Guild/Temple Estates

[Adriddae]

I can see lots of potential abuses in this, especially for money-funneling/banking purposes. Religions are not intended to be money-makers, or to be able to generate large cash flows without significant donations from the nobility.

Granting your estate to the church isn't a significant donation?

[Silverhawk]

Hmm, to keep money in your pocket where it will not be taxed or place it in a temple where it can be taxed...... I really see the positive use of religius banking everyone talks about.

Or are you talking about religius banks in the way that elder priests are always on the move with large amounts of gold to supply every temple with enough gold to stay up. One could say this moving around of gold is a form of banking, but I hardly see it as proper hoarding of gold.

I concider the idea of granting estates of religions/guilds a brilliant oppertunity. Religions can have the oppertunity to be more or less free aggain, unless you all enjoy bland state sponsored "just ad water and it's ready to eat" faiths. Why don't we increase the taxing of religions to the normal levels. At low amounts of gold present in a temple it will balance the income and the outflow, and at very large, so called stockpiles, of gold the taxes will kick in much harder and drain away some of the gold.

I see a good oppertunity here, that as all ideas, need some proper thoughts and a lot of balancing.

[Indirik]

By "significant donations" I mean "significant manual gold deposits in temples". Automated donations/funding is something that Tom has stated in the past that he does not want. Religion funding is not supposed to be "set it and forget it".

I personally like this idea, with the additions that Psych has. We could probably do something with this that could make it work.  But it does require a change to the "manual funding" stance that Tom has taken regarding religions. You'll need to convince him to change that policy before we can even begin considering this as a possibility.

[Huntsmaster]

someone grabs a region by whatever means. gives everything to church then gets banned... no one else will be able to get the stuff back from church... short of jihad against that church.

thing about church is.. instead of region lord, they have the religion equivalent... bishoprics, etc.. dotted all over the place..

Since the largest estate you can make is 50%, this is a non-issue. I think (taking other's suggestions), you could have the largest temple take up a 50% estate and tailor down from there. "Tax" for the temple could be based on follower % in the realm.

Priests could also be tied into this system- choose a "home temple" and gain a portion of that tax as your income, rather than choosing a traditional estate. Give religious hierarchy the option to boot that priest from his temple, rather than the region lord as is done now.

[Psyche]

I was just thinking along the same lines before reading the last comment.  To avoid direct deposits into temples, make it so elder or priest has to sponsor the estate/temple.  The priest wouldn't have to be an elder, but it has to be one of the two- at least somebody with strong ties to the church.

To counter using characters as temporary elders or priests to get temples and then demote or change class, have a mechanism like religions collapsing due to lack of elders/priests/temples.  Have it so the church can designate a new caretaker to the estate, so long as the character is not banned from the realm, with maybe 3-5 days/turns?

[Tom]

Rejected on all accounts.

Estates are given to knights, end of story. Now what the knights do with their taxes is theirs to decide, so all it needs to kind-of implement your feature, but without any additional code or all the drawbacks, is to have a knight who donates all his taxes to a guild or religion.

[Bedwyr]

Rejected on all accounts.

Estates are given to knights, end of story. Now what the knights do with their taxes is theirs to decide, so all it needs to kind-of implement your feature, but without any additional code or all the drawbacks, is to have a knight who donates all his taxes to a guild or religion.

(raises the flag again for some form of tithing, something that can be set automatically so you don't have to manually deposit the gold all the time)

[Tom]

(raises the flag again for some form of tithing, something that can be set automatically so you don't have to manually deposit the gold all the time)

Make a rank for them and set the debt accordingly?

[D`Este]

Make a rank for them and set the debt accordingly?

They still have to visit a temple to manually deposit gold.

[De-Legro]

They still have to visit a temple to manually deposit gold.

The important part of Tom's message was this

without any additional code

It has been mentioned several times that Tom has in the past been against any system to Automate donations to religions.

