Welcome to another development diary about Europa Universalis IV. Today we’ll go into details about mechanics for some religions, that will become available with the next expansion.


Protestanstism
Each protestant church will have their own name in the interface, like Church of England and so on. You can then customise the benefits of your church, and also change it over time whenever you need. To change the aspect of your church, you have to spend Church Power.

Church Power is accumulated each month, depending on your current religious unity, and your monarchs abilities.

Adding an aspect to your church costs 100 church power, but you can remove an aspect at any time, but that will lower your stability by 1.

A Church can have up to 3 different aspects, and there are 12 different ones to pick from. Some of these include.

• Holy Sacraments: +2.5% Discipline
• Individual Creeds: -5% Idea Costs
• Adult Baptism: +1% Missionary Strength.

Buddhism
The Buddhist Faith gained the concept of Karma. Karma needs to be balanced, because if it goes too positive or negative, you end up with penalties. If you go too positive you end up with penalties to your diplomatic abilities, and if you go too negative, you end up with penalties to your military abilities.

However, If you keep a balanced karma, you gain bonuses to both diplomatic and military abilities.

Some examples on how you gain Karma include: Starting wars decrease Karma, while honoring defensive alliances increase Karma.

While adding the Karma mechanic and its related events it also became clear that the game setup could benefit from splitting the existing religion into Vajrayana, Mahayana and Theravada. These three religions will all use the same Karma mechanic but don't all share the same events related to it and can in some cases have different event options in the events they do share. Events related to Lamas are for instance reserved for the Vajrayana faith while only Theravada countries can turn to Ceylon for spiritual inspiration. The three religions also differ in what bonuses they provide.

Next week we will talk about about subjects and how to interact with them...

 

[Loaf Warden]

Stuff like this should not became a mechanic.
If you follow this path you could also add mechanics to reward human sacrifices to some gods or make tribes that drink blood get rewarded by a better crop.

You can't make supernatural or spiritual stuff influence real world business (at least not at this scale). This is a breach of style.

It's about your people's perception, not about a literal interaction between the mundane world and the supernatural. Like when the Aztecs get to too much Doom, the universe doesn't literally end, but the people think it's going to, so they panic and national disaster ensues.

For the karma meter, think of it as things like your soldiers losing confidence in you, and so not fighting as well. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy; it doesn't have to be literally true for the people to believe in it and be affected accordingly.

 

[eroskos]

That's not what karma is that's what people think it is

„Karma” means „action”. Every action you take (doesn't mater good or bad) entangles you more and more into the horror that is „samsara”, the circle of birth and death, also called "life". You don't want that. What you want is to break free from this mortal coil and never come back (Nirvana). To do that you need not to have any karma. That's more or less the basics of what karma is for all dharmic religions

you cannot live a normal live without acquiring any „karma” but you can live a good life (like giving some money to monasteries) and hoping that being a good person will put you in a better position next life to achieve „the enlightenment”. Maybe you will be a monk in a monastery and then you will be able to spend all day meditating and not acquiring any “karma”.



The main difference between Hinduism and Buddhism its that in Hinduism god is very important in achieving „nirvana” and Buddhism is a little „atheistic” in the sens that yes, there are gods but they are pathetic a not as cool as humans. humans are in better position to achieve “nirvana” and all gods are, like, super jelly of us.

Interesting and more in line with my understanding of the concept.

Would dharma be more in line with the mechanic then?

 

[eroskos]

According to wikipedia, this interpretation and the causality with the rebirth theme is just one of multiple interpretations of the concept of Karma.
I remain unconvinced.

but since this is particularly a mechanic related to Buddhism, perhaps this page would be more focused for definition purposes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_in_Buddhism

 

[Brodacious]

Welcome to another development diary about Europa Universalis IV. Today we’ll go into details about mechanics for some religions, that will become available with the next expansion.


Protestanstism
Each protestant church will have their own name in the interface, like Church of England and so on. You can then customise the benefits of your church, and also change it over time whenever you need. To change the aspect of your church, you have to spend Church Power.

Church Power is accumulated each month, depending on your current religious unity, and your monarchs abilities.

