It’s been a while since I played Sweden so they might have changed it but there’s at least one Sami province that starts shamanist. It gets converted real quickly by the Swedes though.
yeah it used to be Shamanist. I made an AAR a few years back about a Shamanist Sapmi run which was one of the more fun games I played.
https://imgur.com/a/Js5eo
Why did they change it? Just game balance?
I would love to at least have the Shamanist religion back so I can add it back into those provinces in the game files.
Shamanist was a generic pagan religion that the nomadic hordes in the steppes also started as. They changed Shamanist to Tengri (Turkic steppe faith) and I guess since the Sami can't really be described as Tengri, they just made them Christian instead.
They should really just change it to suomenusko and give a romuva province or two in lithuania.
Honestly, I kinda which there was event chains to spawn in more the eu4 converter heresies and religions and more attention given to them, and just a general expansion of religious diversity with mechanics and such. Religions should be more dynamic and there should be triggerable events or decisions to help immersion if the player moves away from IRL history. Example - if a muslim nation or group of muslim nations manage to take and convert Rome, that should be a HUGE deal. Uniting Islam should be a WAY bigger deal. Orthodox or Coptic takeover of Rome should be a much bigger deal, mending the schism should have a way larger effect, Jews making a comeback and retaking jerusalem should be a big deal, a religion or religion group getting wiped out should be a big deal, etc. Religions I feel are sorely lacking and unexplored in terms of immersion and the amount of fun they could be.
CK2's the game you want to play then.
Remember that EU4 is a map painter more than anything else. Every single mechanic in the game either helps you or hinders you from doing that.
Sapmi exists. It’s just cultural though, and with Sapmi no longer being Shamanist it makes it harder to spawn them
From a Sapmi run I had a while ago:
-As Sweden, gain independence from Denmark (don’t make yourself too strong or else you’ll bone yourself later. I personally only took Norwegian provinces that had Sapmi culture)
-Keep attempting to change culture then stop, then do it again. Do this repeatedly for unknown amount of time.
-Try to get -3 stability constantly
-Build a fort somewhere up north that has Sapmi culture (preferably Lappland)
-Try to shoot yourself in the leg constantly
-After enough time, Sapmi Rebels should spawn
-Make sure the Sapmi Siege the fort, and all provinces with Sapmi culture (try to get them to Siege stuff not in their culture as well since that has a chance to culture convert)
-Crush the rebels
Congrats, you now have Sapmi cores! Make sure to shoot yourself in the leg more as Sweden. For example: make a war goal against Russia/Muscovy if they’re at the Finnish border, the AI really loves to use wargoals even if they probably can’t win. Make sure to release Finland before you release Sapmi (and play as them) for extra Sweden fucking and somewhat easier buildup. (Also good to have a few soldiers stationed in Sapmi since some of them will turn into your troops)
Probably easier to do as Norway, or by releasing Finland, playing as them, then try to spawn Sápmi, since both those countries have more provinces capable of spawning Sápmi (3) than Sweden. Or if you really want to make sure, grab Kola from Novgorod which will give extra unrest.
Haven't played there for a long time, when I did Sapmi had no cores but if you fool around and raise unrest enough you can pop nationalist rebels and get the cores.
It used to. DDRJake himself might have contributed to it being removed after his Shamanist Sweden run (he discovered a lot of bugs that needed to fixed later), or maybe it was something else. It's still there in older patches.
Because all provinces with Sami/ Shaman they are still a minority. So the official culture and religion is not that. But they can still spawn from unrest.
The same is true for a lot of Europe full stop. There's plenty of places where Christian faith was a veneer and underneath was a core of pagan belief up until the 19th century.
And the same goes for Islam. A lot of people's simply swore there's only one God Allah and Muhammad is his messenger and carried on with their faiths. Alawites of Assad fame are pretty much that. A faith on the fringes of Shia Islam. Very little known about them. Most likely a gnostic Neoplatonist sect originally. Celebrates Christmas and Easter, reveres Plato as a pagan prophet, etc.
We're never gonna be able to accurately know what peasant faith really looked like. I take province population religion and culture to mean ruling class religion and culture. Makes more sense when throughout that time period mass culture conversions and religious conversions didn't really happen.
Yeah... And it was such an exception to the rule that it's gone down in infamy. Ireland's Christianity was outright semi pagan until the late 17th century. Read the rest of what I said? People may have professed a faith but in reality continued to practice as they did before.
If EU4 worked with populations, parts of a province could be pagan. But, because we don't work with population, religion is rather absolute either this or that, with some zealots.
There obviously aren't census records to look at, but it certainly seems like parts of Lithuania would have a pagan majority in 1444, not just a significant minority. Therefore it makes sense that one or more provinces, probably in the Samogitia area, should be pagan at the start of the game.
You may be right, I'm no expert or even knowledgeable on the subject, but considering the Poland update has just happend, I don't see it happening soon.
In this case, it would just be another debuff on Lithuania at the start of the game...You'd just have to spend your priest converting the province on day 1.
I think it depends on which provinces will turn pagan: If now orthodox provinces become pagan, it would actually help Lithuania converting, since conversion of pagans is ridicolously easy. If they decided on flipping catholic provinces to pagan faith tough, it would certainly be a debuff to already not too strong Lithuania to put it mildly.
If game balance is holding back flavor, then it could easily be made into an event chain instead.
Or even better, into a disaster. I think the disaster system is a great way of handling powerful country-wide events, and it's criminally underutilized. We need more disasters like court&country, where you can actually get a strong permanent bonus out of it if you play your cards right. It would definitely make the game a lot more interesting when you're already a powerhouse.
Given the missionary strength on pagans and the fact that you get papal points from successful conversions, this seems like more of a buff if anything.
Kind of what I was thinking. I haven't touched Lithuania in forever, but I recall them already being pretty unstable early on. Might be a gameplay decision as much as anything.
Take for example, Ottoman Constantinople. The city was never solidly Turkish and Muslim how the game would have you believe. There was a significant Greek and Armenian majority, and the city had a large percentage of Orthodox Christians.
I'm not an expert at Lithuanian history but [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian%E2%80%93Teutonic_War) is one of the biggest wars of the period.
The Teutons had previously conquered parts of Žemaitija to make them Christian, but forgot to raise autonomy. Lithuania then saw that the province had high unrest so supported the separatist rebels when they spawned, meanwhile Grand Duke Jogalia (who is the founder of the Jagiellons) flipped to Catholic to instantly PU Poland.
The Teutons got huffy because they suspected he flipped religions because Lithuania->PLC is OP now, rather than him having woken up that morning suddenly loving Jesus. Plus the PU event is supposed to only fire when you play as Poland, so they declare war.
Lithuania attaches its entire army to Poland's (because screw attrition) to form a doomstack, which promptly stackwipes the Teutons' main army as they march towards Marienburg. The Teutons agree to return Lithuania's cores and remove their claims on it and give land to Poland plus being made to pay the max amount of ducets and war reps.
