(6-NS) QoL - Enable Faith Purchase Notifications

[Arthur Jama]

Problem:
Especially in the late game, one can go several turns without realizing that enough faith had accumulated to buy a Great Person. But this can happen early on too, one can forget to buy a Teocalli or an inquisitor. I find this particularly frustrating because I used to play with the mod Religion - Recurring Purchase Notify (v 1), which sends a notification whenever you gather enough faith to buy a missionary, building, inquisitor, unit, great person, etc. This mod is part of WHoward's Pick'N'Mix Mods, many of which are already integrated into the community patch.

Somewhere around 2020-2021 the DLL code in (1) Community Patch that allowed this mod to work was (probably inadvertently) deleted. I have very limited modding capabilities and have not been able to succesfulty make it work again (more details about this in the implementation section).

Proposal:
More of a feature request that does not alter balance, I ask sponsors for help to re-enable this module in the DLL.

With this mod the player gets a notification (with the faith symbol) first when faith is enough to buy a missionary, then again when faith is enough to buy and inquisitor, then again when faith is enough to buy a longswordman, and so on. If I recall correctly, it also considers the cooldown on late game purchase of Great Persons, so you will only get the notification once both conditions are met: the cooldown is over and you have enough faith.

Reasoning:
It is a hassle for many of the religions strategies such as spreaders, faith purchase buildings, inquisition and Great Person purchase (To the glory of God/Constantinople) to constantly check for a faith purchase. Getting a notification is a huge QoL improvement. I really wonder why this feature was never implemented as core VP/CP.

Implementation Details:
The DLL code can be found in WHoward's website in this file:

around line 3,000. A toggle can be added to CommunityPatchTables.xml although my suggestion would be to leave it enabled by default.

 

[usadefcon1]

Why don't you use the auto faith purchase feature in the religious menu?

 

[ma_kuh]

I have often found auto-faith purchase to be insufficient, specifically for Missionary purchases. They always buy in your Capital at the beginning of your turn, so can't keep both the reminder and purchase in a border city for faster spreading.

If they bought at the end of the turn, at least you could see "0 turns" and manually purchase them, and if you forget you still buy them.

 

[adan_eslavo]

Exactly, and one more thing is that when you have enabled autobuilding purchase, but you have no more buildings to be bought, the game sets the "idle" state, so the faith is accumulated infinitely, without a warning.
Also you can get so much faith at a turn that you can purchase 2 copies of the building, but autobuy buys only 1, so 1 turn is lost.

 

[ma_kuh]

It warns you when you run out of buildings to auto-purchase, it's a big red FAITH icon. But it doesn't block End Turn.

 

[pineappledan]

There is already autopurchasing and I'm already swamped in notifications. No thanks!

 

[CppMaster]

There is already autopurchasing and I'm already swamped in notifications. No thanks!

Autopurchasing was already discussed as not sufficient. If you don't like the notification then it'd be cool to be able to turn them off.

 

[Arthur Jama]

Another issue is autopurchase only applying to the capital because sometimes I want to make use of faith conversions to yields (like Gurukalam and Tithe) in other cities as the yields in the capital can be suboptimal later in the game (border growth, hammers).

 

[FinMc]

There is already autopurchasing and I'm already swamped in notifications. No thanks!

I feel like the solution here is to cut down on the currently existing notifications (i.e. every instant yield notif being separate) versus never adding any new helpful ones.

 

[adan_eslavo]

Yeah, digging into the crucial notifications can be hard.

 

[Anarcomu]

For the next congress, an option to choose what notification you want to appear. I personally don't care about instant yields, but that was quit new when I first tried this mod, so definitely shouldn't be turned off by default.
Also, it can change from games to games. I really don't care about CS quests when playing Zulus (except maybe Capture city, but that one I can check every few turns). However, with Austria you want to know new quests.

 

[CppMaster]

Yeah and all those new yield notifications every time I play Progress and finish a building...

 

[Recursive]

Timestamp post to arrange all the threads in a neat order.