Making Great Prophets "Great"

To me, this is another part of the game that's always bugged me a bit: In spite of Priest specialists being pretty solid (especially if buffed), I don't like running them because IMHO Great Prophets are the worst GP.

I mean, Great Scientists are powerful early game, Great Merchants are powerful late game, and Great Engineers and Great Generals are basically always powerful. Great Artists and Great Spies are niche, but in the context of that niche they're excellent. Great Prophets, however, are pretty underwhelming.

"Whoa whoa whoa!" I hear you saying. "Have you, you know, seen Shrines?" For sure. And Shrines are awesome. But to me, that's the whole problem - Great Prophets are amazing to generate - once. Maybe twice, if you happen to found two religions. After that, though, not much point. Even if you go around conquering other people's holy cities, odds are they've already put a Shrine in there themselves.

Maybe that's intentional, but the problem is that it doesn't really make me much more enthusiastic about running Priests, which is what started this whole thing in the first place.

So, to me, two suggestions: First, improve the GP's bulb path. IMHO really this would mostly come down to rearranging the priority. GPs can bulb some really decent techs but the fact that they prioritize religion-granting techs over that really limits it. I mean they can bulb Education, Liberalism, and Printing Press, but you'd never know it because they're obsessed with bulbing Divine Right. They also can't bulb anything post-Renaissance, but I don't know if that's something that really needs tweaking since that's the point where bulbing drops off in power anyway.


Second: Mini-shrines. Allow the Great Prophet to create a building in any city that provides happiness, culture, and that spreads religion in the way the Shrine does. This would function like the Academy - one per city, but in as many cities as you like. Could have different mini-shrines for each religion, could have just one generic mini-shrine that spreads the state religion. Former seems better to me, as it would also help to combat the whole thing where early-game religions are the only ones that are diplomatically relevant. Would clutter up the GP's UI something fierce, tho.

I like the idea of a "mini-shrine" that spreads a religion (I would have it locked to the State Religion at the time you create it so only one button for the UI) however the most fundamental change I would make is that you would need a Great Prophet to found a Religion rather than just discovering a tech.

Religion-auto-spread doesn't work properly in CIV imho, because once a city has a religion, it won't get another by auto-spread, so I don't know why a mini-shrine should be any good, Happiness and Culture are not better than 2 and 5 , which is actually more like a Mini-shrine than your adjustment of it imo.

Adjusting the bulb-path of Prophets sounds like a good idea, because then one could actually build Priest-point-giving World Wonders without having to worry so much about getting a Priest instead of a GS. What I'd really like though would be that a Great Prophet can go teaching, so that he spreads his religion to a certain number of random cities, and that not mattering if they already have a religion or not, as that would give diplomatical options and if one already had a Shrine, one could use each Prophet for an increased income, similar like the always option of the Great Merchant to give instant money. That would actually even create the gamble-option for an early GP to spread Religion in AP-victories, like when building Stonehenge and Oracling Theo, both is possible in AP-victories. No idea, if that is possible.

If you go all in settling lots of Great Prophets, the can really add up, especially with Angkor Wat..... a GP farm that 1 turns any normal unit or building. ...isn't a bad thing....
And the gold, while small in late game, is still gold not attached to your slider.

plus there is somewhere to put all those +GP put wonders

If we want to power them up, maybe some sort of religion spread button. "Share the Gospel" or the like.... Choose a religion that currently exists in the world and auto spread it to the 3 closes cities...
so say Elizabeth across the ocean has a religion you don't, but you really want to become friends.
The religion exists, so you use your GP, select it, and BAM!, you now have that religion - opening up all those diplomatic possibilities....

or maybe have to spread a religion you have, but add the ability to spread to foreign nations...

All in all I think GP are really just fine, it's just other great people help quicker on the typical Liberalism fastest path to victory....

I actually like priests and their great prophet generating selves. The combination of gold and hammers is worth it along with the great prophet point. Its like having unemployed people with money and great prophet points. With a spiritual trait leader and cities with good food all around one can build temples up quick to begin to generate great prophets, make gold and a hammer. If you founded a religion that could be even better and if you have different religions you can make more priests and eventually a prophet. Once the prophet is born, one can make more gold and hammer from having the prophet join the city or build a shrine if you founded a religion and make more gold off the shrine that way. Priests to prophets I sometimes find better than scientists or engineers sometimes since they're like having a merchant and a engineer in 1 priest.