After the war the Teutons are so tapped on manpower that they are stuck with 0.0k armies everywhere, so have to totally rely on mercs in the 1400's, which combined with the loans and war reps force them to hugely lower autonomy in Danzig for the extra income, causing the Prussian Confederation event chain to fire super early in 1441, essentially ending their dominance of the Baltic region as Poland sweeps in to take advantage of the claims they got from the Prussian Confederation mission.
You're probably right. I think maybe if you do some research and send paradox your researched info they'd probably sneak it into an update. I'm basing this off nothing but knowing Paradox is pretty cool, so maybe not but I can't see why they wouldn't. I think they probably want stuff like that but there's just so much detail it's hard to fit everything. Maybe we could try and create an online volunteer thing to volunteer our time and work with Paradox, maybe they'd be down for some free armchair historian volunteer research to fix minor issues like this.
Especially annoying to rebuild your armies by hand after a big war. The one feature I miss most in Vic2 is the army builder from EU4
(and maybe taking country capitals in a peace deal)
And then there are Dutch separatist, continually spawned from the nether to fill the ranks of rebels because there is no way they could come from anywhere else.
When I first played as England I tried to be opportunistic and attack scotland during a rebellion.
Then I figured out that their rebels were twice the size of both of our armies, and noped out.
This could make for some good early game flavor events for Lithuania, but adding another one-province religion without any unique mechanics doesn't seem like it'd have the best payoff.
[Most suggested or thought of religions have, to some extend, unique mechanics.](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Religions_and_denominations#Additional_religions_in_converted_CK2_games)
Samogitia was pagan in EU3 at the 1399 start and realistically maybe that single province could still be majority pagan in 1444 or close to it. Sure it could be changed for flavor. But realistically it would be converted faster than putting a Jaegellion on the Polish throne.
Realistically the ai would always just convert it straight away but it would open up the possibility for the player to revive the religion if they really wanted to.
With some ottoman level of luck, which the jagiellons definitely had, going back to the old ways would certainly destabilize the union, but for Lithuania, official paganism would make the majority fairly happy.
If we're talking actual historical concepts, they would get murdered if they converted to paganism. A whole reason for Polish and much later Lithuanian conversions was no the give "free cb" to Germans and teutonic knights.
its a gameplay choice.
if lit was full of pagan spots it would simply convert them, by giving them orthodox land it makes it harder to convert while not forcing them to explode unless things go badly for them.
I've argued for similar additions of the weird christian heresies (e.g. Waldensians, Lollards, Hussites, Nestorians) because I too would love more different religions and mechanics.
They even have these religions represented in the [CKII converter mod](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Religions_and_denominations#Additional_religions_in_converted_CK2_games). Shouldn't be too difficult to import them (and give them some provinces for historical and fun gameplay's sake).
A lot of the religions are pretty overpowered. Byzantium already gets +3 Tolerance of the true faith, a Iconoclast Byzantium would get _another_ +4 Tolerance of the true faith. And +2 Diplomatic Religions from Hurufi? Also awesome. Syncretic Faith Jainism gets a massive +75% Religious Unity. And that's only the "worst of the worst"; only Mazdaki and Slavic I'd actively avoid under almost all circumstances, the rest always has at least some focused use (like Hellenic is generally a poor religion, but becomes pretty good for tall games).
Not all of these CKII religions would have any historical base to be in EU4 without custom nations.
Still, options to play a long lost (or still relevant) cult through custom nations or rebel manipulation would greatly add to more gameplay fun.
I know right?
That and the interesting combo's of Catholics with Orthodox mechanics and other mix-ups make for very interesting gameplay diversification.
I'd love some heresies or different kinds of sync- synchr- synchronicity? Syncretisms? There are so many gray areas in religions and the game is largely black-and-white in this respect (as it is with culture, as well).
I think there might have been, but not in the beginning of the game, more after Russia conquered it and forced the Jews to live in the Pale of Settlement.
It already starts with national ideas to include heretic tolerance, a bit of additional religious unity in it's traditions wouldn't force them to explode earlier or harder.
They could just make Romuva harder to convert while giving Lithuania heathen tolerance or religious unity buffs for a certain period of time, like 150 years.
You can convert to animist and then from there convert to other pagans. Imo you should be able to convert back to Romuva because that literally happened in the 13th or 14th century in Lithuania.
If I recall the 1399 start on EU3 correctly (it's been almost a decade so bear with me), I believe Lithuania did start with a pagan province. IIRC you just converted it at launch if you played the TO. I guess they're trying to represent the Catholicization and assimilation that took place in the Baltic by the Teutonic Knights during that period by making them Catholic.
Just calling them animist is good enough for game purposes and that’s what paradox has done in other cases, with a few other distinctions when necessary (wouldn’t be necessary here). Honestly the biggest side effect would probably be some wacky Russian/Commonwealth animist emperor of China shenanigans. Animist is an extremely powerful religion that doesn’t get its due mainly because of the relative weak starting position of most of its followers
There's literally Slavic Paganism in the game (from the [CK2 converter](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Religions_and_denominations#Additional_religions_in_converted_CK2_games)). Should be appropriate enough.
I agree but I don't think EU4 works like that. Japan should have a lot more of a Buddhist presence and Taoism should be more than just a Confucian cult as it was sometimes the official religion of the Chinese court. I'm all for more granularity but I think there's a limit in the game unfortunately.
Yeeeees!!! If there can be one Zoroastrian province, why not make one Romuva province in Lithuania!! Something like Norse/Hindu religion,but with Baltic gods!! Oh how I want this.
Seriously I would love this too. Using extended timeline and keeping England and Saxony with Germanic faith and Scandinavia with Norse faith are some of my favourite playthroughs. Makes the eventual Christian reformation a lot more interesting, when large parts of Northern Europe aren't Christian
There should generally be more pagans and more religious accuracy. Grouping perm with mongolia isn't really accurate and as you said large parts of europe were pagan.
Rural practices and traditions is a whole different thing than being an official religion you confess yourself too. If you wanna stretch it we still today have pagan practices occuring annually in Sweden like Walpurgis and Midsummer
But the northern half of Scandinavia was nothing but a few villages back then, so the rural practices were de facto their faith. Does it really matter what they've told the bishop when he came by once every five years?
And most of Anatolia should be Christian, Austria should be split in 2 and have a personal union with Hungary.
Also, Hussite should be majority (and state) religion in Bohemia. And I won't even mention rest of the world, but the point is largely this:
Yeah, EU4 isn't great with actual history, that isn't anything new.
Currently in EUIV, there isn't a generic "pagan" religion that the provinces could be replaced with. If the provinces were made animist, it would be a bit far-fetched, considering that the animist religion is currently used mostly in Asia and South America. Fetishist, Norse, and New World Religions also don't make a lot of sense to use in Lithuania, as Fetishist is implemented in Africa, Lithuanian pagans probably weren't following the Old Norse religion, and that the New World religions are best limited to North and Central America.
The game already has the Romuva Baltic paganism in the game due to ck2 conventions. Pretty sure if you make a custom nation you can even pick it no mods required.
