PSA: Realm Priests are a more powerful tool than you think.

[MGoods]

Unless you've read the dev diaries/in game encyclopedia* carefully you've probably missed something important about Realm priests. They don't just give you money from the temple holdings that they "own", they give you money (presumably at a lower rate than the ones they "own") from *every temple in your realm*. This is a method of taxation that bypasses feudal contracts, that bypasses being multiplied by 0.1 for each layer it goes through and just comes straight to your coffers. Levies too.

And unless you've paid a lot of attention to the numbers you've probably missed something else very important, realm priests give you taxes and levies on a sliding scale from 0 opinion to 100. This is anecdotal, but my priest was giving me *half* of the money his personally owned temples were generating at 100 opinion**. That's a better tax rate than any other barony type. Best of all, he's super rich because he doesn't actually give you *his* money, he gives you magic income and still keeps all the money he makes, so he can upgrade any holding he owns trivially so he generates even more money and taxes for you.

I love Realm Priests. Praise Jeebus.

*it feels weird to say that instead of wiki but it's probably what people are reading atm.

**I don't remember if I had absolute crown authority and more taxes from intimidated/terrrified at the time, or if those affect realm priest tax, so YMMV. Still a better tax rate than feudals/republics

 

[priam11]

Yup.

My current game in 904, I have 3 vassals (2 towns and a baron) for .3 a month. One church holding is 0.8 per month.

Another benefit to this is you only need to make one person happy vs all the other vassals.

Sweet.

 

[Cymsdale]

Unless you are tribal, than all making the realm priest happy does is make a notification go away.

 

[VenetianPriest]

This probably explains why I’m seeing upgraded temples, i.e. gothic cathedrals, all across my realm. They’ve got more money than they know what to do with.

 

[Nyrael]

This probably explains why I’m seeing upgraded temples, i.e. gothic cathedrals, all across my realm. They’ve got more money than they know what to do with.

Sounds historically accurate ;P

 

[Shorkan]

So temples give money to every ruler in the hierarchy? So a bishopric can give money to the count via his suffragette bishop, to the duke via his bishop, to the king via his archbishop an to the emperor via his patriarch? And all without actually losing any money? That is a lot of magical free money for your realm.

 

[MGoods]

So temples give money to every ruler in the hierarchy? So a bishopric can give money to the count via his suffragette bishop, to the duke via his bishop, to the king via his archbishop an to the emperor via his patriarch? And all without actually losing any money? That is a lot of magical free money for your realm.

Could be. There's not a convenient breakdown of sources of temple money (other than X from his own leased temples and Y from other temples in the realm) and I don't play as a vassal much so I've not noticed if the money my realm priest is taking from other temples is taken away from the vassals share of the money.

 

[Volodio]

Unless you are tribal, than all making the realm priest happy does is make a notification go away.

If you're tribal you can still conquer feudal lands with several temples.

 

[Bankipriel]

You raise some very good points.

I was thinking about making lay priests so I could get rid of sons by putting them in the clergy, but I just realized that I have no idea if it actually works that way in CK3.

Does anyone know?

If you set doctrines to *no* marriage, lay priests, and temporal appointments, does installing an heir as the bishop cut him from the inheritance?

If not, then yeah, keeping everything in the hands of 1 vassal is gonna be a great option. Then, I guess the question becomes, make him the head of the new church, or just roll with no head of church?

Or, is it more lucrative to set temporal head of church w/ Communion doctrine, and let all my vassals pay me gold to get rid of their sexual sin traits.

Hmm, decisions, decisions ...

 

[Loginmine]

I'd be careful with temporal right now, because it seems to not play well with inheritances from what you can read here and there.
It also gets destroyed when there are no viable heirs (mainly when gender laws are involved) with no apparent way to get it back.

 

[Dearmad]

So temples give money to every ruler in the hierarchy? So a bishopric can give money to the count via his suffragette bishop, to the duke via his bishop, to the king via his archbishop an to the emperor via his patriarch? And all without actually losing any money? That is a lot of magical free money for your realm.

that's not how it works.