Seraiel said:

Religion-auto-spread doesn't work properly in CIV imho, because once a city has a religion, it won't get another by auto-spread, so I don't know why a mini-shrine should be any good, Happiness and Culture are not better than 2 and 5 , which is actually more like a Mini-shrine than your adjustment of it imo.

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Huh, I actually didn't know that. Nevermind on the mini-shrine thing, then.


I definitely agree with the posts that it'd be cool to have the Great Prophet also function as a sort of mega-missionary. Maybe even have the Great Prophet "Conduct Mission" in a city, which gives a 100% chance of spreading the faith in that city and in every city that has a trade route with it.


Though given the lack of control we have over which cities have trade routes with each other, perhaps not...

If you've got a Shrine city that's clearly going to be in it for the long haul, having multiple settled GPro's isn't so bad. They'll help get Wall Street up and running, and help get a Supermarket and Hospital online without putting Merchants to work in the mines.

GProphets aren't that bad. Okay, bulbing is kind of "meh", but you can use them for a shrine (better for the AI to do it for you though), and you can use them for golden ages.

With this and the civics thread in mind... Honestly, I like the game the way it is (too often evil rng aside ). If we think about the development of the world, it also makes sense that great scientists, merchants and engineers are more valuable than prophets.

Culture games aside, great artists are worse than great prophets, IMO.

Pangaea said:

GProphets aren't that bad. Okay, bulbing is kind of "meh", but you can use them for a shrine (better for the AI to do it for you though), and you can use them for golden ages.

With this and the civics thread in mind... Honestly, I like the game the way it is (too often evil rng aside ). If we think about the development of the world, it also makes sense that great scientists, merchants and engineers are more valuable than prophets.

Culture games aside, great artists are worse than great prophets, IMO.

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Great artists are wonderful in domination games. Not that you would actively try to build them. But if you happen to generate a GA or 2 in the course of a game with nothing to do with them, save them. Culture bomb newly captured cities to push yourself over the Dom limit.

civfanchambers said:

Great artists are wonderful in domination games. Not that you would actively try to build them. But if you happen to generate a GA or 2 in the course of a game with nothing to do with them, save them. Culture bomb newly captured cities to push yourself over the Dom limit.

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agree, and cutting the anarchy of a 20 pop city short is nothing to sneeze at either

Taking one city and a few GA, so your newly acquired city is now pressuring surrounding cities is fun too

Pangaea said:

If we think about the development of the world, it also makes sense that great scientists, merchants and engineers are more valuable than prophets.

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The theories of Einstein, ideology of Marx, acumen of Gates and constructions of Brunel would have been completely different - if they were even born - in a world without Jesus, Buddha, Confucius or Muhammad

I quite like prophets - normally settle for the 2 5 which seems pretty strong. Especially the in the kind of big city that can't or doesn't want to whip. Theology bulb sometimes seems like a good idea too.

Some kind of state-religion super-missionary ability might be a nice alternative, but doesn't really seem in keeping with what the unit is. I think a prophet should be someone who performs a really special deed, like founding a religion or building a huge world-famous shrine, not just some missionary donkey-work. Extending the bulb list past liberalism definitely makes sense though. It's not like the renaissance killed off religion in the real world, and modern techs like media and computers and ecology are arquably quasi religious in any case

If any, surely artists need a buff more than priests, like a couple of for settling.

Aye, as a species we might have got there much sooner

Not necessarily about GProphets, but a solid counterfactual is thinking about what particularly Europe might have looked like without all the wars. And the Middle East. And...

But without the British Empire and Apartheid, would we have got Gandhi and Mandela?

Sorry for straying OT. But I stick to what I've said, that I basically like the game the way it is. The only black blotch in the civics is Serfdom, which even the AI knows is so pointless they virtually never try it

Basically, Civ IV's tech tree is a bit short on modern philosophies other than Marxism and Fascism. Whilst Marx was an atheist, it can be argued that Gerald Winstanley 'bulbed' communism with his theological arguments for common ownership, and many classify Al-Qaida as fascist. Stuff like Pacifism (in the modern sense), Feminism, Civil Rights, Manifest Destiny, and Utilitarianism would give Great Prophets a few more big ideas to come up with in the tail end of bulbing being just about worth it.

