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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...
 
Looks amazing, sucks that we probably won't get another dev dairy for a month+ though.
 
Do you gain a NAP or even an alliance between the two realms? If you're investing time and resources into converting a pagan realm, you probably don't want to see them taken over and all your work undone by more heathens.
 
Man. I was thinking of starting an Avaria game to tide myself over until Holy Fury, but this diary makes me think I should just wait...
 
Catholics don't worship the Blessed Virgin, they venerate her, and consider the two terms to mean very different things.

Yup... the mistakes one gets when you have modern (culturally Protestant) Nordics trying to approximate the medieval Catholic discourse!
 
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This is brilliant.

It'd be cool if you could fail though? your pagan vassals who hate you, prevent the conversion by ambusing the conversion and cutting you all down or something? or a palace coup on the eve?
 
Yup... the mistakes one gets when you have modern (culturally Protestant) Nordics trying to approximate the medieval Catholic discourse!
all the paradox games are like this
I think this case isnt written though, just the fill in deity from name list here form event text? Weird things always happen with it. But it works half the time.
 
Step 1) ask for mass conversion

Step 2) Convert secretly back to pagan

Step 3) Get Money and tempels by sponsor

Step 4) Profit!

Probably things to prevent an exploit like that although it could be realistic depending on the ruler XD.

The Bulgarian's for example played the Pope and Byzantine Basileus off against eachother to go the most concession they could.
 
Probably things to prevent an exploit like that although it could be realistic depending on the ruler XD.

The Bulgarian's for example played the Pope and Byzantine Basileus off against eachother to go the most concession they could.
I suppose it would cost a crap ton of piety just like it already does
 
all the paradox games are like this
I think this case isnt written though, just the fill in deity from name list here form event text? Weird things always happen with it. But it works half the time.
I think there needs to be a new set of localisations so that different religions can use different verbs to refer to their attitude to their religious figures. Eastern Orthodoxy, similarly to Catholicism, has strictly distinct terms for the forms of honour due to God, to Mary, and to the other saints.

A pair of localisations high_god_honour_<religion> and other_honour_<religion> would do the job.

nd
 
Sounds great! A few questions:
Will we be able to play this from the other side? E.g. to play as a sponsor?
Could this also be adapted to add decisions relating to economic alliances (as opposed to military ones?) For example, it would be cool if we could sponsor (or be sponsored by) a friendly neighbouring realm in exchange for say a one way non-aggression pact. Or for an independant count to accept someone as their liege in return for sponsorship?
 
Will we be able to mass conver a another country to your religion? or will we be able to send missionarys to other countrys to convert into your religon? or is this already possibel?
 
Will we be able to mass conver a another country to your religion? or will we be able to send missionarys to other countrys to convert into your religon? or is this already possibel?

You can already send your court chaplain to pagan courts to convert them. Sometimes it even works. They haven't said if the AI will approach you for mass conversion, but I expect that sometimes you will get the pop-up asking for conversion. They did say that if you send your chaplain to another court and they accept that it will trigger the same events as if they had asked you.
 
Catholics don't worship the Blessed Virgin, they venerate her, and consider the two terms to mean very different things.

This happens due to the funny coding in the game. Basically, a religion has a defined "high god", which for Christians is "the Lord" IIRC, "other gods" which for Christians are "Jesus", "the Blessed Virgin", and maybe some angels but I can't remember for sure, and then there's "evil god" which for Christians is of course "Lucifer"

These values are plugged into event texts. The usual results are phrases like "Praise Jesus!" or "I am convinced by their loyalty to the Blessed Virgin", sometimes stuff like this slips through- it should be fixable by just changing the value to "high god" theoretically but that would eliminate the possibility of "Jesus" being plugged in.

Although I am not a Catholic myself, I heard one give a speech as part of a speech class on the virtues of using Mary as an intermediary between regular and God/Jesus. I'm not entirely sure where this lines up historically or in mainstream practice, but if need be you could interpret the event text as suggesting this practice rather than thinking of it as outright worship.
 
