IGN Preview of CiV

I must admit I'm disappointed a bit about the news on religion in ciV. However, it might be something they address in Expansion packs.

However, if the game is as mod friendly as they say it is, it should be easy for a modder to put religions back in. Hopefully with a twist and not the exact same system as cIV.

Firaxis does pay attention to mods and if the mod has a new take on religion that works, it may well be implemented down the road.

So, the question would be, how do you alter religion to make it still fun and less cheesy? Perhaps if everyone put their heads together then it could be implemented in a mod quickly after release.
 
chongli said:
I disagree. They are dramatically expanding the combat system, so much so that something else had to give way. You simply cannot expand all areas of the game as that leads to bloatware. Religion and Espionage were very weak, exploitable and generally unfun systems that honestly deserved the axe.

Needless to say, I am very optimistic about Civ V. They are taking a hard look at the series and holding nothing sacred in the quest to make the game more fun. This, to me, is an extremely admirable pursuit and I think it'll payoff big time.
Click to expand...

I agree. Religion was a distraction and I didn't like it. Espi was annoying and a money sink. Civ 2 did spies pretty well.

Plus there is always expansions. Espi wasn't even in the game till BTS
 
Shylock said:
Plus there is always expansions. Espi wasn't even in the game till BTS
Click to expand...

was thinking the exact same thing. they gotta leave room for expansions!
 
Abremms said:
was thinking the exact same thing. they gotta leave room for expansions!
Click to expand...

That's a pretty poor attitude to have towards stuff like this.

For example (a tad extreme, but it gets my point across):

Civ6:
Units have been removed.

Hey, they got to leave room for expansions!
 
the Falcon said:
I'm pretty sure this confuses the heck out of anyone new to the Civ series. It also doesn't seem like a very meaningful distinction and the difference feels rather artificial to me. Plus, does it really add something to the game? Thus, +1 from me to scrap this "feature". You probably won't even notice it's gone.
Click to expand...
What? No this isn't a "feature"! They are simply two different symbols representing two different things. The commerce you get from your tiles is represented like this :commerce: it is split up between that which goes directly to your treasury, that funds culture, science, and that which funds espionage. :gold: is that which goes straight to your treasury, whereas :commerce: is that which is being extracted from your city's tiles, yet to be split up. So +50%:commerce: will boost everything whereas +50%:gold: will only boost the treasury.

This is hardly a "rather artificial" difference, it's the difference between merely adding money to the treasury on the one hand, and boosting science, culture and espionage (mostly science) on the other. Scrapping this "feature" would simply mean you wouldn't know whether a wonder was boosting a cities commerce (funds everything) or merely the left over bit that goes to the treasury - it would be like using the same symbol for commerce as for science and just having to guess whether only science was boosted or whether everything was boosted.

(it's worth noting also that other multipliers come into play, so if +50%:gold: is on top of :gold: which is already boosted by multipliers, then it could be better than +50%:commerce:)

Now this OT diversion is far more long winded than it needed to be. I don't see why my original, short reply was so hard to understand.
 
Falcon, this has been in since civ2... or earlier, I never played civ1.

You work the tiles in your city, and get trade (civ2), or commerce, (civ4) or whatever it was in civ3. Then that is divvied up according to your sliders: If you have a gold mine with let's say 10 :commerce: and you have 80% :science: and 10% :culture: that means you get 1 :culture:, 1 :gold: and eight :science: out of that tile.

This "feature" is a core component of the game, capish?
 
Lucky The Fox said:
I beg to differ. Religion was well implemented in the way that you could ignore it and still have fun, create your entire strategy around it or something between those extremes.
Click to expand...

The fact that you could ignore it and still do reasonably well, shows imo that it was poorly implemented.
 
Lillefix said:
The fact that you could ignore it and still do reasonably well, shows imo that it was poorly implemented.
Click to expand...

For me, that depends on preference! In any case, many who support religion in the game admit that the system wasn't perfect. It was a good introduction of a new feature and there was plenty of room for it to be expanded and improved. It is a bit sad that instead of working on the system, they decided to yank it out and throw it in the garbage bin (Probably, in part, because of the 19th century focus). To me, it's a little like having a child, and after a year or so, you decide that the child isn't turning out the way that you were hoping, so you give them up for adoption and have new kid.
 
I'm just happy that they announced to bring more exclusive information next week!! :goodjob:

Looking forward to that.
 
