Atheism seems counter intuitive

[shivan]

I think atheism in RoM is kind of strange. You get a happiness penalty for every religion present in your city.
A logital way to make up for this penalty would be to build some temples that (strangly) still give happiness.

Wouldnt it be more logical that they just gave extra unhappiness? I mean, the solution to your problems with religion cannot be more religion!

Atheism should enable the inquisitor or some modern equivilant that could remove religions from your lands.

 

[generalstaff]

The unhappiness makes sense for realism. Ataturk's militant secularism angered conservative Muslims and the Red Chinese's anti-religion policies hurt (and needless to say upset) Buddhists. I do agree that under Atheism, Temples should provide -1 Happiness (which would null most Temples); however, I can see building Temples could represent tolerating a religion in the background, while still forcing out of the foreground. I am mixed whether there should be an Inquisitor for Atheism (An Inquisitor in modern eras should have a modern look though). I'm just glad that Free Religion=>Secularism and Secular=>Atheism from 2.4 to 2.5.

As for your game, I have a strategy that might work (Haven't tried it, which means your game up and then see if it is possible, and is best used with the Christ Statue great wonder): 1. Run Intolerant with no state religion. 2. Purge, purge, purge. 3. Run Atheism with possibly only "We demand Secular unhappiness."

 

[shivan]

actually what i was hinting at was that if have one or more religions in your cities, provided that you just build a temple for every religion then it will cancel out your unhappiness bonus.

So you can go from being a very religious country with lots of temples to an atheist state with not too many penalties. Does not seem right to me.

Also I think there should be an inquisitor, think of the Soviet Union and their various attempts to stamp out all religion. Although not so success in Russia itself some of the former European puppets still have high % of non believers.

 

[2ndimpression]

It would be interesting if choosing atheism gave you a negative relations hit against those with a religious civic - maybe offset with a better bonus for atheism?

 

[zappara]

Atheism is at is is now because of limitations with the xml modifiers. There's a bug in BtS civic modifiers with certain religious civic combinations which gave 14000+ happiness from all temples...

 

[shivan]

It would be interesting if choosing atheism gave you a negative relations hit against those with a religious civic - maybe offset with a better bonus for atheism?

Yes. That would make good sense.
"We see that you have fallen under the sway of a false religion" bla bla penalty should be given toward every civilization that has a state religion.

Also fits well with the soviet unions generally bad relations with other countries.