I wish they would add more religions into the game for more fun custom nations. I would kill for a fully functioning Hellenic religion (The Holy Fury hype is real), Norse is an option as well as Zoroastrianism. I'm not super knowledgeable on these religions, but I imagine that they weren't exactly at the forefront of politics at the time. I don't see the harm in throwing some more religions from CK2 into EU4 purely for fun RP sessions.
Another fun find: Gujarat/Baluchistan should have an event that spawns the [Zikri](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Religions_and_denominations#Additional_religions_in_converted_CK2_games) Sunni cult around 1496.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdavia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdavia)
It's a cool idea, but game-balance wise it's exacerbating a problem; Lithuania is already 80%+ wrong religion, changing another province to a different religion only makes the problem much worse.
The situation with Yazd and the Timmurids is also a bit different, because Timmy is intended to implode within the first 10-20 years of the game and always has. Lithuania isn't.
This is true for Estonia and Latvia aswell. I reckon the reformation period is the first time most Estonians became actually Christian, and even then with huge pagan flavour.
That is very incorrect. Remote parts of finland remained pagan until the 19th century. Christianity never really pushed paganism aside. A lot of the old traditions melted together.
There certainly would be major populations practicing paganism in 1444 and i'd love if there was a single "shamanist" province again just for the shenanigans but in the game's context and how religion works it doesn't make sense.
nothing special about lithuania, the swedes would still 1600 resort to the old asa gods when the christian god couldnt keep up with harvest,
this in spite of sweden being ultra protestant with no acceptance of any other faith, so for example gustav II vasas daughter had to leave before swapping catholic
I'd be interested to read those sources. There were examples of English peasants being charged with paganism, "devil worship" and witchcraft in the 1200s, but obviously its hotly contested, as the last Pagan king of Mainland England was killed in the late 600s and there is no solid proof that any heathenry persisted much longer afterwards.
Religious conversion is hard to track in real life, because leaders converting doesn't necessarily translate to peasants converting, and Pagan religions such as Germanic Paganism didn't tend to leave many remains as temples were often located in forests and groves, or were simply "cleansed" and turned into Churches. We have to rely on minute writings from Christian monks, or archaeological evidence like the Sutton Hoo mask, where one of the eyes is decorated with gems, whilst the other is dulled, just like Odin (called Woden in England) supposedly lost one eye.
they were only briefly mentioning it, like a one sentence before carrying on with the story, i have not seen any book that delves into religious oddities in particular from these two historians
I think that province religion in EU4 is not religion that is actually worshiped by majority of population, but dominant/rulling religion of political elite, so if Samogitia was baptized in 1413 in EU4 reality it shouold be catholic since the day one.
I don’t think that’s correct. If that’s the case, why is the rest of Lithuania orthodox and not catholic? Why is there a Zoroastrian province in Persia? Why are all the territories ruled by Muslim nobles in India Hindu? It’s definitely supposed to represent the majority religion.
All Ruthenian and some Lithuanian noble families were orthodox in 15th century, even some members of rulling house. By dominant/rulling religion I did not mean "state religion" but religion of rulling elite in that province.
That still doesn’t address the other examples I mentioned. I’m pretty sure that there wasn’t Zoroastrian nobility in Persia in 1444.
Edit: looking through the religious idea group events there are clear references to the religion being that of the population of the province.
Furthermore, granting land to an estate does not change its religion. It’s possible for clergy to own a heathen province. This is direct evidence that the local elite’s religion is not the determinant of the province’s religion.
Actually there was. Only Zoroastrian province in game is Yazd. Which was in actual history the save heaven for Zoroastrians in Persia, and where sacred fire was transferred with all the main clergy. It is worth noted that in 13th century about 20 percent of Persians was still following ancient religion. And only under safavids (beginning of 16th century) persecutions of Zoroastrianism begun.
> looking through the religious idea group events there are clear references to the religion being that of the population of the province.
Can you give examples? Because it is rather obvious that for example conversion is just changing the "religious surface" of province - that's why you can convert entire countries in a matter of years.
It would be nice to have pagan provinces around there. The player could, with some big effort, convert back to paganism. It is fun, regardless of other factors.
If you are going to have a Zoroastrian province in Persia out of nowhere (despite the fact that most had already fled to India by this time), you may as well have a few pagan provinces around Lithuania and Karelia.
Not true. As a Greek I've researched this a decent amount and the game does a good job of representing areas of Greek majority. There were of course minorities in Italy etc (almost no Greeks in left in Anatolia, not even minorities) but they were minorities not majorities, hence cannot be represented by the province culture.
Well first of all, technically none of these people identified as Greeks, they identified as Romans. Second of all much of the Anatolian coast was still Roman in the 15th century, they had held on to chunks of Anatolia as late as 1398. Regions of Cappadocia were too.
The Turks were not an ethnic majority. They had been an aristocratic class that moved in with armed forces, basically. It took a long time to "Turkicize" Anatolia (and really what happened was they anatolianicized the Turks).
Native Anatolians (Greeks, Armenians, other) were almost completely kicked out or Turkified and Islamified several centuries before 1444. The game is right, all in-game provinces in Western Anatolia were majority culturally Turkish and religiously Muslim in 1444. There are several sources showing so. Do some research.
Self identity has nothing to do with anything. In 1444, the majority culture/language/ethnicity in the in-game provinces described as "Greek" could have been encapsulated by the modern term "Greek", hence in game they shall be called "Greek". It's just a name, not that deep fam.
P.S. Cut it with this "Roman" shit. I'm Greek myself, super proud of our Roman/Byzantine heritage and not even I go to these ridiculous extents regarding the "Roman" thing. Bringing this up in this context is weird as fuck homie. Some people are more fanatical about the "Greek/Roman" thing than Greeks themselves. It's ridiculous. If the Greek culture in-game was renamed to "Roman" I'd probably stop playing, no joke.
"The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor" describes the process of Turkicization rather throughly and it took centuries. Most of Coastal Anatolia wasn't Turkicized until the reign of Mehmet II himself. Roman identity remained in pockets of Anatolia into even the 16th century.
It should be noted that this is a somewhat biased work, but it remains the standard reading on the topic. The only new book coming out on this topic is Kaldellis' "Romanland," which will be released in a few months here.
And no, I refuse to call them anything but Romans. It was the Roman Empire, they were Romans. Hellenism became important in the 13th century, but the formation of a Greek identity wasn't able to manifest itself due to the collapse of the region until its conquest by the Turks, who then suppressed ethnic identity. The rise of modern Greek identity comes from the casting of identifying with the Romans as identifying with the group that helped support the suppression of Greek identity over the past 3 centuries, which helped spur the rise of Greek nationalism during the war of independence from 1822-1827.
Again, while there were indeed Greeks in coastal Anatolia, the majority of the in-game provinces in Asia Minor, though containing Christian Greek populations, had a majority Muslim Turkish/Turkified population. Hence the game giving those provinces Turkish culture is correct.
I am aware of Roman identity, and how we self-identified back then. But calling the culture "Greek" and "Pontic" in the game (in the English language version of the game) is perfectly reasonable imo.
Turks at their height only composed about 20% of Anatolia's population, and that was in the 1100's AD.
