Religion In Far East

[Canute VII]

For the game's purposes, "religion" is really just a set of beliefs that are used to endorse political legitimacy. Looking at things this way, Confucianism works well as a religion - it means that locals see adherence to the Confucian philosophy as being the thing that supports one's claims to legitimate rulership. The distinction between Confucianism and Buddhism can be clarified as a Buddhist state/province relies on state patronage of Buddhism (i.e. through supporting monasteries) as a source of legitimacy.

To respond to an earlier question, Nestorianism and Manicheanism died out in China during the Tang period because of official persecution. Nestorianism returned with the Mongols (as did Catholicism, actually), but disappeared in the early days of the Ming.

Whatever, it boils down to the fact that the game really does a rather poor job in modelling confucianism. Integral parts of it are actually not modelled by the religion mechanic ("confucianism"), but by the government form ("celestial empire"): mandate of heaven & chinese beaurocracy. Imho the game should settle to push the idea of confucianism either into a religion mechanic or into a government mechanic.

 

[Pomeranian]

Or to be more precise, they are Atheistic religions rather than Theistic religions. Religion is not about worship of deities. Theism is about worship of deities, not religion. Religion is merely a classification that asks what is a person's stance on spiritualist questions.

Just a small point, but Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism are not atheistic religions. Taoist and Confucian writings do mention a deity/deities. Buddhism is a bit more complicated as there are atheistic buddhists, but most Buddhists in traditionally Buddhist countries tend to worship local deities or even Hindu deities, some even worship the buddhas as gods.

 

[Frogbait]

using the same argument, Jesus (... or the historical character that he's based on ) was teaching people philosophy, not religion ... Muhammed was teaching people philosophy not religion ...

Buddhism have distinct mythical and supernatural elements in it and is much more than 'merely' a philosophical "how-to-live" such as Stoicism, Utilitarianism or Confucianism (although admittedly it had certain traits that makes it more of a debate than the others)

Stoicism was more or less a religion until Christianity took hold for the elite of the roman world. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is a great insight in how it was much more of a doctrine of faith rather than philosophical practice as we think of it today. The world / universe is inherently in balance, good deeds balance out the bad deeds, etc...

I had a bit typed up about Islam and Christianity foundations, but I'd rather not get into a major theological debate from stating historical facts

Buddha was not bringing a new god to the table like Jesus and Muhammed.The mysticism and the supernatural elements are not something that he invented.They are the actual religion that he and his followers believed in.From what i know he taught his ways in regions with other religious believes.And don't forget that you are looking at a person who lived in around fifth century BCE with the eyes of a twenty first century person.Buddhism is heavily intertwined with the local religion and that makes most foreigners (like me and you) to see it as a single thing.

Jesus and Mohammad didn't bring a new god to the table. Will elaborate more on this in my response below.

In fact if i recall my high-school religion subject correctly, the Koran fairly explicitly says that people of the book (Jews and Christians) had the right ideas (and prayed to the right god) but that they lost their way somewhere along the way ...

Theologically speaking:

Abraham is the father of all three religions. Hence Abrahamic faiths. The split comes from two sons - Isaac and Ishmael. Basically Isaac leads the way to Judaism and later Christianity, Ishmael to Islam. Islam's split with Jews/Christians is from that. Christian's split with Judaism is that Christians believe Jesus is the Messiah and Jews don't believe he's arrived yet/ Elijah will come at the end of days since he's the closest thing to the messiah in the Torah.

 

[Metz]

Indeed EU only has one religion per province and even in other parts of the world this means that you can assume there are more faiths than the actual province religion.
The province religion is the dominant one which in most cases mean the majority religion. In some cases it does not however:
In Japan Shinto is used to cover the specific mix of religious customs in Japan (including but not restricted to actual Shinto)
In the case of Confucuanism it covers religion with Confucian ideals imposed on it.
Sikhism is the last special case I can think of (that isn't just a generalization of a set of faiths using a specific name such as Inti). There where no Sikh majority provinces on the map during any point of the period covered by EU4 but we still have some switch to it, think of this as Sikhism being politically dominant. Had we not done it this way we could basically not properly cover the impact the religion actually had, even though it was the minority faith even in the Sikh empire.



