User Guide

52
give your forces a chance to reach their maxi-
mum possible morale levels and finish regain-
ing any missing strength.
You will receive an alert at the top of the
screen to remind you that you are fighting at
below optimum maintenance levels if your
country becomes involved in a war. Clicking
on the alert will automatically open the Do-
mestic Interface to this page, allowing you to
adjust the maintenance levels to a desired level.
Remember that increasing maintenance only
increases your units' maximum morale level
and that it will still take some time for your
forces build up the additional morale.
Domestic Religion
The subject of Religion is arguably one of the
most potentially explosive ones in the history
of our species. Countless wars have been fought
over religious differences or misunderstandings
during the ages, with no small number of them
occurring during the very eras covered in Eu-
ropa Universalis III. To omit religion from the
game entirely would introduce a fundamental
flaw in the design, and yet to include it also
risks the unintentional
misrepresentation or triv-
ialization of the beliefs of
our customers.
We decided that the
importance of religion
in this era is too great a
factor to ignore, so it is
included as an element
of the game. While there
have been hundreds of
different belief systems
throughout history, the
practical limitations are
too great to represent
them all. We have there-
fore incorporated a very
simplified version of re-
ligion that inherently re-
quires a high degree of
generalisation and the
omission of many well-recognized world reli-
gions. We wish to assure you that this is done
purely in the interests of game play and that we
intend no disrespect to any creed or culture.
World Religions
Europa Universalis III includes four fundamen-
tal religious groups that had extremely large fol-
lowings and concentrations of during this era:
“Christian”, “Muslim”, “Eastern Religions”, and
“Paganism”. We have, admittedly, approached
this from a decidedly Eurocentric viewpoint
since European nations are the predominant
focus of the game. Each of these major groups
is then subdivided into two or more religious
“subtypes”, and each of these has its own unique
characteristics that affect play. Not all of the
religious subtypes will be enabled when you
begin a game in 1453, since some of them did
not come into existence until later in the peri-
od. The complete list of religious subtypes and
their effects may be found in Appendix E.
Realm Religion
Each country has a specific religious subtype
that it recognises as the
“official” religion of the
realm. The nation will
also be aware of the dis-
tinction between any
other subtypes that exist
within the same major
religious group; but will
treat all other major reli-
gions’ subtypes as being
indistinguishable from
one another. Let’s provide
a specific example:
The adjacent screen
shot is taken from a game
we were playing as France
and our official realm re-
ligion is Catholicism. As a
subtype of the Christian
religious group, a Catho-
lic France is able to dis-