True Prophets

True Prophets
Version 0.6 (Beta)
Updated 3 February 2006

This mod changes the way religions are founded in Civilization 4. Instead of being a byproduct of technology research, new religions are founded by Great Prophets.

This is a beta release of the mod. AI and human both work, but gameplay balancing is not complete. It was developed for patch 1.52.

The mod includes one new normally-buildable building: the Pagan Temple. This building is identical to a normal temple, but has no religion prerequisite. When a new religion spreads into its city, it converts into a temple of the appropriate religion.

Players who want a religion have two routes: build a Pagan Temple and divert population to staffing it, or build the wonders that provide Great Prophet points (Stonehenge, Oracle, and later Angkor Wat, Chichen Itza, or Spiral Minaret).

Interaction of religion with the game is significantly changed: instead of early religions being founded within the first 20 turns, players beelining have a hard time founding a religion before 1200 BC (on Noble), and AIs found religion between 600 BC and 600 AD.

Inspired by Tartan Spartan in http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=154972. Design decisions, balance problems, and playtest results are documented in the mod.

Feedback please!

I really like this idea, and this is one that Civ developers should think about in expansion packs or in Civ V. Because look at most the religions that are in the game. They weren't founded by technologies. They were founded by people.

Judaism (Moses)
Christianity (Jesus)
Islam (Muhammed)
Buddhism (Buddha)

I'll try this. Thanks.

Very, VERY nice.

can I ask you more detailed info about gameplay balance so far?

yes..im curious if the ai knows what to do on this one

outstanding idea! i always thought the tech based way was kind of contrived. are they just revealed in a preset order or do you get to choose? random? how does that work?

OK, I have only played through a couple of times, which I realise does NOT make me an authority on this Mod . However, this is what I have observed.

1) Good News #1: the AI DOES know how to make use of Great Prophets to found religions.

2) Good News #2: the AI DOES build Pagan temples-eventually-and mans them-again, eventually.

Now its #2 which is the big issue, none of the AI civs seem to either build and/or man Pagan temples until VERY late in the game. Even when you beeline, however, it still takes a huge amount of time to get the first religion on the board. Now, I beelined for a Pagan temple-and manned it early-yet did not found Judaism until around 1500BC. What's worse, though, is that there were no other religions founded until around 25BC, and all of the other religions were founded within the space of 15 turns. Now this suggests to me that all the AI civs are building these temples at almost exactly the same time, and are probably waiting a long while to build them too (or else they are not even bothering to staff them for ages). So, here are a few suggestions that might make it work better:

1) Give Pagan Temples an automatic GPP bonus-as well as the ability to create a Priest.

2) Perhaps give the Temple a culture or happiness bonus, to encourage the AI to build it.

3) Perhaps add additional improvements and Wonders which either generate GPP's and/or allow priest creation.

4) Perhaps make the first Great Person threshold somewhere between 50 and 75, so that the first Prophet becomes available earlier.

5) Maybe it might be worth considering having the foundation of the religion require both a Prophet AND access to the appropriate tech. This may help to achieve a greater spread of religion foundation (much too clustered at the moment, IMO).

6) If all else fails, maybe push back the start date of the mod and/or turn down the number of years per turn.

Anyway, though, aside from these points, I DEFINITELY prefer the Prophet based method of getting religions. Now if we can only get the AI to make best use of it, then so much the better. Keep up the fantastic work Kidinnu!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Great points from the Aussie. May I also suggest that religions should be found accidentally. NOT picked. Besides, all the religions are equal anyway.

Because you shouldn't be able to know what religions you're going to find. All religions are found by accident.

Thanks for the comments.

Bast, The religions are all equal, so I don't see the need to make them be chosen randomly - when you pick one all you're choosing is a name and an art style. (It's not really a bad idea, but it's also harder to implement than the current style.)

My playtest experiences are similar to Aussie Lurker's. I could beeline a religion by 1200 BC without cramping my normal style on Noble. The AI never got it earlier than 50 BC, and never founded more than 3 religions by 600 AD. By 1000 AD, everybody (even Tokugawa!) had some religion, some civs had changed religion, and religion appeared to be a nontrivial part of some of the wars that were going on. I haven't yet seen "all" the religions founded early; they weren't as clustered in my playtests as he saw, so I haven't yet worried about that.

I instrumented the game to count Great People born. Around 1000 AD, with 17 AIs, a typical count is 4 great prophets, 2 great artists, and 18 great scientists. This is reasonable for the standard ruleset, but needs tweaking for mine.