Why would we represent a religion long gone by the start of the game? If it did exist anywhere it would be very far from province majority or political influence of any kind.
It's in the nation designer as a fun fantasy option but it was really entirely irrelevant in the era.

It's time to take a step into the future and introduce pie charts to show that provinces have different religions, cultures, and trade goods.

And while we are at it, population count on a provincial and national level.

Here are some tools you can use:

http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pop-in-eur.asp

https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/L02MedievalPopulationC.pdf

And especially this one:

http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_file/Papers/MEDIEVAL_GROWTH.pdf

 

[Mr. Capiatlist]

The "discussion" on what makes a religion and religion and not a philosophy is over. Further posts will not be tolerated.

 

[BrokenSky]

It's time to take a step into the future and introduce pie charts to show that provinces have different religions, cultures, and trade goods.

I think this would be good, but it might not be possible to have it do cultures while maintaining any reasonable level of optimization, depending on how it was done; I think dharper said that the reason he didn't add cultural minorities to Dei Gratia the way it had religious minorities in was that the number of calculations for minority numbers was proportional to the number of religions, but since there were so many more cultures than religions doing culture the same way would slow down the mod to an unbearably slow pace? It might be possible to do it in a different, more optimised way with the whole code than with only what modders can use though?

 

[Shadowstrike]

Whatever, it boils down to the fact that the game really does a rather poor job in modelling confucianism. Integral parts of it are actually not modelled by the religion mechanic ("confucianism"), but by the government form ("celestial empire"): mandate of heaven & chinese beaurocracy. Imho the game should settle to push the idea of confucianism either into a religion mechanic or into a government mechanic.

I'd argue it should be a religion mechanic (focusing on the legitimacy of good rulership and the tributary system), but I think this is confounded by the lack of mechanisms that adequately model the administrative strain of overly large states in the pre-modern period - instead we have one China-specific nerf to deal with it.

 

[Metz]

I think this would be good, but it might not be possible to have it do cultures while maintaining any reasonable level of optimization, depending on how it was done; I think dharper said that the reason he didn't add cultural minorities to Dei Gratia the way it had religious minorities in was that the number of calculations for minority numbers was proportional to the number of religions, but since there were so many more cultures than religions doing culture the same way would slow down the mod to an unbearably slow pace? It might be possible to do it in a different, more optimised way with the whole code than with only what modders can use though?

Religions such as Hindusim and Shinto would not be displayed as they would not penetrate European society unless nations with said religions go on a conquering spree.

Provinces in Europe for instance would only have Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity at first. Then you would see Lutheranism and Calvinism grow. As European nations conquer the New World, you would see Christian denominations slowly consume the local religions.

 

[grommile]

Religions such as Hindusim and Shinto would not be displayed as they would not penetrate European society unless nations with said religions go on a conquering spree.

It's not about display. It's about the underlying processing.

(And, as noted, religions are relatively manageable on this score.)

 

[Me_]

Provinces in Europe for instance would only have Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity at first.

And Judaism and - in some areas - Islam.

 

[BrokenSky]

Religions such as Hindusim and Shinto would not be displayed as they would not penetrate European society unless nations with said religions go on a conquering spree.

Provinces in Europe for instance would only have Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity at first. Then you would see Lutheranism and Calvinism grow. As European nations conquer the New World, you would see Christian denominations slowly consume the local religions.

This and this,

It's not about display. It's about the underlying processing.

(And, as noted, religions are relatively manageable on this score.)

And Judaism and - in some areas - Islam.

but the main thing is that it can be done for religions in a way which doesn't, as I understand it, work at a sensible speed for cultures. If they did implement a system like this for culture, either there would need to be major optimisation increases to the system (e.g. abstracting every culture outside the primary culture group as only being that group to cut numbers) or it would need to work in a different way.

 

[Drachenfels]

Buddha was not bringing a new god to the table like Jesus and Muhammed.

Lol, what? I will quote Bible:

"When Jesus asked his disciples who they thought he was, Peter said "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Jesus praised him for this (Matthew 16:15-17)."

Christianity started as heresy of Judaism, saying Jesus brought new God is like saying reformation brought new gods. Madness.

