A lot of suggestions/comments

[Thunderbrd]

1c) "Divine Prophets"
This game option is also too powerful. You get so many benefits. You can choose which city to found the religion in, but, more importantly, you can choose NOT to found religions. With 26 religions in the game, and so many penalties from having multiple religions in a city, you sometimes want to be able to pick and choose. This is all well and good. The problem is that the option uses Great Prophets as the foundling units. Use missionaries! Every player (not just the first) gets one missionary in a rando city from the religion the tech would normally found without this game option. Give these missionaries 100% spread chance. The first city to get the religion becomes the holy city. If you don't want to found it, delete the missionary. Simple as that. Much more balanced.

This was considered as a possible way to go about it but since it would require pulling up a popup selection on Choose Religions, this was a much easier solution. The way I intend to 'balance' the Great Prophet is to eventually make other GPs just as useful. And besides, it isn't as if the AI nations aren't getting the same type of benefits unless you are playing on such an easy level that you're completely monopolizing on the free prophets. Eventually, 'free prophets' will likely be put behind us with another 'no first to tech benefits' option that would combine with a GP birthing method involving most buildings adding a GP pt towards one sort or another, forcing you to specialize your birthing cities more or risk total chaos in what gets birthed when. DP is phase I of a much larger and slowly developing project and while I could introduce an option for Divine Missionaries, blending it in might be difficult. I may try to do something like it eventually nevertheless since it seems so many tend to agree with your sentiment. Personally, I just don't feel it has the same charm, but that's me I suppose.

 

[TowerWizard]

This was considered as a possible way to go about it but since it would require pulling up a popup selection on Choose Religions, this was a much easier solution.

So, you are saying that because of Choose Religions, a thoroughly unbalanced option in a game in with unique religions, you are making another option bad also? By design?

The way I intend to 'balance' the Great Prophet is to eventually make other GPs just as useful.

Why not just nerf the Great Prophet? But the Great Prophets are not the problem in and off themselves. The problem is that Divine Prophets will provide you with around 20 free Great Prophets. See my comment below.

And besides, it isn't as if the AI nations aren't getting the same type of benefits unless you are playing on such an easy level that you're completely monopolizing on the free prophets.

I am playing on deity on the giant earth map with 28 civs, and I have gotten 19 of the religions by now. Three have not been founded yet, and since I am by far the tech leader, I will eventually get them. Only four religions have been founded by the AI. And I am not even playing with Divine Prophets, because of how powerful it is. However, I would play with it if it gave you a Missionary instead. Unless you implemet the idea you proposed (see below) with is even better.

Eventually, 'free prophets' will likely be put behind us with another 'no first to tech benefits' option that would combine with a GP birthing method involving most buildings adding a GP pt towards one sort or another, forcing you to specialize your birthing cities more or risk total chaos in what gets birthed when.

You plan on implementing another option called "no first to tech benefits" and then found religions with Great Prophets generated by normal means? I guess that is a great idea, actually. Then you have to spend a hard earned GP on founding each and every religion, meaning that not all of the 26 will be founded, meaning less problems with the religious buildings being too powerful. The downside of this method is, of course, that it is hard to generate Great Prophet points without a religion in the first place. Which is why you are suggesting to implement a new "birthing method". Brilliant!

DP is phase I of a much larger and slowly developing project and while I could introduce an option for Divine Missionaries, blending it in might be difficult. I may try to do something like it eventually nevertheless since it seems so many tend to agree with your sentiment. Personally, I just don't feel it has the same charm, but that's me I suppose.

If it is a part of a bigger project, why not wait on implementing it until after all the pieces are in play? And what do you mean by "blending it in might be difficult"? In what way? Change the Great Prophet you generate to a Missionary instead. Then implement both Divine Prophets and Divine Missionaries as options, and prevent the player from choosing both. Or, just get rid of Divine Prophets altogether.

 

[Thunderbrd]

First of all, I'm still in deep protest with the sentiment that Choose Religions is unbalancing. If the AI gets equal access to the options the player gets, there is no imbalance. Thus, when my opponent snipes Scientology and gains a distinct economical advantage while I'm making Asatru my priority, I feel we've both taken uniquely powerful advantages in the game and others still have some great options left to pick from. This is no different than the way wonder building works. You can't get it all unless you're playing too easy a setting.

Second, Divine Prophets, AS it is currently implemented, was something I've wanted since original Vanilla Civ. Techs don't found religions, brilliant people with Rock Star larger than life personas do. Additionally, when I got here to C2C, we had so many bugs in the religion founding mechanisms (especially on multi-player) that it needed a solution. While creating this one, I managed to also debug the rest along the way.

Personally, I like the option (imo, FAR superior to the frustration that random placement gives, more accurate to envisioning the 'event' of a religion founding, and adds strategic depth due to many of the very complaints you register here about how powerful prophets can be - they may be able to do a lot but that just makes them harder to determine what SHOULD be done.)

My opinion on options are that they are options because not all will agree on whether they should apply or not. If you don't like it, don't use it. What I mean by 'blending it might be difficult' is that I don't want any options on the list that can't be mixed in without bugs or inconsistencies with any other options on the list. It annoyed me to no end when I had Limited Religions not working properly with Divine Prophets. That should be fixed nicely now. (actually... I did a repair on that that may not come in til my next pending update.)

Oh, and this:

I am playing on deity on the giant earth map with 28 civs, and I have gotten 19 of the religions by now. Three have not been founded yet, and since I am by far the tech leader, I will eventually get them. Only four religions have been founded by the AI. And I am not even playing with Divine Prophets, because of how powerful it is. However, I would play with it if it gave you a Missionary instead. Unless you implemet the idea you proposed (see below) with is even better.

is a problem of an entirely different nature, the AI's effectiveness, and clumping of religious techs on the tech tree. These are being addressed elsewhere.

