Greetings!
Bit of a sneaky DevDiary today - this Friday (when we usually post Dev Diaries) is the time for Midsummer celebrations here in Sweden, so we wouldn't be able to answer your questions! Tomorrow we'll be busy eating pickled herring and getting rained on, but today we're here for you!
By now it’s hardly a secret that the two main focuses for the Holy Fury expansion are going to be Catholicism as well as Paganism. Playing as a Catholic is core to the game, with a grounded set of rules for you to adhere to (and abuse). Playing a Pagan, in contrast, is a more visceral and instantly gratifying experience - with a strong emphasis on dynamism compared to the more rigid christian faiths. Before going any further, it’s worth noting that the Pagan religious group will be unlocked and playable with Holy Fury.
With Holy Fury, reforming a Pagan faith is no longer a one-click type of deal. Instead you’ll be able to tailor the new religion to become exactly what you want it to be through the new Reformation interface:
You will be able to open and preview this screen at any point while playing an unreformed pagan, allowing you to plan ahead what type of features you want to pick. We’ve also taken this opportunity to make the Bön religion reformable, to provide equal opportunity to the eastern Pagans.
There are three different types of ‘slots’ to be filled in, the Nature, Doctrine and Leadership of the religion. The default selection will be thematically chosen depending on what faith you’re reforming - though there’s nothing stopping you from picking wildly divergent features, such as a Pacifistic Nature for the Germanic religion.
While most features will be available to all pagan religions, they will all have one unique doctrine that only they can pick. This is to enhance the differences between the various unreformed pagan faiths. The Germanic special feature will, for example, contain Seafaring and Prepared Invasions - something the other religions must spend two doctrine slots to get.
The possibilities with reformation are near endless, you’ll be able to make a religion that suits your specific needs. For example, if you’re surrounded by other religions (very common if playing Zun or Bön for example) the Cosmopolitan Nature would be advised, as then you can intermarry with your neighbors to create non-aggression pacts. If you’re tired of the Abrahamic religions and their incessant Crusades, you can adopt a Warmongering Nature combined with a Bloodthirsty Gods doctrine to really show them what you think of their weak rituals.
As there’s too many features for us to bring up right now, I’ll save them for a future Dev Diary. Worth noting is that several of the Doctrines you can choose will contain special events and decisions tied to them, so even if you’ve already played a game once where you reform a Pagan faith - you might just want to play another one, to see what could have been different.
To round off, here’s a few of our favorite reformation setups from us in the Dev Team:
Starting off with my own choice, I’m all about creating chaos - and there’s no greater way to achieve that than to promote not only close-kin marriage, but also harems on top of that! Once during a multiplayer with the Dev Team I managed to reform the religion most of us was playing into something similar to this. They were confused when their children started marrying each other, to say the least!
@Snow Crystal I like playing tall, so I like boosts that let me control who the Heir is, as well as making sure the heir is as popular as possible. I can't stand having a Religious Head that tells me what to do, and think Autocephalous is pretty cool. I don't really care about spreading my faith outside of my borders - if anything, I’d prefer everything outside my borders to be heathenous, so that I get more of a challenge!
@Silfae Usually upon reforming, my dynasty ends up alone against a world of infidels. The quickest way to spread the faith when in those circumstances is through military action, hence the need for a Warmongering Nature. Picking the Astrology Doctrine unlocks the Zodiac traits for my characters, giving them various attribute boosts, while Haruspicy can help me influence the morale of my armies (for better or worse). Furthermore, since Astrology and Haruspicy are synergistic Doctrines, by combining them I gain access to additional perks that would have otherwise been out of reach for me... as well as ending up with an extremely superstitious religion.
@Tuscany One of my favorite reformation combinations is mixing 'Bloodthirsty Gods’ and ‘Haruspicy'. Being able to sacrifice people to your gods and get rewarded for it is great fun, and when combined with Haruspicy (the art of reading an animal's entrails to predict the future) you can even cut apart your prisoners and see whether you will be lucky in future wars. Of course I pick ‘Temporal’ to allow me to rule over all of this as the conduit between god and man, and ‘Peaceful’ because non-violence is obviously the best strategy.
