Alter the way you get religion(s)

[Pitboss]

One of the goals of the change that I'm suggesting is to eliminate the religion race where only a single civ can found a religion and get a holy city for that religion. In my proposal, when a civilization progresses enough to move from the paganism group to one of the other religious clusters, it simply chooses a religion from that cluster and names one of its cities the holy city for that religion with the benefits of a holy city as it is now. Several civs could choose the same religion and each have a holy city in there civ. The drawback would be that choosing a cluster of religion ties one to that cluster for the remander of the game, unless the influences of a neighboring civ forces a change to a different cluster. In this case, the civ could accept the new cluster they had been converted into or take steps to try to expell the "invading" religion. I think that to change reiligions within a cluster there should be a period of anarchy involved, like changing civs. With this system, I don't think that there would be any need to race to found a religion so you can have the benefit of the only holy city for that religion, which I dislike. A civ could concern itself with religion on its own terms when it wanted to shift its emphasis to religion and away from other matters. Or not concern itself with religion at all and wait for religion to come to it. I hope this clarifies my idea. Thanks for the feedback.

Well it sounds interesting, but I did have to reread it several times.

Basicly you get to pick one of the current (non paganism) religions from a drop down box, after you've moved forward from the paganistic "religions".
Which gives you a holy city, that you can place in a city of your choosing.
That allows you to build priests to spread that religion throughout your civs cities.

That holy city will dissapears when you change from state religion ?
After that point it's pretty much the same way as it's now, right ?

 

[ProfessorK]

He is basically a recap of what I orginally posted. As these threads get longer, it is hard to remember what was said in earlier posts:

In this tree the religions would be organized into logical groups based on core beliefs or historical relationships between them. You could have Paganism (Animism, Pantheism, Totemism) leading to Polytheism (Pantheonism and Hinduism) or Eastern Religions (Buddism, Taoism, Confusinism) or Monotheism (Judism, Christianity, Islam). Each religion would have its own benefits which would be logically appropriate to that religion. There would be an equvalent beaker-like cost to move from Paganism to any of the three other religious groups. Within each group you could choose which religion you want to adopt based on which benefits were best for your civ. Again, the building, wonders, and civics and such would have to be tweaked to accommodate this change.

If you wanted to keep holy cities in the game, a player could select a holy city for his religion when he adopts a religion and move it when he switches religions within his chosen grouping of religions. Holy cities would act the same with the exception of their effect on converting units to missionaries as discussed above.

Yes, after you've advanced past paganism, you get to select one religion from either the Polythesim, Eastern Religions, or Monothesism clusters of religions and select a holy city which functions as holy cities do now. Through the game you are tied to the cluster of religions that you select, being able to move between them, perhaps suffering one turn of anarchy for switching state religions. My thoughts were that when you choose a religion you can choose to make it your state religion, but you don't have to have a state religion in order to create a holy city. There are the advantages of having a state religion which are balanced by the one turn of anarchy which you would suffer if you have a state religion and then choose another religion from your cluster of religions.

With civs being able to choose their religion or choose the same religions as other civs and each of them being able to create a holy city, the idea would eliminate the religion race which I dislike so much. One could concentrate one's early tech development on other things, rather than racing to found a religion.

I hope this clarifies my idea.

 

[Pitboss]

It sure does
But it'll remove certain things from the current game, like the single religious wonder, the spiral tower, collecting money from cities with the same religion in another civ, and so on. All by all, those are prices I'ld like to pay, to improve the gameplay. It would also give paganism more reason to be included in the game, instead of the few turns it has now.

 

[ProfessorK]

Yes, there would be some things lost. Perhaps instead of having a lock on the single religious wonder by one civ, instead there would be a different sort of race between civs with the same religion for the religious wonder for that religion. This is a race that I'm more comfortable with. The loss of revenue from other civs with the same religion would be off-set by being able to develop other techs more quickly in the game because you could forgo having to spend your first few turns racing to found a religion. Beside, with people changing religions within their chosen cluster, there would still be a chance to collect some money when someone who had the same religion shifted to another one, but still had your once shared religion in his civ.

Thanks for your feedback on my idea and for initiating the thread. I'll try to check out the article you referened in an earlier thread.