 

[Koshling]

First of all, I'm still in deep protest with the sentiment that Choose Religions is unbalancing. If the AI gets equal access to the options the player gets, there is no imbalance. Thus, when my opponent snipes Scientology and gains a distinct economical advantage while I'm making Asatru my priority, I feel we've both taken uniquely powerful advantages in the game and others still have some great options left to pick from. This is no different than the way wonder building works. You can't get it all unless you're playing too easy a setting.

It's not an imbalance in the sense that it in-principal favors the AI over the player or the player over the AI. However it IS an imbalance (like many things in Civ, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't address them generally) in that it applies strong positive feedback to the leading player's power.

In general good game design applies negative feedback to power differences in an effort to keep things in check. The issue with GPs with DP, or indeed Wonders with techs, is that the leading player has better chances and that leads to a greater lead, and it snowballs. Thus it is that there is a tendency for someone to found far more religions than anyone else, or build far more wonders than anyone else, simply because they have what amounts to am increasing first-mover advantage.

So, the imbalance is in favour of the better (or if that's close, luckier start position) player, whether that be the AI or a human player.

 

[MaXimillionZero]

First of all, I'm still in deep protest with the sentiment that Choose Religions is unbalancing. If the AI gets equal access to the options the player gets, there is no imbalance.

Except that the AI prioritizes flavour religions over the endgame powerful ones. Is there any AI leader that would actually pick scientology first?

Second, Divine Prophets, AS it is currently implemented, was something I've wanted since original Vanilla Civ. Techs don't found religions, brilliant people with Rock Star larger than life personas do.

But the techs give you free great prophets, and without choose religion you can't found the religion without the techs, so it's essentially still the tech giving you the religion, just with the additional option of choosing where/if you want to found it. Which is the type of decision the player tends to be better at than the AI.

You can't get it all unless you're playing too easy a setting.

Like what, Deity?

Spoiler :

That's on immortal start, T1 Deity switch, V23, unlimited wonders enabled but with a good start I can do that even without unlimited wonders. I only recently overtook the leading Civ in score too, they steamrolled ahead through early conquest faster than any civ I've seen but I could still stay ahead of them through seeing their research from espionage and prioritizing accordingly.

Oh, and nobody has still founded Ngaiism, I could myself but I haven't finished planting pig and sheep in my capital yet so I haven't bothered.

 

[Thunderbrd]

It's not an imbalance in the sense that it in-principal favors the AI over the player or the player over the AI. However it IS an imbalance (like many things in Civ, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't address them generally) in that it applies strong positive feedback to the leading player's power.

In general good game design applies negative feedback to power differences in an effort to keep things in check. The issue with GPs with DP, or indeed Wonders with techs, is that the leading player has better chances and that leads to a greater lead, and it snowballs. Thus it is that there is a tendency for someone to found far more religions than anyone else, or build far more wonders than anyone else, simply because they have what amounts to am increasing first-mover advantage.

So, the imbalance is in favour of the better (or if that's close, luckier start position) player, whether that be the AI or a human player.

Ok, I do agree with this. But that's a second modification to come to address all that. For now, its not as if the game has not classically supported, as you indicated, the problem with a snowballing lead in many more ways than simply Choose Religions or DP. And I wouldn't chastise or diss anyone who chose to play with either one off for just those reasons. Nevertheless, I like how both options spice things up a bit and allow for more choice and wouldn't want to see either one go as optional ways to play.

I've been giving some consideration to how the missionary option could harmonize with DP if both were selected... could be workable but I'd not mess with it until I had the other aforementioned solutions developed first to see if we still felt it was necessary.

Except that the AI prioritizes flavour religions over the endgame powerful ones. Is there any AI leader that would actually pick scientology first?

Well, I don't think any AI leaderheads consider it their favorite religion, so probably not, but past the favorite being taken, any leader that considers wealth a priority (and there's lots of those) would see Scientology as a very highly evaluated choice and would shoot for it immediately.

Before I got the 'Favorite selection first' portion working in the ai code, Scientology was sniped pretty quickly because I attempted to give some of the overall 'power' of the religion some consideration in the values I placed on their 'flavors'. It could certainly use a bit of auditing as I was assigning them off the top of my head without a full evaluation of each religion, but it seemed pretty fair at the time and seems to hold up still. I usually have to go for Asatru quickly because aggressives will flock to it immediately.

But the techs give you free great prophets, and without choose religion you can't found the religion without the techs, so it's essentially still the tech giving you the religion, just with the additional option of choosing where/if you want to found it. Which is the type of decision the player tends to be better at than the AI.

While SOME few religions could use being founded in cities other than your capital, I, as a player, usually want them all in my capital regardless, which is how the AI goes about it as well. I guess with that point I was just trying to make it more apparent that it takes a powerful persona to establish a religion rather than just the discovery of a new way to think.

Ok, so I do get what you're saying about the deity lvl play. We have issues with the ai keeping up in general and if that were to be identified and resolved (which we're always working on) we wouldn't have quite the ability to have a runaway monopoly on religions as you are showing. On Vanilla deity there's no hope of ever getting to a tech first and we realize this mod suffers some issues with the true difficulties matching the challenge degrees of the original. Some changes in the tech tree could be pending to assist that problem with Religious monopolies as well.

 

[Sgtslick]

Another (strong) possibility is that it is not choosing sensible promotions for its town watchmen (pretty much always should be crime fighting, or maybe city defense for town watchmen IMO).

Yup, i've seen stacks of 30+ watchmen (idiotic in itself) and not one has police promotion and some with City Raider III