Bit of a sneaky DevDiary today - this Friday (when we usually post Dev Diaries) is the time for Midsummer celebrations here in Sweden, so we wouldn't be able to answer your questions! Tomorrow we'll be busy eating pickled herring and getting rained on, but today we're here for you!
By now it’s hardly a secret that the two main focuses for the Holy Fury expansion are going to be Catholicism as well as Paganism. Playing as a Catholic is core to the game, with a grounded set of rules for you to adhere to (and abuse). Playing a Pagan, in contrast, is a more visceral and instantly gratifying experience - with a strong emphasis on dynamism compared to the more rigid christian faiths. Before going any further, it’s worth noting that the Pagan religious group will be unlocked and playable with Holy Fury.
With Holy Fury, reforming a Pagan faith is no longer a one-click type of deal. Instead you’ll be able to tailor the new religion to become exactly what you want it to be through the new Reformation interface:
You will be able to open and preview this screen at any point while playing an unreformed pagan, allowing you to plan ahead what type of features you want to pick. We’ve also taken this opportunity to make the Bön religion reformable, to provide equal opportunity to the eastern Pagans.
There are three different types of ‘slots’ to be filled in, the Nature, Doctrine and Leadership of the religion. The default selection will be thematically chosen depending on what faith you’re reforming - though there’s nothing stopping you from picking wildly divergent features, such as a Pacifistic Nature for the Germanic religion.
While most features will be available to all pagan religions, they will all have one unique doctrine that only they can pick. This is to enhance the differences between the various unreformed pagan faiths. The Germanic special feature will, for example, contain Seafaring and Prepared Invasions - something the other religions must spend two doctrine slots to get.
The possibilities with reformation are near endless, you’ll be able to make a religion that suits your specific needs. For example, if you’re surrounded by other religions (very common if playing Zun or Bön for example) the Cosmopolitan Nature would be advised, as then you can intermarry with your neighbors to create non-aggression pacts. If you’re tired of the Abrahamic religions and their incessant Crusades, you can adopt a Warmongering Nature combined with a Bloodthirsty Gods doctrine to really show them what you think of their weak rituals.
As there’s too many features for us to bring up right now, I’ll save them for a future Dev Diary. Worth noting is that several of the Doctrines you can choose will contain special events and decisions tied to them, so even if you’ve already played a game once where you reform a Pagan faith - you might just want to play another one, to see what could have been different.
To round off, here’s a few of our favorite reformation setups from us in the Dev Team:
Starting off with my own choice, I’m all about creating chaos - and there’s no greater way to achieve that than to promote not only close-kin marriage, but also harems on top of that! Once during a multiplayer with the Dev Team I managed to reform the religion most of us was playing into something similar to this. They were confused when their children started marrying each other, to say the least!
@Snow Crystal I like playing tall, so I like boosts that let me control who the Heir is, as well as making sure the heir is as popular as possible. I can't stand having a Religious Head that tells me what to do, and think Autocephalous is pretty cool. I don't really care about spreading my faith outside of my borders - if anything, I’d prefer everything outside my borders to be heathenous, so that I get more of a challenge!
@Silfae Usually upon reforming, my dynasty ends up alone against a world of infidels. The quickest way to spread the faith when in those circumstances is through military action, hence the need for a Warmongering Nature. Picking the Astrology Doctrine unlocks the Zodiac traits for my characters, giving them various attribute boosts, while Haruspicy can help me influence the morale of my armies (for better or worse). Furthermore, since Astrology and Haruspicy are synergistic Doctrines, by combining them I gain access to additional perks that would have otherwise been out of reach for me... as well as ending up with an extremely superstitious religion.
@Tuscany One of my favorite reformation combinations is mixing 'Bloodthirsty Gods’ and ‘Haruspicy'. Being able to sacrifice people to your gods and get rewarded for it is great fun, and when combined with Haruspicy (the art of reading an animal's entrails to predict the future) you can even cut apart your prisoners and see whether you will be lucky in future wars. Of course I pick ‘Temporal’ to allow me to rule over all of this as the conduit between god and man, and ‘Peaceful’ because non-violence is obviously the best strategy.
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