How can I stop the early religions from strangling the later ones?

I really love FfH's stunning ability to create an immersive fantasy atmosphere. However, in the two full games that I've played with FfH, this was undermined by the rapid and permanent domination of the earliest religions. In the first game the entire world turned to the worship of Kilmorph (except me: grigori). Everybody became good or neutral and there was never a single war. In the second game, the world was split between Kilmorph and the Fellowship of the Leaves except for me stubbornly clinging to OO. There was plenty of war but I would have loved to see all seven religions play a more active role.

It's the same problem with Hinduism and Buddhism dominating in normal Civ. I was able to use some simple xml-edits to fix that but I'm less familiar with FfH so I would be very interested to know if anyone else has experienced a similar problem or has a solution for fixing it.

It really depends on the civs, in my experience. Some civs seem to make a strong priority out of founding certain religions (like Sheaim and Ashen Veil, or Ljosofalar and FoL).

^bump

I definitely have this problem 9 times out of 10. The only way I've been able to get the Sheaim hooked on AV in ANY game is either to 1) found it myself and convert them or 2) go into Worldbuilder and give it to them. It's annoying since I LOVE the Mercurian/Infernal endgame, but it seems I have to artificially induce it.

I'd just like to know of a way to get there without having to "ban" religions in a custom game or use Worldbuilder to "gift" them.

The problem is twofold - one, a lot of players want complete freedom to play civs however they want (alignment, religion, etc...) and so always speak out against any sort of change that would require more diversity. I'm not against players enjoying the game this way of course, but it has likewise resulted in rather lax standards for AI, and fewer incentives for the "correct" religions/strategies for everyone. My experience right now is often a lot like yours, and regardless of which religion among fol/kilmorph/more occasionally order/empy comes to dominate the Good civs nearly 100% of the time win out against the evil, unless of course I as the player am evil.

So I strongly support giving the AI a much stronger preferences for its religions, this would solve the OP's problem. For other balance, like hero/priest abuse, I've also had ideas like a longer, unavoidable anarchy (5-10 turns) for switching religions (not the first time you adopt) and the AI likewise weighted to not just convert on someone else's whim.

It's a shame to hear this is indeed a recurring problem. Do you think it work to just make early religions more difficult to spread than later religions? This is what I did for normal civ: http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=3015 . From what I remember it worked reasonably well.

If so, what religions are founded earliest and which later? What civs are programmed to beeline for a particular religion?

I think the best solution would be for all religions to appear at roughly the same stage in the tech tree (but not on the same branches). But this would mean messing with the way the tech tree is balanced and how civs are programmed to respond to it.

Earthling: I agree with you, but since this has been an issue for a long from the sounds of it it doesn't look like things will be changing any time soon :/

Wehve had some interesting discussions about this subject here on the forums. Its my hope that this will be fixed in future patches along with all the other AI related issues.

For now, the easy fix is simply not play with khazad/ljosalfar or play without kilmorph/leaves. This no fun though, so if you have a little bit of time to spend, heres the sligtly more complicated way which will unfortunately also stifle religion spreads and not work after a patch.

First, open up in a notebook
Civ4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Fall from Heaven 2\Assets\XML\Gameinfo\CIV4ReligionInfo.xml

Here change the value in <iSpreadFactor> to 0 for all religions or just FOtL/ROK. This will make sure that the AI wont convert because of some random spread to a major city.

Second, open up
Civ4\Beyond the Sword\Mods\Fall from Heaven 2\Assets\XML\Civilizations\CIV4LeaderHeadInfos.xml

2 things you can do here, you want to change or add new <ReligionWeightModifier> for each leader, a negative value will make the AI leader less likely to adopt a religion and a positive value will make the AI more likely.
You can also change the <OpenBordersRefuseAttitudeThreshold> which will make the AI less likely to sign open borders. That way, negative attitude from aligenment will prevent the spread of religions of a diffrent alignement by deciple units.

It will work, but religions will have a lot harder time getting around to everyone. Im sure the team have a better way in mind on how to fix this.

thanks metalmilitia; I think a combination of applying the tweaks I mooted in my previous posts and editing the <ReligionWeightModifier> (which I didn't know about before) should do the trick.

apotheoser said:

It really depends on the civs, in my experience. Some civs seem to make a strong priority out of founding certain religions (like Sheaim and Ashen Veil, or Ljosofalar and FoL).

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In my games, Sheaim very, very rarely found Ashen Veil themselves and if they do, they do it very late.

Aaah, I didnt read that one. You should be good then.

One thing though, open borders are somewhat problematic. For example the Shieam leaders have that threshold set to Furious, so if they start next to or close by ljosalfar or khazad they will allways get converted by desciple units (unless you mean to set the modifiers to -100 which blocks the religion completly). Shieam is just an example, the Doviello leaders doesnt even have a modifier for open borders. The religionweightmodifiers wont prevent this as all cities will likely be converted. Besides, thematically it doesnt make sense that they would be that willing to have open borders with their enemies.

