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Tinto Talks #65 - 28th of May 2025

Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Talks, the happy Wednesdays where we talk about Europa Universalis V!

Today, we will discuss the mechanics of Eastern Christianity religions. We have grouped them into three main religions: Orthodoxy, Miaphysitism, and Nestorianism. So, let’s start without further ado.



Orthodoxy

This is the overview of the Orthodox religion:
Orthodoxy Tooltip.jpg

This tooltip needs some more love, as we’re not showing all the mechanics of the religion. That’s because, as usual, please consider all UI, 2D and 3D art WIP.

This is the country panel of the religion:
Orthodoxy Panel.jpg

Countries of Orthodox religion in Autocephalous Patriarchates, which are a type of IO:
Autocephalous Patriarchates5.jpg

Autocephalous Patriarchates2.jpg

Autocephalous Patriarchates1.jpg

Autocephalous Patriarchates3.jpg

I’m taking here the Autocephalous Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has the custom name of ‘Ecumenical Patriarchate’, as an example.

And here you have the existing Orthodox Patriarchates in 1337:
Autocephalous Patriarchates4.jpg

Countries can Join an Autocephalous Patriarchate, if they’ve just converted to Orthodoxy; or, when they already belong to one, they can Change to a different one, or Create a new one:
Autocephalous Patriarchates Join.jpg

Autocephalous Patriarchates Change.jpg

Autocephalous Patriarchates Create.jpg

The Seat of an Autocephalous Patriarchates defines the Leader of this IO, which unlocks additional effects and actions:
Seat1.jpg

Seat2.jpg

Autocephalous Patriarchates Relocate.jpg

There are also some other blocks in the Autocephalous Patriarchate, as its Saints:
Saints.jpg

And Holy Sites:
Holy Sites.jpg

The main currency of the religion is Religious Influence, which already appeared in the Catholic TT:
Religious Influence1.jpg

Religious Influence2.jpg

You can do a few things with your Religious Influence. First, you can canonize a former ruler, making him a Saint:
Saints1.jpg

Saints2.jpg

Saints3.jpg

The benefits you get from the canonization scale with the ruler stats. So better to make sure that you want to canonize a truly memorable former ruler!

You can also call for a Synod in your country:
Synod.jpg

Synod2.jpg

Synod3.jpg

Synod4.jpg

Finally, there’s a unique type of work of art, Icons:
Icons3.jpg

These icons not only give a modifier to the location where they are, but also can be used in a ‘Periphora’ to another location:
Periphora.jpg

Periphora2.jpg



Miaphysitism

Miaphysitism is similar to Orthodoxy, with some differences. Here is the overview of the religion itself:
miaphysitism.png

Same as Orthodoxy, it also has the mechanics of Canonization and Autocephalous Patriarchates, with these ones being the Patriarchates present at start:
miaphysite patriarchates.png

However, most of these are actually empty due to being occupied by Muslim countries, with only Ethiopia remaining as part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Alexandria and the Armenian patriarchate as the only one containing more than one country.
armenian patriarchate.png

An integral part of each the Eastern Christians and their Patriarchates are their Tenets, defined in a series of laws:
Tenets1.jpg

Tenets2.jpg

The ‘Nature’ tenet is a hard–locked IO Law, that depends on each Religion:
Tenets3.jpg

composite nature.png

These Tenets can be changed, and there are multiple possibilites in each Law:
Tenets4.jpg



Nestorianism

There is no country having Nestorianism as its state religion at game start, but the religion is nonetheless still quite spread in some areas. Here is an overview of it:
nestorianism.png

nestorianism panel.png

Nestorianism also has its own holy sites:
nestorianism holy sites.png

And also its specific definition of the nature of Christ:
separate nature.png

A final remark on a common flavor for all these religions. First, they have their unique flavor monasteries:
orthodox monastery.png

miaphysite monastery.png

The modifiers are WIP, we want to make them somewhat different.

There's a Law in which you can define the policy of the relationship between the state and the religion:
Patriarchate Law.jpg

And that’s all for today! Tomorrow is Thursday, which means that we will publish a new ‘Behind the Scenes’ video, on Friday, we will discuss the Byzantine Empire in Tinto Flavour, and next Wednesday's Tinto Talks will be about Islam.

And also remember, you can wishlist Europa Universalis V now! Cheers!
 
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  • "Religion | Christianity Religion Group"
  • "Religious Influence" <--> "Enabled"
  • Is the 15.957M in the known world or total world?
  • Layout lists assuming there will be a scroll bar , the pop number and icon need to move left.
  • I would add the adornments from event flavor text box to this flavor text box
  • Full justify the flavor text box
  • would it be possible to have the M and K in separate strings so that the numbers can line up?
Orthodoxy%20Tooltip.jpg


  • Looking at this it looks like 'Primary Religion' is more important than 'Orthodoxy', swap font sizes between the two.
  • Picture doesn't seem to go with 'Orthodoxy'
  • feel like you needed to put some information into the picture to justify the space that was used. The left 3 feel randomly chosen
Orthodoxy%20Panel.jpg


  • Cool, you managed to describe this without having to mention IO.
Autocephalous%20Patriarchates5.jpg