[Shenron]

I'd be in favour of automatic donations. Sure you can say that by the making people have to pay their own imposed "debts" but you'd be wrong. We need to accept people are lazy and try to work with that. Just putting it out there.

[De-Legro]

I'd be in favour of automatic donations. Sure you can say that by the making people have to pay their own imposed "debts" but you'd be wrong. We need to accept people are lazy and try to work with that. Just putting it out there.

The thing is so far as I can tell Tom does accept that people are lazy. He just thinks that religions that contain lazy people shouldn't get a leg up from the game. Religions as designed are only supposed to flourish from interaction and by being so compelling they over come peoples inherent laziness. I'm not sure they achieve that as is, but making things automatic would be a step backwards in this regard.

After all if we accept people are lazy, then we accept they might not be bothered to move their units properly either, so lets just make it so marshals control everyone's movement. You could have a button that lets you "join" the army and after that everything just happens. I actually played a game like this, for all of two days. The majority of players just existed to hit that button and let the military elite actually enjoy that game, then when the army was worn down to much to fight you got to log back in, move to a recruitment zone, recruit a new unit and hit the button again.

[Shenron]

The thing is so far as I can tell Tom does accept that people are lazy. He just thinks that religions that contain lazy people shouldn't get a leg up from the game. Religions as designed are only supposed to flourish from interaction and by being so compelling they over come peoples inherent laziness. I'm not sure they achieve that as is, but making things automatic would be a step backwards in this regard.

After all if we accept people are lazy, then we accept they might not be bothered to move their units properly either, so lets just make it so marshals control everyone's movement. You could have a button that lets you "join" the army and after that everything just happens. I actually played a game like this, for all of two days. The majority of players just existed to hit that button and let the military elite actually enjoy that game, then when the army was worn down to much to fight you got to log back in, move to a recruitment zone, recruit a new unit and hit the button again.

I sort of disagree with your comparison of moving units and religion. The reason I support automation for religion is because I think religion should be the status quo. If you want a successfull religion then obviously this needs rp and dedicated members and the all the rest of the hoo-haa. The problem is that currently we have areas that just don't accept religion at all, this annoys me a lot. Instead of having a mix of no religion, dud religions and good religions; I think we need to narrow it down to dud religions and good religions.

[De-Legro]

I sort of disagree with your comparison of moving units and religion. The reason I support automation for religion is because I think religion should be the status quo. If you want a successfull religion then obviously this needs rp and dedicated members and the all the rest of the hoo-haa. The problem is that currently we have areas that just don't accept religion at all, this annoys me a lot. Instead of having a mix of no religion, dud religions and good religions; I think we need to narrow it down to dud religions and good religions.

My understanding is that in these cases its not that there is no religion, simply that there is no religion of a size and organisation to be worthy of mention. It follows from Toms statement that no noble is atheist, nobles either follow a large established religion which have recognisable temples, or they follow smaller religions that "fly under the radar"

As it stands, it is really not that hard to have a religion of some sort, so if we have large area's with no religion, I would suggest that it is because the nobles have no interest in pursuing a organised religion in the area, no matter how simple we make it.

Something of interest though, The Manifest Path has a few temples which are making enough gold in contributions to pay for themselves, might have to investigate how we are managing that.  But we are managing to maintain 15 temples, and looking to build more and expand some of the ones we have. This is managed from the income provided by the faithful of pretty much two realms, with the majority coming from 1 realm. Anyway with 15 temples the difference between the upkeep and the contributions is a mere 18 gold. Not a huge imposition is it.

[Tom]

There are several reasons why religion debts (or income) is not automatic. It also has to do with the location of temple funds, gold distribution is supposed to be a problem (we don't have online transactions in BM, and way too much gold is already moving around in magical ways) and also to allow people to accumulate debts. Religions are first and foremost a roleplaying instrument, and that means pressuring people into actually paying their debts is a good thing.

I do agree we need to advance them some. If someone opens a feature request to give people a list of religions to join when they create a character, just like they choose a duchy to start in, I would agree to that (though it would be middle priority).