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Tinto Talks #61 - 30th of April 2025

Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Talks, the happy Wednesdays where we talk about our entirely super-top-secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

This week, we will examine the mechanics of Protestant religions and the final situation involving all Western Christian confessions, the War of Religions.

First is first, we differentiate the 3 main Protestant religions: Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism. All the different branches of Protestantism, more or less strictly covered under these wide denominations, are later represented through Church Aspects, a mechanism we’ll describe now. The underlying system here is for every player to be able to customize their own Protestant Church. As an example, the early Anglican Church funded by Henry VIII was very different from the Anglican Church that developed in times of James I, and the further division that then happened with the Puritans; we aim to portray dynamically these theological aspects with Church Aspects, therefore.

Let’s take a look at a Lutheran country first:

Early Reformation.jpg
I’m using the same save as last week’s TT. The Reformation was born in Perugia, and after a couple of years, it has already spread to some countries, of which Denmark is the biggest.

Here is the overview of Lutheranism and its religious panel:
Lutheranism tooltip.jpg

Lutheranism panel.jpg

Similarly to Catholicism, and other religions, it also uses Religious Influence as a currency:
Religious Influence.jpg

This currency is used to add or change Religious Aspects to your Church, and it also allows us to perform Religious Actions (of which we can’t currently perform any, as we don’t fulfill any of their triggers).

Let’s take a look now at the Religious Aspects, which define each Protestant Church:
Religious Aspect.jpg

There are plenty of Aspects, that can be either shared between the different Protestant religions, or be unique to them. This is the list of all the aspects available to Lutheran churches:
Religious Aspect2.jpg

Religious Aspect3.jpg

Religious Aspect4.jpg

Religious Aspect5.jpg

And this is what it looks like when you decide to pick one of them:
Translated Bibles.jpg

The base number of Religious Aspects that define each Church is 3, although this is subject to review, as usual. And it is possible to have entirely different and unique aspects per religion, since it’s a scriptable/moddable feature. Furthermore, Religious Aspects can have an impact on the relations a country has with others who use Religious Aspects. Since the aspects are partially shared between the faiths, this could lead to unlikely friendships… and hostilities.

Let’s now move on to the next religion, Calvinism, which is quite similar in structure to Lutheranism. It also spawns during the Reformation situation, it also has Calvinist Preachers that spread it, and it also uses Religious Aspects and Actions:
Calvinist Preachers.png

Calvinism tooltip.jpg

Calvinist panel.jpg

Calvin.jpg

Fun fact, Calvin has ended up being the Bishop (=ruler) of Basel in our save game!

Finally, we have Anglicanism. This Protestant religion doesn’t trigger through the situation, but as an event for England that may trigger after the Reformation is active:
Act of Supremacy.jpg

Ignore the broken loc, it appears like that because I used a console command to trigger it.

If we decided to Take command of the Church, a new religion will be created:
Take command of the Church.jpg

Anglicanism2.jpg

This is its overview and panel; Anglicanism starts with some more Religious Actions available:
Anglicanism.jpg

Anglican Religious Actions.jpg

Last, but not least, we have a couple of religions that also share the religious aspects, but are not necessarily tied to the Reformation situation. This includes Lollardy and Hussitism, which will be created together with their corresponding reformer, and the earlier catholic heresies of Bogomilism, Catharism, Paulicianism, and Waldensian.

The last feature we’re going to take a look at today is another situation, the War of Religions. This is the ending to all the narratives related to the Catholic and Protestant Churches, a fight for the religious supremacy over Europe, centered over the Holy Roman Empire, with the Thirty Years' War as inspiration:
War of Religion1.jpg

War of Religion2.jpg

War of Religion3.jpg

Two International Organizations will be created, the Protestant Union and the Catholic League:
Protestant Union.jpg

Catholic League.jpg

And this is the panel for the situation, which both sides, their relative strengths, the possibility to join one side or the other, etc.:
War of Religion4.jpg

An inconclusive result may lead to the negotiation of the Peace of Westphalia between the members of both Leagues and will alter the religious laws of the Holy Roman Empire.

… And that’s all for today! Next week, @Johan will come back once again to show more of the most recent changes and tweaks in the game. Cheers!
 
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  • would it be possible to pick a different color for the wastelands? the manilla folder yellow seems off. Maybe something in the grey range provided that grey isn't used for map category colors.
  • I like how there is one giant Catholic across Europe. Would it be possible to do the same for other maps like the climate, vegetation. etc.?
Early%20Reformation.jpg


  • Add classification to the subtitle in the title bar like in unit type.
    • "Religion | Christianity" or
    • "Religion | Christianity Religion Group" if you feel Religion Group is required
  • Shift the pop numbers over about the size of the scroll bar (more space between bat and pop icon)
  • Is the number of pops, even in places we do not know of?
  • If the Religion 'has not yet been conceived of', do you need to list that there are no pops and no known countries?
  • If there are 0 countries that we are aware of just list that line and not a list consisting of 'None.'
Lutheranism%20tooltip.jpg


  • Swap the font sizes between 'Primary Religion' and the name of the religion as the religion is the important piece of data. Same for the language.
  • I dislike that the Religion and language boxes are not symmetrical. If nothing is meant to exist between them I would extend them to take up the weird looking gap. Barring that at least make them equal sized.
  • Background image doesn't feel like 'Lutheranism'
  • I do not like the Imperator Rome's sun for religion icon in PC
  • looks like at some point it was decided that 6 things need to be on these screens and these were picked from a hat. At least the three on the right have coherence.
  • What does the donut chart in the middle represent?
  • What does the dinner party image at the bottom have to do with religion?
  • I have noticed 'Tolerance of the True Faith' and 'Primary Religion Tolerance', are these different concepts?
Lutheranism%20panel.jpg


  • Reduce the size of the title blocks for each Aspect. If all we were listing was the titles of the aspects it would be fine, but are we are being verbose it would be better with smaller title blocks.
  • Why is 'Clergy Power' understandable but we need to specify estate in 'Peasant Estate Satisfaction Equilibrium'?
  • What is 'Estate Satisfaction Volatility'?
  • Switch to 'Monthly Progress towards...'
  • 'Possible Clergy' icon should use the cap or max modifier instead of a heart
Religious%20Aspect2.jpg


That is it for now. I'll try to get back for the rest.
 