  • Then you have to go and place IO as the subtitle here. Wouldn't this be better served with the subtitle of 'Autocephalous Patriarchate'
  • Can any member invite new members or just the Leader
  • The member section should have flags and a scroll bar instead of '...and ## more'
Autocephalous%20Patriarchates2.jpg


  • decrease 'Seat' and 'Religion' titles font size and increase the variables font size
  • picture makes him look like a tourist trying to get a shot and not natural.
  • I like the clarity of the attribute icons but dislike that they change color.
  • I would drop the frames from the flags
  • I think that 14 is an odd number to have for flags in a row.
  • Is the generic blue flag over UN globe staying for the member icon?
Autocephalous%20Patriarchates1.jpg


  • Can we have a shared map mode between all of the AP instead of each having their own?
Autocephalous%20Patriarchates3.jpg


  • I'll assume these are rather early WiP, otherwise I would say having the first line just restating the title is not helpful.
  • I would move the check boxes over so that the vertical bar from those lines subordinate to a clause (i.e. 'At least one....') terminate into the clauses check box.
Autocephalous%20Patriarchates%20Create.jpg


  • Wouldn't "Autocephalous Patriarchate Variable" be a better subtitle?
  • What is changing? The seat's location?
  • If the 'reason' list is an empty set it would be better to have a secondary title (dropping the 'due to:') and not list the empty set.
Seat1.jpg


  • So the tooltip for a location doesn't have information about the location? or is this a cropped version?
  • I think that stating that the location is the seat of the EPoK makes more sense than stating that the location owner is the leader of the EPoK.
Seat2.jpg


  • the first two items in the list are repeated as the last two items.
  • the first two items appear to be a clause (by virtue of lines) but do not have a clause line item (all of, any of)
  • The second item has a bullet instead of a check box
  • (check box and line alignment I talked about above)
  • Why to we have the two check lists? (the complete and the failing list at the bottom?)
  • Shouldn't the "Have at least 20.0 religious influence" be in the check list?
Autocephalous%20Patriarchates%20Relocate.jpg


  • Since all saints must be dead do we have to indicate that all the saints are dead?
  • can we fix the attribute area background?
  • As others have mentioned. It seem odd for long dead saints to be wearing current clothing styles
  • maybe I am old but having 'sort' titles that don't align with the columns hurt.
Saints.jpg


  • Should the section be called something else as it seems to be both Sees and holy sites?
  • I don't like the yelp review rating number down the side.
  • Can we normalize the columns? the separators on holy site are wider than the rest
  • looks like you are doing better with the paper curling up bottom adorner but it still looks odd with the clipping to brown
Holy%20Sites.jpg


This as far as I got. Hope to be back for the rest
 
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This is not directly related to Orthodox, but how is the Kingdom of Alodia, whose kingship heritage is of the ancient civilization of the Nubians that goes back more than 4,000 years ago end up as a "Minor Tribe?" I hope this is just the results of the game not being finished, but just in case there was an oversight I wanted to point out, that the structure of the Nubian Kingdoms was that of a Nilotic Kingdom, not a "tribal" organization, and it was hardly minor. 1.2 million people, larger than the population of Ethiopian Christians. I hope that African polities that are not as famous are not all going to be labeled "tribes."

miaphysitism.png
 
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2) Are Orthodox saints shared? It wouldnt make sense for Georgians, Greeks and Serbs having different saints, though maybe there could be 'local', less renown saints and 'Global' saints, more prominent around different Orthodox nations.
I second this, there should be a global Orthodoxy IO alongside Patriarchate IOs.
The global IO should give bonuses based on how unified the orthodox church is (This should be determined by how many policies patriarchates share and the power of individual patriarchates determined by how many orthodox pops belong to them and by other factors).
 
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There's flavor content about mending the Schism in both ways - Roman Catholicism triumphant in Constantinople, and Greek Orthodoxy triumphant in Rome.
Is this as simple as getting a Catholic/Orthodox majority in Constantinople/Rome, and getting an event for that?
Right off the bat they get the orthodox bonuses wrong, it should be -50% max literacy rather than +5% for realisms sake so the actual literacy rate discrepancies between denominational lines historically would evolve dynamically in-game.
Why would eastern orthodoxy suffer a malus (ignoring that -50% is absurdly large, I'm guessing you think it would be multiplicative when it would have to be additive) to literacy rate? Russia had a lower literacy rate than western europe, but that didn't have anything to do with orthodox Christianity.
 
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I think "triumphant" here needs to be defined. I think even if theoretically catholics would convert province of Constantinople, then would not mend the Schism.

Why would eastern orthodoxy suffer a malus (ignoring that -50% is absurdly large, I'm guessing you think it would be multiplicative when it would have to be additive) to literacy rate? Russia had a lower literacy rate than western europe, but that didn't have anything to do with orthodox Christianity.

At which time period? I'm pretty sure at 1337 literacy rate between Rus and Western Europe would not be much different and this would reman the same for most of the game's timeline. Significant divergence would be something from Vctoria's time period, or at least from 1700+ Plus literacy rates in Western Europe would widely differ country by country.