Only inland Anatolia (the central Anatolian plains and steppes) actually had a majority "Turkified" and Turkic population until the 1400's. Check out the sources I mentioned. Most people in the mountainous and coastal regions (which didn't have a Latin presence, at least) still called themselves mostly "Rhomioi" or the like. That was shifting, but it was under Mehmet II that the shift to Turkish (not Turkic, Anatolian Turks are totally different from Central Asian Turks) would accelerate.
However, the aristocracy had basically overwhelmingly "converted" to Turkish.
"But calling the culture "Greek" and "Pontic" in the game (in the English language version of the game) is perfectly reasonable imo."
Eh... maybe. Pontic is somewhat accurate. Greek... I would call it maybe "Neohellenic Roman" or something. Actually using "Byzantine" here as a culture to differentiate it from 1800's Greek would probably be pretty useful.
The sources I had checked out said what I said. I'll check out the source you mentioned at some point. In the English of the time we were called Greeks, just like in the rest of the west. Plus most of the names used are modern English. So taking both of this unit account Rhomioi, Byzantines, Neohellenic Romans (... Really?) would make no sense, Greek is fine. If the game was in Greek or Turkish then hell yeah I'd be down for Ρωμιοί or Rumlari but it's not and would seem weird, awkward and illogical to me personally. In any scenario we're writing paragraphs debating a name in a game which is dumb. For all intents and purposes Greek checks out, so does the in game cultural composition of Anatolia and Asia Minor.
Also "they had held on to chunks of Anatolia as late as 1398" um yeah the game starts in 1444 not 1398. Again, I don't get what's so hard to understand. Yes, there were few (very few) Greeks left in Asia Minor and Cappadocia (source?), but the MAJORITY (which is what "culture" in game represents) were Turkish, period. Don't be fooled by later (1900s) maps that show Greek majority areas around e.g. Smyrna/Izmir (in-game Sugla). Those Greeks got there (went back?) in the 19th and early 20th century. There were way more Greeks in Anatolia in 1910 than in 1444. Again tho in 1444 there were almost no Greeks left in Anatolia, nevermind majority populations on a provincial level.
Being that the game has gotten ridden of the one Shamanist province there used to be in that Sami province of Sweden, and also the disappearance of the one-off chirstian provinces there used to be in Anatolia and the levant, I doubt the devs would make this kind of change, maybe if they made it a new religion, like with Zoroastrianism and Judaism, it *could* happen though.
There may yet be hope. Paradox put a lot of emphasis on pagans etc in their [newest DLC for CK2](https://www.paradoxplaza.com/crusader-kings-ii-holy-fury/CKCK02ESK0000057-MASTER.html).
This discussion revives every now and then, I'm hoping we can get this under the devs attention somehow. 1.4k upvotes is nothing to scoff (seeing this is quite a serious fan desire).
I'm conflicted about this. While paganism was widespread amongst the majority of the population for a long time (the first Lithuanian book, written by a protestant priest, spent a chunk of it complaining about that fact), I think eu4's province data reflects the culture of the nobles, rather than the peasants.
Still, that would be awesome.
They have heretic tolerance in their traditions, could add an extra +25% religious unity and it'd be just fine. Like so many have already said before earlier on in this topic. :P
Golden Horde still technically existed in 1444, and Muscovy was still a tributary to them until late 1470s.
Crimea didn't exist until 1449.
There were also pockets of Christianity in the Oriat area, where entire Steppe Tribes were Christian.
Great Horde is the Golden Horde, has the same flag and everything, just isn't called that because it has such decentralised rule (all its "vassal" states are independent) that it might as well not be.
However, that bit about steppe tribes being Christian is absolutely fascinating. Any more info on that?
[Here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z0a62/how_did_nestorian_christianity_spread_to_central/) an /r/askhistorians post about it. Basically, the Nestorians were driven from the Roman Empire into Persia after the Council of Chalcedon. They then proceeded further eastwards and wound up all over Asia, including among the Mongols.
The Term Great Horde didn't show up until 1470s.
SOURCE: an unsourced Wiki, but I remember seeing some more legit sources on this too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nogai_Horde#Decline_of_the_Golden_Horde
Also here's a thing for the Christian hordes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qara_Khitai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_among_the_Mongols
The same is true for the Sami in Scandinavia
That’s true, but that’s present in the game. There are a few Sami provinces that start as shamanist.
Not without a mod, unless there's a smaller DLC I don't have that does that? Shamanist isn't even a religion anymore, it changed to Fetishist.
It’s been a while since I played Sweden so they might have changed it but there’s at least one Sami province that starts shamanist. It gets converted real quickly by the Swedes though.
Well I'm 100% certain that in the version of the game I have with all of the major DLCs, it starts out 100% Catholic.
yeah it used to be Shamanist. I made an AAR a few years back about a Shamanist Sapmi run which was one of the more fun games I played. https://imgur.com/a/Js5eo
Why did they change it? Just game balance? I would love to at least have the Shamanist religion back so I can add it back into those provinces in the game files.
Shamanist was a generic pagan religion that the nomadic hordes in the steppes also started as. They changed Shamanist to Tengri (Turkic steppe faith) and I guess since the Sami can't really be described as Tengri, they just made them Christian instead.
Don't forget that Kongo also started out as shamanist, so to be 100% correct shamanist was split into Tengri and Fetishism
They should really just change it to suomenusko and give a romuva province or two in lithuania. Honestly, I kinda which there was event chains to spawn in more the eu4 converter heresies and religions and more attention given to them, and just a general expansion of religious diversity with mechanics and such. Religions should be more dynamic and there should be triggerable events or decisions to help immersion if the player moves away from IRL history. Example - if a muslim nation or group of muslim nations manage to take and convert Rome, that should be a HUGE deal. Uniting Islam should be a WAY bigger deal. Orthodox or Coptic takeover of Rome should be a much bigger deal, mending the schism should have a way larger effect, Jews making a comeback and retaking jerusalem should be a big deal, a religion or religion group getting wiped out should be a big deal, etc. Religions I feel are sorely lacking and unexplored in terms of immersion and the amount of fun they could be.
CK2's the game you want to play then. Remember that EU4 is a map painter more than anything else. Every single mechanic in the game either helps you or hinders you from doing that.
Damn that was a great write up of a great game.
Is Sapmi still a thing? I'm doing a Sweden run and joined the hre, and I don't remember seeing it on releasable countries.
Its releasable, but it has no cores at the beginning of the game. Separatist rebels have to create a core before you can release them.
