Missionaries

[Cataphract887]

Maybe it is just me, but i cant bring myself to spend so much money on missionaries when the chances, at best, at maybe 50-60% with costs from 300 ducats to several thousand. I understand religious conflict will cause -30% in the provence, but it seems to me just about any investment-even troops-gives more return than missionaries. Sure they may pay themselves off....SOMEday. I would rather save my money for refineries. Along the same vein i never convert state religion.

Just try to keep the number of religions in your empire to 3 or less up until you begin the WC blitzkrieg

Is there any math done on how good changing from catholic to another religion is?

 

[Flashleg8]

Well sometimes when I play its not always just the hard core financial reality of whether it economically makes sense to change religion or not - it’s about gameplay and challenge. I'm playing the GEP game as Portugal just now and one of the other players converted to Protestant - it revamped the economy but I loved it so much as it introduced a gameplay element that I'd not tried before - totally separated us from our natural ally Spain and forced us to use new strategies.

As JFK said (roughly) "We do not chose to do these things because they are easy - we choose to do them because they are difficult" (or something to that effect )
Also some times its fun to "convert the world to the one true faith" and make that your mission.
But I take your point about if missionaries are worth it - I would say the larger the country the more hassle t is to change religion. But if you're a small country with lots of colonies (easy and cheap to convert) with lots of pagan provinces (benefit of changing culture as well) it’s worth it.
The other point to make - some times late in the game you've got plenty of money any way so you may as well convert the provinces no matter how low the chance is.

 

[unmerged(4344)]

There are plenty of investments you can make in EU2 with higher returns than missionaries. However, those are not always available. Missionaries exist from 1419, for all nations.

Also, how cost-effective they are depends a lot on what sort of game you are playing. In a WC, you never buy stability. So conversions don't matter as much. But if you are playing as a more moderate mid-sized nation, stability matters for trade; and paying lots extra for alien religions adds up.

Consider a situation where you are buying one level of stability every 5 years, OK? And you have one alien religion province, costing you 60d to stability instead of 25d. So you're paying out 45d every 5 years, basically forever, as a cost of having that province be wrong-religion. Average is 9d/year - not a small amount. Now you are also losing the 30% in census and tax income for that province, too. Which may be an equivalent amount.

One other thing to note wrt missionaries is that the new looting rules make gold much, much more available in the very early game. If you start near China, for example, there's no reason why you can't subjugate them for 10-20 years of looting, building up a war chest of 10000d or so to start your game off. Minus costs (lots of armies), which may be pretty much, but still. With money like that, you can afford missionaries.

 

[unmerged(19088)]

Converting Pagan provinces to your religion and culture is worth it... like Span.. taking the gold provinces in Mexico/Peru.. and making them Iberian Catholic with missionaries during the 16th century.. that's a good deal....