Each court priest (bishop, archbishop, whatever) is in control of the coffers for ALL the churches tied to the counties controlled by his direct liege (your demesne). He gets that dough. he gives you part of it. It varies depending on if he approves of you or not and his opinion.

The temples in other demesne give money only to the priest attached to that demesne.

This results in usually the higher up nobles getting more dough, but not always. If you have a ton of churches in your realm instead of castles, you can stand to make a LOT of money with just your court priest (whatever his label is- higher sounding labels doesn't mean actually controlling more churches- in ck3 it's just color to the name attached to the rank of the layman noble who controls the court the priest is attached to).

Now what he does with his OWN money after that is controlled by how the religion works, and his "choices." (EDIT- this may mean passing money to higher ups who pass some of it on to you- that's what it appears to me but I could be wrong).

 

[Loginmine]

that's not how it works.
Each court priest (bishop, archbishop, whatever) is in control of the coffers for ALL the churches tied to the counties controlled by his direct liege (your demesne). He gets that dough. he gives you part of it. It varies depending on if he approves of you or not and his opinion.

So what is the highlighted part then?

We've kinda established that the first one is part of your realm priest's income from all the temples in your domain(it would be nice to know the scaling though and it doesn't seem to be listed anywhere).

 

[Dearmad]

I wasn't clear. From what I can tell- it's the money left over from the priests at lower tiers in your hierarchy that they submit to the priests higher up the chain. It's proportional and not all of their money they gave to him, necessarily.

Your priest makes: 10 from stuff in your direct control.
The two priests below him each make say 5- they each give 2.5 to their liege. Of the 2.5 they each have left, they may give like 1 to your priest (this part is murky to me and seems to depend on church rules idk).

So your priest has total of 12. If he likes you he gives you 6.

So when check the number as you did for the breakdown, you see:
+5.0 (priest your domain)
+1.0 (other temples)

Notice that a lot of this ALSO appears to apply to Levies. My god, but my priest sometimes gives me 25% or more of the total of my levy! When he doesn't approve of me and cuts me off, it can break my bank and hurt my army a lot.

 

[ShoGuL]

It feels like being a super duke with a lot of temples is really strong right now. My duchy of Barcelona has 2.700 total levies, and 1000 of them comes from temples. I am pretty sure that if you only have counts under you, all temples in the realm pay to the bishop (as there is only one).

 

[Loginmine]

I wasn't clear. (...)

Ah, ok.

I'm still peeved that this stuff isn't written up somewhere. For example the demesne part seems to scale up to 35% at high relations but I'd love to know what are the thresholds. For the vassal part, I'm not bored enough to check.

All in all, it seems quite a bit stronger than Lay Clergy where you are locked into feudal vassal tax rates (at least muslims are, I haven't checked custom faiths). Unless you hold only temples yourself instead of castles, seeing as levies are nigh useless anyways (can you do that though?). It makes me thing that going for a temporal head of faith may not be worth the gold you lose.

 

[Bankipriel]

It seems like the winning combo might be: Theocratic & Temporal, revocable appointments, with NO head of faith.

1 realm priest I get to appoint, and if he goes crazy or stops liking me, I can give him the boot and appoint someone better (who likes me).

No head of faith to get angry with me, excommunicate me, or give additional claims out to my vassals.

No head of faith also means holy site control gives a boost to county conversion rate, which is great.


The only 2 down-sides I see are: 1) no crusades/great holy wars, 2) no turning in piety for gold

The only one of those I care about is the gold, but if I'm not saving it up to trade in, then I've got more piety to burn on local holy wars. Seems like a fair trade.

What do people think?

 

[Caeserion]

It seems like the winning combo might be: Theocratic & Temporal, revocable appointments, with NO head of faith.

