Legen
Emperor
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2015
- Messages
- 1,491
Proposal:
Great Prophets gain the ability to unlock the faith purchase of one Great Person type for your civilization.
Rationale:
When you think about it, it is weird that great people faith purchase is primarily unlocked not by faith or religion, but by policies. This proposal is an exercise on how we can have faith purchase of GPs as a default pursuit for all civilizations through the religious game itself.
There are many potential uses for this ability, as certain GP synergies are sometimes tied to policy trees that may not be ideal for your strategy. For instance:
Amendment:
Added a limit of 2 uses to this ability.
Great Prophets gain the ability to unlock the faith purchase of one Great Person type for your civilization.
- Great Prophets gain a separate ability that consumes the prophet on use.
- Name suggestion: Spiritual guidance
- Like the Holy Site ability, that prophet must not have used a city conversion before.
- Upon using it, you can select a Great Person type not yet unlocked for your civilization. The selected GP type will be available for faith purchase to your civilization starting at Industrial Era.
- Other civilizations do not benefit from you unlocking a great person type through this method, even if they share the same religion with you.
- Can only be used if at least one great person type is yet locked, and pending uses of this ability are lost if all great people types are unlocked before the choice is made.
- Safeguards to a player being unable to end the turn in edge cases.
- Edge cases: picking 'To The Glory of God', having one type yet locked and picking the finisher of the relevant policy tree, spending multiple prophets in a single turn.
- Limited to 2 uses per game for each civilization.
Rationale:
When you think about it, it is weird that great people faith purchase is primarily unlocked not by faith or religion, but by policies. This proposal is an exercise on how we can have faith purchase of GPs as a default pursuit for all civilizations through the religious game itself.
There are many potential uses for this ability, as certain GP synergies are sometimes tied to policy trees that may not be ideal for your strategy. For instance:
- All ideologies have tenets that depend greatly on a specific GP:
- Freedom: Transnationalism (merchant -> Industry), which is not ideal for civs or situations that favor Rationalism instead (e.g. Korea, Babylon, or when facing these two).
- Order: Spaceflight Pioneers (engineer -> Tradition), which would require you to pair a Tall-oriented tree with a Wide-oriented ideology.
- Autocracy: Lebensraum (general -> Authority), which may not be ideal for civs that may prefer Progress, or that are meant to be flexible and adaptable (e.g. Celts, Iroquois, Rome).
- Certain civs have a unique GP replacement, but the player may want to pursue policy trees that don't unlock it (e.g. Venice, 34UC Carthage with a general/admiral replacement).
- Certain civs have special bonuses tied to a specific great person, but may want policy trees that emphasize a different part of their uniques (i.e. Japan, Sweden, Assyria).
Spoiler Rationale before the addition of a limit of 2 uses per game, no longer relevant :
How balanced it will be? It depends on the current balance regarding faith output. Without major faith imbalances, the main restriction I foresee to this ability is the exponential faith costs of Great Prophets, plus the opportunity cost of not having a Holy Site or city conversions out of them. Moreover, spending a prophet this way only opens an option, instead of giving you immediate yields as you would with any other great person. I expect most players to unlock one or two key great people for their strategy, then find the faith cost of additional prophets to be prohibitive. Certain civs and beliefs may be able to push it further, but anyone aiming to unlock more than two GP types will likely find it much easier to pursue the 'To The Glory of God' reformation instead.
Amendment:
Added a limit of 2 uses to this ability.
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