I think that feudalism would allow them to reform. Feudalism is actually about government where as Renaissance was an article and philosophical movement.
Feudalism is just 1 single institution, I think this would be way too easy. Apart from that I belive Renaissance is much more fitting thematically, because its about literally "re-birth".
I especially like your religion suggestions. Good stuff.
Thanks, still thinking about how to further improve this.
Some good ideas in there but my major hang up at the moment is that one way you can get institutions is to develop your provinces. This will give quite an advantage to human players that min-max to solely develop their capital until they are ready to reform.
Firstly, thanks for the feedback, it's very appreciated. One will only be able to reform if one has
1. reformed religion
2. embraced renaissance institution
I.e. a human will have to develop 2 institutions and reform religion (as with the traditinal reform path). The modifiers I have added to the "primitive" label, i.e. higher institution embracement cost, lower spread, higher develpment cost, will all make this a bit more difficult, but of course if it proves too easy these modifiers can be tweaked. Thus, developing 2 institution in your capital will likely be costly.
Additionally for nations that can migrate they will constantly remove any institution progress they have gained. This would be unless institution progress carried over but then that would leave a big exploit potentially of developing up your province to gain institution progress, than migrating to gain monarch power, than spending monarch power on your next province at the lower price until you are ready to migrate again and so on etc.
This would need to be play-tested, but I think most reasonably - given your arguments - they would loose institution progress upon migration. So they could migrate a lot first to gain monarch power, then develop and embrace institution. Then they have two options:
1. abondon the developped province to again start migratiion (they would still have the institution embraced and this already embraced ínstitution should be carried over to any new province they would migrate to)
2. settle down and expand from their developped home province
Also I didn't gather from your post what would happen to nations that reform this way? Currently the nations that reform get the government and institutions of the neighbouring nation, as well as a percentage of their tech. When reforming this way what tech does the reforming nation get etc.?
They will get the tech they have. Again this depends on play-testing, but if this would seem somehow punitive, then we could introduce a new modifier after reforming society something like "modernization zeal" giving some technology cost reduction for x years (or this could be part of a native mission tree).
While the whole thing needs some agency i dont agree with this.
The point of these religions is that the start is an uphill battle of some sort while going through the reforms but you get to keep them afterwards.
Breaking that down to only being able to essentialy being able to keep one of the 5 bonuses makes them not only weak but very flat and uninteresting.
While the current bonuses from the reforms are strong and the Religions themselfes have some nice baseline bonuses
their ability to convert or tolerate is nearly non-existent making them very bad at dealing with unrest.
The bonuses counteract that which is also a likely reason why all 3 of them get -2 unrest in some way by the time they reform.
Thanks you for the feedback and I see your point. I would like to add some more modifiers to the religious options. For now I have simply put in the existing modifieres from the "religious reforms". Hopefully after putting more in, the new options will be both powerful, immersive and provide some gameplay value (i.e. choices to make). Wait for an update soon.
