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Rationalizing (In Game) Religion

Citizens of the Internet, allow me to introduce to you the culmination of years of occasional effort and Attila based irritation, my personal overhaul of Total War Attila’s system of religions. More specifically in this mod I have rebalanced the different religious options, lowered the percentage of your population that needs to follow a religion before you can convert to it from 35% to 5%, corrected the inaccuracies in CA’s geographic distribution of religion, reduced the likelihood the AI will change its state religion, and tried to make the religious bonuses logical rather than magical. For those of you who are interested I am going to lay out the changes I made, and chose not make, starting with the changes below:

Christianity*-Arianism and Greek Orthodoxy remain the same, but Latin Christian monasteries sanitation bonus is weaker and now affects the whole province. Oriental Orthodox minor temples no longer reduce upkeep (how is a stylite going to help you pay for more soldiers?) but do produce osmosis pressure.

Eastern Religions-Zoroastrianism and Semitic Paganism are unchanged as they are already effective, reasonably logical, and fairly balanced. Judaism has a lower research bonus in their main temple line to balance them with Greek Orthodoxy (Greek Orthodoxy has a larger research bonus but Judaism has minor temples that produce sanitation). Manichean temples now reduce public order penalties from the presence of other religions instead of from migrants as this makes more sense with the Manichees history of blending their faith with local ideas.

Paganism-All Germanic pagans now have access to the Langobard unique temples while Other Religions, Tengrism, Roman, and Celtic Paganism are identical to their vanilla counterparts. Slavic Paganism now has half the replenishment bonus and loses its bizarre climate change powers (Slavic Temples=Coal-Fired Power Plants?), but does gain a bonus to cultural wealth output to compensate.

*Those who know their Church history can quite fairly point out that when the game starts in 395 A.D these branches of Christianity had not yet diverged from each other and thus Total War Attila’s depiction of them is anachronistic, but let me try and make the case for leaving them separate. Oriental Orthodoxy technically did not split with the rest of the Church until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D, but that event would take place during the course of the main campaign and there had been practical and theological differences between the Armenian, Syriac, and Coptic churches on one hand, and the Greek and Latin churches on the other which ultimately lead up to the rupture in 451. The case for leaving the Greek and Latin churches separate would appear to be far weaker given that schism would not take place until 1054 A.D., nearly six hundred years after the main Attila campaign ends. My guess as to what CA was thinking here is that even though East and West were in lockstep theologically at the time, there were already differences developing in the liturgical language, the art style, and who each church looked to as its head. As a compromise decision I have chosen to leave the Greek and Latin churches as separate religions, but in recognition of the fact that they did not think of themselves as such I have changed the diplomacy system so that now Greek Orthodox states will approve of Latin states religion and vice versa.


Religious Distribution- Although the developers at the Creative Assembly do seem to have done their homework on which regions were Christian or pagan at this time, when it comes to the various Eastern Religions they seem to have left it on the bus. It pains me to say this as a fan of Manichaeism, but that religion is egregiously over represented in the Western Roman Empire as I have been unable to find any evidence for Manichees north of the Alps or west of Rome even though Total War Attila has them living as far away as Londinium. Meanwhile Judaism has the complete opposite problem in that it's only present in Palestinia and Arabia when in the 5th century the Jewish diaspora was well in progress, so small Jewish communities should be scattered around the Mediterranean. Finally, we have Oriental Orthodoxy, which CA added primarily for the Kingdom of Aethiopia without apparently realizing that this kind of Christianity should also be present in Egypt, Syria, and Armenia, the latter being another example of Manichees being over represented, although that might be an attempt to show the roots of the dualistic Paulician heresy of the 6th century. I have done my best to correct all these problems as well as adding the strong Manichaean presence in North Africa that so annoyed Saint Augustine, greater levels of Orthodox Christianity in what would become the nation of Georgia, and an extra Jewish community in Augusta Treverorum to represent the ancestors of the Ashkenazi.


Miscellaneous Things-The final couple of changes I have made with this mod revolve around the act of changing the religion of your state. For the player I have made it much easier to choose what religion you want by lowering the threshold to five percent (however please note that due to the formatting of the menu where you change your religion, the religion you want to convert to has to be at least be the third most popular in your empire) as conversions that did happen in this period tended to be top down, based on whichever religion the local king happened to like. On the other hand, I have made it far less likely that the A.I will choose to change their religion as I have noticed that in the vanilla game Europe is more Christian in 420 A.D than it is in the Age of Charlemagne campaign in 768 A.D. Finally, for those of you who have chosen to read this far I would like to thank you for your interest and I hope you will enjoy my work more than I enjoyed trying to understand where CA gets its information from.

P.S, if this turns out to be popular perhaps I can try to mod some sense into real-world religions. I have already found this interesting modding tool referred to as a “pencil” which lets me add or subtract things from religion books…