Possible to allow only one religion be the dominant religion in a city?

I'm curious if this customization is feasible, or if it exists somewhere, in some form.

The idea I have is to allow only one religion to be the official religion in a city, and that this is measured in percentages, based on a number of influences:

• nearby cities' religion
• missionaries
• state religion

So that each missionary would not be just a chance to spread religion in that city or not, but the missionary would carry a chance at exerting some amount of influence on the city's official religion.

A possible way to do that (which I had been thinking of doing) is to allow the "Holy City" bolean in more then one city at at time and to simply interpret it as "dominant religion", this would require SDK moding as currently activating that boolean automaticaly sets it false everyware else.

Would this be done in the same kind of way as the ethnic makeup of cities (like 98% Roman, 2% Japanese, or whatever)? Or am I entirely missing the point?

Also, what would be the benefit of having only one religion in a city?

Mattastic said:

Would this be done in the same kind of way as the ethnic makeup of cities (like 98% Roman, 2% Japanese, or whatever)? Or am I entirely missing the point?

Also, what would be the benefit of having only one religion in a city?

Click to expand...

That's precisely my idea, with percentages of religion representations.

The purpose is for playing out a scenario where there is a battle of a half-dozen civs who each begin with their own religion. Some start friendly, some at war. The dominant religion would contribute to a religious victory and of course affect any religion-related bonuses in that city. (If the state religion is the dominant religion in the city, city receives bonuses - otherwise, no.) Same goes for the bonus of being able to see cities with your state religion when you possess the holy city.

But the real crux of why I'd like to do this is that in the regular system, you can't push another religion out. I'd also plan to create negative effects on a city (in production & gold) that has a religion other than the state religion, but only to do this based on a dominant one. So then if your city with your state religion turns to another, you have a chance to reclaim it and nullify the negative effects of having a city under another's religion.

There's also a method to send missionaries while at war to a city that I want to get working, with certain units capable of a promotion that will hide the missionary unit from the enemy's view while they are on the same tile. Missionaries, rather than having a chance to spread religion in a city or not, would have a chance to make so much of a percentage effect on the religion in a city. Or, in the way I think would be most clear, is to add up religion points which would then be displayed as a percentage. So:

London starts out with 50 points for the Islam religion and no other. A missionary comes and has a total potential value of 50 points for Confucianism, but based on a distance from the Holy City has only a chance to establish between 50 and 90% of those points. His random mark hits 80% so he contributes 40 points. Now it's 50-40. Maybe a Super Missionary unit (needs better name) comes and has a potential value of 100 points, or a Great prophet is capable of doing this trick and has 500 points in his potential, with a 60-100% success rate of adding those points to a city's religion score.

In doing all this, you can combat an opponent's chances at gaining a religious victory, at seeing your cities, and at ruining your opponent's bonuses or curing your bonuses from state religion. The net result is that religion becomes much more strategic than it is now.

More about the negative effects:

• perhaps the negatives only occur if the city is represented by the state religion of an enemy state (at war); friendly state religions produce no positive or negative effect
• negative effects include: less production, less trade routes, less culture
• there could be boosts to the negative or positive effects according to thresholds- level one being 50-75% and level two being 75.1-100%, for example
• if the city religion score is even, the default is to the city's state religion

And since open borders becomes more crucial, perhaps there is a production boost to having open borders.

The promotion to hide a missionary that I mentioned in the previous post becomes crucial, you see, to effectively send defenseless missionaries without your opponent or friendly neighbour getting suspicious and closing borders or ruthlessly murdering the missionary. Although it will make them paranoid.

I had considered this before, since I didn't like all religions being considered equally distributed in a city (and also didn't like seeing 7 or even more icons crowded into cities). My idea was to have 4 religion 'slots' in every city, each of which can be occupied by any religion, and each consecutive slot is harder to add a new religion to and easier to replace (moreso with an existing religion).
So, say there is a city with no slots filled, and hinduism spreads there via the spread mechanic from another city. That civ switches to hinduism as state religion and builds a missionary in the city, and uses it to add a second hinduism to the lineup. While the city will only ever be able to build one hindu temple/monastery, each slot filled with hinduism grants additional happiness if it's the state religion (and any other benefits, based on civics, which would probably need to be reduced). Suddenly, a buddhist missionary appears, filling the third slot with non-hinduism, much to that civ's ire. After having the last slot improbably filled with hinduism by city-spread again, the civ builds a hindu missionary and manages to replace buddhism (which would be much less likely than if it were in an 'earlier' slot on the city, or if hinduism wasn't already dominant). This mechanic might also allow for further restrictions, like only being able to build cathedrals in cities with at least 2 of the given religion.

Ah, this would be very interesting. I would love to see this come out.

My possible Ideas could be if you only had 1 religion in a city at once. Unless you had No State Religion or somthing.

And when another religions percentage got above the leading one, the city would convert religions.

For instance In Berlin the percentage of Christian Pop could be : 85% in 1600 and then when the 1700's came around the pop % droped to 45% for Christianity and Islam took over with 55%.


Just my thoughts. G'luck Laurier
Splinter13

I really like where this idea is heading. It seems a lot more natural than a sudden "Buddhism has spread to Orleans!" message, to have a small Buddhist minority starting out, rather than assuming the entire population switched overnight to Buddhism.

A thought occurs though: firstly, if this would be represented as a percentage, then a "no religion" religion would have to be introduced as a starter. Atheism, Paganism, Other - or whatever you wanna call it. Under this system, when Judaism is founded in a city with no other religion, it might gain a sizable minority (say 10%), but the remaining 90% of the population would still be "Pagan". Obviously though, this non-religious group would probably be disadvantaged by having no Holy City, no prophets, and no religious buildings to carry influence.

Do you know if anyone is going to try and finish this? Laurier are you going to do this or are you just putting some of your ideas on these forums?

I'm not much of a coder so I wouldn't know what it would involve doing. Python, SDK, XML??

I would love to see these ideas put in, As soon as possible

Thanks,
Splinter13

I'm a pretty good coder, except I have no experience coding with Python or C++.

I'm not sure when I'll have time to learn what I need to pull this off or get it started. Although I'd like to find a weekend to join the ranks of mod developer, it would take me a while I expect to make something like I've imagined here happen.

So I'm putting this idea out there in hopes of enticing some expertise to take it up. Or at least get enough voices clamoring for it that some expert coder pushes it up his or her to-do list for mod development.

I'd recomend starting off small like adding a simple int varable in one of the InfoClasses to modify something in the games like a Promotion, Unit or Building. Then work your way up to doing an ambitious mod like that.

Well, I don't think I could actually achieve this personally, as I don't understand python or anything, but I'd say a good place to start would be to check out the code for the spread of ethnic groups to cities (or indeed, to any square). Find out what drives that spread, and see if you can copy the function with other logical drives.

A quick 'hack' to get this implemented would be to keep track of the percentages for each city in python (most likely using script data) and then each turn add/remove religions from the city so that only the dominant religion is in that city. Implementing this as an sdk mod would probably be better though.