 

[Metz]

This and this,





but the main thing is that it can be done for religions in a way which doesn't, as I understand it, work at a sensible speed for cultures. If they did implement a system like this for culture, either there would need to be major optimisation increases to the system (e.g. abstracting every culture outside the primary culture group as only being that group to cut numbers) or it would need to work in a different way.

On a monthly basis, the same way that prestige, income, and legitimacy goes up or down, so too can the % of religion in a province. The same goes on in provinces for autonomy and revolt risk already.

 

[Canute VII]

I'd argue it should be a religion mechanic (focusing on the legitimacy of good rulership and the tributary system), but I think this is confounded by the lack of mechanisms that adequately model the administrative strain of overly large states in the pre-modern period - instead we have one China-specific nerf to deal with it.

Actually the stability mechanic could rather easily be transformed into "modelling tha administratve strain of overly large states in pre-modern period". See my posts in this thread https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ability-mechanic-change.963875/#post-21784282

 

[Shadowstrike]

That replicates the EU2 mechanic where stability cost scaled to size, meaning big nations stagnated more. Good idea.

Edit: Just to be clear, I support this. Original post might have been incorrectly read as being sarcastic.

 

[Frogbait]

That replicates the EU2 mechanic where stability cost scaled to size, meaning big nations stagnated more. Good idea.

Edit: Just to be clear, I support this. Original post might have been incorrectly read as being sarcastic.

Meh, between all the +stab events that you can get as a large nation let alone if you decide to be Orthostronk or Catholic it'd pretty much nullify stab cost increases.

 

[grommile]

That replicates the EU2 mechanic where stability cost scaled to size, meaning big nations stagnated more. Good idea.

I Westernized enough times in EU3 (every province had a stab cost, your empire stab cost was the sum of your province stab costs, and while you were Westernizing you had +50% stab cost) to develop a deep and abiding loathing for size-scaled stability cost mechanics.

(Funny thing was, if you knew what you were doing you could make even quite a large country's stability cost astonishingly small relative to income.)

 

[BrokenSky]

On a monthly basis, the same way that prestige, income, and legitimacy goes up or down, so too can the % of religion in a province. The same goes on in provinces for autonomy and revolt risk already.

Yes that's pretty similar to how D.G. does it (except it uses something like 13 [so it can't be tied] units which have a religion each, rather than integer %s) and the amount of population of each religion is shown as a province modifier which gives a bonus based on tolerance. Even then, it only runs the calculation biannually, because of the calculation cost of calculating the change for each religion for each province.

My point is that this happens for only a handful (~20-30) religions [D.G. adds some as well, including CK2 pagans] and it's calculation intensive enough that optimising the mod seems to come down to optimising the religious minority system most of the time (or at least this is the impression the mod author seems to give). Doing this for the 310±10 cultures in the game (not including 16 lost cultures, some of which might be justified as being present as a minority) would be pretty much impossible in that manner.

Given that, my point is that provinces could be given multiple trade goods and religions, but there's no guarantee a cultural minority system could be implemented in a way which allowed the game to run smoothly.

 

[Canute VII]

Meh, between all the +stab events that you can get as a large nation let alone if you decide to be Orthostronk or Catholic it'd pretty much nullify stab cost increases.

Actually, larger nations should be more prone to suffer from events giving negative stability. I'm thinking about natural disasters, spread of pests, bad harvests + famines. I'm thinking about being dow'ed by a coalition giving neg. stability.

 

[Canute VII]

I Westernized enough times in EU3 (every province had a stab cost, your empire stab cost was the sum of your province stab costs, and while you were Westernizing you had +50% stab cost) to develop a deep and abiding loathing for size-scaled stability cost mechanics.

(Funny thing was, if you knew what you were doing you could make even quite a large country's stability cost astonishingly small relative to income.)

I haven't played EU1-3, so I cant comment on the implementation. However I understand that some will deem fixed stab cost penalties, that you cant counter, "un-fun". Therefore my proposal includes a trade-off between stab cost and local autonomy (which evidently can, among other effects, reduce income quite substantially).

On a related note, an "administrative monarchy" could give a stab cost reduction, while being less favourable towards expansion (in comparison to e.g. absolute monarchy with its +5% discipline). So large countries could be induced to choose this goverment form.