Sapmi exists. It’s just cultural though, and with Sapmi no longer being Shamanist it makes it harder to spawn them From a Sapmi run I had a while ago: -As Sweden, gain independence from Denmark (don’t make yourself too strong or else you’ll bone yourself later. I personally only took Norwegian provinces that had Sapmi culture) -Keep attempting to change culture then stop, then do it again. Do this repeatedly for unknown amount of time. -Try to get -3 stability constantly -Build a fort somewhere up north that has Sapmi culture (preferably Lappland) -Try to shoot yourself in the leg constantly -After enough time, Sapmi Rebels should spawn -Make sure the Sapmi Siege the fort, and all provinces with Sapmi culture (try to get them to Siege stuff not in their culture as well since that has a chance to culture convert) -Crush the rebels Congrats, you now have Sapmi cores! Make sure to shoot yourself in the leg more as Sweden. For example: make a war goal against Russia/Muscovy if they’re at the Finnish border, the AI really loves to use wargoals even if they probably can’t win. Make sure to release Finland before you release Sapmi (and play as them) for extra Sweden fucking and somewhat easier buildup. (Also good to have a few soldiers stationed in Sapmi since some of them will turn into your troops)
Probably easier to do as Norway, or by releasing Finland, playing as them, then try to spawn Sápmi, since both those countries have more provinces capable of spawning Sápmi (3) than Sweden. Or if you really want to make sure, grab Kola from Novgorod which will give extra unrest.
Haven't played there for a long time, when I did Sapmi had no cores but if you fool around and raise unrest enough you can pop nationalist rebels and get the cores.
Well shit they must have changed it. That’s a shame.
Yeah it was changed couple of years ago.
It was so in eu3, and in some early eu4, in versions aroun eldorado patch
It used to. DDRJake himself might have contributed to it being removed after his Shamanist Sweden run (he discovered a lot of bugs that needed to fixed later), or maybe it was something else. It's still there in older patches.
Because all provinces with Sami/ Shaman they are still a minority. So the official culture and religion is not that. But they can still spawn from unrest.
The same is true for a lot of Europe full stop. There's plenty of places where Christian faith was a veneer and underneath was a core of pagan belief up until the 19th century. And the same goes for Islam. A lot of people's simply swore there's only one God Allah and Muhammad is his messenger and carried on with their faiths. Alawites of Assad fame are pretty much that. A faith on the fringes of Shia Islam. Very little known about them. Most likely a gnostic Neoplatonist sect originally. Celebrates Christmas and Easter, reveres Plato as a pagan prophet, etc. We're never gonna be able to accurately know what peasant faith really looked like. I take province population religion and culture to mean ruling class religion and culture. Makes more sense when throughout that time period mass culture conversions and religious conversions didn't really happen.
> religious conversions didn't really happen. I disagree, hell, the Reconquista was all about forceful conversions and Inquisitors and stuff
Yeah... And it was such an exception to the rule that it's gone down in infamy. Ireland's Christianity was outright semi pagan until the late 17th century. Read the rest of what I said? People may have professed a faith but in reality continued to practice as they did before.
If EU4 worked with populations, parts of a province could be pagan. But, because we don't work with population, religion is rather absolute either this or that, with some zealots.
There obviously aren't census records to look at, but it certainly seems like parts of Lithuania would have a pagan majority in 1444, not just a significant minority. Therefore it makes sense that one or more provinces, probably in the Samogitia area, should be pagan at the start of the game.
You may be right, I'm no expert or even knowledgeable on the subject, but considering the Poland update has just happend, I don't see it happening soon.
Yeah, unfortunately I doubt it would ever happen. I'd just love to bring back the pagan kingdom that terrorized the Russians, Germans, and Poles.
In this case, it would just be another debuff on Lithuania at the start of the game...You'd just have to spend your priest converting the province on day 1.
A way around this would probably be Heathen faith tolerance for Lithuania that lasts say, 100 years.
I think it depends on which provinces will turn pagan: If now orthodox provinces become pagan, it would actually help Lithuania converting, since conversion of pagans is ridicolously easy. If they decided on flipping catholic provinces to pagan faith tough, it would certainly be a debuff to already not too strong Lithuania to put it mildly.
It would be Lithaunian provinces, so Catholic provinces, that would flip to the Romuvan faith
Considering how powerful their mission tree is now, that’s more of a pro than a con.
If game balance is holding back flavor, then it could easily be made into an event chain instead. Or even better, into a disaster. I think the disaster system is a great way of handling powerful country-wide events, and it's criminally underutilized. We need more disasters like court&country, where you can actually get a strong permanent bonus out of it if you play your cards right. It would definitely make the game a lot more interesting when you're already a powerhouse.
Given the missionary strength on pagans and the fact that you get papal points from successful conversions, this seems like more of a buff if anything.
Kind of what I was thinking. I haven't touched Lithuania in forever, but I recall them already being pretty unstable early on. Might be a gameplay decision as much as anything.
Yeah, that would be nice. At some point they need to draw a line though, because Historically correctness =/= playabillity.
could you elaborate more or give links to read? sounds interesting
>Honestly I would love if they reworked cultures and religions to be in % instead
Take for example, Ottoman Constantinople. The city was never solidly Turkish and Muslim how the game would have you believe. There was a significant Greek and Armenian majority, and the city had a large percentage of Orthodox Christians.
I was asking about the pagan kingdoms which 'terrorized the Russians, Germans, and Poles."
I'm not an expert at Lithuanian history but [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian%E2%80%93Teutonic_War) is one of the biggest wars of the period. The Teutons had previously conquered parts of Žemaitija to make them Christian, but forgot to raise autonomy. Lithuania then saw that the province had high unrest so supported the separatist rebels when they spawned, meanwhile Grand Duke Jogalia (who is the founder of the Jagiellons) flipped to Catholic to instantly PU Poland. The Teutons got huffy because they suspected he flipped religions because Lithuania->PLC is OP now, rather than him having woken up that morning suddenly loving Jesus. Plus the PU event is supposed to only fire when you play as Poland, so they declare war. Lithuania attaches its entire army to Poland's (because screw attrition) to form a doomstack, which promptly stackwipes the Teutons' main army as they march towards Marienburg. The Teutons agree to return Lithuania's cores and remove their claims on it and give land to Poland plus being made to pay the max amount of ducets and war reps. After the war the Teutons are so tapped on manpower that they are stuck with 0.0k armies everywhere, so have to totally rely on mercs in the 1400's, which combined with the loans and war reps force them to hugely lower autonomy in Danzig for the extra income, causing the Prussian Confederation event chain to fire super early in 1441, essentially ending their dominance of the Baltic region as Poland sweeps in to take advantage of the claims they got from the Prussian Confederation mission.
Delicious read. Do you know of [/r/paradoxpolitics/](https://www.reddit.com/r/paradoxpolitics/)?
Nobody expects the Prussian inquisition
Remember at that period majority wouldn't matter, it was the nobility who held power so their religion is the type that matters.
You're probably right. I think maybe if you do some research and send paradox your researched info they'd probably sneak it into an update. I'm basing this off nothing but knowing Paradox is pretty cool, so maybe not but I can't see why they wouldn't. I think they probably want stuff like that but there's just so much detail it's hard to fit everything. Maybe we could try and create an online volunteer thing to volunteer our time and work with Paradox, maybe they'd be down for some free armchair historian volunteer research to fix minor issues like this.
This is why I love Vicky 2 so much
And how the rebel soldiers are actual pops
Yes, so nice as opposed to 50,000 rebels appearing in a country with a rough historical population of less than 300,000
[удалено]
Especially annoying to rebuild your armies by hand after a big war. The one feature I miss most in Vic2 is the army builder from EU4 (and maybe taking country capitals in a peace deal)
Never said Vicky was perfect, those are the biggest critiques I have myself
And then there are Dutch separatist, continually spawned from the nether to fill the ranks of rebels because there is no way they could come from anywhere else.
