Are the religions useless?

Tokira

Warlord
Joined
Dec 31, 2010
Messages
163
Pardon me if I'm wrong here but having played one game with the expansion, I haven't really found any specific reason why you should focus your empire in building faith and trying to create the best religion possible. Sure, the beliefs are somewhat useful, you can get bonus diplomatic points from another civs who have adopted your religion and you get some benefits with the city states if they share your religion, at least if you're the founder.

However, these all seem pretty minor effects to me. There isn't a way to win a religious victory, which is a huge minus to me. It also seems rather meaningless if some city from another nation adapts your religion as their main religion. You can't see what they're doing like in Civ 4. You can't annex them or puppet them as if they were in awe of your religious superiority (at least as far as I know). It simply seems to make no difference whether your religion is strong or not. Has anybody else thought about this?

Now don't get me wrong. I actually like the religions and I like spreading mine even if it makes little difference. It adds more immersion to the game as I can imagine religious wars, which don't otherwise really exist as a mechanic. However, I do feel that the developers could have done something more with this system.

Ps. Sorry if the thread already existed. I tried to search and only found Civ4 threads.
 
if there is a religious victory then religion would be more powerful, but religious victory not an option... AI's do have the "we adopt your religion in most our cities" thing but if they come kneel before you it's more fun
 
Is there a victory option RELIGION DOMINATION.

I don't think so, you could mod it.

But only because faith is a new game element, it does not have to be main element i think. I like the way it makes the world more dynamic and can support you to your final destination -> VICTORY...no matter how:)
 
Religion isn't supposed to singlehandedly win you the game, it's another tool to use, and it's pretty versatile since you can get all sorts of bonuses, depending on what you pick. Definitely not useless.
 
Religion isn't supposed to singlehandedly win you the game, it's another tool to use, and it's pretty versatile since you can get all sorts of bonuses, depending on what you pick. Definitely not useless.

Agree with this statement....play more than one game and see how the diff options help you :)
 
Highly versatile, lots of CHOICES (something sorely lacking is virtually all games these days), I'm enjoying it.
 
Lots of happiness and sciency boosts to be made from Religion's options, actually. I'm currently liking the one that gives you additional hammers for every X amt of followers in your cities.
 
OP u have to be jokeing right? apart from the amount from the huge happyness/gold/culture u can rake in, u can also buy units wit faith letting u keep building that wonder while defnding from a early attack. i recomend playing wit celts amd trying it out. altho like they said above, its a tool to leverage ur win with
 
Just finished my first game, playing the Celts on Emperor. Tried to focus as much on religion as possible, not really knowing where it would go. I ended up winning a science victory, and I would say it gave me a massive advantage.

I spread Christianity throughout the whole continent as I had such a huge head start. Picked the founder belief of 2g per city. Spread it to any island city states I came across. Incan Buddhism tried to take hold but was crushed into the corner by the strength of all the christian cities dotting the landscape.

Using the holy warriors enhancement and an army half paid for in faith I dispatched two of my close neighbours by around 1000AD

Sharing a religion helped me stay friendly with my one surviving rival on the continent, and earned me huge money. Also certain city states were pretty much perma-friendly as I kept fulfilling their faith based quests.

Then late game as I had switched to a science victory focus, I was buying great engineers with faith which let me rush the hubble telescope and great firewall.

Interested now to play a game without as much of a focus and see the other side of the coin...how it affects your plans
 
It isn't completely useless, but somewhat agree with OP. Other than religious civs it needs quite investment to found own religion.
I find just wait for other religions come in, and enjoy somewhat not-so-powerful bonuses is better in this case.
 
So far I quite like the role of religion. It can either be a key component to your broader strategy, or a nice bonus plus flavor you get for little effort, but it isn't all-consuming. Getting Daoism early as Ethiopia gave me the chance to spread it far and wide before most religions were established. I consistently got 1/5 of my culture purely from the bonus I got from World Religion, and I did this with just a little preparation in the beginning of the game. In my current game I'm Muslim China and all my beliefs are centered around getting happiness, so occupying and razing cities doesn't slow my production down any. It's a smaller bonus, but noticeable.
 