This happens due to the funny coding in the game. Basically, a religion has a defined "high god", which for Christians is "the Lord" IIRC, "other gods" which for Christians are "Jesus", "the Blessed Virgin", and maybe some angels but I can't remember for sure, and then there's "evil god" which for Christians is of course "Lucifer"

These values are plugged into event texts. The usual results are phrases like "Praise Jesus!" or "I am convinced by their loyalty to the Blessed Virgin", sometimes stuff like this slips through- it should be fixable by just changing the value to "high god" theoretically but that would eliminate the possibility of "Jesus" being plugged in.

Although I am not a Catholic myself, I heard one give a speech as part of a speech class on the virtues of using Mary as an intermediary between regular and God/Jesus. I'm not entirely sure where this lines up historically or in mainstream practice, but if need be you could interpret the event text as suggesting this practice rather than thinking of it as outright worship.
The line is definitely venerating and asking for her to put in a good word rather than worshipping her.

The classic line is "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and the hour of our death" rather than "our father... ...forgive us our trespasses... ...and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil".

You ask Mary (and other saints) to pray for you, and with you, as advocates before God, and address the prayers to God Himself.
You ask a patron saint to strengthen your will or endeavour by aiding you in your trouble.


It's not always an easy line to distinguish, which is why Catholic and Orthodox groups are sometimes accused by Protestant groups of praying to saints.
 
Step 1) ask for mass conversion

Step 2) Convert secretly back to pagan

Step 3) Get Money and tempels by sponsor

Step 4) Profit!

Step 3.5) Adopt feudalism!! Remember, unreformed pagans can't adopt feudalism, so I wonder if you could fake convert for the mass conversion, adopt feudalism, and then switch back? Might be kind of fun!
 
Catholics don't worship the Blessed Virgin, they venerate her, and consider the two terms to mean very different things.
I'd say that is a heresy?


But then if we play as one of the non-pagans, will we be able to instigate the mass conversion (decision versus random events) and are we obligated to pay them at fixed time periods if that is the case?


This happens due to the funny coding in the game. Basically, a religion has a defined "high god", which for Christians is "the Lord" IIRC, "other gods" which for Christians are "Jesus", "the Blessed Virgin", and maybe some angels but I can't remember for sure, and then there's "evil god" which for Christians is of course "Lucifer"

These values are plugged into event texts. The usual results are phrases like "Praise Jesus!" or "I am convinced by their loyalty to the Blessed Virgin", sometimes stuff like this slips through- it should be fixable by just changing the value to "high god" theoretically but that would eliminate the possibility of "Jesus" being plugged in.

Although I am not a Catholic myself, I heard one give a speech as part of a speech class on the virtues of using Mary as an intermediary between regular and God/Jesus. I'm not entirely sure where this lines up historically or in mainstream practice, but if need be you could interpret the event text as suggesting this practice rather than thinking of it as outright worship.
The quick fix would be perhaps just plug a different word for "worship" with Minor gods/ non-designated god(s) ?
 
It's not always an easy line to distinguish, which is why Catholic and Orthodox groups are sometimes accused by Protestant groups of praying to saints.
Saints and similar sorts of things are essentially local gods or spirits that got co-opted into the religion either to help convert people or because of polytheistic traditions carrying over. People like the idea that there's something nearby that cares about them and their community/people in particular.

Step 3.5) Adopt feudalism!! Remember, unreformed pagans can't adopt feudalism, so I wonder if you could fake convert for the mass conversion, adopt feudalism, and then switch back? Might be kind of fun!
Considering that the mass conversion also converts all your provinces too, trying to go back to paganism would be very hard.
 
I'd say that is a heresy?

But then if we play as one of the non-pagans, will we be able to instigate the mass conversion (decision versus random events) and are we obligated to pay them at fixed time periods if that is the case?

The quick fix would be perhaps just plug a different word for "worship" with Minor gods/ non-designated god(s) ?
Technically it'd be a heresy, but it's one that derives from an error of understanding, and so should be easy to clear up with educated folk who can understand the technical differences in the words used to express worship, praise, devotion, and veneration.
With the uneducated masses of this period you'd probably correct it by rote, and simplified explanation that you pray to God and ask the Saints to pray with you.

And yeah, the fix is probably just to make sure that entries using "worship" can't call Mary and the list of saints.