Use missionary to stop CoR

[honkajoki]

When playing a catholic nation trying to stop the reformation, your success depends a lot on where the centers of reformation spawn. If a CoR spawns in an OPM, or the capital of a smaller country that you can force convert at once, you can quite easily stop the CoR. If it spawns in the capital of a larger country, you can force convert after some more wars, which is fine, it should be more difficult to stop religions supported by large countries. If it spawns in a non capital province of a large country, you can perhaps force to release a country whose capital the province becomes, and force convert that country, again, fine.

If the CoR spawns in one of your own provinces, or a province of one of your subjects, you either have to wait for 30 years or release a vassal or your subject and then declare war on them. Assuming there even is a suitable core on the province so that you can release a vassal. Thus it is harder to stop a CoR that spawns in your own province or a province of your subject, than a CoR that spawns somewhere else.

To fix the above, I suggest that placing a missionary to convert a province with a CoR stops the CoR from propagating religion as long as the missionary is there, even when the missionary is not making any progress. You can think of it as the missionary being in a theological debate with the reformers. That way the CoR and the 30 year ban on reconversion still matter, by taking up a missionary and his maintenance cost, but stopping CoR that spawns in your own country is no longer too hard compared to stopping one in another country.

While on the subject of missionaries, perhaps one should be able to override the missionary of a subject. For cases when the subject takes 100 months to convert a province that you could convert in 10.

 

[InvisibleBison]

I'm not sure about this suggestion. On the one hand, it does seem odd that it's much harder to stop a CoR in your own territory than one in another country. On the other hand, if the Reformation isn't a huge problem for all Catholic countries, is it really implemented correctly? Perhaps the devs should bring the difficulty of squashing foreign and domestic CoRs into alignment by making it harder to squash foreign ones rather than making it easier to squash domestic ones.

 

[honkajoki]

That's a valid point.

I don't know much history, am I correct in thinking that during the Lutheran reformation there were some German princes who supported the reformation, and the survival of the reformation, including the physical survival of Luther himself, depended on having the support of those princes? Are there examples of a country being reformed against the will of its rulers, and without a revolt that would equate an in-game victory by religious rebels? If there are no such examples, then it should be easy to stop the reformation in your own lands.

One way to make it harder to squash reformation in foreign lands would be to make it impossible to convert a province that has separatism. Perhaps only applying to CoR provinces, perhaps to any with a different christian religion, perhaps to all. But even then, the idea that a missionary working in a CoR province would stop propagation, could be used. It would hard to stop them all due to lack of missionaries.

 

[RMS Oceanic]

The CoR already cannot target a province with an active missionary, so perhaps the ability to park a missionary in an already converted province to ward off the CoR from that specific Province isn't the worst idea.

 

[DukeLeto42]

So, this is a solid idea, and I think the following is a good demonstration of why:

I don't know much history, am I correct in thinking that during the Lutheran reformation there were some German princes who supported the reformation, and the survival of the reformation, including the physical survival of Luther himself, depended on having the support of those princes? Are there examples of a country being reformed against the will of its rulers, and without a revolt that would equate an in-game victory by religious rebels? If there are no such examples, then it should be easy to stop the reformation in your own lands.

Yes to most of this. Luther was absolutely supported by German princes, who (to to reduce a complex issue to the purely political and a crude version of that) saw it as an opportunity to thumb their nose at Austria (and the southern-focused Hapsburgs and the HRE more generally). They were key to maintaining the Reformation and protecting Luther, even if their reasons may not have been entirely religious fervor.

As for reformation without a ruler's will, there are examples but they tend to be (in EU4 terms) junior partners in Personal Unions. The Low Countries, for one, reform despite the efforts of the Hapsburgs, and the conflicts over that effectively result in the creation of the Netherlands / Belgium divide we know today. However, these are best thought of as the game models them - junior partners in PUs that can reform without the leading partner's consent.

For our purposes, the mechanic you're describing probably fits better with the Hussites (which by EU4 are just one province in Bohemia). This is very much a proto-Reformation, and Jan Hus preached many of the same things Luther did. However, he was invited to a church council to defend his views, which turned out to be little more than a heresy trial (this is why Luther was so active in getting political support and refused to attend his own council until the Emperor himself guaranteed his safety). After he was burned at the stake, several decades of conflict rocked Bohemia.

The lack of leadership support for Hus (Bohemia was, in EU4 terms, in a PU under Hungary at the time) helped ensure that, instead of spreading, Hussites pretty much end up confined to Bohemia. Effectively, a "Hussite Reformation" was stopped by Hus' death and stalling out the drive for reformation (which in-game we could imagine as plopping a missionary down on the province for decades). Rather than their CoR being converted away, Hussites survive until being (more-or-less) folded into the various new Protestant denominations.


Coming back to the beginning, I think there's a solid historical basis for expensive, unrest-producing suppression of a CoR (i.e. sticking a missionary on it), which would also reduce the pressure for release-and-force-religion cheese.

 

[RedArmy]

Adding a peace deal option « destroy reformation center » would be the best alternative in my opinion. It should be a separate from « enforcing religion ».