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CK2 Dev Diary #89 - Mass Conversion, or how I learned to stop my Pagan ways and love God

Greetings!

Note that this is the last DevDiary before vacations start. Until they are over we will not post any diaries, or post them very sporadically. We will resume the normal schedule on the 10th of August.

Today we’d like to talk about Mass Conversion, the flip side of what we talked about in the last DD (Dynamic Pagan Reformation). While Reforming a Pagan faith is a very epic feat, it’s also a fairly hard one to pull off in many cases. Historically, pagan rulers often turned to their neighbours religions in order to solidify their rule - and now so can you!

It used to be quite a suicidal affair to convert to a non-Pagan religion as a Pagan ruler, your provinces would stay pagan and your vassals would often be upset with you and immediately start a faction to install a pagan claimant. With Holy Fury it’s much more reliable, and carries great benefits to both you and your people. Depending on your strength as a leader, and the respect you have from your subjects, you can now convince your realm to join you in a Mass Conversion. A Mass Conversion will see you, your subjects and your lands adopt a new religion - except for particularly rebellious subjects, of course. Note that only Tribal Pagans will have access to this mechanic.

To Mass Convert your realm you first need to find a so called ‘Sponsor’. You can either look for a sponsor manually, by looking at the interactions menu with landed independent characters, or you can access a list of anyone who would be willing to go through the trouble by clicking a new button in the religious interface:
MassConversionDD_InterfaceValues.png


As said before, this list contains a list of everyone who will accept to convert your realm, and in the bottom right corner you can see that the AI reasoning is now exposed! The acceptance will not just be a bunch of pluses and minuses, instead you’ll be able to see exactly how they reason. If you, for example, want Byzantium to be your sponsor, you can enter the character sheet of the Basileus and check the interaction tooltip to see his reasoning if he says no, which will give you actual hints on what you could do to improve the chances of him accepting.
MassConversionDD_Accepted.png


After you’ve found a sponsor that accepted your offer, the Mass Conversion events will begin!
MassConversionDD_mainEvent.png

Note that the event image is a placeholder.

If you’re a tribe with low organization, you will actually gain a level of organization upon performing a Mass Conversion, in addition to you and your land switching to the new religion. The downside to doing one when you have low organization is, as mentioned earlier, that fewer subjects are likely to go along with it.

It doesn’t end here though, you and your sponsor will continue to keep in touch - and your sponsor will keep on helping your realm by providing you with money, building churches in your realm and many other things. Examples:
MassConversionDD_SponsorEvent.png
MassConversionDD_SponsorEvent2.png


In addition, the priest that your sponsor will send you will also help you out. He will attempt to modernize your realm and ensure that you act in accordance to your new faith. For example:
MassConversionDD_PriestEvent.png


So, as you can clearly see, this system stands in stark contrast to the Dynamic Reformation we talked about in a previous Dev Diary - by reforming you gain absolute control of your future, but it’s a difficult path to walk that also require you to conquer vast territories. A Mass Conversion, on the other hand, is a fairly easy thing to accomplish that also comes with temporal benefits - but you’ll have to submit to a faith that might not represent you or the people you rule...
 
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Does being a tributary factor in? In Khazaria games, I tend to make just about everything in Eastern Europe tributary, and like to try to spread Judaism to them.
 
benjaseth said:
Odin is not pleased.
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That depends.

He might send Thor to hammer on your door and ask if you've heard the good news.
After all, he promised to remove the Ice Giants, and I don't see many of them around...

I'm looking forwards to a raiding/prosetylising reformation of the Germanics.
 
What's the positive impact on MA for the proselithizing faith?
In the example screenshots I can see the negative impact on Romuva, but not on Catholic.
 
Stephanos said:
Yeah, that would be cool too. I would really like to have the ability to have multiple name lists for different religions inside a culture. It is strange to see pagan Hungarian rulers with western Christian names for example.
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Absolutely. Hungarians are just some of the very jarring cases - the same applies to Russians and the Scandinavian cultures after they have split. And of course the famous case of Coptic (& Greek) names popping very regularly up in Muslim dynasties of Egypt because the name list for 'Egyptian' culture uses it. There's quite a bit to do along this axis, yet I really hope the developers take note since it would be really helpful for immersion. I hope one day to be rid of the likes of 'Caliph Agathonikos Agathonikosid' and his ilk.
 
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What will sponsor get for his work to extend Realm of <here_insert_god_name>?
 
rageair said:
you can see that the AI reasoning is now exposed! The acceptance will not just be a bunch of pluses and minuses, instead you’ll be able to see exactly how they reason.
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This is the single greatest quality-of-life update in the history of Paradox.

Honestly: thank you.
 
I wonder if you can do the old switcheroo on those gullible monotheist fools, by accepting a conversion and later just washing away the baptism after you've gotten the benefits from them?

This did happen often enough. There's a lake in Finland called "Katumajärvi" or "Regret Lake" where people washed away their baptism. There were also numerous complaints that finns often accepted conversion when pressured, but when the threat left they threw out the priests left there to preach and went back to their old ways.

Mind you this was in the early days until the new christian faith became accepted and intermingled with the old traditions enough for people to consider it their own.
 
Silfae said:
The AI acceptance score is being unlocked only for certain choices, not all diplomatic actions.
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Can we at least get "Political concerns: -40" rather than a bunch of bars that are hard to count?
 
Thaif said:
There were also numerous complaints that finns often accepted conversion when pressured, but when the threat left they threw out the priests left there to preach and went back to their old ways.
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Yes, well, this sort of complaints are almost ubiquitous wherever religious specialists who are largely dissociated from the lower social strata need to motivate royal power to back them up. The 'ongoing conversion' is also a frequently found phenomenon in the Merovingian ecclesiastical texts in Gaul. To believe their church council acta and synodial deliberations, the peasantry could do absolutely nothing right without constant supervision, royal dictates backing the clerics up, and constant expansion of the church's holdings.
 
