I dunno, when I think about religion, I think about how it's brought people together and tore people apart. People of the same religion flock together, and sometimes they take their frustrations out on people with a different religion. And then people within that religion feel animosity towards others in the same religion because of opposing views. I saw a Catholic priest debate a republican author on CNN tonight because the Priest thought peace and reducing poverty were more Catholic than war and banning abortion.
When I think of religion, I think of it as evolving as much as civilization itself, with the two cross pollinating along the way. Christianity starts with a few disciples in the Roman Empire and eventually spreads all the way to the Emperor, and beyond to the Barbarians in the North. The Roman Empire collapses, but Christianity lives on, and it is the most reliable delimiter when trying to determine Europe's borders. Eventually feudal states emerge in Europe, and they are all Christian, and by the time of Reformation many of them have embraced their own state-version of Christianity, and yet still have subtle ties to the Pope. Colonialism occurs, and Christianity comes with it. And all over the world today, you have Christians in nearly every country, and yet share a common seed. The theme here is how religion transcends the state sometimes, and sometimes religion and the state interact -- these "memes" piggy back on one another.
Another theme in religion is how it can change and diverge. From the dawn of Christianity you can show how the Roman Emperor embraced it and added a few laws of his own. You can look at the debate between Augustine and Pelagius and the Donatists -- not a trivial debate -- and you can even show how Augustine won and the others were pronounced heretics or were killed. And while Mohammed interacted with Christians himself, he did not embrace Jesus as a messiah but as a prophet. All while Christian prophets amended the new testament with their own ideas. You even had the book of Nicodemus which details how Jesus went down into hell and faught with Satan, which was later retracted and "out of print". You can say that Communism was inspired by Christianity, and in a sense is a religion with its own mythology and value system. The theme of religion becomes interpretation, as well as amendment, and inspiration. Christianity is full of ideas that mutate, cross-breed, and die.
And you can focus on how sometimes the state and the church were at war. If anything, this is a prominant theme through the middle ages. Leaders are held hostage by the Pope, metaphorically speaking, and have no choice but to listen to his orders. Finally, when the leaders are powerful and intelligent enough, and the church has been exposed as corrupt, the leaders can usurp the pope for power and form their own state religions. All while in other places in the world, religion is not institutionalized, and thus there can be no fight between Church and State. Religion remains a few guidelines for life.
But you can't have a war between religion and state if they're controlled by the same person. You'd need someone to control France and another person to control The Pope. And determining who gets to be the pope isn't even a system worth modelling because it would be so ridiculous.
You can't talk about how religions interact with each other, that's for sure. That's well beyond what Civ is capable of. The best you could do is walk through these hard-wired steps of how religion evolved in some kind of tech tree, and that's not interaction. Even if religion evolved in a tech-tree vacuum, the hard-wired approach means some religions would end up being dead ends, only a handful of religions would continue to change.
And forget about religions spreading beyond states. Even if you assume the most ridiculous -- that every nation gets to invent their own religion -- what happens when they overtake another state's religion? Why would that state say "I guess I'm going to spread someone else's religion so I can help them win"? Why would that state stick with that religion at all, if there's the potential to split, evolve, even invent a new religion or secularize?
When I think of these historical effects of religion, I think of a model complex enough to be a mod on top of Civ. The AI plays as States, and you play as a Religion. Sounds kind of fun, actually. But not feasible without a lot of development, and a lot of fundamental changes in the game.
But rhialto, don't let my negativity about the above issues reflect what I think about your idea. I think your model is admirable in that it's probably the most manageable and sane representation I've heard of. And if they absolutely had to put religion into Civ 4 that wasn't a huge complex mod, I would hope that it would be your model.
But what we're left with is a model that does none of the above things. The most important historical effect a religion has, in your model, is determining what you can or can't build. Sure Japan never built Michaelangelo's chapel ... but if you were to read a book about religion and history, the importance of that revelation wouldn't even make it into the footnotes.
It's just not worth it to me. I feel like we have a choice between a simplified model of religion with a few effects on building, a huge model of religion that isn't even feasible, or something else. Are we going to put a model in the game that has none of the really interesting aspects of religion, just so we can feel better about putting "Religion" on the back of the box? Or are we going to pursue other features that can feasibly go beyond simple labels, with meaningful implications for gameplay and immersiveness?
