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Fervour Inversion - Winning Holy Wars Increases Fervor

Winning Holy Wars increases your faiths fervour, and losing them decreases the defeated faiths fervour.

Inverts how the game distributes fervour by rewarding victory and punishing defeat. Successful religions will remain unified and cohesive, while defeated faiths will be overcome by doubt and heterodoxy. Make medieval faith justified by combat again, proven true in war, and exposed bereft of God's grace in defeat.

Vanilla currently punishes faiths for being successful in Holy Wars and rewards them for losing. It's very counter-intuitive and at best a gamey and artificial way to stifle snowballing. It's responsible for the almost universal result in present playthroughs of Catholicism being at minimum fervour and overcome by heresies because it is successful in religious wars. This mod restores the intuitive consequences of religious conflict by inverting the fervour distribution in Holy Wars from vanilla, and adding a fervour risk/reward to losing Holy Wars you and the AI declare.

An anticipated balance effect is less heresy in Europe which may now under trigger and need a boost. My Fervour Midpoint Rebalance mod addresses this with several heresy tweaks, heresy scaling to faith size, and new religious overflow mechanic, that complements Fervour Inversion.

Fervour Inversion also includes a fix to the problem of crusade realms losing to cycling peasant populist wars within months of winning a crusade. The problem is that no pacification bonus is given to counties on winning a crusade, and the foreign culture and false religion county opinion modifiers are so large they auto-spark revolts.

Fervour Inversion's fix is to apply a "Locals Pacified" county opinion modifier of +50 for 25 years on victory in a crusade, matching the v1.2.1 "Locals Pacified" county opinion modifier gained on crushing a peasant or populist revolt. This is enough to counteract the foreign culture and false religion modifiers and prevent the first peasant revolt from occurring, and cycling after that. It represents the super generational pacification that occurs on the special conquest of a crusade and the early fervour of a vindicating victory of the faith and people. It will protect the new crusade realm from internal peasant threats during its infant stage and stop crusade realms flipping and succumbing to the conquered straight after victory.

Chinese localisation added thanks to Juijote.

Highly Recommended Complementary Mods

Fervour will tend towards a midpoint of 50%. Fervour will decay when above 50%, and will gain when below 50%. Gives fervour freedom of movement from starting and returning to a mid-point, will not get stuck at minimum or maximum and do nothing. Less fervour snowballing, less fervour collapse, less implausible stickiness at 100% fervour for small faiths, and less inexplicable stickiness at 25% for large faiths. Highly complementary with Fervour Inversion mod and Less Sinful Priest Scandals.


Fixes the other major cause of fervour loss to large religions by increasing the cooldown timer and trait requirements needed to trigger the sinful priest scandal event. It will no longer overtrigger fervour loss merely because large religions have lots of priests.


Extends the benefits of pacification to religion and culture conversion as a defeated people look to new gods and masters. Chancellors and Court Chaplins now convert post-crusade counties with triple their base skill.


See Also
My Collection of CK3 Fixes, Features, & Reworks