[discussion] About state religion, religious victory, changes to religion, etc.

So, we sort of bordered this topic in the other thread about a possible Theocracy ideology, but I figured this could use a thread of its own to discuss. So question is, what changes to current religion system could one imagine that would allow for a meaningful Religious Victory?

One thing I miss is the idea of a State Religion - i.e. you declare one religion to be your State Religion. If you have founded a religion yourself, you would by default want this to be your state religion, but this feature can be relevant with civs that haven't founded a religion as well as when entering a religious war with another religion.

If a civ adopts your religion as State Religion without having founded a religion themselves, this should make Great Prophets that spawn to them be associated with your religion. This makes better sense than the current system, where you can convert all their cities and have them have the "happily adopted your religion" modifier showing, and then suddenly they will found their own religion and start removing yours, which doesn't make sense. Furthermore, since the number of available religions in a game is normally > half of the number of civs, this means that majority of civs will get to found their own religion, which makes it very hard - and not very worthwhile - to pursuing an early spread of your religion outside your own borders.

I was contemplating a bit on religious wars, and specifically what should determine whether a civ wants to change their state religion, particularly if they have founded their own religion. Then I thought, would it be possible to make some sort of "influence" system similar to how it works for ideologies, so if you spread your religion and get a lot of pressure in their cities, this would give them unhappiness and demand to change to your religion? Perhaps the game would do a matching of your religions pressure vs. their religions faith, or something like that.

Not sure how the details of this would work, but it does seem to me that something inspired by how current ideology system works could be used to determine which religion that would be their favored religion, and hence force them to adopt your religion as State Religion, even over their own. That would also allow for a handy entrence for a religious victory, namely that you need your religion to be state religion with all civs?

Ok, I thought some more about how the idea of a battle between Faith and Pressure could work in determining State Religion, and I think I came out with a rough outline for how this could work.

The basic will be a battle of pressure:

• Pressure excerted by your religion on your cities by your religion is the defense you accumulate for your religion to work against other religions.
• Pressure excerted by other religions on your cities will be their offense to weaken your religion.
• The religion with the highest accumulated pressure on your civilization will be the populations favored religion. Having a different religion as State Religion than the favored religion will cause unhappiness (in levels, similar to how it works for ideologies).

Now the crucial part here is to find a way to make it so that the person who founds the first religion will not automatically become favored religion with everybody else. Here's a basic outline of how it could work:

• For the sake of this discussion, I imagine we change it so that Great Prophets have a power of 2000, whereas regular Missionaries have a power of only 1000.
• When you found a religion, this will count as the Great Prophet using all his 4 charges on your Holy City. This will accumulate a buffer of 8000 pressure for your religion.
• When you spread your religion to a friendly city, each spread will add to the defensive value of your religion for your civilization. Thus, if you use a Missionary to spread your religion to your friendly city, this will increase the defensive pressure of your religion by 1000. If you use a Great Prophet, it will increase the accumulated pressure by 2000.
• When you spread your religion to a foreign city, each spread will add to the offensive value of your religion against that civilization. Again, the value will depend on the agent of the religion (1000 or 2000, modified by attrition).
• Passive pressure excerted from cities to neighboring cities will also be accumulated over time.

Now the idea here is that if you force an active early spread of your religion into foreign lands, you can accumulate a lot of pressure with these civs. Specifically, if you manage to accumulate more than 8000 pressure with a civ before they found their own religion, your religion will by default have dominated a religion if they found one, because founding a religion will only give them 8000 defensive pressure. What this means is that the higher the pressure you accumulate before a civ found a religion, the more likely they are to adopt your religion as their state religion. One your religion is present as state religion, they lose the ability to found a new religion, any Great Prophet they spawn will belong to your religion. Of course, they can abandon your religion as state religion, should they want that, either to go for another religion, or to go into no state religion, which would allow them to found their own (but would give them unhappiness as long as your religion was dominating in pressure).

A system like this would make it much more meaningful to go into religious wars. If you spam another religion with your missionaries, you can build up a massive pressure by accumulating all the pressure points the missionaries excert when they influence their cities. Great Prophets obviously would be more dangerous in this regard, because their higher strength and ability to move enemy religions will also decrease the passive pressure the other religion builds up.

Religious Victory would be achieved if you got every other civilization to adopt your religion as state religion.

The numbers offered in this thread would not necessarily be the correct ones, but this was an attempt to make an outline of how such a system could work.

I really like this idea, wouldn't change a thing.