Historical Accuracy: Relgions

Lean

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After playing this mod for several months, practicly non-stop, and begining to make senarios, something has been troubling me: The lack of religions. I mean, for a senario creator, it's a nightmare. For a hardcore civ player, it's a nightmare (Atleast, it is to me and my friends). Religious differences make for a more intresting, and more historical game. I mean come on, having a United Christian Europe all buddy buddy 95%of the time when the player is European get's old fast.

Regarding senarios: It's something that makes me twitch just thinking about it. Having Russia and Leon getting the "We care for our brothers and sister's of faith" during a Middle Age senario. Or between the Byzantines and the Papal states in a 1300s senario. So, what I propose, is expanding upon religions. Something like:

1.Zoroastrain
2.Orthodoxy
3.Protestantism
4.Shi'a
5.Shinto
6.Greek Mythology
7.Druidism

And change 'Christianity' to 'Catholicism'. And 'Islam' to 'Sunni'


Perhaps we can use Rapture as a base, that is, the religions are founded by a GP? For example:

Orthodoxy:
Founded by: A Great Prophet in a Catholic city
Shrine: Haigha Sopia: +1 :commerce:, Spreads Orthodoxy

In addition to making the game more challenging, new religions can play crutial parts in Revolutions, allowing for more revolutions per game, thus improving gameplay drasticly, without the need of new technologies! It'll also add the sense of historical accuracy to the game that some, if not many, people strive for. What do you guys think?
 
The 7 religions work well for gameplay, I will not be adding any more to the base game. LoR uses RevDCM as it's core, so you can add more religions easily in an add on; I'm pretty sure Rapture can be pugged in using the WoC system.
 
Yes, there would be. Today's Europe is split religiously, and wars were even fought over the splitting of Christianity. On a regular Earth Map, when the Human player is in Europe, it will most likely be Christian, which means everyone's buddy buddy, which makes the challenge go down. Splitting Christianty will not only make senarios that I, Dragonxander, or anyone else will make, more historical, but will also add to the challenge of the game by not producing all friendly neighbors, and, in edition, it will help move revolutions along, which, if I'm not mistaken, is one of the main aspects of the Unoffical Expansion.
 
Yes, there would be. Today's Europe is split religiously, and wars were even fought over the splitting of Christianity. On a regular Earth Map, when the Human player is in Europe, it will most likely be Christian, which means everyone's buddy buddy, which makes the challenge go down. Splitting Christianty will not only make senarios that I, Dragonxander, or anyone else will make, more historical, but will also add to the challenge of the game by not producing all friendly neighbors, and, in edition, it will help move revolutions along, which, if I'm not mistaken, is one of the main aspects of the Unoffical Expansion.

I understand this, but I can't design LoR around the concept of Huge Map pre made scenarios. Setting the default Religions in LoR above 7 would ruin alot of the religious game play aspects on standard and smaller maps.

Like I said, you can pretty easilly add more religions as an add on using WoC, ask Johnny Smith how to do it, I'm fairly certain it's a simple procedure, just pluggin in some Rapture files into the WoC folder. But more religions can't be done for the main install.
 
I understand this, but I can't design LoR around the concept of Huge Map pre made scenarios. Setting the default Religions in LoR above 7 would ruin alot of the religious game play aspects on standard and smaller maps.

Like I said, you can pretty easilly add more religions as an add on using WoC, ask Johnny Smith how to do it, I'm fairly certain it's a simple procedure, just pluggin in some Rapture files into the WoC folder. But more religions can't be done for the main install.

No no, I understand where you're comming from phungus, that wasn't aimed at you. I forgot the quotes. I'm already looking into a Rapture/LoR crossover (Perhaps LoRapture as a name) and will probibly beginning work soon, if not tonight.

I was mearly pointing out to Jawa that more religions, including a plit on Christianity, could have a very diverse effect on LoR(apture), and that it would add to the concept of revolutions, even on non-Earth maps. I wasn't asking you to do anything about it, like I already said, since I'm working on it.
 
The other thing is that the AI would view all brands of christianity as different religions, this would not just be a few war in europe this would be a lot of wars
 
The shcism addition can help, for instance, I had a game (Huge Archipelago, with snaky continents) in which more than half the civs shared the same continent, & despite having 2 religions in it (hindus & christians), only Christianity prospered. Even so, the relations were more in the "Cautious" field, meaning there wasn't major opposition or partnership. In that case, some schisms could have helped spice up the situation.

About the smaller maps issue, how about making the religious splits as a custom (non-standard) game setting?
 
I completely agree with Lean on this!

I Think LoR Could really benifit from this in a lot of ways, even though it might be difficult. (I know this sounds arrogant, especially coming from a guy who only used map editing to cheat in this noob days, but i can however promise you i've taken my slice of non-stop civ and trying out different mods, so please here me out).


