Changes to Religion

Rob (R8XFT)

Ancient Briton
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I would like to see some changes to religion and wondered if they could be modded?

The first is that once you have a pantheon and discover a prophet, one of the options would be to extend your pantheon by opting for a second pantheon belief. Obviously, by doing so, you'd be gambling getting this bonus belief against being able to found a religion at all, let alone the founder beliefs etc that you wanted.

The second change, going hand-in-hand with the above, would be to limit the pantheon beliefs so that there were only so many available in the game and once they ran out, civs could not even start a pantheon. One of the intentions here is that a random number of pantheon beliefs are selected per game, leaving the possibility that your favourites might not even be there at all. I get drawn to the bonus science with trade routes, which never seems to be picked by the other civs, but for it not to be there might make me vary my strategy based on those beliefs that are available.

The third change would be that if another civ's religion is adopted by a city, then their faith output goes to the civ whose religion it is. I think this would make faith more of a consideration; it almost doesn't matter if some of the outposts are a different religion at the moment.

The fourth and final change would be to have buildings (and a wonder) which have an impact on missionaries similar to the effect that the constabulary, police station and great firewall wonder have on spies. What I might well do if this were possible would be to mod the Great Temple to be able to be built once the equivalent to the police station was in every city (this is one bit of modding I can do!)

Any thoughts and suggestions?
 
If it sounds like something you'd enjoy playing then go for it. I don't use religion much, mostly because missionaries/profits cannot be automated and I find the task of pushing them all over the map to fight over religion repetitive and not worth the effort in general as designed. So, I use it mostly just to get the bonuses, I almost never spread.

I think the proposed changes would make the game harder (for me anyway). But obviously a lot of people want that sort of things. :)
 
Weird! I've been playing with the pantheon/religion code this weekend to get a "Natural Wonder Epiphany" mod working - "Oh wow! That's really moving! Let's go tell the tribe how spirutal it is!" - which grants a second belief to a pantheon.

The first is that once you have a pantheon and discover a prophet, one of the options would be to extend your pantheon by opting for a second pantheon belief. Obviously, by doing so, you'd be gambling getting this bonus belief against being able to found a religion at all, let alone the founder beliefs etc that you wanted.
While the game data structures will support multiple beliefs per pantheon the API/UI doesn't. It's a fairly simple DLL mod to change the API (and I have now done this) and the UI changes are also easy (if you can code Lua). You'd also need to add the logic to get the AI to do this, but pretty sure you could do that in Lua.

The one thing you'll need to decide is if the second pantheon belief should transfer to the religion - by default only the first is transfered, but you can use Lua to fix that so I didn't add it to the DLL

The second change, going hand-in-hand with the above, would be to limit the pantheon beliefs so that there were only so many available in the game and once they ran out, civs could not even start a pantheon. One of the intentions here is that a random number of pantheon beliefs are selected per game, leaving the possibility that your favourites might not even be there at all. I get drawn to the bonus science with trade routes, which never seems to be picked by the other civs, but for it not to be there might make me vary my strategy based on those beliefs that are available.
You can already do this with the pantheon/religion events I added - specifically PlayerCanFoundPantheon and PlayerCanHaveBelief

The third change would be that if another civ's religion is adopted by a city, then their faith output goes to the civ whose religion it is. I think this would make faith more of a consideration; it almost doesn't matter if some of the outposts are a different religion at the moment.
You could probably fudge this in Lua - by checking at the start of the player's turn what religion their cities are and flipping any faith as necessary between players - but it would be neater in the DLL if you're going down that route anyway

The fourth and final change would be to have buildings (and a wonder) which have an impact on missionaries similar to the effect that the constabulary, police station and great firewall wonder have on spies.
I assuming by this you mean that certain buildings would give a local/global percentage reduction on the missionary's/prophet's spread strength. Not in the code by certainly easily addable (just by following the espionage code if nothing else)

W
 
Thanks for the comments. I'm going to have to get to grips with Lua, but at least I know it's achievable! The changes would be for Anno Domini; with it being an ancient mod, having more than one pantheon-type belief that could then be transferred to the religion (thanks for mentioning that I would need to code that in) would be more fitting to the setting than the world religions as they are now.

Thanks again, guys; hopefully I can master Lua and be able to do this type of thing without too many referrals!
 
I assuming by this you mean that certain buildings would give a local/global percentage reduction on the missionary's/prophet's spread strength. Not in the code by certainly easily addable (just by following the espionage code if nothing else)

See post 212 here
 
@Rob
I've been toying with the idea (and even more so now that I've been pointed to the new events in Whoward's DLL) of making a mod that gives religion specific beliefs and civ specific religions.

Each religion would have different and unique beliefs. Each civ would only be able to select from specific religions.

The idea would be to use this, in part, to create a more customizable experience. If I want to max my production I can choose the pantheon/religion that has a lot of bonuses for that. Food, same.

My first attempt is going to be to take the greek/roman pantheon and make a pantheon for each God, then several flavors of religion. E.G. "Hellenistic: Conquer" or "Hellenistic: Culture" or "Hellenistic: Faith", etc. I still have a lot of design/thinking to do, but that is the general idea. Does this mix with anything you had in mind? Or am I onto something different? I'm basically doing it for an ancient wonder victory type Greek scenario, which is taking the place to some extent of my Wonder Land WIP (put off until BNW).
 
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