Playing on classical start helps. FOL and ROK still come earlier then the others but its not so big a difference, plus they all tend to get founded before open borders spreads one or the other too much. Adding a few extra players to the maps and setting at least a couple to random good and random evil means you at least get a couple heretic civs for everyone to beat on.

Also, sometimes you just have to go into WB and pass out order/AV to keep a game from becoming a FoL hippy peace fest.

The best option though, in my opinion, is to try out Fall Further and some of the ModModMods. I forget if they specifically did anything about this but it seems like a good deal more religious violence goes on there.

Here's the LeaderHeadInfos I use that increases the AI religion preferences as well as ups the open border thresholds:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=210106&d=1239190142

And the ReligionInfos file, that defines the passive spread of FoL and RoK to 5, as opposed to initial 100 (I think that with the increased weights, it can be increased to 10 or 15):

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=208453&d=1238169321

Ashen Veil is often founded not by Sheaim, but by more economically strong evil (Balseraphs, for example).

Earthling said:

The problem is twofold - one, a lot of players want complete freedom to play civs however they want (alignment, religion, etc...) and so always speak out against any sort of change that would require more diversity. I'm not against players enjoying the game this way of course, but it has likewise resulted in rather lax standards for AI, and fewer incentives for the "correct" religions/strategies for everyone. My experience right now is often a lot like yours, and regardless of which religion among fol/kilmorph/more occasionally order/empy comes to dominate the Good civs nearly 100% of the time win out against the evil, unless of course I as the player am evil.

So I strongly support giving the AI a much stronger preferences for its religions, this would solve the OP's problem. For other balance, like hero/priest abuse, I've also had ideas like a longer, unavoidable anarchy (5-10 turns) for switching religions (not the first time you adopt) and the AI likewise weighted to not just convert on someone else's whim.

Click to expand...

There ought to be an option which makes the AI follow the lore more closely

Oh, certainly options are ideal, but I also know that AI work is very hard on the team and everyone involved. Since a lot of these are preset values/weights I don't know if an option would even be viable. So I think that maybe if the community as a whole worked on a consensus (that could be coded one way) it wouldn't be too bad; this isn't the hugest issue for me so if everyone likes it enough the way it is that's fine - we could just reduce certain religion spreads and leave it at that.

Cheers for that Lone Wolf. Have those settings worked well in your games? Any problems with other religions tending to dominate instead, or are they all more or less equal now?

Cheers for that Lone Wolf. Have those settings worked well in your games? Any problems with other religions tending to dominate instead, or are they all more or less equal now?

Click to expand...

I've played one game with these settings, with one in progress. In the first one, I was Thessa. That's how religions went in the first one:

Me - FoL
Mahala - FoL
Perpentach - CoE
Flauros - Order - OO
Faeryl - CoE - AV
Tebryn - AV
Valledia - AV
Sabathiel - Order
Einion - Order

Don't remember the religion of Beeri, who was OOC'ing most of the game. Cassiel, naturally, had no religion, Cardith got eliminated before he adopted one.

The game in progress:

Me (Einion) - Empyrean
Capria - Order (founded both Order and Emp)
Varn - Order
Beeri - no religion yet.
Arturus - RoK
Flauros - OO
Keelyn - AV
Os-Gabella - OO (has no AV cities yet)
Hannah - CoE
Faeryl - no religion yet

Dunno about the religions of Jonas and Mahala, didn't meet them yet.

wow, looks like you've got the balance just right then!

Well, maybe FoL and RoK are at some disadvantage now.

maybe there should be something pushing the Ai civs to found religions if they don't have a holy city and push them to stay with the religion they founded.
it shouldn't be too important so that it's not too predicatble.

but nowadays I find the "convert to my strongest neighbor's religion" is very frequent.

From my tinkering with the DLL and Python, there seem to be two main reasons why everyone seems to FoL/RoK.

First, the AI weights don't do much. You can increase them but it still won't stop, say, Einion from adopting the Ashen Veil if it's the only religion in his empire (and even if it's only in one city). The solution I liked best was making the AIs with negative religion weights never adopt that religion. The civs with no particular preference then still convert to whatever comes their way, but it stops situations like Tebryn following the Order or an OO Bannor. Of course, the player would still be free to adopt whatever they wanted, but the AI leaders would remain 'in character'.

The other thing is that there isn't enough driving AI players to found religions other than those first two. FoL and RoK always get founded very early on whenever the Ljosalfar or Khazad are in the game because those two civs are hardcoded (in the Python) to beeline straight for them right from the beginning. There's nothing similar there to make other 'no-brainer' choices like Sabathiel -> Order or Tebryn -> AV happen in quite the same way, so these religions often end up being founded very late on if at all, by which time the earlier religions have become dominant.