1. Europe as we can probably all agree on is a very big part of any civ game, whether you're playing a world map or not, theres always a Europe of some sort in every game, a cluster of strong civilizations who are constantly in war.
- Now, since world maps have come around pretty much every single one of them have missed out on one major flaw:
Europe isn't Europe
Whether it's world map or other map the Slaughterhouse that is infact Europe, is nonexistant. Why? because apperantly all bordering nations always get the same religions, nevermind the fact that literally hundred of nations throughout time have invented or grabbed a different religion than their neighbour just to get an excuse to go to war with them.

2. Besides the American decleration of independance, name ONE revolution in this world that hasn't been because or through religion. (And no, Hitler doesn't count, he won an election.) Here are a few that have: The entire Middle east. Russia, from Kievan Rus to Tsarist Russia and From Tsarist to Communist, Germany twice, Britain twice, and not to mention all the little minor religions in Europe like Calvinists, Luterians and so on.

3. Erm has it ever occurred to anyone that most great units and wonders are spawned from religious differences?

-The Oracle. Based upon Polytheism, yet often invented by a civ without a religion
- The hagia Sophia, Literally changed Russia from a state ruled government, it is literally written by the russian scouts that when they saw the Hagia Sophia they realized that this was the ultimate religion, it was one of the main reasons why Catholisism went on their orgy of large buildings because they saw the effeciency from the Orthodox. Without The Hagia Sophia, Russia would probably have been Catholics through the influence of the Polish.

These are just two which i can remember, there are plenty of more but i'm not going to go further into them since i do not know exact facts, though i'd be happy to look depper into it if it's of any hope of this.

4. The religions present are based on Civlizations pathetic attempt to seem fair to all cultures.

Judaism.
I have nothing against jews, and i admire jewish culture, but the fact that it's a world religion is laughable to me.
-Jews didn't spread their religion but their culture, if you want to compare it to Civ it would be more like your cities lost a % of their previous culture and it instead turned Jewish.
- The Jews have paid direly throughout history because they didn't bow under to oppression from greedy kings who wanted a part of their wealth, thus making it a cash cow with holy city is just plain silly.

Taoism.
Again i don't want to make this seem like it's my view of a religion here that matters, but for a religion to be a world religion you have to look at the facts:
Who were Taoists? - Chinese and Mongolians
Was there ever any war due to TAosism? - No.
Did the chinese state control the religion like the Pope for example controlled catholicism and used it as a tool for wealth and power? - no.
Would be fair to say Taoism isn't a religion but a philosophy and perhaps more a civics issue than anything else? - Give me one good reason as to why not.

Maybe adding new religions isn't the way to go, but changing the old ones would make this game much realistic, IMO.

I have literally read so much on this forum regarding this game and i'm looking so much forward to trying it out, it seems to have potential as strong as Rhye's.

I have one question about religion. ARe there differences depending on which religion you pick? Does islam have a stronger conversion power since it's new and fresh, or is it still the same old, the entire world is buddist and the ocean countries are locked out iwth their own religion?
 
... and a bump. Whilst I mostly agree with Lean's observations, if phungus420&co. wish to "keep things simple", I would at the very least like to see religions founded by the prophet at the point one creates the shrine and you can found any religion you have the techs for. So in that sense, they would now work more like corporations and stop the same tiny handful of civs (say on the Earth Map with 20+ civs) holding holy cities because they start with Mysticism.

As for Lean's proposed expansion of religion, I'm all for it and if anything would like to see it within core LoR as like Lean says, it adds further opportunity for revolutions and holy wars.

Talking of generalities, there are monotheisms (Judaism, Chrisianity, Islam), polytheisms (Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto) and "non-theisms" (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism (yes again)). Within gameplay and real-life, the former tend to exclude everything else (examples being European and Middle East countries), yet the other two could all co-exist quite happily alongside each other (East Asia, particularly China... with it's fusion of Confucianism-Taoism-Buddhism).

Which then takes it to the second point with the polytheism/non-theism group... Such civs, or those in such civs sphere of influence, can have multiple state religions (eg: India... Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism).

Lastly, certain religions are derivatives. First there was Judaism, where there was a split of "Jewish-Christianity", which by the time of St. Peter, founded Catholicism. Then there were further splits later on in history...
 
Phungus, would you care to explain in what way seven religions fit the gameplay? I'm not saying it doesn't; I'm just interested to hear a more lengthy answer because I saw this claim many times already without a really argumented backup.
 
