top 9 tenets?

[Less2]

Carnal Exultation - Combo this with concubines/multiple wives. Every landed member of your dynasty will generate 10-20 children and skyrocket your renown.

Pursuit of Power - Invasion CB is of course the best CB in the game.

Pentarchy - extra fervor for holding holy sites is important.

Communal Identity - Technically spreading your culture is almost always a bad thing, but if you want to roleplay and culture convert as much as possible then this will do it for you. It's also a nice universal opinion bonus.

 

[sterrius]

Carnal Exaltation -> Don´t underestimate +25% fertility for ALL followers of the faith. You will never run out of people and you will quickly see your dynasty running around the world getting countys/duchies everywhere. Prestige will skyrocket.

Communal idendity -> Looks weak but its actually quite strong if you can name your Priest. a 15+ learning priest can easily convert a province in 2-5 years. It makes converting culture something trivial saving time from your stewart that should be giving gold/development non-stop.

Also it gives +10 for everyone following your faith. Very good to balance short reign penalty.

Legalism -> If you combo your religion to have many virtues and you take a good care of your heir it makes your kingdom super stable and cheap to change anything you want.

Pursuit of power -> Can save your thousands of prestige/gold. But it will demand you to go Full Tyrant and you do need something to offset that -10 vassal opinion.

Human Sacrifice -> Huge piety farm. You do need something else to quickly research learning skills to actually use all those piety levels. (Like the one that give +2 learning for piety lv on scholar tree).

Unrelenting Faith -> Its cheap and give ALL FOLLOWERS +4 prowess. It basically make everyone able to be a knight and actually do something. It can be really powerful. Also give +2 advantage vs all other faiths.

Vow of Poverty -> Very very powerful. +2 piety/month for -20% gold allows me in ireland to create a full religion in 30-40 years. Also its powerful for the low price. (Unless youre pagan/zoroastrian, not worth for 1500 ^^).

Synchertism X religion -> Can make your religion survive if you do it in the middle of a "Evil" religion area like middle of france.

Warmonger -> A easy Casus belli never hurted anyone ^^.

Ritual Hospitality -> +0.3 to 1.5 piety/month just for doing something you're always gonna do after you get to X size. (Put powerful vassals in the council).

Consolamentum -> Allows you to decide when to die and this can sometimes be pretty powerful.

Ancestor Worship -> Very very powerful and make your kingdom very stable.

Alexandrian Cathecism -> My Favorite. +20% Learning Lifestyle can make a learning character go to +60%/month. I can quickly finish the scholar tree and go for something else. If my character have something else i have 2 trees to develop at lighting speed.


Auspicious Birthright + Esotericism -> Maximize your Miracle Workern chance and pilgrimages can upgrade your wise man to miracle worker..
Its worth for +5 piety/month and +50 same faith opinion. (Basically you're a god ^^).

This with learning focus can make your culture gets well ahead of everyone else in research. Its not a flash or short term reward but will make a difference by mid/end game.

 

[Nevars]

About carnal exaltation if you are tight on tenet slot, polygamous doctrine (and probably concubine) would accomplish the same thing (if not better already) and it doesn't waste you one slot.

Though you can combine them ofc if you don't mind one slot.

But for me it's not a priority.

 

[the glory of plain]

pursuit of power are powerful but also unstable
all three tenet unlock great holy war are a little too overpowered
religious law legalism literalism ritual cannibalism and bhakti are much better than average

 

[hajutze]

Communal idendity -> Looks weak but its actually quite strong if you can name your Priest. a 15+ learning priest can easily convert a province in 2-5 years. It makes converting culture something trivial saving time from your stewart that should be giving gold/development non-stop.

I have to ask - why would you want to culture-convert provinces tho'? It's time you can spend on deving your capital, and the more provinces you have of a culture the harder it will get to push that culture to a higher average dev.

 

[Myrten]

I have to ask - why would you want to culture-convert provinces tho'? It's time you can spend on deving your capital, and the more provinces you have of a culture the harder it will get to push that culture to a higher average dev.

Access to regional innovations and you will usually complete all techs before time anyway

 

[Supersotamies]

i love the human sacrifices as you get a lot of piety and dread.

 

[Atalvyr]

I have to ask - why would you want to culture-convert provinces tho'? It's time you can spend on deving your capital, and the more provinces you have of a culture the harder it will get to push that culture to a higher average dev.

It is useful if you have a culture with poor development and have a neighboring culture with good development. Instead of developing eg. Irish from 4-5 average development, you can just convert the 10+ development provinces in Britain.

Also, you don't want to have provinces of a backwards culture, as the province culture determines which buildings can be built there.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

I found that the starting Asatru Tenets are incredibly powerful and I did not change them when I reformed my religion.

Ancestor worship doubles your prestige at birth. This is absoultey massive. Depending on your dynasty rank, you start with 500 Prestige or more. With this tenet, you start with 1000! Having High prestige is needed to invade Kingdom titles and its also a massive boost to opinion and grants you more Knights.