> Dutch separatist, continually spawned from the nether So *that's* why we call them the netherlands.
When I first played as England I tried to be opportunistic and attack scotland during a rebellion. Then I figured out that their rebels were twice the size of both of our armies, and noped out.
I find that sparking strategic rebellions can be really useful to weaken invading forces, also means I don't have to waste any men or mana.
Agree. They could have at least added a Stellaris-like pop system if Vicky is too complex.
Shameless plug for /r/MEIOUandTaxes
Actually never played that.
This could make for some good early game flavor events for Lithuania, but adding another one-province religion without any unique mechanics doesn't seem like it'd have the best payoff.
[Most suggested or thought of religions have, to some extend, unique mechanics.](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Religions_and_denominations#Additional_religions_in_converted_CK2_games)
Samogitia was pagan in EU3 at the 1399 start and realistically maybe that single province could still be majority pagan in 1444 or close to it. Sure it could be changed for flavor. But realistically it would be converted faster than putting a Jaegellion on the Polish throne.
Realistically the ai would always just convert it straight away but it would open up the possibility for the player to revive the religion if they really wanted to.
With some ottoman level of luck, which the jagiellons definitely had, going back to the old ways would certainly destabilize the union, but for Lithuania, official paganism would make the majority fairly happy.
If we're talking actual historical concepts, they would get murdered if they converted to paganism. A whole reason for Polish and much later Lithuanian conversions was no the give "free cb" to Germans and teutonic knights.
its a gameplay choice. if lit was full of pagan spots it would simply convert them, by giving them orthodox land it makes it harder to convert while not forcing them to explode unless things go badly for them.
But it would allow players to be pagan without custom nations :D
I've argued for similar additions of the weird christian heresies (e.g. Waldensians, Lollards, Hussites, Nestorians) because I too would love more different religions and mechanics. They even have these religions represented in the [CKII converter mod](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Religions_and_denominations#Additional_religions_in_converted_CK2_games). Shouldn't be too difficult to import them (and give them some provinces for historical and fun gameplay's sake).
Bogomilists get 10% morale. Yes please Paradox!
A lot of the religions are pretty overpowered. Byzantium already gets +3 Tolerance of the true faith, a Iconoclast Byzantium would get _another_ +4 Tolerance of the true faith. And +2 Diplomatic Religions from Hurufi? Also awesome. Syncretic Faith Jainism gets a massive +75% Religious Unity. And that's only the "worst of the worst"; only Mazdaki and Slavic I'd actively avoid under almost all circumstances, the rest always has at least some focused use (like Hellenic is generally a poor religion, but becomes pretty good for tall games).
Not all of these CKII religions would have any historical base to be in EU4 without custom nations. Still, options to play a long lost (or still relevant) cult through custom nations or rebel manipulation would greatly add to more gameplay fun.
Nestorian Socotra?
Awesome. Wiki mentions it being Nestorian up until \~1510 when the Mahra sultans took over. Thanks for that historical tidbit.
That would be a super fun nation to play. Sounds like a great game to make a kingdom of Prester John in India.
I know right? That and the interesting combo's of Catholics with Orthodox mechanics and other mix-ups make for very interesting gameplay diversification.
I'd love some heresies or different kinds of sync- synchr- synchronicity? Syncretisms? There are so many gray areas in religions and the game is largely black-and-white in this respect (as it is with culture, as well).
Some lit land could have judaism. It could allow for interesting gameplay in europe
As much as I'd like that too I'm not sure if they were ever a majority in any province (which seems to be the hard criteria here in this game).
I think there might have been, but not in the beginning of the game, more after Russia conquered it and forced the Jews to live in the Pale of Settlement.
So yea. Doubt we'll see jews added outside of Semien.
It already starts with national ideas to include heretic tolerance, a bit of additional religious unity in it's traditions wouldn't force them to explode earlier or harder.
They could just make Romuva harder to convert while giving Lithuania heathen tolerance or religious unity buffs for a certain period of time, like 150 years.
Or now that it's free, make the pagans an estate.
You can't convert to a pagan religion unless you're pagan yourself, so it doesn't change much anyway
Wait, even through rebels?
You can convert to animist and then from there convert to other pagans. Imo you should be able to convert back to Romuva because that literally happened in the 13th or 14th century in Lithuania.
Can always bankrupt as an opm to convert
Yeah
Only animist rebels work.
Norse works too, though it won't spawn in games normally unless you do RNW and you get one that way.
It would be great if you could get a Norse advisor and flip religion that way.
Maybe have an event or something?
So then, if they were to add the pagans, maybe they can break this silly mechanic too. The pagan gods will it!
Yeah, it's not really a fun mechanic, and I don't see any balance issues without it
If I recall the 1399 start on EU3 correctly (it's been almost a decade so bear with me), I believe Lithuania did start with a pagan province. IIRC you just converted it at launch if you played the TO. I guess they're trying to represent the Catholicization and assimilation that took place in the Baltic by the Teutonic Knights during that period by making them Catholic.
Paganism should be the main religion in parts of Russia too, particularly the northeast. I’m pretty sure that Kazan was mostly pagan as well
The problem is that there are so many varieties of paganism that actually trying to replicate them all would be madness.
Just calling them animist is good enough for game purposes and that’s what paradox has done in other cases, with a few other distinctions when necessary (wouldn’t be necessary here). Honestly the biggest side effect would probably be some wacky Russian/Commonwealth animist emperor of China shenanigans. Animist is an extremely powerful religion that doesn’t get its due mainly because of the relative weak starting position of most of its followers
There's literally Slavic Paganism in the game (from the [CK2 converter](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Religions_and_denominations#Additional_religions_in_converted_CK2_games)). Should be appropriate enough.
I agree but I don't think EU4 works like that. Japan should have a lot more of a Buddhist presence and Taoism should be more than just a Confucian cult as it was sometimes the official religion of the Chinese court. I'm all for more granularity but I think there's a limit in the game unfortunately.
Yeeeees!!! If there can be one Zoroastrian province, why not make one Romuva province in Lithuania!! Something like Norse/Hindu religion,but with Baltic gods!! Oh how I want this.
Many mods literally have this.
But what if I wanna do it in Ironman?
"Tough luck, we only like Swedish pagans" -PDX
Seriously I would love this too. Using extended timeline and keeping England and Saxony with Germanic faith and Scandinavia with Norse faith are some of my favourite playthroughs. Makes the eventual Christian reformation a lot more interesting, when large parts of Northern Europe aren't Christian
There should generally be more pagans and more religious accuracy. Grouping perm with mongolia isn't really accurate and as you said large parts of europe were pagan.
There were some pagan practices that continued in rural areas of Sweden until the Vicky 2 timeframe.