It's more an intuitive thing. Play on a Standard or Small map, and the diplomatic relations, tensions, friendships, etc. which form and effect the game are balanced around 7 religions. To be honest on a tiny map it would be better with 4 or 5, and duel 3. On a large map it would probably be best to have 9 or 10 religions, and I'd wager an even dozen or a bakers dozen on a huge. That's just how the game seems to be balanced. What I'd really like would be to be able to set the number of religions that spawn in a game scale with mapsize. But I can't (of course if someone created such a modcomp I'd merge it in a second), so I'm keeping 7 religions as that's the way Civ IV vanilla and BtS are set up, and it's the most balanced on a standard sized map. Of course my sense of balance is a matter of opinion, but since it's inline with how firaxis balanced things I think it's a safe position to take.
 
Oh, that makes sense.

And it would actually be quite easy to do what you said. You could create a new tag for CvWorldInfo, called iMaxReligion, and, when the game wants to found a religion, you run a check to see if the number of religion already founded is inferior or not to the max number of religions allowed; if it isn't inferior, then you don't allow the religion to be founded.

You'd have to tweak some things like the display in techs: "First to discover founds X"; make it not appear if no religion is ever foundable (should be easy enough... I think there's a ::canFound(religion) function somewhere).
 
Maybe Afforess will make that scaling religion modcomp he posted about wanting.

Another thing that irks me is the religion spread rate. Theyre all set to 100. Keeping the later 4 religions at bay. But with choose religions it makes it difficult to change that. Is there away to make a them different spread rates. Maybe making the technology that founds it give that religion a certain spread rate.
 
Oh, that makes sense.

And it would actually be quite easy to do what you said. You could create a new tag for CvWorldInfo, called iMaxReligion, and, when the game wants to found a religion, you run a check to see if the number of religion already founded is inferior or not to the max number of religions allowed; if it isn't inferior, then you don't allow the religion to be founded.

You'd have to tweak some things like the display in techs: "First to discover founds X"; make it not appear if no religion is ever foundable (should be easy enough... I think there's a ::canFound(religion) function somewhere).

I tried something like this, but I'm just not good enough at C++ to get it to work. I got my changes to compile, but it blocked everyone from founding religions, and seemed to ignore my input in the XML.

I would be very appreciative if you could get this to work, but I just don't have the experience to get it to work...
 
You would have to create a tag in CvWorldInfo (CvInfos.cpp & .h); let's call it iMaxReligions. You know how to create an integer tag; it's just that.

Then you'd have to go into CvTeam.cpp, in ::setHasTech(...); here you'd have to find the part in the first "if (bFirst)". There, you should see a loop going through all entries of ReligionInfos. Before that loop, you should init a variable, let's call it iCounter; then you do a loop through all religions (like the one below, but not IN the one below) and you check GC.getGameINLINE().isReligionFounded((ReligionTypes)iI); if yes, you increase iCounter by one. Then you compare iCounter to the iMaxReligions tag of the WorldInfo; if iCounter is inferior, let the game run the base loop.

Not tested but should work...
 
You would have to create a tag in CvWorldInfo (CvInfos.cpp & .h); let's call it iMaxReligions. You know how to create an integer tag; it's just that.

Then you'd have to go into CvTeam.cpp, in ::setHasTech(...); here you'd have to find the part in the first "if (bFirst)". There, you should see a loop going through all entries of ReligionInfos. Before that loop, you should init a variable, let's call it iCounter; then you do a loop through all religions (like the one below, but not IN the one below) and you check GC.getGameINLINE().isReligionFounded((ReligionTypes)iI); if yes, you increase iCounter by one. Then you compare iCounter to the iMaxReligions tag of the WorldInfo; if iCounter is inferior, let the game run the base loop.

I made the integer tag fine. It's where to have it loop that I struggled with. I was looking in CvPlayer...

Okay, so should this work?
Code:
            int iCounter = 0;
            for (iI = 0; iI < GC.getNumReligionInfos(); iI++)
            {
                if (GC.getGameINLINE().isReligionFounded((ReligionTypes)iI))
                {
                    iCounter++;
                }
                
                if (iCounter <= GC.getMaxReligions)
            if (bFirst)
 
Code:
            int iCounter = 0;
            for (iI = 0; iI < GC.getNumReligionInfos(); iI++)
            {
                if (GC.getGameINLINE().isReligionFounded((ReligionTypes)iI))
                {
                    iCounter++;
                }
             [b]}[/b]
                
            if (iCounter <= GC.getMaxReligions[b]()[/b])
            if (bFirst)
I bolded the changes (minor); it should work :)
 
Code:
            int iCounter = 0;
            for (iI = 0; iI < GC.getNumReligionInfos(); iI++)
            {
                if (GC.getGameINLINE().isReligionFounded((ReligionTypes)iI))
                {
                    iCounter++;
                }
             [B]}[/B]
                
            if (iCounter <= GC.getMaxReligions[B]()[/B])
            if (bFirst)
I bolded the changes (minor); it should work :)

Okay. I'll test it out and see how it goes.
 
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