I only played one game since the release of the expansion and I started on a continent with the Aztecs, Iroquois and Siam (being Spain myself) and religion didn't add much to my game. All four of us founded our own religion and I found out pretty early on that my neighbors, the Aztecs, didn't appreciate my efforts of spreading my religion into their cities so I gave up trying to share my beliefs with them. All I am using it for now is to slow down the decrease of my influence on city states.

Siam and the Iroquois keep sending in great prophets to get my cities to switch faith, so in actuality, most of my faith goes towards keeping my cities under my faith. It just feels meaningless really. I was hoping for something that would give the early/mid game more dynamic like in civ IV, where it forged alliances with your friends in faith and created disputes with the unfaithful nations.

One game is not much to base an opinion on though and will see going forward if religion really brings something to the game.
 
After playing the Byzantines and Mayans, I'm very impressed with how powerful religion can be. The Byzantines in particular can leverage religion with great effect.

The vanilla civs won't get as much out of it, though.
 
TL;dr but in my game with Byzantine, only putting moderate amount of my resources into religion, I was easily getting 70+ gold per turn and plenty of happiness, culture, and other goodies from faith due to my religion. There are plenty of other ways it can be used too, but that's my example.

So no, used properly, religion is not useless at all.

Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2
 
Well, like I said in the starting post, I agree that there are some uses for it. Thus I don't think that it is useless.

Let me express the thing that bothers me the most with an example:

I was playing as the Byzantines. Ethiopia found Christianity as the first religion in the world and I found the Shinto religion as the second. Shinto began to spread to the cities surrounding me, but Christianity didn't seem to take off at first. First my religion spread to my cities, then to nearby city states and finally to some of the cities that I occupied. Then it started to spread to enemy cities. I was quite thrilled about it and wanted to see what would happen when the nearby Chinese cities would adopt my religion. Once it happened, I was disappointed. The only thing that really happened was that the cities got the torii-gate icons and Wu had the "We happily adopted your religion" thing on the diplomacy window. That was all, at least all that I noticed. What I would have wanted would have been some kind of control. At least I should be able to view the cities like in Civ4.
 
View cities that are outside your control?

That's for espionage to handle.
 
At first I agreed, OP. I will admit a religious victory would be really cool but the way it is now is fine. It adds a lot of depth to whatever strategy you want to delve into, or helps kind of round things out that you are weak on. It really mingles in well with cultural races as well. The problem I had, and I think Op has, is that it really doesn't interact that much with outside sources. Yeah it can spread to other cities but unless you chose beliefs and things that take advantage of that it really doesn't do anything other than a diplo bonus.
 
Problem I see with religions is not effectiveness (some of the bonuses are Very Very powerful - mid to end game) - but your ability to cherry pick the bonuses you want if you don't play a civ with early faith generation bonuses (Celts, Ethiopians, Mayans) if those early faith bonused civs are in the game....

Not only will you have much less faith generating ability - your Pantheon faith cost will increase as more civs pick theirs as well as limiting your options ...

If you play Celts, Ethiopians, Mayans your starting strategy will probably have to include the ability to pick Pantheon & Religion ASAP and seriously focus on the Religion side of things through the game ...

For the other civs - ability to become a player on the religions front depends on rare lucky happenings such as stumbling onto Religious City-States ...
 
I think religion is designed quite quite good. You see, there's a very questionable mechanic of global race. Civ 4 was all about race, in Vanilla Civ 5 only wonder race remains. Now we have additional gameplay to race and it's completely optional, which is fun.

P.S. Why do you name Maya here? They can't generate more faith than any other civ, they just gain science from Shrines. Surely, they could pick 1 additional great prophet later in the game, but there are other civs who have advantage in the same area - either from Wonder, or by finishing Liberty faster.
 
I really would love more victory conditions, Religious/Economic/Population etc. Maybe something like, make your religion dominant in a certain percentage of cities?

In my opinion, religion is a bit boring. The choices are pretty boring, and after you get your second prophet, you don't even have to bother with it any more. I wish there were a lot more chances to gain new belief. If I had any idea how to mod, I'd love to mess around and change a few of these things.
 
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