Some musings on improvements to playing as a Muslim

[Roretan]

I'm sure that paradox is already working on mechanics to differentiate Muslim rulers from others, but with that being said I felt like wishlisting, because I'm only human.

I said musing in the title but I've been typing for a long time now. This is too rambling to be 'musings'. To summarise I'd like an events-based system to model internal conflicts based on Islamic governance, religious differences, and the difficulties of cultural pluralism (in a religion which demands tolerance in a time when people were not). Failure to manage the system well should have some significant consequences based on historical situations in the Muslim world, from mujahidden revolts, religious schisms, assassinations, civil wars, and realms fully collapsing to other cultures within the religious group. I'd also like the importance of piety to political legitimacy to be more of a concern than it is in CK2. Having lower temple vassal opinion of a sinner is not much of an issue when your rulers can own the temple holdings instead, and history is full of religious revivalist/fundamentalist revolts.
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I know there are issues in things like how iqta governance barely differs from feudal governance, and I see some complaints around the jihad/crusade system, dealing with the blobassids etc, but my personal interest is more in looking at the decadence system.

I don't enjoy the decadence mechanic. The model feels a bit absurd right now, where if you don't execute enough decadent cousins or win holy wars a brand new desert tribe will invade your realm, and neatly replace you in your holdings and top level titles. The realm continues as before. This system could be a lot more chaotic when it goes wrong: a same-culture vassal dynasty could revolt; a neighbour could come smashing into you with an invasion cb and an event-spawned army; different culture or religion vassals could attempt to declare independence; and religious movements could attempt overthrow you and install new or extant dynasties, assassinate sinful characters in your dynasty and court, or establish a theocracy led by the Ulema.

I think Decadence roughly models the tensions between different ruling tribes, and urban v rural power bases, and the idea of cyclical nationalism/social cohesion of Asabiyyah, from Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah. The idea is that ruling dynasties and tribes become less focused on ruling well and instead focus on entrenching, enriching and empowering themselves. With the rulers becoming decadent (but also neglectful, intolerant or tyrannical), the realm could start to decline and a new 'thing' would sweep in and take power. This 'thing' is a new driving force behind leading and organizing the society, almost like nationalism, whether it be an ascendant internal dynasty, an invading culture, or religious revivalist groups, etc. It would repeat again and you see a period of contentment, then a breakdown and revolution. Of the four Rashidun Caliphs only Abu Bakr died a natural death, the other three being assassinated. The last, Ali, was killed by Kharijites who installed the Omayyads; then Shi'as and Persians overthrew the Omayyads to install the Abbasids; who fell to Isma'ili Shi'a Fatimids; then Seljuks invaded.

A lot of the flavour added to Islam in EU4 would be nice to see in CK3. Iqta, pastoral tribes, or theocracies etc. The division of muslim characters into creeds and schools of jurisprudence, ie Aqeeda and Madhab, is a nice one for flavour. There doesn't necessarily need to be any particular gameplay difference between the Ashari, Athari, Maturadi or Mutazalia creeds, nor Hanafi, Shafii, Maliki and Hanbali madhabs. With the newer more customisable religious system there certainly can be gameplay differences attached, but they would have a simple role as flavour/rpg traits, and as social cleavages which separate people through opinion maluses. Atharis in particular could be less accepting of lieges who have lower piety. I can't write much more about this because I don't know how well developed the four primary madhabs of Sunni Islam were during the game's timeframe. I'm also not all that knowledgeable on Shiism, nor on how Sufiism presents in either case.

In any case I'd like Asabiyyah as a more dynamic mechanic than the decadence model where I have to convince, exile or kill enough relatives. There is almost no challenge or interest in it for the player, and while AI dynasties consistently fall to it, the world doesn't change when they do. I'd like it modeled as a event-driven and stability-like mechanic. Poor stewardship, sinful rulers or advisors, oppressive vassals, and internal divisions along religious and cultural lines could generally lower realm opinion of the rulers. High stewardship, content constituent cultures, and tolerated religious communities would provide, hopefully, internal peace. Without knowing more game mechanics I can't really put a lot of detail into example events, but you should force decisions on the player so the system is an active one.

