Religious intolerance - any good?

[KonradRichtmark]

Having recently started playing EU1 I wonder, is there really any reason not to maximise religious tolerance? I.e pull state religion to the maximum and all others present in your empire as high as you can while being zero-tolerant towards the religions non-existent in your empire.

Can you force-convert heretics via intolerance and military might, or something?

 

[unmerged(11600)]

Having recently started playing EU1 I wonder, is there really any reason not to maximise religious tolerance? I.e pull state religion to the maximum and all others present in your empire as high as you can while being zero-tolerant towards the religions non-existent in your empire.

Can you force-convert heretics via intolerance and military might, or something?

Sort of, yes. You can send colonists to any city you own and control whose population is under 5000, which will change its religion to your state religion if not already so. So what you can do, if you're a crafty bastard, is hate the minorities to make them rebel, let them capture the city, and then take the city back again, as every time a city falls to a siege the population gets put to the sword.

The risk is that the province(s) might declare independence, putting you into a war you didn't want, unless you're Morpheus in which case you wanted it anyway .

-Pat

 

[Morpheus506]

Pffft, what is this rebellion you speak of? The citizens of the world yearn to be members of the Siberian/Breton/Morphean Empires, no one would think of rebellion! That and anyone who does is immediately crushed. I like to simply make it really intolerant, then all the people get pissed off and destroyed. Generally they never get down to 5000, though, and if they did I probably wouldn't notice enough to send a colonist. I don't really care about people not of the state religion (especially funny when you're pagan, e.g. Sibir )

Oddly enough, this is my Vic strategy as well--piss off the Anarcho-Liberals until they rebel, and rebel, and rebel, and soon their losses overtake the population growth, and voila, no more rebellious Anarcho-Liberals.

 

[Nikolai II]

Having recently started playing EU1 I wonder, is there really any reason not to maximise religious tolerance? I.e pull state religion to the maximum and all others present in your empire as high as you can while being zero-tolerant towards the religions non-existent in your empire.

Can you force-convert heretics via intolerance and military might, or something?

As long as you have religion sliders with no matching provinces there is little reason to not put that at far left. (I won't say no reason, since your slider position slightly affects your relation with nations with that state religion, but this penalty/benefit is usually not noticed beneath BB-penalties, war-penalties and coredispute-penalties, but it exists)

Conversion only works against provinces with less than 5000 citizens, and although capturing a province kills a fraction of it's population (fraction of besiegers force that is) the only way to go from 5000 to 4999 or less is by the negative growth that is imparted upon the province from being besieged and plundered.