Adding an aspect to your church costs 100 church power, but you can remove an aspect at any time, but that will lower your stability by 1.

A Church can have up to 3 different aspects, and there are 12 different ones to pick from. Some of these include.

• Holy Sacraments: +2.5% Discipline
• Individual Creeds: -5% Idea Costs
• Adult Baptism: +1% Missionary Strength.

Sounds like one of my posts from a long time ago. Awesome Sauce with Gravy.

 

[Apolojuice]

Karma is a weird word, since it's more of an absolute value. It worked in CK2, but it's a number over there, a scale to balance here. Dharma would be better.

Also, the bonus for staying in the middle is disappointing? It would be really hard staying in the middle, much harder than being super impious or pious for muslims, so the bonus should reflect it.


It's good to see how our collective fever-dream of some sort of scale with the middle giving the most bonuses for buddhism was somehow correct.


PS. It's probably better if Japan is now Mayahana buddhist (the different branches of buddhism should get their own icons as well), Shinto is basically Japanese paganism, and elevating it to the point of a branch of "eastern religion" is awkward, what's the difference between shinto and animism in Ryukyu? an army, probably.

 

[InFerroVeritas]

One thing I don't really like is how it always seems like buffing some religions and not others creates a weird balance issue. In the current version, for instance, Reformed and Catholic got buffed and Protestant didn't. That left Protestant countries somewhat weaker than their counterparts. Just weird.

You're not infusing your troops with supernatural karma power, they just fight better for a leader they perceive as good.

Right. This actually already happens with the two religions that have those sliding scales. With Orthodox countries, your bonus to your ability to fight is that huge +33% manpower bonus you get at max authority. And Muslims receive a bonus to military stuff on both ends of the piety spectrum (though, to be fair, +10% morale and +20% fort defense are much better than just +20% manpower).

It's also not that odd for soldiers to be more dedicated to rulers they like. That's... basically how Napoleon happened. And it's definitely how the Hundred Days happened.

 

[loup99]

I think an expansion will be released not before the end of May. AoW had 2 months of delay.

I am wondering now what else awaits. When we get new NIs, patch notes, EXPANSION'S NAME etc...

No, it will be out by Late June/Early July. You are out too early, a lot of new mechanics are planned judging on Johan & Wiz have been saying/hinting.

 

[mvm900]

I'm all for any new mechanics to make playing different regions more interesting. Thanks, Paradox.

 

[BarskiPatzow]

I can't play this game no more ;( Too many good things in this expansion to play without at the moment


edit: i'll finally get a chance to play our Bohemian brothers and some Italians, those are only catholic countries I could play GG protestant Italy

 

[johnleeyx]

No, it will be out by Late June/Early July. You are out too early, a lot of new mechanics are planned judging on Johan & Wiz have been saying/hinting.

Yeah I think that was basically what he said (late june/early July=not before end of may)
But when do you think they will announve it?

 

[loup99]

Yeah I think that was basically what he said (late june/early July=not before end of may)
But when do you think they will announve it?

Announce it? This month, in may I would personally say, but it is harder to decide as they have not been as consistent with announcements as they havbe been with DLC releases.

 

[LRDK]

Why would positive karma have a diplomatic penalty and negative karma have a military penalty? Surely they should be the other way around?

Honouring alliances would surely increase your diplomatic reputation, while declaring war would decrease it and boost your military abilities?

Karma is bad: you accumulate karma when doing something like killing someone. Thus the high karma for diplomacy makes sense, as you will be less virtuous in the eyes of the community, but more adept to killing and war.

 

[francishillsman]

Welcome to another development diary about Europa Universalis IV. Today we’ll go into details about mechanics for some religions, that will become available with the next expansion.


Protestanstism
Each protestant church will have their own name in the interface, like Church of England and so on. You can then customise the benefits of your church, and also change it over time whenever you need. To change the aspect of your church, you have to spend Church Power.

Church Power is accumulated each month, depending on your current religious unity, and your monarchs abilities.

Adding an aspect to your church costs 100 church power, but you can remove an aspect at any time, but that will lower your stability by 1.

A Church can have up to 3 different aspects, and there are 12 different ones to pick from. Some of these include.

