Switching Between Christian and Muslim

[unmerged(26764)]

I'm trying to swap a Muslim dynasty to a Christian one, and finding that the game is intentionally making this impossible. Has anyone found a way around this?

Here is the situation. I'm playing the Persian-cultured Persian Empire. I started as the Persian-cultured one county emir of Sistan, expanded inside Persia, overtook the Seljuks, and then expanded using constant invasions and holy wars to take the Middle East, Arabia, and most of the Byzantine Empire. I just fought off the Ilkhanate and now that decadence is insane want to swap to Nestorian. Which had always been my plan.

Historical note: Nestorianism flourished inside Persia. It was a very powerful and popular religion second to Islam. So a Persian dynasty becoming Nestorian is actually quite historically appropriate. And I thought it would be sort of cool because I've never seen anyone using the new mechanics of the expansion DLCS to creating a Persian Empire under a powerful Church of the East.

So, my emperor married a Nestorian wife to educate little Nestorians. But when I give her any wards, the AI immediately takes that ward away and give him to a Sunni Muslim. So apparently, you can't educate kids in a "heathen" religion? This event that steal wards away from who you assign them to, even your own kids, is very very aggravating. You can't appoint anyone other than a Sunni Muslim as court chaplain either. So you can't educate a different religion heir, and you can't convert one, so there seems to be no good way to switch.

The only think I can think to do is marry an Orthodox wife and then divorce her hoping she takes the kids and educates them Orthodox. Hope one of them stays Persian culture. Then murder everyone in the line of succession to make him inherit. But this is pretty roundabout and probably too annoying to make it worth it.

At this point in the game, there's no point in continuing to play if I can't switch. Decadence at this point rises so fast it takes over the entire game. Just two or three living characters of your dynasty makes it rise so fast all you can do is keep winning holy wars constantly to drive it back down. I can do that, sure. But it's not really fun enough to make the game investing in any further. As far as I'm concerned, the game mechanics have "ruined" the game unless I swap religion.

Since I don't find the prospect of seeing whether I can invade and holy war my way to a world conquest faster than the three heirs I leave alive at anytime run up my decadence to be fun, any help is appreciated. Ideally, a way to get around that infuriating event that steals wards from wrong-religion tutors -- I can't even find the thing in the event files. I really hate this event -- either make it impossible to give the ward to that tutor or don't but don't keep swapping my own kid's tutors to random people without my consent. What a bad design decision.

 

[Mods]

you should be able to make them educate your own kids, when you're a different religion than your vassals you can demand conversion on the ones who miraculously don't hate you for being a heathen. Any vassal in prison will accept conversion as well, regardless of relations (good for converting zealous lords)

 

[Lac du Bois]

Does the thing with the church/mosque holdings being destroyed still happen? That seems even worse.

 

[unmerged(26764)]

you should be able to make them educate your own kids, when you're a different religion than your vassals you can demand conversion on the ones who miraculously don't hate you for being a heathen. Any vassal in prison will accept conversion as well, regardless of relations (good for converting zealous lords)

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I can assign a Nestorian to educate one of my kids. But a few days later an event will fire that re-assigns them to a Sunni tutor. It goes to the court chaplain if he can take another ward, otherwise to another random Sunni. I don't know if this event is Islam only, but it's infuriating.

 

[DC123456789]

If you're really desperate, you can just change the religion in the game files.

 

[Mods]

can you show a screenshot of the event? I've heard about people switching to zoroastrianism as persia, so I do believe it's possible to convert

 

[DLFebin]

I think it was made impossible with SoI to prevent gameovers for people without it. Why they did not make it possible for people with DLC is beyond me.

 

[Mods]

You're not the caliph are you? I still doubt that would really have anything to do with it though

 

[Spartanlemur]

Would be interesting to see an new ambition: "change religion"

 

[Mackus]

I checked gamefiles, and there are only two events that set guardian for child. It seems both education of female muslims, and switching non-muslim guardian are hardcoded - which is pretty awful.

I can assign a Nestorian to educate one of my kids. But a few days later an event will fire that re-assigns them to a Sunni tutor. It goes to the court chaplain if he can take another ward, otherwise to another random Sunni. I don't know if this event is Islam only, but it's infuriating.

It would help greatly to see screenshot of this event. If its possible to mod this away, screenshot is what is needed.

 

[rashtrakut]

Or you could open up the command console and type

religion nestorian

and

religion [charid] nestorian

for any body else you want to switch

 

[keytool]

I don't know how you feel about console but you could type this in:
religion (CharID) nestorian
That'll change the religion of whatever character ID you use to the religion chosen. I feel like its cheating sometimes, but for RP purposes or for broken game mechanics I use it.

EDIT: Someone above already did it

 

[Lamprey]

I suggest adding instructions for figuring out a character's ID to make this even more helpful. I for one wouldn't know how to find it short of digging through character text files - at which point I may as well change it in said files, negating the need for console statements.

 

[SweetHalcyHS]

I am not surprised if he already knows how to cheat, heh.

But a good point has been raised here. This seems like an awfully artifical limit when trying to enjoy the game; when religions are such a big deal in this era, conversion from one to another should definitely be a legitimate mechanic. I hope that this is seen by a developer and worked into future patches.

 

[Mackus]

I suggest adding instructions for figuring out a character's ID to make this even more helpful. I for one wouldn't know how to find it short of digging through character text files - at which point I may as well change it in said files, negating the need for console statements.

charinfo 1
after you put that in console, you get all sort of useful info just by placing mouse cursor over character portrait

 

[Ratlegion]

Pretty stupid. I hope we can figure this thing out.

 

[Taran14]

This issue definitely needs to be adressed

 

[Joel M Bridge]

So you can go from Christian to Muslim but not Muslim to Christian?

 

[unmerged(26764)]

I'm not caliph. Just emperor of Persia.

I don't have a screenshot handy but can capture one next time I play. It's nothing special. What happens is you get the normal pop-up that says "X has agreed to become guardian of Y child." But you didn't ask him. So it's the same pop-up you normally get. The problem is the game auto-requested him to do it, taking the child away from the guardian you assigned.

Is there another event that does this for female muslims automatically? That would be good to know -- I didn't know this happened. Because some of the children were female, so that's apparently a different event.

 

[Zireael]

You can't go from Christian to Muslim without DLC. There's no event making sure you don't have an accidentally Muslim heir, though. There should be, if there's a Muslim equivalent - and both of these should be disabled for people with the DLC.