- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Short thought: wouldn't it be cool if Freemasonry was represented as an international organization that fucks with late-game European countries and colonies? I can imagine the Republic of Letters in it, too.
Edit: I didn't really look closely at the dev diary and it seems like half of what I said is in it as Aspects. I guess you can take the absence of an Aspect as the same as "not having this thing." I sound retarded now.
WORDS WORDS WORDS
Meh. I don't like this.
At this point I think what I'd really like to see is a sort of representation of churches as distinct entities in and of themselves. Not necessarily agents of gameplay, but just that a state can very well have multiple churches, or that churches can overlap borders, and that the state can have relationships with them other than just "evil heathens to kill and convert." Catholicism is this already in the game. I don't know how they're doing Orthodoxy, but these games have tended to portray Patriarchates in one way or another. Well, it's high time to represent this in "Protestantism."
A Christian church ultimately falls in one of three polities: episcopal (ie Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox), presbyterian (ie Presbyterian, Dutch and Swiss) or congregational (ie Puritans, most small churches today), loosely corresponding to dictatorship, republic and federalism/democracy as political analogies for how they're organized. Additionally, some of these churches were independent of the state, subject to the state or theoretically superior to the state (again, consider Baptist and Methodism, Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, and Catholicism as potential examples). Investiture is one of those things that would be like a sub-polity, to what extent does the ruler control the leadership?
Second, a Christian church has a theology. Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Arminian, Quaker, Doukhobor, Evangelical. Arminianism spawned out of Calvinism but basically came to prominence within the endless Calvinist-Lutheran fight for the English Church, and then it ultimately recombined with Calvinism to form Evangelicalism. Quakerism and Anabaptism are quite similar, but recently I learned that I was mistaken in believing that Quakerism is Anabaptist; it's not. Some of these categories could be condensed, but I think that at a minimum it is useful to have a tradition representing the very much (and geopolitically meaningful) not-Calvinist peace churches (of which Doukhobors can also be considered a branch), to have some way of representing the Church of England's incoherent pseudo-Catholic sludge, and later American churches that could be regarded as a branch of Calvinism or Arminianism, yet were really a new thing more like each other than they were like their parent faiths.
Thirdly, a Christian church has its unique aspects (flavor bullshit).
Fourthly, a Christian church has territorial control. I haven't fully thought this out, but my thinking is that congregational and presbyterian churches are cultural in nature, while episcopal churches can be unified among a nation, cultural, or a sort of mixture with formal borders. Consider, again, Orthodoxy. The premise of Orthodoxy is that the church is largely divided by nationality, but this doesn't always strictly follow cultural boundaries if for no other reason than that people themselves don't sort like that. (There is also, likewise, an ecumenical patriarch). Or, again, Calvinism has often had separate state churches in its own countries (Scotland, Netherlands and Switzerland, with England's "Anglican" Church having at times leaned Calvinist). Cultural churches could, perhaps, exist at varying levels of specificity. If there are big ones in a political union, they may just unify to represent larger areas, like when English Calvinism briefly tried for union with Scottish Calvinism.
Big thing about disunited churches: is there something meaningful, for diplomacy or politics, in having their internal divisions represented? Fifty patriarchs in one world-spanning empire isn't interesting, but a patriarch in another country who is a cause of nationalism in that country's lost territories is.
What I would like to see is a system with enough flexibility that it can portray the much simpler world of European Protestantism (where one state religion is more or less fine) and the clusterfuck of the British Empire. In the British Empire, Anglicanism was not a real religion at all. It was a Church that several religions were fighting for control of. Calvinism's instincts called for presbyterianism - for a while it fought for union with the Scottish Kirk - but it was willing to uncomfortably accept episcopalianism if that gave it state power. Then, by the end of it all, it was evolving into that radical congregationalism that spread across the seas to America before it was isolated in its homeland. All the while, Scottish Presbyterianism was a powerful state religion in its own right, and Ireland became a battlegrounds of TWO state religions (Presbyterian and Anglican) AND an international religion in the form of Catholicism!
There needs to be an option for a sort of ecumenical secularism. I've never been content with how the Thirteen Colonies are portrayed; I've thought before that even in base EU4 mechanics it would be easy enough just to have colonizing provinces have a chance of spawning any culture and religion from home provinces. I would again draw inspiration from Old World. State religion is a choice. A state will have a de facto state religion no matter what, in that it is dominated by a religion that defines its culture and has social power over others, like it goes even today, but complete disestablishment should be a possibility, maybe gated off behind very late game political philosophy tech, without having to totally remove the role of religion in politics. Some representation that the national has an identity even if the state doesn't formally associate with it.