Ancestor worship is even more powerful if you choose the diplomacy tree, which is one of the strongest in the game in my opinion. Suddenly, you gain +40 opinion from everyone and even more Knights from your prestige level, makes ruling super easy.

I have no idea how anyone could play with human sacrifice. How else would you accumulate dread? Dread is super powerful and you get tons of bonuses from lifestyle perks depending on dread level. After succession, just sacrifice some 5 or so Prisoners to increase Dread and help with rule. It grants a ton of piety aswell, which is needed for Holy wars or just increases your piety level. Thats even more opinion bonus.

Warmonger allows you to abduct prisoners, giving you all the prisoners you need for sacrifice.

 

[Myrten]

Ancestor worship doubles your prestige at birth. This is absoultey massive. Depending on your dynasty rank, you start with 500 Prestige or more. With this tenet, you start with 1000! Having High prestige is needed to invade Kingdom titles and its also a massive boost to opinion and grants you more Knights.

Ancestor worship is even more powerful if you choose the diplomacy tree, which is one of the strongest in the game in my opinion. Suddenly, you gain +40 opinion from everyone and even more Knights from your prestige level, makes ruling super easy.

In early stage yes, but by the time you reform religion prestige shouldn't be an issue.

I have no idea how anyone could play with human sacrifice. How else would you accumulate dread? Dread is super powerful and you get tons of bonuses from lifestyle perks depending on dread level. After succession, just sacrifice some 5 or so Prisoners to increase Dread and help with rule. It grants a ton of piety aswell, which is needed for Holy wars or just increases your piety level. Thats even more opinion bonus.

You can execute people even without Human Sacrifice tenet

Warmonger allows you to abduct prisoners, giving you all the prisoners you need for sacrifice.

Any war allows you to take prisoners, warmonger just makes you able to wage more wars

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

In early stage yes, but by the time you reform religion prestige shouldn't be an issue.

I consider prestige one of the strongest things in the game to have. Having that much bonus opinion is a great boost. I have had multiple characters on the highest possible prestige level thanks to this. And I did play with 867 start, I am currently at about 1050. My current dynasty fame would only grant 500 instead of 1000.

However, I am used to having tons of prestige and many dialogue options which add prestige are not very useful. Just like in an RTS you gotta make use of the ressources you have, often times I have more than 2000 prestige just sitting around. Same with Piety thanks to Human sacrifices.

You can execute people even without Human Sacrifice tenet

How much Piety do you gain from it? According to the wiki, you gain none unless you are fundamentalist.

Piety levels are very useful because they grant direct stat bonuses if you hold the holy sites. Like Learning or Stewardship per level of Piety.

Taking Prisoners from the court grants you a ton of gold, but also useful people to recruit to your own court.

In case you didn't know, marrying women from your own court and searching for "prowess" is an easy way to find high prowess knights. Or you can find a great court physician for free. Or you find a 30 learning priest or a 30 intrigue spymaster. Its way faster and easier to ransom prisoners than using the abduction scheme.

You want people in your court to marry for knights or great council position.

And guess what, having High prestige + diplomacy grants +40 opinion, enough to cancel the "wants seat in council" malus from strong vassals.

 

[Myrten]

I consider prestige one of the strongest things in the game to have. Having that much bonus opinion is a great boost. I have had multiple characters on the highest possible prestige level thanks to this. And I did play with 867 start, I am currently at about 1050. My current dynasty fame would only grant 500 instead of 1000.

However, I am used to having tons of prestige and many dialogue options which add prestige are not very useful. Just like in an RTS you gotta make use of the ressources you have, often times I have more than 2000 prestige just sitting around. Same with Piety thanks to Human sacrifices.

You get 300 prestige just for forming a duchy title, and later on you get huge amounts of prestige monthly for various things, but also from battles and many other things. In my roman campaign I got 37k presige and I don't even know where it came from, so just as I said - this tenet only makes sense in early stage.

How much Piety do you gain from it? According to the wiki, you gain none unless you are fundamentalist.

Piety levels are very useful because they grant direct stat bonuses if you hold the holy sites. Like Learning or Stewardship per level of Piety.

Taking Prisoners from the court grants you a ton of gold, but also useful people to recruit to your own court.

In case you didn't know, marrying women from your own court and searching for "prowess" is an easy way to find high prowess knights. Or you can find a great court physician for free. Or you find a 30 learning priest or a 30 intrigue spymaster. Its way faster and easier to ransom prisoners than using the abduction scheme.

You want people in your court to marry for knights or great council position.

And guess what, having High prestige + diplomacy grants +40 opinion, enough to cancel the "wants seat in council" malus from strong vassals.

Again - at early stage piety from human sacrifices is great and absolutely required if you want to restore dead religion like Hellenism, but later on, when you control all holy sites, fight wars, take part in crusades etc... you simply get more piety than you need and will get levels of devotion anyway.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

You get 300 prestige just for forming a duchy title, and later on you get huge amounts of prestige monthly for various things, but also from battles and many other things. In my roman campaign I got 37k presige and I don't even know where it came from, so just as I said - this tenet only makes sense in early stage.


