Non-territorial Agressive Expansion

[Canute VII]

How about not only giving AE for taking foreign lands, but also for expanding your religion/culture by conversion (i.e. ideological expansion)?

Each time a province's religion would be converted, all countries belonging to its original religion group would get AE, same religion e.g. 4 AE, heretics of the same group 2 AE (best scaled with province development and distance). Same for culture analogously.

Why?

• It would add some second-order considerations to conversion
• especially the religious idea group would be indirectly "nerfed", which is sorely due since many seem to think it indispensible
• It would add another realistic source of AE, which would require some trade offs to make regarding better integration vs future ease of warfare - even during peace time

E.g. if Ottomans convert Greece to Sunni Islam, all ortodox nations would build up AE against it, catholics/protestants also a bit. If Muscovy converts sunni provinces to orthodox, ottomsns would feel unhappy. I.e. chances of having an alliance between Ottomans and Muscovy would be diminished and they'd be more likely to set each other as rival, which would be a rather realistic outcome.

 

[grommile]

This hurts Christians post-reformation much more than it hurts the Ottomans, because the Ottomans are much better equipped to own heathen provinces without conversion than most Christian states are.

 

[Canute VII]

This hurts Christians post-reformation much more than it hurts the Ottomans, because the Ottomans are much better equipped to own heathen provinces without conversion than most Christian states are.

Ok, reasonable objection.

• That's why heathens only get half the AE, maybe it should be even less ->balancing is required
• Maybe restrict the AE to countries of a different religious/cultural group?
• Catholics and Protestants are meant to clash, anyway - so maybe this can be married to the religious wars?

 

[Philadelphus]

But it's called Aggressive Expansion, not Aggressive Conversion!

More seriously, this is…actually an interesting idea, though I have some problems with it. With AE gained from conquest, the peace deal screen tells you exactly how much every country affected will have with you. The conversion interface would need to similarly spell out how much AE you'd get from each conversion or it would be very frustrating checking all the nearby countries (imagine playing in the HRE!) to see which will now join a coalition. And I'm not sure I want to review AE for every* conversion to see if I trigger a coalition.

Maybe if it was only for culture conversion; unless you have heathen/heretic tolerance in your national ideas and went Humanist, you generally want to convert religions as quickly as possible or they'll cause significant rebel problems, whereas I've probably converted culture maybe 20 times in over a thousand hours of gameplay.

Also, I think you'd want a fall-off like normal AE; if I take a 3-development province in Western Sahara, no one in India will care about the conquest—probably no one in Egypt will care—so why should they care if I convert its religion, which it's pretty much a given I'm going to do at some point after the conquest?

*Every conversion once I get up to around 50 AE and am on the edge of a coalition.