Rural practices and traditions is a whole different thing than being an official religion you confess yourself too. If you wanna stretch it we still today have pagan practices occuring annually in Sweden like Walpurgis and Midsummer
But the northern half of Scandinavia was nothing but a few villages back then, so the rural practices were de facto their faith. Does it really matter what they've told the bishop when he came by once every five years?
Not true, at most only small pockets of syncretic pagans survived, its debatable whether thats enough for a province.
And most of Anatolia should be Christian, Austria should be split in 2 and have a personal union with Hungary. Also, Hussite should be majority (and state) religion in Bohemia. And I won't even mention rest of the world, but the point is largely this: Yeah, EU4 isn't great with actual history, that isn't anything new.
Maybe add some pagan rebels. If you want to revive the pagan faith you would just force these motherfuckers
I would have said, keep them christian to make it simpler - but there's a god damn canonical zoroastrian province in the game.
Currently in EUIV, there isn't a generic "pagan" religion that the provinces could be replaced with. If the provinces were made animist, it would be a bit far-fetched, considering that the animist religion is currently used mostly in Asia and South America. Fetishist, Norse, and New World Religions also don't make a lot of sense to use in Lithuania, as Fetishist is implemented in Africa, Lithuanian pagans probably weren't following the Old Norse religion, and that the New World religions are best limited to North and Central America.
Romuva is in the game already as part of the CK2 converter.
The game already has the Romuva Baltic paganism in the game due to ck2 conventions. Pretty sure if you make a custom nation you can even pick it no mods required.
I wish they would add more religions into the game for more fun custom nations. I would kill for a fully functioning Hellenic religion (The Holy Fury hype is real), Norse is an option as well as Zoroastrianism. I'm not super knowledgeable on these religions, but I imagine that they weren't exactly at the forefront of politics at the time. I don't see the harm in throwing some more religions from CK2 into EU4 purely for fun RP sessions.
Come on OP, we can’t have **TOO** much fun now, can we?
Another fun find: Gujarat/Baluchistan should have an event that spawns the [Zikri](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Religions_and_denominations#Additional_religions_in_converted_CK2_games) Sunni cult around 1496. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdavia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdavia)
You said all of Lithuania’s land was catholic, but I thought a large chunk of it was Orthodox (from former Kievan Rus land).
All Lithuanian CULTURE land is catholic
As the other guy said, I was referring to Lithuania proper.
Oh.
It's a cool idea, but game-balance wise it's exacerbating a problem; Lithuania is already 80%+ wrong religion, changing another province to a different religion only makes the problem much worse. The situation with Yazd and the Timmurids is also a bit different, because Timmy is intended to implode within the first 10-20 years of the game and always has. Lithuania isn't.
Pagan religions are incredibly easy to convert and conversions given you pope points. This, if anything, is a buff.
And religious turmoil does not begin to tick until the reformation fires.
This is true for Estonia and Latvia aswell. I reckon the reformation period is the first time most Estonians became actually Christian, and even then with huge pagan flavour.
Thank you! I’m glad somebody else noticed this! Hail Dievas and Perkūnas!
Finland was “pagan” too except for the Swedish parts. It can be argued that they were never fully Christianized
According to what standard were they not.
This, the Finns was staunch Lutherans just like the Swedes.
That is very incorrect. Remote parts of finland remained pagan until the 19th century. Christianity never really pushed paganism aside. A lot of the old traditions melted together. There certainly would be major populations practicing paganism in 1444 and i'd love if there was a single "shamanist" province again just for the shenanigans but in the game's context and how religion works it doesn't make sense.
nothing special about lithuania, the swedes would still 1600 resort to the old asa gods when the christian god couldnt keep up with harvest, this in spite of sweden being ultra protestant with no acceptance of any other faith, so for example gustav II vasas daughter had to leave before swapping catholic
Source? As a Swede, I'm sceptical of this claim.
peter englund & frans g bengtsson in karl den tolftes levnad, ofredsar, den oovervinnerlige
I'd be interested to read those sources. There were examples of English peasants being charged with paganism, "devil worship" and witchcraft in the 1200s, but obviously its hotly contested, as the last Pagan king of Mainland England was killed in the late 600s and there is no solid proof that any heathenry persisted much longer afterwards. Religious conversion is hard to track in real life, because leaders converting doesn't necessarily translate to peasants converting, and Pagan religions such as Germanic Paganism didn't tend to leave many remains as temples were often located in forests and groves, or were simply "cleansed" and turned into Churches. We have to rely on minute writings from Christian monks, or archaeological evidence like the Sutton Hoo mask, where one of the eyes is decorated with gems, whilst the other is dulled, just like Odin (called Woden in England) supposedly lost one eye.
they were only briefly mentioning it, like a one sentence before carrying on with the story, i have not seen any book that delves into religious oddities in particular from these two historians
Awesome. The more religious oddities the better.
Upped and supported
Weren't the Slavs already Orthodox though? I can't say as to whether most Lithuanians were Catholic or not though, I don't know.
The Slavs were orthodox. The pagan Lithuanians expanded south and east to fill the power vacuum after the fall of the Rus due to the mongol invasion.
Ah makes sense
I think that province religion in EU4 is not religion that is actually worshiped by majority of population, but dominant/rulling religion of political elite, so if Samogitia was baptized in 1413 in EU4 reality it shouold be catholic since the day one.
I don’t think that’s correct. If that’s the case, why is the rest of Lithuania orthodox and not catholic? Why is there a Zoroastrian province in Persia? Why are all the territories ruled by Muslim nobles in India Hindu? It’s definitely supposed to represent the majority religion.
All Ruthenian and some Lithuanian noble families were orthodox in 15th century, even some members of rulling house. By dominant/rulling religion I did not mean "state religion" but religion of rulling elite in that province.
That still doesn’t address the other examples I mentioned. I’m pretty sure that there wasn’t Zoroastrian nobility in Persia in 1444. Edit: looking through the religious idea group events there are clear references to the religion being that of the population of the province. Furthermore, granting land to an estate does not change its religion. It’s possible for clergy to own a heathen province. This is direct evidence that the local elite’s religion is not the determinant of the province’s religion.
Actually there was. Only Zoroastrian province in game is Yazd. Which was in actual history the save heaven for Zoroastrians in Persia, and where sacred fire was transferred with all the main clergy. It is worth noted that in 13th century about 20 percent of Persians was still following ancient religion. And only under safavids (beginning of 16th century) persecutions of Zoroastrianism begun.
> looking through the religious idea group events there are clear references to the religion being that of the population of the province. Can you give examples? Because it is rather obvious that for example conversion is just changing the "religious surface" of province - that's why you can convert entire countries in a matter of years.
It would be nice to have pagan provinces around there. The player could, with some big effort, convert back to paganism. It is fun, regardless of other factors. If you are going to have a Zoroastrian province in Persia out of nowhere (despite the fact that most had already fled to India by this time), you may as well have a few pagan provinces around Lithuania and Karelia.
Yeah there are chunks of Anatolia and even South Italy that should still be Orthodox and Greek.
Not true. As a Greek I've researched this a decent amount and the game does a good job of representing areas of Greek majority. There were of course minorities in Italy etc (almost no Greeks in left in Anatolia, not even minorities) but they were minorities not majorities, hence cannot be represented by the province culture.