• Holy Sacraments: +2.5% Discipline
• Individual Creeds: -5% Idea Costs
• Adult Baptism: +1% Missionary Strength.

Would it be possible to freeze the church aspects for revolutionary or American Dream governments? Having the USA modify its official religion seems... odd somehow. This feature is awesome, by the way. Its a permanent policy that just costs a stab hit. Set it and forget it.

 

[Zakkachu]

Can't wait for the new expansion now
The Protestant mechanics look really interesting, while the Karma mechanic for Buddhist seems to be less about expanding and more about being a diplomatic nation.

 

[mudcrabmerchant]

It is not actual Karma just like it is not actual Piety, its perceived Karma as in your subjects and your enemies perceive you to have this much Karma.

You're not infusing your troops with supernatural karma power, they just fight better for a leader they perceive as good.

It's about your people's perception, not about a literal interaction between the mundane world and the supernatural. Like when the Aztecs get to too much Doom, the universe doesn't literally end, but the people think it's going to, so they panic and national disaster ensues.

For the karma meter, think of it as things like your soldiers losing confidence in you, and so not fighting as well. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy; it doesn't have to be literally true for the people to believe in it and be affected accordingly.

This would work, if the karma meter actually represented how people would act. Honoring defensive alliances reduces your diplomatic ability. Waging frequent war of your own reduces military ability. Perhaps you could attribute the loss of military ability to increasing war-weariness, but we already have war exhaustion, which represents that factor just fine in the rest of the world. And I can think of no reason why honoring alliances and generally not being a dick would somehow reduce people's opinion of you.

I can only imagine that they were inspired by the idea of the Middle Path and notions of balance in eastern religion, but if so, these represent a blatant misunderstanding of both. The Middle Path referred to a midpoint between a normal materialistic life and the insane nearly-suicidal brand of asceticism that existed around the Buddha's time. The idea that it's somehow necessary to balance violent aggression with loving peace is not Buddhist at all. Only by conscious and strained warping of Buddhist teachings can one bring them to justify aggression of any kind.

Interesting and more in line with my understanding of the concept.

Would dharma be more in line with the mechanic then?

As per the devs' plan, Karma is probably preferable to Dharma. It refers to the balance of your ruler's actions, not to their philosophical doctrine or accepted/propounded understanding of the world (not a good translation of dharma but eh, it's a tough word).

Karma is bad: you accumulate karma when doing something like killing someone. Thus the high karma for diplomacy makes sense, as you will be less virtuous in the eyes of the community, but more adept to killing and war.

As I said previously, in Buddhism you do not accumulate karma - rather, your karma is a balance of the moral weight of your actions, which can affect the conditions of your rebirth, and according to much popular belief, your fortune in your current life. Having good karma sets you up for a better reincarnation, and is the result of not being a dick, generally speaking. Crap karma arises from harming other beings, primarily.

I imagine by high karma, the devs mean good karma. Which properly should be lowered by waging offensive war, while it makes some sense for karma to increase if you defend an unjustly attacked ally. As per your example, I fail to see how high/good karma gained via using diplomacy over violent, murderous warfare would make you less virtuous in the eyes of the community.

 

[Metz]

What about karma affecting affecting your ruler's stats? Bad karma decisions by the ruler lower the diplomatic stat and raise military stat and vice versa. With administrative being affected positively and negatively by multiple option events regarding karma and Buddhist actions.

 

[Noramia]

• Holy Sacraments: +2.5% Discipline

Holy cow. I should go to Mass everyday.

 

[Samgee Gamwise]

So potentially, there will be a Church of the United States? That seems to me a bit unconstitutional...

 

[Me_]

So potentially, there will be a Church of the United States? That seems to me a bit unconstitutional...

Last time I checked the US were a Manchurian Confucian Enlightened Despotism.

 

[Dr. Quaz]

...That is not true. Like, at all. I can name numerous Protestant movements that were not state religions, among them the Anabaptists, the Baptists, the Methodists, and Unitarians.

Anabaptists, Baptists and Unitarians are all Reformed Protestant and not mainstream Protestant, hence the reason they are not state religions. Also, Methodism began as a branch of the state church of England, and only became independent after the founder died.