Open Defender of the Faith to all religions

[balmung60]

As it stands, Defender of the Faith and its bonuses are currently restricted to Christians and Muslims, giving them an (additional) advantage in conversion ability (+1 missionary), military power (+5% morale), wartime endurance/downtime between wars (or a DIP savings) (-0.025 War Exhaustion/month), and prestige (+1/year), which affects many things.

I would like to propose extending this to all religions, reducing Christian/Muslim bias and allowing other religions to get a third missionary without having to go out of their way to conquer Rome (or a fourth if they do) and gain these same bonuses.

 

[DerMaulwurf]

Can we at least agree that Dharmic, Jewish, and Zoroastrian should definitely be able to claim DOTF? And probably also reformed and non-primitive-tech pagans (Norse, reformed Nahuatl, reformed Mayan, reformed Inti, and maybe Tengrism)?

For Eastern, it sounds like there might be some justification for Buddhism, too. Shinto and Confucian are more of a stretch, I'll admit, though. Though for Shinto, my bigger problem would be that Japan would have no obligations to actually defend anyone outside of if they lost a conversation-specced vassal or something.

But a jewish or zoroastrian country would have no independent co-religionists to defend, making the whole thing a bit pointless on the conceptual side. Of ocurse I would have loved that additional missionary in my zoroastrian Persia game. And a Coptic DotF is already in the same situation. Still looks like a cop-out to provide the needed extra missionary.


As a comment I would want to add that there is really a gulf between 'did not happen historically' and 'absolutely could not have happened'. Of course it reinforces any argument to that point, but it's absolutely not sufficient on it's own.

 

[solidprice]

Still think every faith should have a DOTF.

But would settle for dharmic, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Norse, and reformed new world religions/nations.

you could have eastern faiths/all other faiths get DOTF by westernizing.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If nothing else, an extra missionary for controlling holy cities relevant to the religion makes sense. Hindu, SIkh, Buddhism all have obvious candidates. I'm not sure what you can do with pagans in that regard though, or Confucian/Shinto. Shinto really is miserable when combined with Japanese events. You can't go the tolerance route and still stay Shinto because you'll have to enforce Sakoku law (even with humanist, you'll be very intolerant of heathens), but you can't convert crap quickly either and the unrest is huge in heathen land. On the bright side, a Shinto client state republic is literally the only client state that will consistently convert heathen provinces, lol.

 

[AndrejK]

Defender of the Faith for everyone? Cool looking forward to it. Before we do it however how about each faith gets a defender of faith on each continent? Since Mutapa doesnt know that Ainu has claimed it and vice versa

 

[alpaca]

I'd go the other way and remove the feature altogether. The mechanics are pretty crazy, the AI almost never has enough money for it anyways, and as you say, it just arbitrarily makes already strong religions even stronger. I think it could be subsumed under religious ideas, and instead extend the Holy War to also give you a CB if countries of your faith are attacked by heretics and heathens, and if provinces of your faith are under the control of heathen rulers, even if they are non-adjacent. If you succeed in the wargoal (say, liberating a catholic country), you should get a temporary prestige bonus, perhaps until ruler death or for 2-3 decades, relation modifiers with true faith countries, especially the one you defended (may also include trust here to make diplo vassalizing more likely), and maybe even some temporary morale or WE reduction to make it more interesting to intervene.

Historically, the literal version seems to have been nearly irrelevant apart from (self-)aggrandizing English monarchs, and the more abstract idea of promising to defend members of whatever faith you belong also didn't seem terribly relevant to me. Exceptions were perhaps the caliphate and, later on, Russia, but even then it seems mostly to have been pretext to gain political influence for the most part.