I like MEIOU and Taxes and Old World for how well they portray pluralist states. It is a choice to be uninvolved with religion, promote state religion but be pluralist, promote state religion but be exclusionary, even a mixture in that you may choose to tolerate one minority but not another. A similar approach here would recognize that a state may not give a shit about the varieties of Protestantism, but still be a de facto ecumenically Protestant state, which is exactly what the early US was. In time that could be a de facto Christian state. This can apply elsewhere. Dharmic religion goes poorly with Paradox games already, but to allow a country like Japan to be simultaneously Confucian, Buddhist and Shinto helps with accuracy and is more interesting gameplay-wise as well. I've rambled about it a lot before, but I like having the Cult of Reason and Cult of Supreme Being (based deist state religion) as very late game religions or churches that a revolutionary republic can adopt for state atheism.
Edit: I didn't really look closely at the dev diary and it seems like half of what I said is in it as Aspects. I guess you can take the absence of an Aspect as the same as "not having this thing." I sound retarded now.
WORDS WORDS WORDS
Meh. I don't like this.
At this point I think what I'd really like to see is a sort of representation of churches as distinct entities in and of themselves. Not necessarily agents of gameplay, but just that a state can very well have multiple churches, or that churches can overlap borders, and that the state can have relationships with them other than just "evil heathens to kill and convert." Catholicism is this already in the game. I don't know how they're doing Orthodoxy, but these games have tended to portray Patriarchates in one way or another. Well, it's high time to represent this in "Protestantism."
A Christian church ultimately falls in one of three polities: episcopal (ie Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox), presbyterian (ie Presbyterian, Dutch and Swiss) or congregational (ie Puritans, most small churches today), loosely corresponding to dictatorship, republic and federalism/democracy as political analogies for how they're organized. Additionally, some of these churches were independent of the state, subject to the state or theoretically superior to the state (again, consider Baptist and Methodism, Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, and Catholicism as potential examples). Investiture is one of those things that would be like a sub-polity, to what extent does the ruler control the leadership?
Second, a Christian church has a theology. Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Arminian, Quaker, Doukhobor, Evangelical. Arminianism spawned out of Calvinism but basically came to prominence within the endless Calvinist-Lutheran fight for the English Church, and then it ultimately recombined with Calvinism to form Evangelicalism. Quakerism and Anabaptism are quite similar, but recently I learned that I was mistaken in believing that Quakerism is Anabaptist; it's not. Some of these categories could be condensed, but I think that at a minimum it is useful to have a tradition representing the very much (and geopolitically meaningful) not-Calvinist peace churches (of which Doukhobors can also be considered a branch), to have some way of representing the Church of England's incoherent pseudo-Catholic sludge, and later American churches that could be regarded as a branch of Calvinism or Arminianism, yet were really a new thing more like each other than they were like their parent faiths.
Thirdly, a Christian church has its unique aspects (flavor bullshit).
Fourthly, a Christian church has territorial control. I haven't fully thought this out, but my thinking is that congregational and presbyterian churches are cultural in nature, while episcopal churches can be unified among a nation, cultural, or a sort of mixture with formal borders. Consider, again, Orthodoxy. The premise of Orthodoxy is that the church is largely divided by nationality, but this doesn't always strictly follow cultural boundaries if for no other reason than that people themselves don't sort like that. (There is also, likewise, an ecumenical patriarch). Or, again, Calvinism has often had separate state churches in its own countries (Scotland, Netherlands and Switzerland, with England's "Anglican" Church having at times leaned Calvinist). Cultural churches could, perhaps, exist at varying levels of specificity. If there are big ones in a political union, they may just unify to represent larger areas, like when English Calvinism briefly tried for union with Scottish Calvinism.
Big thing about disunited churches: is there something meaningful, for diplomacy or politics, in having their internal divisions represented? Fifty patriarchs in one world-spanning empire isn't interesting, but a patriarch in another country who is a cause of nationalism in that country's lost territories is.
What I would like to see is a system with enough flexibility that it can portray the much simpler world of European Protestantism (where one state religion is more or less fine) and the clusterfuck of the British Empire. In the British Empire, Anglicanism was not a real religion at all. It was a Church that several religions were fighting for control of. Calvinism's instincts called for presbyterianism - for a while it fought for union with the Scottish Kirk - but it was willing to uncomfortably accept episcopalianism if that gave it state power. Then, by the end of it all, it was evolving into that radical congregationalism that spread across the seas to America before it was isolated in its homeland. All the while, Scottish Presbyterianism was a powerful state religion in its own right, and Ireland became a battlegrounds of TWO state religions (Presbyterian and Anglican) AND an international religion in the form of Catholicism!
