"Chance" at Great Prophet

You can only pick a certain set of religious beliefs and once you've picked them you can't access the other ones; the only way to get the benefit of the beliefs you didn't pick is to let someone else spread to your cities, which only gives you the follower beliefs and if you didn't want the founder benefit what were you doing creating a religion to begin with?

You can really only expect to get a certain amount of social policies a game; you will certainly never fill out all of them before someone has reached some sort of victory condition. Mercantilism may be a beautiful thing to have, but that's an entire tree of policies you have to get to get to it. You're going to have to delay other things to get to it in a reasonable time frame, and by "other things" I mean Rationalism which is kind of a big deal.

I could go on.
 
I wonder if people would like it if the chance went both ways. If they said the chance for a great prophet began "around" 200 faith so you had a theoretical chance of getting it early, maybe people wouldn't treat it as a slap in the face if they didn't get it exactly at 200.
 
I must admit: I really hate this mechanic.
Not so much because it is random, but for being more or less the only random thing about Great People in the game.

I already had several games where I waited in vain for my prophet, sometimes losing my desired religion perk, having to delay the Hagia Sophia to prevent the cost increase or - even worse - not being able to found a religion alltogether. The worst incident was a recent MP game where I waited 8 rounds for my prophet, just to lose the last religion slot to an AI at the same turn he finally spawned.And to rub salt in your wounds, you have to pay ALL your faith for the prophet, no matter when he spawns. Yeah, it's really nice to lose all my 275 faith for the prophet that was supposed to cost me 200, punishing me even more by delaying my next one.

Stuff like that drives me nuts. Either make all of the GPs random, or none.
...and, no, tweaking the limit to "around 200" instead of "200+" wouldn't make it any better for me.
 
It wouldn't really change the main complaint, in that of all the important mechanics it is the only one tied entirely to sheer dumb luck. Firaxis has generally been very good at limiting the influence of luck in a game; the major thing is your start, which of course is the one that can be most easily worked around because you're aware of your situation from turn 1. A strategy where you focus heavily on getting a religion can be ruined by crossing the threshold and then waiting another 8 turns and there's nothing you can do about it. Which is like, totally lame dude.
 
I miss the civics in Civ IV when you had to make some trade offs--this for that.

I am not remembering trade-offs per se. It is one of my pet peeves with III, IV, V that policies are all so entirely positive. (I think either III or IV, I forget which, has very minimal penalties associated with some policy choices. Please refresh my memory!) Civ II policy-type choices came with more restrictive side effects than did III or IV!

I miss the matrix approach from SMAC/X. After the first few “policies”, each new option had stronger benefits, and more severe penalties! It could be a real balancing act. Plus the AI civs really cared about your policy choices, pretty early in the game too.
 
Back to the topic of the thread , I really HATE randomness in general in strategy games and this first prophet thingy is probably the worst thing, its already quite hard to get a religion working on immordeity even with a religion oriented civ.
 
I really hate this too. It's very strange that you can predict down to the turn when a building or unit will finish, when a social policy will pop, when you will finish a tech, when you will pop a great person, etc. But the one thing you really need to race for to make Piety worthwhile or use the Byzantine UA has this random component.

I just feel like there wasn't a lot of crossover between what religion was supposed to accomplish in G&K versus how it now functions in BNW, as part of a tree that is maybe supposed to compete with Tradition and Liberty.
 
Technically things are less random now because you can get a GP guaranteed through a wonder and social policy. It's hardly worth it, though.
 
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