While playing Qing I noticed they also have a clergy privilege "inward perfection" which does what you describe. Stab hit on war dec but in return dev cost reduction based on clergy land. So you could increase that modifier by selling land to the estates.
Is that the one Korea starts with? Because from the name alone it would make no sense if Korea has it but Ming doesn't. However an idea would be to give Korea an improved version of this privilege, like France has an improved version of the nobility privilege for more vassals. That would make it useful. Korea does start with a good ruler and they'll most likely end up developing their lands early.
I'm all for increasing Korean starting development (it's pathetically low). However pushing it all the way to Japanese development would be too much.
I think the starting truce with the Manchus has to stay though. Otherwise we'd never see Manchu (or Qing) forming.
Apparently being Confucian gives you the option for choosing it, but Korea is the only country that
starts with it, meaning they need to piss off their clergy to revoke it. Your idea of Korea getting a buffed version could work, but I'd say the original version would have to be buffed slightly too, for it to be even remotely useful. 10% base and 20% for Korea would make it feel like less of a railroading mechanic and more of a flavour choice.
Korea's development needs a significant buff, but not to 300. I can understand Japan's development being bloated because it's divided into multiple states (read; HRE), but Korea having similar dev to the likes of Oirat is just ridiculous. Ideally Korea's dev could sit somewhere around 250, with a few more provinces added (such as the addition of Ganghwa island I've mentioned on another thread)
That's the one, yes. I did some quick testing and basically it is 5% dev cost reduction for every 30% land hold by the clergy. That is very, very low for how much land you have to grant them. Maybe it increases if the clergy have 60%+ loyalty? IDK.
On game start the maximum amount of land you can give the Clergy is <50% even if you leave 0% crown land, because there are three estates to divide the land to. The privilege will need a
significant scaling buff for it to be useful.
The conceptual problem with this privilege (and the one that gives manpower from noble land) is that there's no real way to ensure a specific estate gets lots of land.
-dev cost IS a powerful modifier... when you get later in the game and can stack lots of it together. If you could get this privilege at -10% dev cost it would be quite good. Switching out privileges is fairly cheap.
The period when dev cost becomes a powerful modifier is later into the game, where you'll likely have maximum absolutism, and be declaring wars frequently. Taking a stab hit everytime you declare war just so you get 4% off dev cost is not worth it. And at that point the only real reason you'd be dev-ing would be because you're taking it slow and have excess points left over.