There needs to be an option for a sort of ecumenical secularism. I've never been content with how the Thirteen Colonies are portrayed; I've thought before that even in base EU4 mechanics it would be easy enough just to have colonizing provinces have a chance of spawning any culture and religion from home provinces. I would again draw inspiration from Old World. State religion is a choice. A state will have a de facto state religion no matter what, in that it is dominated by a religion that defines its culture and has social power over others, like it goes even today, but complete disestablishment should be a possibility, maybe gated off behind very late game political philosophy tech, without having to totally remove the role of religion in politics. Some representation that the national has an identity even if the state doesn't formally associate with it.
I like MEIOU and Taxes and Old World for how well they portray pluralist states. It is a choice to be uninvolved with religion, promote state religion but be pluralist, promote state religion but be exclusionary, even a mixture in that you may choose to tolerate one minority but not another. A similar approach here would recognize that a state may not give a shit about the varieties of Protestantism, but still be a de facto ecumenically Protestant state, which is exactly what the early US was. In time that could be a de facto Christian state. This can apply elsewhere. Dharmic religion goes poorly with Paradox games already, but to allow a country like Japan to be simultaneously Confucian, Buddhist and Shinto helps with accuracy and is more interesting gameplay-wise as well. I've rambled about it a lot before, but I like having the Cult of Reason and Cult of Supreme Being (based deist state religion) as very late game religions or churches that a revolutionary republic can adopt for state atheism.
I'd like to see colonization be turned into a far more hands-off game of, like a venture capitalist, approving or rejecting proposals that opportunistically come up. Columbus thinks there's land to the West. Pizarro believes he can conquer an Indian civilization if he looks hard enough for one. The Quakers want to establish a religious utopia. You get events giving proposals: give me a charter to this territory, to establish a government with these characteristics, and we will exchange this support. Most European colonization was not actually directed by the state; it was venture capitalism where conquistadors and merchant companies raised their own capital and started franchises, so to speak, of the metropole.
Charters essentially steer where the colony develops, gives it casus belli, things like that. There's no real reason they can't overlap (they did in real life frequently) even between the same nation's charters, but it could provoke a shooting war among one's own vassals.
Spain happened to mostly send out conquistador-type colonies, Britain religious-utopia-type colonies, mostly for the simple matter that Britain happened to have a lot more religious minorities AND was open to dumping them in the New World.
Refusing to allow a colony doesn't mean they won't set out anyways, nor does a colony have to remain part of the metropole. Slightly outside of the timeframe, Liberia is an instance of directly sponsoring a colony but doing so with full intentions of giving them complete independence. The Lanfang Republic was, to my knowledge, wholly independent of the Chinese government. The Watauga Association desired representation as part of North Carolina, but when the Crown wouldn't recognize it it became (against its own desires) a de facto independent state. (I want to play as Watauga.)
I'm excited that there's overlapping jurisdictions between Indians and Europeans now, because I have never liked that the game depicts land as one or the other. I'd like to see the possibility of massive land transfers in war where a colonial empire surrenders its claim to an area like, say, Transappalachian America, but it is purely a diplomatic matter as it's all still Indians. Colonial powers should be able to build trading posts, forts and stuff in the same vein that merchant republics can in EU4 on the land of other nations.
Charters essentially steer where the colony develops, gives it casus belli, things like that. There's no real reason they can't overlap (they did in real life frequently) even between the same nation's charters, but it could provoke a shooting war among one's own vassals.
Spain happened to mostly send out conquistador-type colonies, Britain religious-utopia-type colonies, mostly for the simple matter that Britain happened to have a lot more religious minorities AND was open to dumping them in the New World.
Refusing to allow a colony doesn't mean they won't set out anyways, nor does a colony have to remain part of the metropole. Slightly outside of the timeframe, Liberia is an instance of directly sponsoring a colony but doing so with full intentions of giving them complete independence. The Lanfang Republic was, to my knowledge, wholly independent of the Chinese government. The Watauga Association desired representation as part of North Carolina, but when the Crown wouldn't recognize it it became (against its own desires) a de facto independent state. (I want to play as Watauga.)
I'm excited that there's overlapping jurisdictions between Indians and Europeans now, because I have never liked that the game depicts land as one or the other. I'd like to see the possibility of massive land transfers in war where a colonial empire surrenders its claim to an area like, say, Transappalachian America, but it is purely a diplomatic matter as it's all still Indians. Colonial powers should be able to build trading posts, forts and stuff in the same vein that merchant republics can in EU4 on the land of other nations.
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