In the docs I discussed some of the alternatives I'd thought about:

1. GPP on palace - really dull, everybody gets it at the same time, human never gets a religion unless they're philosophical or build a pagan temple quickly.
2. GPP on obelisk - creates a scattering of GPP across the empire. I tested this idea once and the AI didn't build many obelisks, but that may have been because it was at a low difficulty level (was paying more attention to testing the human). Would actually give obsolescence via Calendar some benefit.
3. GPP on pagan temples. OK.
4. Priest slot on pagan temples. I like this because it requires a real sacrifice to get an early religion - you can't just build something and let it sit, you also need to dedicate some population to it. But that's probably why the AI isn't getting it.
5. Wonders - there are only two of these early, and 3 of these roughly medieval.

I've considered cutting the first GP threshold in half, but with the current AI that will just give them more early scientists. Pagan Temple currently has religious flavor 10; I'll be playing with the LeaderheadInfos in the next week to see if I can increase their proclivity to staff temples and to build obelisks, and turn down the appeal (and cost) of the religious techs a little.

Well, perhaps if you gave the Pagan temple some benefit aside from providing a priest slot, then that might work. Something like culture makes sense-I would probably make it around 2-4 culture per turn, to ensure the AI builds it. Once built, I have a strong suspicion that the AI will staff it quickly. After that, have it go obsolete at a respectable time-perhaps with Theology or Divine Right.
I also still strongly advocate retaining the tech-based element of religions, at least in determining which religions your prophets can actually found.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Haven't tested this interesting mod yet, but maybe you should give the Pagan Temple a real high FLAVOR_RELIGION. Might need 30 or above that religios AIs constantly build it.

EDIT: Is it possile to make it unbuildable if the city already has a religion?

Downloaded and hope to enjoy some testing later,

would suggest that the pagan temple retains the culture and happiness bonuses of a religion specific temple,

it seems wrong that currently cities can have libraries barrracks even wonders before a building which nourishes their spiritual needs

One of the tests I'd like to run is:

* pagan temple has same cost and bonuses as normal temple (80, +1 culture, +1 happy, 1 priest slot)
* as soon as religion spreads in the city, pagan temple converts into temple of new religion
* pagan temples are not buildable once the city has a religion

The one possible problem I see here is that this makes the happiness available sooner and more easily than vanilla balance.

Aussie, on your most recent note, 2-4 culture per turn seems like a lot to me. In general, this is supposed to be a very-fine-grained mod, not a total conversion, so I'm not adding any wonders, and adding as few buildings and other things as are necessary.

(Now, I have at least three total conversion mods in design/prototyping phases, but this was a cool idea that could get to a playable state quickly. I don't have as much free time as Kael seems to. True Prophets would probably also go into one of those mods.)

Chalid, I'll look into that; in my glancing through the file I hadn't seen anything with a flavor value higher than 10, and didn't want to exceed "reasonable" bounds.

Anybody who has debugging on can watch my code's decision processes in the logs. I think I'm going to have to add a bit more there - note when temples are built, and when they're staffed. If staffing is happening long after building, I'll try putting +1 GPP on the building to speed the prophets up.

Kidinnu said:

Chalid, I'll look into that; in my glancing through the file I hadn't seen anything with a flavor value higher than 10, and didn't want to exceed "reasonable" bounds.

Click to expand...

Kael used to give some of his buildings Flavors of 40 to have the AI build them, but the idea of giving the pagan temple the same bonuses as the original temple and converting them later should do trick. You might even think of disabling pagan temples as soon as a religion has spread to the civ, as from there on real temples can be built. I would even go farther and change all the pagan temples to temples of this first religion - and giving the religion to the cities too.

For more statistics, I left a 17-AI game running overnight, and was finally able to check it just now.

All 7 religions were founded, between 100 and 150 turns in. (by England, Spain, Arabia, Greece, India, Mali, and China)

In 1884, great person counts were: 35 prophets, 13 artists, 49 scientists, 8 merchants, 27 engineers.

I wonder if this shows some AI bias, or if players typically have such unbalanced counts? Or would these shift even more if it ran to conclusion?

An idea to prevent religion hogging and or excessive early religion founding is to increase the number of great prophets required to found multiple/later religions

I guess this is really two (perhaps mutually exclusive) options

1) founding a religion is like golden ages therefore to found a 2nd religion requires the sacrifice of 2 great prophets etc

2) Later religions have a have tech pre-requisites and or higher costs with each prohet making a contribution

For gameplay/realism tweaking it might also be an idea to link appearance of G prophets to some techs / wonders

IMO religions should keep their tech prerequisites to be founded, as they make sense. so for founding christianity, you would need theology+a prophet. seems good to me.

