Trouble Reforming African Religion

[BuddyLove]

I started as King of Ghana in the 867 time frame; managed to conquer Mali and become Emperor of Mali, but now I'm getting stuck.

I'm starting to be able to get my pick sometimes on Gavelkind, but I want to reform African religion so I can escape it, but I cannot get to enough moral authority.

I have 4 of the 5 Holy sites, all except Draa to the North which is part of the huge Muslim empire that encompasses all of Spain- I can't conquer it, so I've just kept expanding around, and have only a few big enemies left in Africa, but it takes so long for my armies to March to conquest and I'm completely dependent on tribal armies I can't even control.

How do I get out?

Building temples take 600 gold, which takes a LONG time to get to since I get so little per month; I've gotten as high as 46 Moral authority, but I cannot get to 50 without the 5th Holy site.

Any suggestions?

 

[Serenity84]

Do you have Horse Lords or Jade Dragon? With the Trans-Saharan Trade Route and the Mali gold mines you should be filthy rich

 

[VoodooEconomist]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think raiding and burning down other faith's temples increases MA as well. There are the "Build Great Pillar" and "Hold Great Tribal Festival" decisions too which influence MA, but I'm not sure if Africans have those.

 

[BuddyLove]

I don't have Horse Lords or Jade Dragon expansions yet; and with raiding the problem is that by the time I can get enough troops from my capital in Timbuktu to somewhere to raid successfully it's never more gold than I spent on the army upkeep even if I have a few hundred free raiders.

 

[MK1980]

didn't they add special prestige based retinues for pagans with holy fury? or do you still need legacy of rome to build those? they'd be helpful for raiding.

also, it may still be worthwhile to raid stuff even if you don't make a lot of money. you can get prisoners through sieges and ransom them. courtiers are usually only worth 10 gold and you may not even find someone to pay, but if you get lucky and get the heir or wife of some important sultan or whatever you can often collect a decent ransom to return them.
and you get a temporary MA boost for your faith by burning down the temples of infidels, which may allow you to reform eventually and fix the annoying inheritance

 

[BuddyLove]

I'll have to try ramping up the raiding again.

I don't know what stuff has and hasn't been added, I just started last week and I only have the one bundle worth of expansions (the one with the Islam and Way of Life and all that).

 

[junassa]

I'll have to try ramping up the raiding again.

I don't know what stuff has and hasn't been added, I just started last week and I only have the one bundle worth of expansions (the one with the Islam and Way of Life and all that).

If that's the Dynasty Starter Pack on Steam then you should have Legacy of Rome.

If you don't know how to make retinues do this: click on the military tab, under military there should be 3 tabs retinue, army levies, and fleet levies. Click on retinues. Over on the right there's a list of retinues that are available for your ruler along with their cost (prestige, piety, gold). There should be icons saying which type of troops they are (light infantry, archers, etc.). If you don't have a lot of prestige it's ok to get the one that has only light infantry and costs prestige, but the one you really want is the one with 100 light infantry and 50 archers which cost 50 prestige. Make as many of those as you can. When you create a retinue, it only has 1 unit in it, but will eventually grow to like 250 or so.

Here's a post that helped me:

So, what you want to do is early on take the scholarship focus (it costs 50, but that's fine) and pick the options to study the stars. You'll get a ton of military tech points. If you're in the pre-viking age, you might want to spend some getting seafaring, but otherwise put them all into military organisation. All of them.

At the same time, focus on building level 1 hillforts in all your personally-owned tribal holdings. Again, it's a big expense, but it's going to pay off way more than building markets.

Now, go to the retinue tab. You'll see there's a light infantry retinue you can raise for prestige. Raise all of them. If you've done the two above steps, your retinue cap will probably be into the thousands.

Now go forth and raid the crap out of everything while spending no gold on upkeep!

EDIT: Okay, so my brain melted and glossed over the bit where you said you were landlocked. Yeah, that's going to be hard. However, you can still use prestige retinues to avoid having to spend money on military upkeep.

 

[AdamantineFist]

... with raiding the problem is that by the time I can get enough troops from my capital in Timbuktu to somewhere to raid successfully it's never more gold than I spent on the army upkeep even if I have a few hundred free raiders.

Not about the gold. If you're trying to reform you're gonna need to loot a lot of temples. Luckily Ethiopia is full of those, and doesn't have tons of troops. Go burn some temples in Ethiopia and you have reformed in no time.

 

[SomeKindOfGnome]

When I'm trying to up the MA of a pagan religion to reform, I typically just go on a raiding spree with all of my troops split between 1-3 groups, depending on how many troops I have and the strength of the realm I'm raiding. By the time I get to 50% I should have enough money to build a Great Pillar which is costly and requires piety (which is also necessary for reformation) but can bump MA up to 50% earlier than expected.

 

[BuddyLove]

Ah, see that's good to know because I knew retinue where there but I didn't realize I could intentionally create more of them. . .

This whole game is just a series of finding a problem and then realizing there's an easy solution for it buried somewhere in a menu screen you've been ignoring for me. . .

I'm not sure if "Ethiopia" exists for me- there's abyssinnia, two Muslim empires, and then the Muslim Spanish empire that are what I have left for borders.

 

[junassa]

Ah, see that's good to know because I knew retinue where there but I didn't realize I could intentionally create more of them. . .

This whole game is just a series of finding a problem and then realizing there's an easy solution for it buried somewhere in a menu screen you've been ignoring for me. . .

LOL I've played this game for literally thousands of hours and I'm learning new things every time I play.

 

[acsa4]

Burning down Infidel temples with raids is a great way to increase moral authority, so are county conquest's if I remember correctly, But I could be mistaken about that.
Check this out, it should be a helpful guide for you: https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/Moral_authority
Hope this helps.

 

[BuddyLove]

So, I took the advice, built up retainers and raided my way to the moral authority to switch to reformed. Then I was able to go feudal, now I just have to finish consolidating after the switch and get to the requirements for primogeniture.