To be fair: that is the vanilla situation for a number of religions. How often have you seen a Tengri reformation, honestly? Only the player really manages to make enough conquests in the right places to reform the religion, and that may be acceptable for other religions too - unlike Romuva, whose core territory could be conquered in a single Crusade.
I saw a couple of Tengri reformations back before HL, which screwed over the Tengri in particular since nomads will just abandon their faith every generation or so because of some mercenary becoming Khagan after converting to whatever when hired and there's no convenient "Convert to Tengri" decision for them to take. Overall, I can agree that pagan reformations should be
somewhat rare, but smarter AI CB use to help it reform (and to help it in many other places too, e.g. restoring the Roman Empire) would be good so that the AI doesn't shoot itself in the foot on the finish line.
All non-Shinto pagans certainly have the CBs for taking the necessary land, however, while the Shinto would (as things currently stand; as mentioned, we've disabled Pagan Subjugation for them vs. non-Shinto pagans due to unintended behaviour) be stuck in e_japan pre-reformation (and only the holder of e_japan is able to attack a bunch of provinces since other rulers obviously lack de jure CBs for those) unless they manage to inherit a claim (or tilte, but that's unlikely) since holy wars obviously would be disabled if they were made unreformed, so I would say that the situation would be different for them.
Looking at this image:
There is a "Clear" button. So it seems credible to me that there is a NULL state - unless it resets the features to default. I suppose we'll have to wait for release date to figure it out, but it's still good to keep that in mind.
You might be on to something there, but we'll have to see what happens and still have to consider the non-HF interactions, and, as mentioned, we recently decided that the distinction between reformed and unreformed Shinto was unwanted, so we might not want to change things even if it is possible.
True enough.
One other way would be to make an event that automatically makes the holy site baronies independent should they get a liege - and require the completion of condition X to vassalize them. That would work for both with and without HF.
That would mess up the AI's behaviour because we can't mod the "Offer Vassalization" interaction and it probably would attempt to vassalize those titles ASAP after the barony goes independent, and since there's no on_new_liege on_action it would be rather messy to deal with all ways that a holy site could end up under a Shinto ruler, and (though the game will already have deviated
very far from history if that point is reached) if a nomad somehow pillages a Shinto holy site it stops being attached to a specific barony and the situation gets even messier since it becomes attached to the county
and could be attached to a completely different barony down the line depending on when the temple holding is built.
Yes, but if people began playing pagans more after HF and realised that pagan reformation was extremely
fun, maybe priorities would change?
It's good to keep possibilities in mind. (and I personally would probably mod mainstream religions to be reformable as well, if I were able to. When you have conquered Christendom and vassalized the pope - why not declare that human sacrifice should be a thing? Henry VIII managed to change his religion with much less territory
).
As I mentioned in the original post about HF plans, we might add
something similar to a reformation to the Shinto faith without actually having a reformation, so they might not be stuck with
all of the features we give them from the start (though we might limit some choices severely), but when looking at the things that would be needed to prevent certain reformations for one exception it doesn't look particularly appealing to have standard reformations.
Just out of curiosity: did they historically intermarry with Ainu or Tengri pagans, who were relatively close to them? And do they in your mod?
I don't know if there were particularly many intermarriages historically, but I'm no expert on Japanese history/the Shinto religion, and such marriages might have been far less politically expedient than other options (and the Tenno usually married (as far as the primary consort went; whether polygamy (with lots and lots of wives) or concubinage (with lots and lots of concubines) is most accurate in CK2 is something I've been thinking a bit about for some time) inside the Imperial Family or with someone from the family of the Shogun or Kampaku because they were in control).
As for intermarrying in the game, I've not really kept track, but since there are pretty much
no historical female characters in the area yet outside of the Imperial Family (and
that is missing
lots of characters in general) and the Fujiwaras (who also have an incomplete family tree right now) and pretty much only the holders of e_japan and k_japan start out married (and only in some starts) there's not going to be a lot of intermarriage possibilities early on as things currently stand as everyone initially will scramble to marry random Lowborns.
A somewhat harsher reaction than I had expected, but fair enough. I do think that such an event, if hidden somewhere in a non-obvious location in the script (and perhaps occurring multiple times) would in fact be safer than P'dox's standard one-line "has_dlc" trigger that anyone can in fact simply disable without modding knowledge by removing it.
Religion playability is not tied to the has_dlc trigger in script, so we'd be changing a different blocker (the structure inside the religion files), and if we've done that we'd have made it trivially easy for someone to locate our on_whatever_pulse loop event and put an "always = no" in its trigger (or just commenting it out) to let them continue to play as the religion (just without any features that use a has_dlc lock). It would also require us to update
all references to certain religion groups where we want to conditionally allow stuff and to do a bunch of other things to maintain functionality, so it really would be a messy option even if we did not have to worry about the DLC lock.