Game intends to represent these issues by institution system probably.
 
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The Serbian church of this time wasn't an "autocephalous patriarchate", but it was an autocephalous Church: the archbishop, who was the head of it, was elected by a Serbian synod or situationally appointed by the kings of Serbia, nothing went through the hierarchy of Constantinople. Giving Serbia an independent Patriarchate or giving it a special "flavor" name would better reflect the true political situation of the age. I don't know the details but I'm almost certain something similar was in place in Russia just because of the geographic distance
 
At which time period? I'm pretty sure at 1337 literacy rate between Rus and Western Europe would not be much different and this would reman the same for most of the game's timeline. Significant divergence would be something from Vctoria's time period, or at least from 1700+ Plus literacy rates in Western Europe would widely differ country by country.

Game intends to represent these issues by institution system probably.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. The divergence has nothing to do with religion, and giving Orthodox any max literacy malus seems unsubstantiated, much less a -50% one (which basically mean orthodox countries can't have any literacy for almost the entire game since that's how additive modifiers work, but even reading that as multiplicative seems insane).
 
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You can do it mechanically, for your country:
If a Nestorian empire rises in India of China, I think it make sense that Sanskrit or Chinese become the liturgical language.
 
Which one of the four "Nature" laws is supposed to represent the Hypostatic Union, the teaching which all Chalcedonian christians (orthodox, catholics and protestants) agree on? Namely, that Jesus has two natures, fully divine and fully human, distinct but united in one person. Going by the flavor text, "Composite Nature" is Monophysitism. If "Dual Nature" is supposed to represent Miyaphisitism (going by the screenshot), then "Separate Nature" is Nestorianism. All that remains is "Single Nature" and that does absolutely not sound like what the Hypostatic Union teaches. Is the screenshot showing "Dual Nature" in the Miyaphisite section actually from Orthodoxy?
I think Dyophysitism is Composite Nature, Single Nature Monophysitism (though I'm not sure what religion has this), Dual Nature Miyaphisitism, and Seperate Nature Nestorianism.
 
They probably have Ruthenian culture
it would be very unhistorical to extend the cultures of a later time to people who lived before the Mongol and Lithuanian conquest of the Rus principalities. The early Rurikovichs were united in culture and constituted a single community, unlike the tribes under their control (Polans, Drevlyans, Radimichs, Vyatichs, Krivichs, Volhynians, Severians etc.), which is well shown in CK3. It would be strange if Octavian Augustus had a Mediano culture
 
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it would be very unhistorical to extend the cultures of a later time to people who lived before the Mongol and Lithuanian conquest of the Rus principalities. The early Rurikovichs were united in culture and constituted a single community, unlike the tribes under their control (Polans, Drevlyans, Radimichs, Vyatichs, Krivichs, Volhynians, Severians etc.), which is well shown in CK3. It would be strange if Octavian Augustus had a Mediano culture
We have the same problem with the Anglo-Saxon rulers of England using modern English renderings of their names, unfortunately I don't think they think it's worth the effort to create special historical cultures for situations like this.
 
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Grand Duke Vytautas of Grand Duchy of Lithuania in year 1415 did an Autocephaly and created a Patriarchate for Orthodox in GDL, will the be possible when the country itself did not follow the Orthodox church?

Also, adding these two scripted events would be fun :
Stoglav Synod
Schism of the Russian Church
With this one offering Old Believers pops to GDL or Poland if they exist, if Muscovy has its own patriarchy and wants certain reforms.
 
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How can I convert my country to a religon - like Nestorianism for example?
I think they showed during one of the Indian talks the decision to convert to Sunni Islam, based on that my assumption is that the default is that you can convert to whatever religion is the majority of your nation, with individual religions modifying the requirements. I think Sunni only requires 40% for example.
 
I'm wondering why the developers chose to label it as 'primary religion' instead of simply 'religious tolerance.'

  • Why is there a 'Primary Religion Tolerance' modifier on the religion tab, just below the liturgical language text?
  • Does adding 'primary' actually help here, or is it just unnecessary?

If there were also 'secondary' or 'tertiary' religion tolerance values, the label would make sense—but if not, isn't this a bit confusing? It doesn’t clearly convey the meaning.
If there's no other category of religion tolerance, then using 'primary' seems redundant. Can someone shed some light on this?
 
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Good overview of Orthodoxy, Miaphysitism, and Nestorianism.
 
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. The divergence has nothing to do with religion, and giving Orthodox any max literacy malus seems unsubstantiated, much less a -50% one (which basically mean orthodox countries can't have any literacy for almost the entire game since that's how additive modifiers work, but even reading that as multiplicative seems insane).
Well. I think (small) bonus for literacy for Orthodox is warranted. since number of clergy is one of the sources of literacy in this time period. Orthodox Church with powerful clergy, lots of monasteries with tradition of writing chronicles, life stories of saints etc fits the bill.

Another and probably most important source (any meaningful universal school system is either out of timeine or on a verge of it) is urbanization and similar processes, which are simulated by institutions and other mechanics. Though serfdom as a limiting factor should probaby also be counted in, but that's because it limits urbanization rather than affecting literacy directly.
 
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