Can everyone sponsor religions or is this restricted (for example cosmopolitan reformed pagans can't etc.?)
Is it possible to mod a religion to not be able to sponsor its religion to others?
 
classicist said:
Indeed. And in order to make the baptismal name changing even more historical, it would be really terrific if there would be a possibility to emphasise the likelihood that the converting ruler adopts the (appropriately localized) form of his sponsor's name. There are many examples of this, and it befits the importance of god-parenthood in many medieval societies: very often, the converted ruler was interpreted as a god-child of the sponsoring Christian ruler or indeed the presiding bishop of the conversion.

Here's to hoping that a ruler who has conducted a Mass Conversion of his realm will have a better chance of gaining a sainthood. That, if anything, would be historical to the degree of normativity.
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This should be pretty easy to implement given the current culture-localising mechanics at work in names already. You could adopt either the sponsor's name (which would then automatically change to the appropriate equivalent if the culture names are linked properly). The other alternatives that comes to mind would be for the character triggering the mass conversion to adopt a name either specified in the religion file or potentially belonging to the culture of the sponsor.

e.g.
Johannes (a Dutchman) sponsors Þorbjörn (a Norseman)'s conversion to Catholicism and he adopts his sponsor's name as Jon
Alexios (a Greek) sponsors Yaroslav (a Russian)'s conversion to Orthodox Christianity and he adopts Pavel (Paul) as a Christian name
Ælfræd (an Anglo-Saxon) sponsors Guðrum (a Norseman)'s conversion to Catholicism and he adopts Æthelstan, a name from his sponsor's culture

The third of these options happened with the historical Ælfred (who, despite being West Saxon spelt his name as Mercian) and Guðrum despite it being less obviously a thing to do on conversion (Æþelstan was either Ælfred's dead eldest brother or uncle so it might have been connected to that).

Picking between these options could simply be random or effected by other factors like moral authority of the target religion (prioritising the second option), prestige of the sponsor (prioritising the first option), opinion of the sponsor (prioritising the first option), closeness of culture (prioritising the third option), or prestige of the sponsee (prioritising keeping their original name, possibly at a cost of piety?).

e.g.
a high prestige Lombard Theoderich sponsors an Old Frankish Raginari's conversion to Catholicism. As the Karlings have fallen to the Umayyads, Catholic Moral Authority is low. As such there would be an increased chance of adopting the sponsor's name as Theuderic (high prestige of sponsee), or a name of the sponsor's culture e.g. Merovech (closeness of culture) and a decreased chance of adopting a religion-specific name like Stephen (low catholic moral authority).

classicist said:
Absolutely. Hungarians are just some of the very jarring cases - the same applies to Russians and the Scandinavian cultures after they have split. And of course the famous case of Coptic (& Greek) names popping very regularly up in Muslim dynasties of Egypt because the name list for 'Egyptian' culture uses it. There's quite a bit to do along this axis, yet I really hope the developers take note since it would be really helpful for immersion. I hope one day to be rid of the likes of 'Caliph Agathonikos Agathonikosid' and his ilk.
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That should be readily fixable by properly linking names in the culture file to those in the religion file (although this could slightly mess with the "adopt a name of the target religion" mechanic I suggest above if you ended up with a West African pagan converting to Catholicism sponsored by a Portuguese king adopting a Coptic name although I guess being able to move the name field in the religion file into specific parent religions rather than just religion groups should fix that (i.e. being able to put Coptic names as Miaphysite rather than Christian).
 
I hope Mass Conversion is extended to all religions, with flavor for each. I'd like to see the potential for tribesmen to go Hindu or, even more fun, a heresy! However, I don't want a baptism theme in places where it makes no sense.

Only Jews and Christians baptized new converts. May Jewish clergy baptized Gentiles during their conversion to Judaism (though I'm not sure if it's before or after their circumcision). Christians are commanded to baptize converts.

I also have an idea for the Jewish one, as a flavor reference. At the end of the Event text, the Jewish rabbi working with the conversion should hold up a circumcision tool and say "Now your men shall be one with the Covenant of Abraham.".

The Option tooltip says "We have to cut our WHAT?!".
 
Will secret religious cults factor into mass conversions? For example, if a zealous vassal chooses to convert but secretly forms a cult?
 
@esoanem Thank you for fleshing out the possible ways of implementing the baptismal name changes - as well as the additional suggestions and historical examples. Did not know that about Ælfred. It sounds like prestige of the characters could indeed be a useful parameter to factor into the mechanic. And the suggested fix for the Coptic/Muslim name fuddle gives hope that we will possible get a corrected name list. Very useful indeed!
 
Slime99 said:
Can Nomads do this do? You stated that only TRIBAL pagans can do this but wouldn't it be a waste of immersion to exclude nomads. Just sayin'.
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It also wouldn't be accurate as in nomad societies religion was far more fluid. I think nomads should have their own immersive interactions with religion, but this would reduce nomad immersion IMO
 
Silfae said:
3. Mass Conversion is a realm-based mechanic, so it can only start between two independent rulers, then trickle down to the Pagan's vassals.
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Some sort of religious encroachment mechanic or event/decision chain for ambitious cynical vassals using nearby organized religions to bid for power would be a pretty nifty addition to the game.

At the very least, this should hopefully lead to more pagans converting to Orthodox, rather than almost everyone going catholic or sunni purely due to the number of independent kingdoms or higher that follow those religions.
 
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