My point was, how pagan is Shinto? To Christians, any non-Abrahamic religion is pagan, of course. But when I think of pagans, I think of people sitting around campfires wearing animal skins and living in huts. That honestly does not match with my picture of Shintoism, which seems more comparable to Zoroastrianism to me.
I did not mean to imply that they were being moved there. I was talking that I was by no means advocating/proposing moving other pagans who do sit around campfires wearing animal skins outside the pagan_group.
Both the Zunists (who are feudal from the start and thus "civilized") and the Hellenics (which are unplayable, but still) are already in pagan_group, so the condition for being pagan is already more complex than "be uncivilized".
The Shinto religion sort of sits between the Eastern group and the pagan group when it comes to overarching features right now (HF will of course change the exact features of post-reformation pagans a bit depending on reformation, and some pre-reformation pagans might perhaps be tweaked there too):
- The Shinto religion is polytheistic (pagan, Hindu, and Taoist).
- The Shinto religion has concubines (all pagan and Eastern religions have this).
- The Shinto religion has female temple holders (Buddhist and pagan).
- The Shinto religion has heir designation (Buddhist and Taoist).
- Shinto rulers can't raid unless their government or culture provides raiding (Jain, Buddhist, Taoist, Zunist (both reformed and unreformed), and Hellenic).
- The Shinto religion has county conquests (pagan; the Buddhist single-county holy war CB is roughly similar but can go overseas in a limited fashion).
- The Shinto religion has duchy-tier holy wars for 100 piety (reformed pagan; Hindu has them for free, Buddhist pay 250 piety, all others have no duchy-tier holy wars).
- Shinto rulers can subjugate the same religion only (unreformed Aztec only; the other unreformed pagans can subjugate any other pagan and the Dharmic religions can all subjugate other Dharmics inside their own culture group).
- The Shinto religion has a rel head (reformed pagan; of course, since the Shinto religion used to be a reformed pagan religion it might originally have been added because of that).
- The Shinto religion doesn't have GHWs (Eastern and unreformed pagan).
- The Shinto religion sort-of has holy books (reformed pagan and Eastern).
- All Shinto counts and higher start feudal (which isn't a religious feature but is more common for rulers following Eastern religions than for pagan rulers) and can always feudalize (reformed pagan, Bön and Eastern).
- The Shinto religion has a Devil Worshipper cult (pagan, Hindu, and Tianxia's Taoist).
- The Shinto religion does not have a Monastic Order (pagan and Taoist).
- The Shinto religion currently lacks a holy order (unreformed pagan and Taoist; we've not gotten around to holy orders for the rest of Tianxia's pagans either, though, so this "feature" is probably an oversight).
- The Shinto religion can intermarry with with Buddhists (Eastern (because of same-group intermarriages always being permitted) and a couple of pagans).
- The Shinto religion has a harder time converting non-pagans (unreformed pagan, Bön, Jain, and Taoist; Dharmics also have trouble converting one another as a rule).
The religion is still in the process of being fleshed out and could get more stuff in either direction there, might get something like the HF warrior lodges (depending on whether a slightly tweaked warrior lodge would be sensible or not; that's impossible to tell before HF is out), might lose some pagan_group flavour, might get some indian_group flavour with RoI active (though most of that is unlikely to be fitting due to being about gurus, elephants, and the like), and so forth, so which group is the
overall most fitting group for them might change. Putting the Shinto religion in their own group is rather unappealing, so Eastern or pagan (and thus locked to either tOG/HF or RoI) would seem to be the only sensible options, and since the Eastern group used to be the
Dharmic group back before JD, it certainly wouldn't have made sense to put the Shinto religion there at that point (and the Taoist religion in Tianxia was part of the now removed Daotic group at that point, which also would have been unfitting), thus making it pagan by default at that point.
Which works for me, in theory. What I don't want is for them to be in the position Vanilla Bön is right now. That is, eternal restriction from converting others to your faith. I have not played with a pre-reformed religion before, so I don't know how they work with converting others.
So devs of Tianxia: reformable, unreformable, pagan, non-pagan; whatever you do, don't repeat Paradox's mistake and put them in the Bön position right now. It derailed my entire campaign when I found out that Bön inherently cannot function because nobody will be of your religion once you are an empire.
The Shinto currently has the ability to
ask for conversion, much like the Bön religion has since the last patch or so, so in that area the Shinto religion isn't as restricted an an unreformed pagan would be.
However, slower
county conversion (of non-pagan provinces, similarly to unreformed pagan religions and the Bön, Taoist, and Jain religions (and the Buddhist and Hindu religions against other Dharmics)) is a feature that's unlikely to go away since the Shinto religion is
not a proselytizing religion, and if that's a problem I suggest either not playing as a Shinto ruler
or modding event 900 to remove the penalty.