Zeal!

[GhavGrim]

How do I increase zeal in my provinces?

Hi, long time listener, first time poster. I've trawled the archives for a while but haven't found a search function to aid me. Perhaps someone can direct me to the relevant thread? The topic has surely been covered.

The presence of religious preachers increases zeal. Is this a bonus of a set amount or a gradual increase over time? Likewise what kind of bonus do religious buildings give?

Is there any other way of increasing zeal? I ask because despite having several preachers in each province with religious buildings the zeal factor is surprisingly and stubbornly low, below 20%.

Are there any benefits to having particularly high or low zeal? Most events i've seen tend to reduce it and half the religious perks are detrimental, which would suggest low zeal is desirable. So why the whole religious tech tree? Surely this can't be just to increase loyalty, which is far easier to raise by cheaper means? (like peasants being paid to swagger threateningly through your provinces)

Hmm. Starting to look like a zealous rant...
Synopsis: What do you know about zeal?

[NodachiSam]

Inquistors are supposed to work if you are catholic. Having zealous rulers helps. I've been wondering myself. I have a game where I can barely use grandinquisitors because the entirety of Europe is becomming somewhat secular, lol. I had an a grand and regular inquisitor on crete for a decade trying to increase the zeal but it stayed at zero. I can't quite figure it out.

I'm not sure if normal preaches increase zeal. They and religious buildings should but they don't seem to help a whole lot sometimes. Also, if a large percentage of the population is of different religions like 50%, zeal can't get too high either. The pope's provinces are always zealous.

[Del Arroyo]

Piety of King is BIG factor. Kings with plenty of piety (usually from Pious Factions, such as Castilian Spain or Aragon), get 70-90% zeal in provinces with churches. Kings with little to NO piety (such as pretty much any Danish king) will get 5-25% if they're lucky.

Piety of Governors is ALSO a big factor.

Also, the traditional leanings of the people in the particular region or province you're looking at is very important. If you are Catholic, for instance, and take over North Africa, Egypt and the Middle East, you'll typically see content 100% Roman Catholic provinces with 0% zeal, regardless of any and all other factors.

..

Anyway, that's just what I've observed. Usually zeal is good, but if you don't have any, erm, "religiously appropriate" governors available when you conquer a new province, then sky-high zeal can sometimes be a pain in the ass. Of course then you just revert to the universal fix of really big garrisons.

DA

[NodachiSam]

Thanks for the info Del Arroyo

[EatYerGreens]

GhavGrim,

The Forum Search function may become available to you when you cease to be a junior member. Keep posting question or replies, it won't take long. The Edit own post facility also comes online once you're a member, if you can't see that button under your posts yet.


Religious buildings will increase the proportion of population following the faith of your faction but zeal is something totally else. Treat your priests and bishops as 'portable' churches, who do the same job but can also gather information on foreign lands for you. Once you've built a church, there's little need to keep a priest in that territory as well, so send them out of home territories and get more value out of them.

I find most of the steppe provinces are a good place to send a bunch of them to since these start off 100% pagan and one can race the Muslim/Orthodox factions to convert the biggest proportion of them, so that if they get to invade these places first, religious insurrection may ensue and slow them down.

If you're a Catholic faction and capture a predominantly Mulim province, building a church will do the best job of realigning faith and this reduces the risk of rebellions based on religious differences on your turf and counteracts other faction's preachers. Churches/Mosques also gradually 'leak' faith into neighbouring provinces, so with a long-term military stand-off in place, you can send a gradual wave of conversion ahead of yourself, to some extent, by building one at the border province while you summon the military means to invade. A province which is strategically useful because it borders several other provinces is a good place to construct one to make the most of this leakage effect.

Having said all that, the previous replies show there is not a great correlation between faith and zeal. Inquisitors are supposed to whip up zeal in Catholic regions but, as observed, not always so. Perhaps a team of four or five of them together may have a compound effect. Just watch they don't go crazy and start burning the general population!

I've seen at least one post here advising to lay a trail of Inqies along the route you plan for your crusade and if this is another faction's lands, maybe you don't need to worry so much about the burnings.

What does zeal do?

It affects the initial size of crusade armies at the time they are launched, so you want high zeal where you build your chapter house. The zeal in provinces it subsequently moves through affects the rate at which deserters leave the crusade stack. High zeal means low drop-out rate.

It may also affect the number of men from your regular forces who get sucked into the crusade and from other nation's armies as it passes through their lands. I prefer to believe that this effect is down to the piety rating of individual unit leaders but it's difficult to tell and I could be wrong.

If 25% zeal means you stand to draw in 25% of all troops garrisoned in that province as it passes through, then that's pretty respectable. Too high and you'll find yourself with depleted forces and much unit merging/retraining to do. Pumping up zeal in another faction's lands means you can drain their big border armies, beef up your crusade, whallop the target province and keep the troops afterwards.

[dgfred]

Thanks for the tips EYG , good stuff to know.

[antisocialmunky]

Lots of crusades raise zeal.

[yesdachi]

It has been my experience that zeal will lower if your Inquisitors are left in a province without a target for too long. The % of people worshiping will go up but because the people live in fear of being torched they will not be as zealous. In my current Spanish campaign I left one in a French province mostly because I kept forgetting about him but later because I wanted to see what would happen. Zeal there was in the single digits while all around it were in the 30's. My Inquisitor kept torching the people every other turn or so and had 4* by the time I moved him. I don’t know for sure if random burnings build up *'s but I didn’t use him for anything else and I don’t think he would have started out like that.

Anyway, the only real use I have found for zeal is crusades. High zeal = more troops join, low zeal = deserters from the crusade.

And a zealous king definitely affects the zeal of the people.