Kid R said:

I quite like prophets - normally settle for the 2 5 which seems pretty strong. Especially the in the kind of big city that can't or doesn't want to whip. Theology bulb sometimes seems like a good idea too.

Some kind of state-religion super-missionary ability might be a nice alternative, but doesn't really seem in keeping with what the unit is. I think a prophet should be someone who performs a really special deed, like founding a religion or building a huge world-famous shrine, not just some missionary donkey-work. Extending the bulb list past liberalism definitely makes sense though. It's not like the renaissance killed off religion in the real world, and modern techs like media and computers and ecology are arquably quasi religious in any case

If any, surely artists need a buff more than priests, like a couple of for settling.

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How about letting a Prophet create a building for, for +15% , +2 , +2 and +10% ? It's actually what Prophets do, they educate people by teaching them something which came from god, they make people more and because they believe in a life past death, so don't fear death, they heal the souls of people, which contributes towards their , and they pick up the people that got lost on the way, and get them back to society, so they make people productive, that previously weren't. All of those are good bonuses, and if you make those buildings religion specific, so create a possibility to have one of each for every religion, you actually can create some really powerful cities. +15% ist definitely not overpowered, it's even below the value of a Library, +2 and +2 are very good for large cities (every metropole today has large cathedrals) , it's an efficient way because less buildings are needed, or larger cities are possible, and i. e. +50% from 5 GP-buildings are 2 Forges. Maybe a little fine-tuning is needed, but I think this could be a solution.

What about a 25% (50 seems too much?)boost to happy, ala an academy?

I still like some sort of religion spread more, but that seems harder to code well

I wonder if an alternative shrine (+, +, + etc) would risk making prophets too flexible, and overpowered? I mean do we think they're too weak as they are? The thread was saying great prophets aren't "great", not that they aren't strong!

If genuinely too weak or strong the boring, but least-chance-of-breaking-the-game-balance-somewhere answer would be tweak the settled 5 or 2 one way or the other. Those do look like numbers the devs already did some balancing on TBH

It would be really funny if great prophets could do some kind of seeing into the future Seems like the kind of thing you'd expect them to do
Not sure what form that could take - I can only think of tech-based. Learn one random tech from anywhere in the tech tree more than 5 techs away? Would make an interesting choice if you'd normally go cuirs but know you've got free steel coming later on...

One thing that can already be done is that the gold bonus can be changed to commerce via XML editing. I tried this in the past with both priests and great prophets, and it made them much more versatile because a commerce bonus can be directed towards either gold or beakers using the slider.

MilesBeyond said:

So, to me, two suggestions: First, improve the GP's bulb path. IMHO really this would mostly come down to rearranging the priority. GPs can bulb some really decent techs but the fact that they prioritize religion-granting techs over that really limits it. I mean they can bulb Education, Liberalism, and Printing Press, but you'd never know it because they're obsessed with bulbing Divine Right. They also can't bulb anything post-Renaissance, but I don't know if that's something that really needs tweaking since that's the point where bulbing drops off in power anyway.

Click to expand...

Having them prioritize the "GROWTH" techs (in addition to the "RELIGION" techs) is a fairly simple option - a copy/paste jobbie in the XML, iirc.

lindsay40k said:

Basically, Civ IV's tech tree is a bit short on modern philosophies other than Marxism and Fascism.

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Yeah...I think a case can be made for Democracy and Ecology as well, and maybe Robotics (along the lines of transhumanism).

lindsay40k said:

Basically, Civ IV's tech tree is a bit short on modern philosophies other than Marxism and Fascism

Click to expand...

Uh, what? We have:

Fascism
Communism
Industrialism
Liberalism
Economics
Constitution
Democracy
Nationalism

What is missing? Scientology? Nihilism? Bokononism? The flying spaghetti monster meme-tier philosophy? I think Soren fully captured the big things when he designed the technology tree.

Additionally, technologies like Genetics, Robotics, and Ecology can be philosophically oriented.