While I agree that "vanilla" religions were somewhat useless, they provided a good backbone for mods. Religions in Fall From Heaven, for example, have a much bigger impact. I'll be sad to see it gone :(
 
You're dead right Cilpot. For all the blandness of Vanilla religions, the stuff they did with religions in various mods was spectacular. I'm currently working on a Mod which will place greater emphasis on National Pantheons & Animist faiths as both a prelude to founding one of the 7 main religions & as a long-term option if you decide to eschew any of the main religions.
My civics mods, in the past, have also been about introducing various benefits & penalties to religion based on Dogma (like Reformist vs Fundamentalist) & your relations with other religions (like Insular vs Evangelist). These kinds of things could have made Civ5 religion *really* superb!

Aussie.
 
I thought having a religion system in Civ4 would be controversial, but not in this way.

Personally, I never thought religion was a fun aspect of the game. It felt like feature creep to me. It's pretty silly to complain about added features in an expansion pack, but the beyond the sword pack had a bit of that problem, too. The espionage system, events system, and corporations thrown in made the game bloated and confusing.

That's one of the reasons why I liked CivRev. Sure, it was super simplified, but it was refreshing to play a game that distilled Civ down to what made it fun. I think they're trying to keep that same kind of focus for the new Civ, but at the same time making sure it's still strategically deep.

Getting rid of religion is fine by me. But if I hear they replaced health and maintenence costs back to corruption, then that'll be an issue.
 
If simple is all you want in a Civ game, then by all means play CivRev or Civ2, because they sound more up your alley. Some of us want the depth that has been the hallmark of Civ over the last 2 major releases (CivIII with culture, resources & differentiation between Civs & CivIV with Religion, Civics, deeper Diplomacy & Great People)-& this feeling I get that CivV is taking a backward step is not a *Good Thing* IMHO!

Aussie.
 
A lot of people argue that the simplicity of Civ, especially when compared to other games, has everything to do with what makes it Civilization. Even in CivIV your ability to micromanage cities was expanded while making it simple to perform and less of a need to have to.
Proof, that it is possible to both expand and simplify at the same time. Maybe there was no clear way to simplify religion without making it a meaningless feature. And a more complicated way would result in WAY more people complaining that they ruined religion. Better to axe it than have every game critic writing how much it sucks now.
 
Inspired by another website, I've re-read Soren Johnson's afterwords in the back of the Civ IV manual. I thought it was interesting to read what he has to say about religion in regard to diplomacy, particularly in the context of the IGN article.

"The most important reason to be proactive in the spread of religion is diplomacy. A problem that diplomacy suffered from in previous Civ games was a lack of motive - it often felt quite arbitrary that one civilisation might like you while while another hated you. Religion provides a useful back-story to give diplomatic dealings more logic. Choosing a different state religion than your neighbour may lead to animosity and possibly war. However, some well-placed missionaries in their largest cities could sway their people to your own religion, winning a long-term ally."

It's going to be interesting to see what other 'motives' there are to explain a civs reaction to 'you', particularly the first time you meet.
 
Shiggs713 said:
Religion was clearly more than just another love/hate flag. Found a religion in your capitol, use bureaucracy and spread your religion around and say its just a love hate tag.
Click to expand...

Bad example - Shrines provide :gold:, and Bureaucracy doesn't provide a multiplier for :gold:. :)
 
Hypernova said:
What? No this isn't a "feature"! They are simply two different symbols representing two different things. The commerce you get from your tiles is represented like this :commerce: it is split up between that which goes directly to your treasury, that funds culture, science, and that which funds espionage. :gold: is that which goes straight to your treasury, whereas :commerce: is that which is being extracted from your city's tiles, yet to be split up. So +50%:commerce: will boost everything whereas +50%:gold: will only boost the treasury.

This is hardly a "rather artificial" difference, it's the difference between merely adding money to the treasury on the one hand, and boosting science, culture and espionage (mostly science) on the other. Scrapping this "feature" would simply mean you wouldn't know whether a wonder was boosting a cities commerce (funds everything) or merely the left over bit that goes to the treasury - it would be like using the same symbol for commerce as for science and just having to guess whether only science was boosted or whether everything was boosted.

(it's worth noting also that other multipliers come into play, so if +50%:gold: is on top of :gold: which is already boosted by multipliers, then it could be better than +50%:commerce:)

Now this OT diversion is far more long winded than it needed to be. I don't see why my original, short reply was so hard to understand.
Click to expand...

Yes, but why can't you take :gold: out of your treasury and re-allocate it back into :science:, :culture: or :espionage:? Does the :gold: somehow get transmuted into :nuke: that scientists and entertainers and spies will no longer accept it for their wages?
 
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