The most consequential thing about Nicaea may not be the creed at all. In 325 a Roman emperor, only recently the patron rather than the persecutor of the church, summoned bishops from across the empire, moved them at public expense on the imperial post, housed them at his residence, presided at their opening session and then enforced what they decided. Nothing like it had happened before. Bishops had met in regional synods for a century, but no mechanism existed to gather the whole church or to make its decisions stick.
Constantine's motive appears to have been order rather than theology. A church he had just made a partner of the state was tearing itself apart over the teaching of an Alexandrian presbyter, and a divided church was no use to him. He seems to have had little personal investment in the disputed vocabulary and considerable investment in agreement being reached.
The arrangement that resulted, in which the emperor convenes and the bishops define, set the shape of church and state relations in the Christian East for a thousand years and supplied the West with a precedent it spent the Middle Ages arguing about. The council also legislated on ordinary church order in twenty canons, on the reconciliation of those who had lapsed in persecution, on the jurisdiction of the major sees, and on a common rule for calculating Easter, which is the practical matter that reached the most parishes fastest.