I've been resisting tech prerequisites because there are two possibilities:

• They make it even harder to build a faith. Isn't it enough to have to get a great prophet?
• They don't make any difference. By the time you have great prophets, you have the necessary techs.

Since I'm seeing all the religions appear between 400 BC and 600 AD in the most recent AI-only game (50 turns of spread), I wasn't too worried about spread, and most of them wouldn't have been delayed. Given that that was probably the peak period of religion foundation in real life, I was satisfied with it.

Now, real life may not make for good gaming, but just checking wikipedia for a ridiculous attachment to the facts (and rounding to the nearest century):

• Hinduism: 1400 BC (I guess Asoka beelined!)
• Buddhism: 500 BC
• Confucianism: 500 BC
• Taoism: 300 BC
• Judaism: 300 BC, or maybe much earlier
• Christianity: 1 AD
• Islam: 600 AD

I haven't mastered cannotBuild() yet, and need to do some real work (TM) But once I do I'll be playtesting:

• pagan temple has stats like a normal temple
• only buildable in cities without religion (TODO)
• automatically converts to first religion to spread into that city
• requires TECH_PRIESTHOOD to build
• AIs who prefer or are currently using Free Religion will found multiple faiths (wow, only Elizabeth prefers it?)
• track completion of all temples so I can monitor AI timing
• track assignment of priest specialists so I can monitor AI timing (TODO)
• track discovery of religious techs so I can monitor AI timing (TODO)

Since Civilization has a city-by-city model of religion spread, I don't see why I should prevent the player from building a pagan temple in a non-religious city when a religion has merely spread to the civ. I might consider preventing the build when the civ has adopted a non-pagan state religion.

Adding the extra benefits to the temple makes me think it ought to wait until Priesthood, to maintain standard balance. (And otherwise the auto-conversion is a bit of an exploit )

I don't see any AIs in vanilla civ who prefer Paganism as their favorite civic, but I'd consider having them not found faiths...

Well, its funny Kidinnu, but your second point is WHY I want tech prerequisites to remain for founding religions. If it makes it too hard (i.e. if it causes the AI to NOT found religions with its Prophets) then I agree-don't apply tech prerequisites. Otherwise, I think having prerquisites in makes sense, as well as helping to maintain a nice spread of religions. Either way though, release what you have so we can test it for you, and we can all get back to you with our observations as before. Anyway, keep up the fantastic work, it is a really SOLID mod!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

why are we so concerned with spreading the religions out? would it be that bad to have 2-3 religions founded within 10 or so turns, by different civs? it happens already with hinduism, buddhism, judaism.. and i dont see it negatively effecting gameplay at all.

regardless, brilliant mod!

I ran another 17-AI game on autopilot, for about 180 turns. Temple build reports were broken, but here's what I saw sorted by turn:

So there's some strong clustering effect in this run. Tech dependencies would spread out those later foundings. And since I never removed the rest of the benefits the later religions get (I never noticed Islam's holy city has better commerce than Hinduism's), I'll reintroduce tech requirements for religions.

I also need to know *who* founded each religion. Happy had a priest active for the 13 turns before religion #1 was founded, but she's not philosophical, so that'd only be a third of the points she needed. If she had built Stonehenge around turn 50 things would be OK, but I don't have that information. Mao's philosophical, but the Chinese only kept their priest working about half the turns he could have. So Mao could have founded if he'd built Stonehenge in turn 70.

I need temple dates. It was interesting watching the AI's frequently allocate and unallocate priests; they certainly have more appetite for micromanagement than I do. Hope to answer the question of when they found temples vs. when they staff them tomorrow.

I also have religion foundings spreading religion (like shrines); I'll probably turn that off, to make early dissemination more dependent on Missionaries. If a player gets a religion around 1200 BC, even without building any missionaries they can convert half the AIs before any other religions are founded.

mayonaise: I'm not sure that spreading religions out is necessary. But some of the vanilla game seems to be balanced around it - the early religions could take over the world, BUT you probably don't have good communication with the other civs, or the spare production capacity to pump out missionaries. Looking at the ReligionInfos file you can see that the late religions spread faster and have larger commerce benefits in the holy city. Having some spread in religion founding dates seems to add complexity to the game's strategy.