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LEAGUE WAR!!! One of the mechanics I most dearly hoped would remain in the game! It is good to see that it's still here!!

That said, every single screen that we've seen is SLIM, THIN, NARROW, and lacks MEAT!!! These unrealistic expectations for screen shapes, which require everything to conform to a standard, are not good!!! Make the screens thick, curvy, shapely, and unique!!! Please!!!

EVERY. SINGLE. SCREEN. looks like it was designed to be seen in a mobile phone rather than a computer monitor!!

View attachment 1287628
You may like to have a lovely map with some proper coloring to take a look at at the same time, right?:

War of Religion5.jpg

And this is not even the fullscreen with a proper 3D map, just the flatmap mode with a fraction of the complete UI.
 
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4. There's some content for a lot of different Christian denominations, but not at the same level as the main ones, by far, and for obvious reasons.
Why were Lollardy, Hussitism,Bogomilism, Catharism, Paulicianism, and Waldensianism picked over say Anabaptism and Unitarianism?
 
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We haven't defined any (yet), so we're open to suggestions about any (if considered a good idea by the community).
Possible options for Protestant holy sites (separate for each branch):
  • locations where the first preachers spawned,
  • the first converted locations,
  • the capitals (with a cathedral - maybe) of the first converted countries.
 
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Will protestant countries get events related to witch hunts? We saw the catholic church got a policy in regards of witchcraft but protestant countries should be engaging into full witch hunting mania during the game's time period.
 
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Will there be an option to have a 'historical" reformation and war of religion? So that the countries who historically became protestant always do so in the game?
 
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I hope the various aspect of your church can't be replaced at will like in eu4, and they take time to fully kick in.
It costs stability, besides Religious Influence, to change the existing ones. And we could add an implementation time for them, if it's something the community wants.
 
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It costs stability, besides Religious Influence, to change the existing ones. And we could add an implementation time for them, if it's something the community wants.
An implementation time sounds like a good addition. These shouldn't just feel like they're being swapped in and out, these doctrines were part of long theological debates.

Also, please make the religious aspect for re-baptism cause massive opinion penalties for faiths without that aspect, to perhaps show the persecution of Anabaptists and Baptists by both Protestant and Catholic authorities. (The penalty was drowning.)
 
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Wouldn't it be better to have religious aspect scale with religious influence ? Eventually getting rid of most of its use as "mana" ? It could be imo more immersive and "emergent" to have your religious influence something you carefully monitor to get as much benefit as possible, rather than a currency you accumulate and spend for all your aspect and then stays mostly idle barring some emergency use. Ofc that would require to rebalance all the ways you can get it, but that would still be worthwhile. You could also avoid arbitrary limit of a number of X (currently, 3) religious aspect and instead have the benefits they provide be scaled depending of the number of active religious aspects you have. (so the more religious influence you have, the stronger your religion effect, AND the more aspect you have, the weaker each individual effect is)
That's actually a good idea. Strong religious influence should unlock aspect slots and activate their effects, but if your influence should go low, then the effects of slots starting from the last added should be disabled. Then we can replace the influence cost for adopting or replacing aspects to be a time-based solution of probably 50 years + clergy dissatisfaction penalty.
 
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Alright, I am making a second, more formal request to the Paradox Development Team directly and pray you see it.

Please add more Protestant denominations, I would personally far rather have the branches of Anabaptists, Unitarians, Presbyterians, Puritans (Congressionalist?), Methodists and Greek Catholic than the Religious Aspect mechanics. As much as I understand one of your pillars for this game is about creating a more dynamic game, it feels like certain flavor is being sacrificed on the alter of realism here. If you all would really rather die on the hill of three Protestant faiths, then please, at the very least can you rename them Evangelical and Reformed instead of 'Lutherans' and 'Calvinists'? For the sake of respecting the wishes of John Calvin and Martin Luther?

I am personally a Roman Catholic myself but have deep respect for the Protestant churches, and though I really do enjoy the flavor for the Catholic Church you have given us, I feel like the Protestants have been given the short end of the stick.

Also screw it, I'm being greedy and asking for some Baptist and Quaker representation too, why not?
That's a quite insane number, specially since many of those denominations would swing hugely in their own ideas across the game's timeframe. I would just represent all those groups as a single 'radical reformed' religion with different tenets inside.
I also disagree about renaming lutheranism to evangelicalism as it would lead to confussion with the modern evangelical movement, luther's wishes aside, classical lutheranism is to this day simply called lutheranism to differentiate it from later sects.
 
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Could you please share some unique Hussite Aspects?

A war of Religions situation must, can and will end only once domination/p.o.Westphalia is reached? Are there any possible temporary halts to full-on war, like a truce or something akin to myriad treaties & peaces that either got broken or were just between junior participants...
Adamite Services.jpg

Punishment of Sin.jpg
 
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Are the religions balanced or are we going to have a situation at release, where some religions are inherently better (gameplay-wise, as in it is much more interesting and offers much more)?
Balance never ends, neither pre- nor post-release.
 
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