Europa Universalis IV – Tips on Switching Religion Via Rebels

Switching Religion Via Rebels

Сrеdit gоеs to Marquoz!

First, good choice doing this as Austria. That and Oirat are almost certainly the easiest approaches.

As for conversion, some general hints may help:

• Conquer as many provinces of the correct religion as you possibly can. This will lower the number of rebel conversions you need and give you multiple targets to spawn rebels from (assuming you have multiple missionaries).
• Turn off any forts near rebel stacks.
• Smooth out your borders and spawn rebels as far into your interior as you can. As you noted, you can’t control where they go. But the deeper in your territory they appear, the more likely they are to stay within it.
• Keep spawning more stacks by sending additional unfunded missionaries to provinces of the desired religion that you still control. You can use your armies to take back such provinces as needed.

It’s a pain. I hate that converting via rebels is necessary for some achievements.

Oh, and one other hint. In a campaign where you know you plan to convert via rebels later on (like your Austria one), avoid converting land to your starting religion. You can agree to the demands of religious rebels when they are the strongest in terms of development in your nation, so lower that threshold by keeping as many possible religions around as you can.

Most, but not all zealots have the demand to change the state religion and most of these require that their religion is dominant. The dominant religion is the religion with the highest development in the country. So, as Austria, don’t convert Orthodox, Sunni, Coptic, Shia, or any other religions. Stick them into TCs instead (which you should be doing anyway) and keep them around so that you aren’t a giant monolithic bloc of Catholic.

You lose out on big papal influence that way, but it’s worth it for a conversion run like this one. If you’re 25% Catholic, 25% Orthodox, 10% Shia, 25% Sunni, and 15% Tengri, your Tengri rebels only need to grab >10% of your development to become dominant, which they will achieve at >25% instead of >50%.