Nerfing Free Infidel Revocation, mainly for Muslims?

[zijistark]

If you're a Muslim, Free Infidel Revocation is an extremely powerful law. You also have access to the muslim_invasion CB, which is targeted against any other religion, and subjugates all rulers within a de jure kingdom-tier title (rather than unlands them like the other forms of Invasion can, if enough territory is occupied).

I showed the fruits of how this can be exploitative when I posted an empire/AAR pic in the HIP forums of my rapid unification/conquest of Sicilia, Lombardia, Bourgogne, Carinthia, Croatia, and Bosnia without a single ruler, so much as even baron-tier, in my realm being non-Sunni. I was able to manually revoke every single title post-kingdom-invasion, down to the baronies, and replace all their lords with bright young Sunnis willing to follow my every order.

Note that the Muslims of a different, legit branch of Islam can't be freely revoked (at least I don't think), though, so it's mostly just this case in which it's really despicable.

For non-Muslims, if you can manage to convert to a heresy and beat the faction to lower CA that will arise (which may very well be reasonable if the heresy was already taking root for awhile in the realm), this is also mega-powerful.

Though I don't mind players doing either of these things and exercising their CA, I still see the situation as in need of balance.

Why? Because infidel rulers almost never say, "No" to the "Revoke Title" diplo-action, and if by some chance they do, you can handle them one-by-one in pathetic revolts. From experience, they never say "No" if they were subjugated in a Muslim Invasion (probably due in part to the subjugation opinion modifier).

• What should we do about this? We have the option of making FIR only available at High Crown Authority, but I'm not sure how I like that.
• We can perhaps override the diplo-action accept/decline on_actions for title revocation and at least add a stacking opinion malus-- only when there was no other righteous reason to revoke beyond being an infidel-- to all [remaining] rulers in the realm that are considered infidels to the revoker. This would at least probably make most mass revocations stop going smoothly after the first 3-5 titles hijacked.
• Other ideas? Discussion? Interest in implementation?

[thefinestsieve]

The 2nd option of those listed seems like the best. Even better might be to make sure they pretty quickly launch a proper rebellion. You're going to get the baronies eventually anyway, so you might as well be made to work for it. I do hate overriding vanilla stuff like that, but I haven't looked at it so maybe it wouldn't be too messy.

[zijistark]

Problem is, there's no reason to believe that the liege is necessarily going to revoke all infidels' titles. I mean, an AI liege wouldn't do anything silly abusive like that.

So "proper rebellion" needs to be driven by some other mechanic (in the case of a liege going heretic, perhaps just a revocation-unrelated religious faction to depose him). Should he happen to only have Medium CA and there are a lot of "infidels," they will all quickly join the faction to lower CA (also at higher CA, but they can only reduce it one tier/rebellion and those can't happen more than once every 10 years) and presumably be up in arms nearly as fast as he can start revoking titles. However, this doesn't help for my use-case regarding Muslim realms w/o infidels that suddenly gain a fair bunch whose titles can all be revoked and them unlanded within 7-14 game days of conquest.

Giving a stacking opinion malus with other infidels would at least make it so that they'll all more likely to revolt generally and that the answers will hopefully starting becoming "No" to Revoke Title after the first wave, meaning it's going to at least be labor-intensive and open the liege to weakness if he does such a thing. If he's a heretic, then it would probably solve the issue one way or another (provided there was a proper revolt CB to depose him to somebody of the right religion, which there isn't, but...).

[escalonn]

Isn't it possible to have other vassals join the refused-revocation revolt? I know it is at least when the revocation is tyrannical. Ideally, the moment you tried to revoke one of the infidel titles, every one of them would revolt en masse. Or, at least, would have a high probability of revolting, depending on their opinion of the guy losing the title. If it's possible to mod, this would be nicer than the rapid CA faction joining, since that doesn't even have the desired effect when CA is above medium. Plus, it gives you the option to tolerate the infidel vassals for the time being, or indefinitely, and that's pretty nice if you can't afford to deal with the revolt you should be facing for revoking.

Re. the CA faction: supposing the ruler fired all the revocations before the faction fired... Does that ongoing diplo interaction prevent the faction leader from sending the ultimatum until it's too late for him?

[zijistark]

Well, that requires a vassal to actually refuse the revocation. I've systematically cleansed entire kingdoms down to the last baron without a single "No." [Sidenote: This can maybe be tweaked a bit in defines.lua.]

All infidels suddenly join a fellow infidel (of same religion, I assume) over a single revocation? Seems like a bit of an overreaction to what may just be a singular revoke...

Whether it is actually possible to get them to join the just-started-by-hardcode revolt war cleanly is unknown (such that they resume being vassals properly again when the war is over and such). RoI really fucked this kind of thing up with its revolt titles and their hard-coded magic.

[thefinestsieve]

I definitely agree that we probably shouldn't be having revolts instantly. But I do think watching for a chain of revokes, especially in situations where there are other infidels, indicates an actionable pattern. (One could be nothing, two could be a coincidence, but three is a pattern, etc)

[escalonn]

Why not revolts on the first revoke, at least from vassals that are nearby and don't hate the victim? You’ve beat their liege into the ground; now prepare to beat the vassals into the ground. Sweeping a whole de jure kingdom of wrong-religion vassals should be harder! It should be impossible to sweep your whole realm just by converting at medium CA. Maybe it was just a single revoke... but if I were one of them vassals, I'd definitely see it as an existential threat. ‘Any one of us could be next; we need to fight back before he weakens us even more!’

[zijistark]

If they all join the revolt, you've essentially forced the liege into a situation in which he has pressed the elusive "Revoke All Infidels" button. Of course, since he'll probably still win (otherwise, why would he do it?), the result is just that he now has all these infidels neatly in prison and awaiting righteous revocation.

[zijistark]

I mean, that's a way to make the AI do the abusive thing that players can do all the time. I mostly want to stop players from doing this cheesy shit at such relatively low CA (for a player). I'm also interested in the general issues involved with using FIR on a mixed realm due to heresy. In those cases, selective revokes may be the smartest and also not abusive thing to do, but they could easily trip an arbitrary "dogpile point" where the dogpile itself wouldn't really make a lot of sense.

[Plus, I think I don't want to code the extended CB for such a dogpile revolt (it will involve nasty maintenance and unclean stuff due to a lack of on_invalid support in CBs still), unless it were actually more general than this particular case.]