Again - at early stage piety from human sacrifices is great and absolutely required if you want to restore dead religion like Hellenism, but later on, when you control all holy sites, fight wars, take part in crusades etc... you simply get more piety than you need and will get levels of devotion anyway.

So it really ends up being too many ressources to spend. Thanks very useful to know. Thanks!

I am looking forward to trying something else then. What about Cannibalism? Doesn't look very useful apart from relieving stress and getting sick. It would have been nice to have a chance of gaining skills from it.

Also are there any special combinations which require multiple tenets to yield hidden results?

 

[pliznobn]

All memes aside, Divine Blood can also be useful for reducing border gore inside your realm (if you care about that kind of thing) since rulers will tend to keep it in the family and rarely inherit other lands.

Doesn't this result in all your powerful vassals being too inbred to do anything yet still demanding council positions.

 

[Myrten]

So it really ends up being too many ressources to spend. Thanks very useful to know. Thanks!

I am looking forward to trying something else then. What about Cannibalism? Doesn't look very useful apart from relieving stress and getting sick. It would have been nice to have a chance of gaining skills from it.

Also are there any special combinations which require multiple tenets to yield hidden results?

Cannibalism would be nice if you couldn't get sick and there would be a way of making all your characters cannibal. Currently I think it's not very useful for a tenet.

I haven't seen any special combinations like in CK2 so far, just some tenets working nicely with others, but many tenets have hidden features.

Picking good tenets is very situational, depends on what you want to do, what other bonuses you have etc...

In my current campaign:

I've started as Asatru - it has awesome tenets for start, thanks to Human Sacrifice I was able to get 36k piety to restore Hellenism

When I Reformed Hellenism I've picked:
Divine Marriage - it increases fertility between family members, opinion bonus is also nice
Religious Law - Allows me to revoke titles from vassal from time to time, useful in fixing my realm
Warmongering - Restoring Roman Empire requires a lot of offensive wars so it was absolutely essential.

Now when I restored imperial borders I've created new faith:
Divine Marriage - as above
Pursuit of Power instead of Warmongering - I no longer wage that many wars so I'm ok with offensive war penalty, in return I get -50% tyranny reduction which is awesome since I also own Aachen and it's special building for -20% more and my character is Callous so I got -90% tyranny.
Communal Identity - Now when my religion has spread far enough and I'm done with major expansions I think it should allow me to culture-convert faster as others have suggested in this thread, will see if it was good idea.

 

[Jeffry]

I am looking forward to trying something else then.

When I reformed my Norse faith I kept Human Sacrifices and Warmonger for the easy CBs and executions. And since I wanted to be the Head of Faith myself, I chose Communion as the 3rd one. Not sure if it works as it should and won't be patched, because in-game it says only spiritual Head of Faith can excommunicate somebody, but I can do it too as a temporal one. So if I don't like a vassal I can just excommunicate him and imprison him / revoke his title, costs piety to do so, but piety is easy to come by. And from time to time ppl in my realm pay me 100g to remove their sins. Basically a stronger version of Religious Law (which I wanted to pick originally) because the person in question doesn't even need to have any sinful trait, I can just decide on a whim that he/she is viewed as a criminal.

Yeah yeah I know, spiritual Head of Faith is better, better % taxes and levies from temples, but I like to control things myself, like when to declare a Great Holy War etc. Plus Fylkir is a cool title.

 

[Less2]

Doesn't this result in all your powerful vassals being too inbred to do anything yet still demanding council positions.

Inbred is incredibly rare.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Communal Identity - Now when my religion has spread far enough and I'm done with major expansions I think it should allow me to culture-convert faster as others have suggested in this thread, will see if it was good idea.

I started my game as Haesstein in western France with nordic culture and Norse Pagan religion. After some time I did manage to conquer france, but my culture was different from french culture. I did get a special decision to create the "normannen" culture and I became the culture head. A fusion between french and norse.

Because of this, most of my time is spend turning the country into my culture and religion because otherwise I get massive tax and levy maluses.

 

[Matt516]

Communal identity hands down. Instant conversion of county in your culture at high fervor? I've seen France turned completely Adamite because of it.

It seems like this would work really well for more inward-focused (one might even say Insular) realms, but less well if you want to blob since it's harder to manage provinces that share neither your culture nor religion.

Monasticism: A cheap way to disinherit people can be pretty convenient sometimes.

I just cannot figure out how to actually use this. Can't seem to ask anyone to take vows when it matters.

 

[Myrten]

I started my game as Haesstein in western France with nordic culture and Norse Pagan religion. After some time I did manage to conquer france, but my culture was different from french culture. I did get a special decision to create the "normannen" culture and I became the culture head. A fusion between french and norse.

Because of this, most of my time is spend turning the country into my culture and religion because otherwise I get massive tax and levy maluses.

When it's both different culture and religion I'd say Communal Identity won't help