1 realm priest I get to appoint, and if he goes crazy or stops liking me, I can give him the boot and appoint someone better (who likes me).

No head of faith to get angry with me, excommunicate me, or give additional claims out to my vassals.

No head of faith also means holy site control gives a boost to county conversion rate, which is great.


The only 2 down-sides I see are: 1) no crusades/great holy wars, 2) no turning in piety for gold

The only one of those I care about is the gold, but if I'm not saving it up to trade in, then I've got more piety to burn on local holy wars. Seems like a fair trade.

What do people think?

Its great for expansion but then when your realm becomes large enough its going to be harder to keep them in line without being head of faith or having one subordinate to you. No head of faith to excommunicate means you can't get an easy imprison reason on troublesome vassals, to forgive your sins in exchange for gold, etc.

 

[Shorkan]

I wasn't clear. From what I can tell- it's the money left over from the priests at lower tiers in your hierarchy that they submit to the priests higher up the chain. It's proportional and not all of their money they gave to him, necessarily.

Your priest makes: 10 from stuff in your direct control.
The two priests below him each make say 5- they each give 2.5 to their liege. Of the 2.5 they each have left, they may give like 1 to your priest (this part is murky to me and seems to depend on church rules idk).

So your priest has total of 12. If he likes you he gives you 6.

So when check the number as you did for the breakdown, you see:
+5.0 (priest your domain)
+1.0 (other temples)

Notice that a lot of this ALSO appears to apply to Levies. My god, but my priest sometimes gives me 25% or more of the total of my levy! When he doesn't approve of me and cuts me off, it can break my bank and hurt my army a lot.

Ok so if it works like this the court priest just pay 2 separate taxes: one to his lord and one to the court priest of the lord's liege, who then pays part of this to his lord and part of it to the court priest of his liege etc until you get to the top liege. I really hope it all just adds up and they don't conjure money out of thin air but it's hard to know for sure with the info we are given in the game.

It feels like being a super duke with a lot of temples is really strong right now. My duchy of Barcelona has 2.700 total levies, and 1000 of them comes from temples. I am pretty sure that if you only have counts under you, all temples in the realm pay to the bishop (as there is only one).

Super dukes are incredibly powerful in general because it is just so much better to have a lot of small vassals than a few big ones with the nested obligations system where only a certain percentage of levies and taxes goes up to the next level. Being a king basically forces you into making big vassals with the penalties for having more than 2 duchies and the opinion penalties from each count in your duchies. Then again, you can't push duchy claims for others and have them become your vassal als a duke and at some point you will run into your vassal limit and need bigger vassals so you might as well be a king. I think this point comes quite late though.

 

[Dearmad]

I don't think they are conjuring up money other than from the ground like you would expect with the initial taxation.

 

[Battlex]

Unless you've read the dev diaries/in game encyclopedia* carefully you've probably missed something important about Realm priests. They don't just give you money from the temple holdings that they "own", they give you money (presumably at a lower rate than the ones they "own") from *every temple in your realm*. This is a method of taxation that bypasses feudal contracts, that bypasses being multiplied by 0.1 for each layer it goes through and just comes straight to your coffers. Levies too.

And unless you've paid a lot of attention to the numbers you've probably missed something else very important, realm priests give you taxes and levies on a sliding scale from 0 opinion to 100. This is anecdotal, but my priest was giving me *half* of the money his personally owned temples were generating at 100 opinion**. That's a better tax rate than any other barony type. Best of all, he's super rich because he doesn't actually give you *his* money, he gives you magic income and still keeps all the money he makes, so he can upgrade any holding he owns trivially so he generates even more money and taxes for you.

I love Realm Priests. Praise Jeebus.

*it feels weird to say that instead of wiki but it's probably what people are reading atm.

**I don't remember if I had absolute crown authority and more taxes from intimidated/terrrified at the time, or if those affect realm priest tax, so YMMV. Still a better tax rate than feudals/republics

Can someone break down stats on churches vs cities now