My initial reaction to Fachy's mod -- posted here because it's more of an explanation of why I made certain choices than an indictment of the ones Fachy made.
I think it's great to see someone else trying to make these religions different and interesting. I'm not going to make a laundry list of stuff I like/dislike about Fachy's mod, but I do want to talk about why I won't be following his lead in one critical area.
I've looked through Fachy's stuff using a tool to compare the xml files (since I didn't quite understand all of the description in that thread). As I understand it, the biggest change in his mod is requiring a particular faith as your state religion before you can build its temples or enjoy their benefits. I'm not entirely comfortable with that approach, for the following reasons:
1. If you convert to , say, Taoism, then your Jews effectively cease to exist and you enjoy the benefits and costs of having a 100% Taoist population. Perhaps there are some effects that really should key off of which faith is the state religion, but surely your Jews haven't started eating pork just because the state religion has changed.
2. As far as I can tell, multiple religions are not only useless, but actually bad under Fachy's mod. In order to prevent people from simply choosing no state religion (whereupon the game lets them build buildings that would otherwise require a particular state religion), you have to introduce some sort of penalty for having no state religion. Moreover, Fachy also introduces a penalty for each religion in a city, which is partially offset by the one temple that will be active at any time. So what's the problem?
a. Free Religion becomes a terrible choice, offering big unhappiness penalties without the usual advantages of the civic. Since I'm interested in realism, this would imply that we should see societies with freedom of religion being the most strife-torn nations on the planet. In fact, the reverse seems to be true -- most free-religion countries seem quite peaceful. Indeed, most of them experienced far more strife when they had a state religion (provoking violent opposition from nonstate religious groups) than after they adopted free religion.
b.
Religious diversity becomes a source of unhappiness. This makes intuitive sense to many people, since it takes two to fight and therefore at least some diversity is required for conflict. However, I study civil wars for a living and the best available evidence suggests that religious diversity usually decreases the risk of civil strife. While there are certainly some religious wars out there, countries with lower levels of religious diversity actually have a slightly higher chance of civil war than countries with a high level of religious diversity. We rarely hear news stories that say "Muslims and Christians in Guinea didn't kill each other last week" -- but that is the normal state of affairs. Moreover, many of the most bitter "religious" wars are actually fought between co-religionists who disagree on some arcane point of doctrine (often these wars are really about who gets to exert religious-political authority, not really about the doctrinal disputes at issue). The best work on this issue was done by a team funded by the World Bank; some notable papers were written by Collier, Hoeffler, Sambanis, and others I forget. Other papers, including one by Fearon using different data and methods than the World Bank scholars, have reached the same conclusion. While much of this research was published in peer-reviewed journals, you can get most of the important papers by simply Googling for "risk of civil war" AND "religious diversity" -- search for those phrases in the text if you don't know how to read tables of statistics. Here's a few links for the curious (warning: these papers are dense, filled with statistics and math -- focus on the conclusions, which are pretty easy to follow):
Collier and Hoeffler -- Greed and Grievance in Civil War
Fearon -- Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War
There are several dozen of these studies, although most of them focus on similar data and are written by a handful of researchers. Now there are a few studies that say that religious diversity plus state repression of nonstate religions increases the risk of conflict, but even these effects are quite weak compared to the effect of economic and strategic variables.
To summarize: I'm not implementing a "religious diversity is bad" element because it wouldn't be realistic, and I'm not tying Temples to state religion because that leads to bizarre outcomes when you choose Free Religion or switch state religions.
This really isn't intended to be a negative post, so now I'll pose a question. I do think Fachy's approach has a lot of interesting elements to it, even though I don't want to do exactly the same thing as him for the reasons I just gave. What I would
like to do is tie most of the effects of a religion to the number of people with that religion in a city. I don't think this is possible yet, because many of the interesting values (i.e. health from Pigs) can only be integers (unlike health from forests, which gets to be .4 instead of 0 or 1). Moreover, I don't even know if there exists a variable that says what % of a city is each faith. I suppose that 1/(number of faiths in a city) would do in a pinch, but there is no way to define and use that variable in the game yet. The SDK may change this, and I'm still poking around in the Python files and others' mods to see if someone else has solved the puzzle.
My point? I'm looking for more ideas about how to implement things realistically. I recognize the problems that come up when you tie everything to Temples as I've done, but I haven't been able to find a solution that doesn't create more problems than it solves. I hope Fachy and others continue to pursue their mods, because that increases the chance that one of us will stumble across the perfect solution to these problems.
![[to_xp]Gekko](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/74/74677.jpg?1475248346){kind=avatar}
in all citys with that staatereligion too, otherwise -1 
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