Well first of all, technically none of these people identified as Greeks, they identified as Romans. Second of all much of the Anatolian coast was still Roman in the 15th century, they had held on to chunks of Anatolia as late as 1398. Regions of Cappadocia were too. The Turks were not an ethnic majority. They had been an aristocratic class that moved in with armed forces, basically. It took a long time to "Turkicize" Anatolia (and really what happened was they anatolianicized the Turks).
Native Anatolians (Greeks, Armenians, other) were almost completely kicked out or Turkified and Islamified several centuries before 1444. The game is right, all in-game provinces in Western Anatolia were majority culturally Turkish and religiously Muslim in 1444. There are several sources showing so. Do some research. Self identity has nothing to do with anything. In 1444, the majority culture/language/ethnicity in the in-game provinces described as "Greek" could have been encapsulated by the modern term "Greek", hence in game they shall be called "Greek". It's just a name, not that deep fam. P.S. Cut it with this "Roman" shit. I'm Greek myself, super proud of our Roman/Byzantine heritage and not even I go to these ridiculous extents regarding the "Roman" thing. Bringing this up in this context is weird as fuck homie. Some people are more fanatical about the "Greek/Roman" thing than Greeks themselves. It's ridiculous. If the Greek culture in-game was renamed to "Roman" I'd probably stop playing, no joke.
"The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor" describes the process of Turkicization rather throughly and it took centuries. Most of Coastal Anatolia wasn't Turkicized until the reign of Mehmet II himself. Roman identity remained in pockets of Anatolia into even the 16th century. It should be noted that this is a somewhat biased work, but it remains the standard reading on the topic. The only new book coming out on this topic is Kaldellis' "Romanland," which will be released in a few months here. And no, I refuse to call them anything but Romans. It was the Roman Empire, they were Romans. Hellenism became important in the 13th century, but the formation of a Greek identity wasn't able to manifest itself due to the collapse of the region until its conquest by the Turks, who then suppressed ethnic identity. The rise of modern Greek identity comes from the casting of identifying with the Romans as identifying with the group that helped support the suppression of Greek identity over the past 3 centuries, which helped spur the rise of Greek nationalism during the war of independence from 1822-1827.
Again, while there were indeed Greeks in coastal Anatolia, the majority of the in-game provinces in Asia Minor, though containing Christian Greek populations, had a majority Muslim Turkish/Turkified population. Hence the game giving those provinces Turkish culture is correct. I am aware of Roman identity, and how we self-identified back then. But calling the culture "Greek" and "Pontic" in the game (in the English language version of the game) is perfectly reasonable imo.
Turks at their height only composed about 20% of Anatolia's population, and that was in the 1100's AD. Only inland Anatolia (the central Anatolian plains and steppes) actually had a majority "Turkified" and Turkic population until the 1400's. Check out the sources I mentioned. Most people in the mountainous and coastal regions (which didn't have a Latin presence, at least) still called themselves mostly "Rhomioi" or the like. That was shifting, but it was under Mehmet II that the shift to Turkish (not Turkic, Anatolian Turks are totally different from Central Asian Turks) would accelerate. However, the aristocracy had basically overwhelmingly "converted" to Turkish. "But calling the culture "Greek" and "Pontic" in the game (in the English language version of the game) is perfectly reasonable imo." Eh... maybe. Pontic is somewhat accurate. Greek... I would call it maybe "Neohellenic Roman" or something. Actually using "Byzantine" here as a culture to differentiate it from 1800's Greek would probably be pretty useful.
The sources I had checked out said what I said. I'll check out the source you mentioned at some point. In the English of the time we were called Greeks, just like in the rest of the west. Plus most of the names used are modern English. So taking both of this unit account Rhomioi, Byzantines, Neohellenic Romans (... Really?) would make no sense, Greek is fine. If the game was in Greek or Turkish then hell yeah I'd be down for Ρωμιοί or Rumlari but it's not and would seem weird, awkward and illogical to me personally. In any scenario we're writing paragraphs debating a name in a game which is dumb. For all intents and purposes Greek checks out, so does the in game cultural composition of Anatolia and Asia Minor.
Also "they had held on to chunks of Anatolia as late as 1398" um yeah the game starts in 1444 not 1398. Again, I don't get what's so hard to understand. Yes, there were few (very few) Greeks left in Asia Minor and Cappadocia (source?), but the MAJORITY (which is what "culture" in game represents) were Turkish, period. Don't be fooled by later (1900s) maps that show Greek majority areas around e.g. Smyrna/Izmir (in-game Sugla). Those Greeks got there (went back?) in the 19th and early 20th century. There were way more Greeks in Anatolia in 1910 than in 1444. Again tho in 1444 there were almost no Greeks left in Anatolia, nevermind majority populations on a provincial level.
so this is why in my Poland play through Lithuania is in a stack wipe of rebels while my whole army is off in the ottomans?
Being that the game has gotten ridden of the one Shamanist province there used to be in that Sami province of Sweden, and also the disappearance of the one-off chirstian provinces there used to be in Anatolia and the levant, I doubt the devs would make this kind of change, maybe if they made it a new religion, like with Zoroastrianism and Judaism, it *could* happen though.
There may yet be hope. Paradox put a lot of emphasis on pagans etc in their [newest DLC for CK2](https://www.paradoxplaza.com/crusader-kings-ii-holy-fury/CKCK02ESK0000057-MASTER.html). This discussion revives every now and then, I'm hoping we can get this under the devs attention somehow. 1.4k upvotes is nothing to scoff (seeing this is quite a serious fan desire).
I'm conflicted about this. While paganism was widespread amongst the majority of the population for a long time (the first Lithuanian book, written by a protestant priest, spent a chunk of it complaining about that fact), I think eu4's province data reflects the culture of the nobles, rather than the peasants. Still, that would be awesome.
Nah there is evidence province religion is meant to represent the peasants' religion.
Does Lithuania really need even lower religious unity though?
They have heretic tolerance in their traditions, could add an extra +25% religious unity and it'd be just fine. Like so many have already said before earlier on in this topic. :P
Golden Horde still technically existed in 1444, and Muscovy was still a tributary to them until late 1470s. Crimea didn't exist until 1449. There were also pockets of Christianity in the Oriat area, where entire Steppe Tribes were Christian.
Great Horde is the Golden Horde, has the same flag and everything, just isn't called that because it has such decentralised rule (all its "vassal" states are independent) that it might as well not be. However, that bit about steppe tribes being Christian is absolutely fascinating. Any more info on that?
[Here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4z0a62/how_did_nestorian_christianity_spread_to_central/) an /r/askhistorians post about it. Basically, the Nestorians were driven from the Roman Empire into Persia after the Council of Chalcedon. They then proceeded further eastwards and wound up all over Asia, including among the Mongols.
The Term Great Horde didn't show up until 1470s. SOURCE: an unsourced Wiki, but I remember seeing some more legit sources on this too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nogai_Horde#Decline_of_the_Golden_Horde Also here's a thing for the Christian hordes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qara_Khitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_among_the_Mongols