for example, that realm will raise troops from its church vassals, but any Catholic on a Holy War against them won't be able to;

3. wastes processing power as church baronies decide on irrelevant building decisions. Paradox needn't have worried about "optimising" the game after recent expansions; all it needed to do was stop all these actions. The only things that one needs to build in a Catholic church barony are walls and schools.

 

[Slayen]

All of my yes to this. Take as many +1s as you wish.

 

[Talq]

Yep. This is one of those classic 'it seemed a good idea in 2011' design decisions that simply should have been undone & changed. Instead, they've had to add all sorts of things to mitigate the effects (like piety from temple holdings & cutting papal income)

The 'idea' behind it is that catholics are compensated by papal power, holy orders, or can get an anti-pope or (worse still) a vassal pope.

In practice,

1. it disadvantages small states and helps rich ones.
2. It makes catholics the religion that least wants temple holdings, despite being the one religion where they are more significant (possibly outside of buddhism - which in game has nothing special to do with temples...)
3. It calls attention to AI inadequacies, both in building worthless temple holdings and failing to cut church taxes (so sending free money to the pope).
4. Its created problems with people getting their hands on the papal cash.
5. its nonsensical - why are your church vassals staying at home, even when warring with infidels?
6. its historical nonsense - your vassals never simply could stay at home because they liked the pope lots, and a key element of resolving the investiture controversy was that the secular responsibilities of bishops stayed with the lord.

One idea would be to ditch it, and simply have catholic temples pay a fee to the pope (or anti-pope). Alternately they could even have papal (anti-papal) income just depend on the number of loyal holdings.

Then they could also cut temple tax rates (which were high on the assumption they could not be used by most catholics), and slightly reduce the income sloshing around the board to everybody else.

Failing that, they could at least let the lord keep access to the troops, given the pope has no use for those.

 

[pattb011]

In response to the original post:

I agree with you points, its very hard to earn anything from church vassals. But maybe only do the splitted-up income/levy if the vassals opinion of you and the pope is the same. If the vassal has a +30 of you and +50 of the pope, then you should improve relations. But when you and the pope cap-out at 100 (which it often does) the income/levy should definitly be split as there is no way to earn anything from the vassal otherwise.

Just a suggestion. I didn't really explain very well but hopefully you get the point.

But nonetheless, a +1 from me

 

[NewbieOne]

Yes, the 100/100 tie situation is one of the rather many half-baked jobs in CK2 design. One of the many possible solutions to this mess could be to include papal opinion in the equations. Another, to waive the 100 cap and count the real total for the purpose of comparing the liege to the pope.