Race for Religion

Race for Religion (Gods & Kings)

Looking for the Brave New World version of this mod? Go here!

Race for Religion is more than just additional beliefs. Experience a new dynamic around religion while still being compatible with other mods, even those that add new religions. Don't get left behind in the Race for Religion!

• Every pantheon belief provides a way to generate faith. Pick one that fits your circumstances and strategy. Using it well will ensure your success in the Race for Religion!
• Once you have a religion your founder belief will spread it to the corners of your empire and beyond! Proselytize and profit at the same time.
• A cornucopia of followers beliefs guarantees that no two games of Race for Religion will unfold the same. No matter your unique style or strategy there is a follower belief that will benefit you! Try to find all the subtle synergies you can!
• Enhancer beliefs will allow your foreign worshipers to contribute to your cause. Become an international religion and nothing will be able to stop you!

Key Mechanical differences:

• Dozens of new beliefs.
• The cost to found a Pantheon does not increase as other players found Pantheons. Founding a Pantheon always costs 10 faith.
• When a religion is enhanced the distance at which it generates pressure is reduced from 10 to 6.

The Steam Workshop entry has screenshots of the beliefs which can also be seen above. If you like the mod and want me to prioritize development of it rate it and favorite it on Steam and post here.

Download Locations:
- The Steam Workshop entry.
- From CivFanatics.

FAQ:
Q: Why did a belief that gives a lump sum of X gold/culture/science/etc (such as Initiation Rites) give me Y gold/culture/science/etc?
A: Lump sums of gold/culture/science are often scaled based on game speed. If you are playing on a non-default game speed the description will not be accurate.

Q: Why did nothing change after I started a game with this mod?
A: Are you running Civilization 5 in a language other than English? English is the only language currently supported in Race for Religion.

Q: Is this mod compatible with mod X?
A: This is not an easy question to answer but here is a good rule of thumb. If mod X changes beliefs it will not be compatible. But if mod X doesn't than it is almost certainly compatible. Mods that add new religions without changing beliefs will be compatible (so long as the author of the other mod did some specific technical things they usually do).

Q: I like most of this mod but hate X! Can I turn off X?
A: It may be possible, see the "how to use options" section below. If there is something else you want to be an option let me know by posting in the CivFanatics thread or by leaving a comment below and I'll see if it can be included in future versions.

How to use options:
In your "Sid Meier's Civilization 5/MODS/Race for Religion(v X)/Options" directory there are two directories. You can turn off an option by changing the name of the directory from "Enhancer spread penalty" to "_Enhancer spread penalty".

• Turning off "Enhancer spread penalty" makes it so enhancing a religion doesn't reduce the distance it generates pressure.
• Turning off "Pantheon costs" makes it so the faith cost to found a Pantheon increase as normal.

Known Issues:

• If Byzantine takes a second founder belief as their bonus belief, their religion will spread at 14 distance instead of 10 until they enhance
• If Byzantine takes an enhancer belief as their bonus belief, their religion will spread at 6 distance
• Reliquary only gives faith when a great person is consumed if you founded the religion.
• The gold provided by Tithes does not show up in the gold-per-turn UI. (visual issue only)
• The faith provided by Pilgrimage is listed in the UI as coming from a "founder belief" instead of "enhancer belief". (visual issue only)

Change log:
V 12 Race for Religion


older versions:

Sounds like an interesting concept. I'll give it a try.

I've been playing with this, and have a few comments so far. It's a lot of fun. It seems best on a compact map or Pangaea type map, where religion spreads well and weakest on a island type map. Also, you should probably not send the notices that just say "you got 0", but I guess it does serve the purpose of telling me (or nagging me) my religion hasn't spread yet.

I am not the best of beta testers for this as I've avoided religion largely due to the fact that I find manually moving missionaries around the map fighting other missionaries to convert cities tedious in the extreme. I do make a lot of use of the religious bonuses so more of those is always good.

I'm interested enough to try it again. Great work.

I would be interested in hearing what beliefs people used when forming their religion and how it fit into their strategy. I collected similar information from my play testers and I would like to see what combos you guys tried.

Getting ready to try this tonight. Comments to follow...

A new version of Race for Religion has been put on the Steam workshop and put on CivFanatics. This version only contains a bug fix for the enhancer belief "Religious Migration". You should be able to continue any previous Race for Religion game with the new version.

man this is a great mod, i like your ideas. But i think some belief are underpowered
- Desert Folklore, i think the original Desert Folklore is much better, because you could gain faith on hills also.
- Goddess of Hunt, what about the Dear resources???
- Stone Circles, as i experience there are only few stone and marble which spawn near every Civilization starting location. i think it would be better if you make it +2 faith??
- Divine Laws, i think it would be better if you make it +2 happiness.
- Pagodas, man i think the Pagodas is underpowered +2 happiness only? what about faith and culture?
also i think it would be good if the God of Protection would be +1 happiness and faith instead of production and faith. And lastly I think the Messenger of Gods would be better if you changed the gold to science??
and for the other beliefs the're Perfect!
anyway this just only my opinion.

Knightmare, reading your perspective on various beliefs has been very useful. I am currently putting together the next content update for Race for Religion (approximately a half dozen new beliefs) and some of the beliefs you mentioned are being targeted for refinement.