• Do you commit an expedient sin and risk the anger of your pious vassals?
• Do you give a Persian vassal representation in your primarily Arab court to placate all characters of that culture?
• Maybe a local area which is predominantly following a minority madhab is demanding the appointment of local Qadis of their own madhab.
• Your urban vassals are demanding 'privileges' of some type be given to them at the expense of tribal/noble vassals who provide you more manpower, rather than the production and tax base of the cities - who do you favour?
• As a character who is themselves a vassal, maybe your liege will start to impose his religious particulars on you in an attempt to centalise and homogenise his realm.
• Your realm cohesion is low enough that when the Ulema approach you, but you fail to censure a particularly sinful advisor, you face a mujaheddin revolt including attempts to assassinate yourself and your courtier.

I think a critical aspect of this, beyond the context of Khaldun using the Asabiyyah theory to describe Arab societies, is the importance of piety to political legitimacy in all Muslim communities. I don't feel like the mechanics of CK2 emphasise how important it is to be pious if you want a stable rule, despite the inconvenience of it. John Esposito is an academic who has done a lot of work on a theory of reform vs revival in Muslim communities, where crises of temporal power are usually explained as being caused by a deficiency in morality and piety. The typical responses are reforming (in the past few hundred years this has meant westernising), and revivalism, which is about restoring piety in leaders and society at large. Westernising isn't really a sensible option in the medieval period, so the main response to crises is religious revivalism. In the absence of temporal successes people begin to criticise their leaders, also in cases of flagrant impiety. The political legitimacy of rulers in Muslim societies becomes tied to the approval of religious groups, which are often the primary social groups of many people, and experienced in mobilizing the population.

These groups start to takfir their leaders, declaring them taghut or murtad, essentially non-muslim, and calling for revolts against them to install legitimate rulers, by which they mean pious muslim leaders. There is a greater level of responsibility and piety expected of Muslim leaders in a caliphate than in other generic Muslim realms, where rulers are to a greater degree expected to follow and implement sharia. In game play terms, assuming a similar system for your council is present in Ck3, once a Muslim ruler holds something like an empire title, or perhaps the Caliphate itself, a Shura council of scholars could be added. This would mean additional 'advisor'-like honourary positions, but drawing from the pool of people eligible for the 'court imam' position. These councilors would be primarily interested in religious propriety, more so than concerns which are more personal, financial, military, etc.

I've just gone back and written a summary at the top of the post, so I won't bother ending the post coherently at this point. Thank you very much for reading, please give your thoughts, suggestions, and wishlists below!

 

[Tokiedian]

Decadence system s**ks. At least the system should be a thing AI could handle.

Personally, I prefer military-based system as a muslim government rather than religious system. Instability of muslim states derived from the fact that they often outsourced their military capability to subject commanders, especially Mamluks and failed to control them.

 

[Surimi]

From a gameplay standpoint, I actually think decadence is a great idea, even if the execution is lacking.

In a game about dynasties, polygamy is extremely overpowered, because a single male ruler can produce dozens of male children, which makes dynasties extremely stable. Decadence serves as an interesting counter to this, by punishing large families.

However, decadence was pretty harsh on implementation and often felt quite unfair or RNG dependent, which lead to it gradually being toned down to the point where, as you say, players could easily avoid it. But I think the idea is still necessary, Muslims need something akin to the pressure on Christian rulers to produce an heir, because they don't have that and without a counter it's going to make Muslim play extremely stable and boring.

I also have to say, I'm not a huge fan of stability style event-driven systems. To me, that's still a very reactive system, and I think the problem people had with decadence is that in practice it's very reactive. You wait for someone to become decadent and then hit the button. Reacting to events doesn't really allow the player to have any strategy to manage or deal with the problem, they're just waiting for events and then deciding what resource to sacrifice based on immediate need. Even with current decadence, you can make interesting decisions like having fewer wives (with a prestige hit) to avoid a swarm of decadent children down the line, or deciding to preemptively imprison or murder your relatives to keep them from becoming decadent.

Honestly, while I like the idea of decadence as a gameplay mechanic, my feeling is that unless the team can come up with a really good idea for decadence, they should just remove it for now. Instead, I'd like to see a focus on making Muslims a bit less of a "gimmick" run, with more diverse mechanics reflecting the diversity of the Islamic world. Right now Muslims in Persia use a Turkish succession system (for both temporal and caliphal succession) with decadence mechanics inspired by North Africa. It's sort of a mess, and treats Islam as way more homogenous than it actually was.