I can provide my current thinking on various beliefs. My intent is explain -- not necessarily to persuade. My thinking has evolved before based on feedback and I expect similar evolutions to continue to happen.

Desert Folklore:
I wanted to weaken this Pantheon relative to Gods & Kings because nothing else came close to it if you had a desert capital start (due to playing Egypt, Arabia, etc). I wanted to make it so that best use of it required expanding to desert locations. It is possible it may be buffed in the future, but the most likely buff it will receive is providing +2 faith from every Oasis.

Goddess of the Hunt:
Like Goddess of Festivals, Religious Idols and Religious Jewlery, Goddess of the Hunt provides +2 yield from two luxury resources. Deer are distributed differently and in much greater quantity than luxury resources, which would make Goddess of the Hunt much more profitable compared to Goddess of Festivals, Religious Idols and Religious Jewlery.

There has been a belief I've considered that was +1 Faith from every deer but I haven't included it in the mod because it does not seem that exciting or synergistic.

Stone Circles:
You are correct that Stone and Marble are relatively rare. Marble is not placed the same as other luxury resources and you can not get a geographical cluster of Marble like you can with Silver, Gems, etc. In theory a player who has lots of stone near them should be able to generate more faith from Stone Circles than they could from taking Goddess of the Hunt in a geographical cluster of Furs but lose out on the additional food. If Stone Circles needs to be buffed it will likely be by having the Stoneworks gives +2 faith.

Messenger Gods:
The reason this gives faith instead of science is because I wanted every Pantheon to provide a source of faith, even if the main draw of the belief is the other stuff it does (for example see Fertility Rites). The reason this provides Gold is because getting the most out of the belief requires found a bunch of small population cities, but trade routes to small population cities don't always provide more money than the maintenance cost of the roads to connect them. Providing an extra bit of gold per trade route would help make it profitable to connect small cities.

Goddess of Protection:
I will admit I have not been happy with this belief in its current form. In theory the pro-Goddess of Protection argument is that it provides +4 yield per city in every city, which is more than most follower beliefs and Pantheon beliefs are designed to be a bit weaker than follower beliefs.

The con argument is that Castles take awhile to get to so during the early stage of the game this will only provide +2 yield per city. Also, outside of this belief Walls and Castles have no economic benefit and spending multiple turns of production just to get +1 Production & +1 Faith is inefficient compared to building Universities, Aqueducts or just about anything else.

A pro response would be that if this belief is combined with the Honor Social Policy that provides +1 Happiness from defensive structures or the Neuschwanstein World Wonder it can be profitable to build Walls and Castles.

However, a con response would be that Honor is the weakest of the three initial Social Policies and Neuschwanstein isn't available until much later in the game.

In conclusion, I am planning to buff this. Most likely it will be by having it also heal units adjacent to the city by +10 hp per turn.

Pagodas:
While Pagodas are much weaker in Race for Religion as compared to Gods & Kings, they are the single best way to get happiness. +2 Happiness in every city (except puppets) is better than every other other faith-purchased building and every other source of happiness (Observatories via Celestial Cartography, Courthouse via Divine Laws, Gardens via Peace Gardens, Mint via Usury Ban and Forge via Work Ethic) only work on buildings that can't be built in every city.

Divine Laws:
One thing I wanted to do in Race for Religion was reduce the amount of Happiness follower beliefs provided. Happiness is something of a god-stat in Civ 5 and I wanted follower beliefs to generally provide less than 1 Happiness per city (unless they were a faith purchased building).

In theory part of what is suppose to make Divine Laws worth it is that it can be combined with Divine Right (+2 Faith from every Courthouse and Constable).

A new version of Race for Religion is now available! This version includes multiple new beliefs and multiple modifications to existing beliefs. It would be interesting to hear if any of the modifications have changed your opinion of various beliefs, combos and strategies.

This will almost certainly be the last update before Brave New World.

Love this mod! Only bad thing is that it doesn't seem very compatible with GEM - some beliefs seem to get double effects. Almost worth it though, with so many interesting effects from this mod!

Assuming I'm looking at the correct version of GEM (https://github.com/Thalassicus/gem/tree/master/Gem/GEM) it alters a couple of different beliefs, causing compatibility issues with Race for Religion. However, if you change the name of the "<stuff>/GEM/Faith" folder to something else "<stuff>/GEM/_Faith" that should disable all the alterations GEM makes to religion, allowing Race for Religion to work correctly.

If this isn't clear or doesn't work let me know. Compatibility is a priority for me.

That seems to work, thanks! Going to play a full game later to make sure - for the record, it's also a good idea to disable the text changes from /GEM/Text/en_US/Faith.sql.

Is Machiavelli24 still activ with his mods?

I am. I'm mostly working on Beyond Earth stuff. I may do another release of Race to fix a couple of minor outstanding bugs and tweak a few beliefs.

(Also, technically this is the G&K version of Race, not the BNW version)

Machiavelli24 said:

I am. I'm mostly working on Beyond Earth stuff. I may do another release of Race to fix a couple of minor outstanding bugs and tweak a few beliefs.

Click to expand...

I see. great to hear

Edit: Sorry, wrong thread. I'm using the BNW version so will go over and post there instead.