Change of the missionary mechanics

[Siptah]

It was discussed many times that religion needs to be changed in civ 7, because it is neither thematic nor is it a lot of fun. Here is a not-very-well-thought-out-yet-but-momentarily-to-me-interisting-sounding (TM) suggestion:

1.) bring back religious pressure. I would even say that religious pressure should be the standard way of converting nearby settlements.

2.) make conversion with missionaries an actual effort and relate it to culture and/or gold. Missionaries should be expensive units (similar to commanders, for example) that you don't build/buy a lot of. They should lose their charges for conversion. Instead, they gain the ability to exert religious pressure on a settlement (regardless of district) when standing on a respective tile. The pressure is not just any value, but you as the player can decide how much culture and gold you want to invest in the conversion.

An example: Rome is Catholic and receives +20 religious pressure per turn towards Catholicism and +3 religious pressure towards Islam (your religion) per turn. Hence, in order to convert it, you need to increase the religious pressure of Islam by +18 per turn, then it would slowly convert as long as you keep your missionary and the task active. Through the years, Rome has accumulated a lot of religion: Catholicism sits at 260 strength, and Islam only at 24. Hence, increasing the religious pressure of Islam by +18 would mean that you need hundreds of turns to actually convert it. So, better to invest 40 culture per turn and 40 gold per turn to create 160 religious pressure per turn on Rome. With that, it will be converted in just two turns, and starts to pressure nearby cities with Islam. Of course, if you remove the missionary right away, Rome will convert back after some time. So maybe keep it some more turns or have multiple missionaries active in the region, so that the pressure of Catholicism overall drops. This system, while complicated, gives the players much more options, more decisions, granularity, and a defense (as you can use missionaries on your own cities as well). It also ties religion closer to the culture and your overall economy output of your civ.

3.) It's possible to include great works or wonders in the system: if a settlement hosts a relic of your culture or religious wonder, it boosts the religious pressure of your religion that this city exerts. That way, permanently converting foreign settlements of a civ that is also religious is more difficult, and requires to do it more as a planned campaign, while rather non-religious civs can be converted with more ease.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Honestly, I don't see this as fun:

1. Religious pressure could look like more realistic (although looking at real world religion spread I really don't think so). But it has little control from player and a lot of complexity. But more important, it's out of place for Civ7 which requires precise control on conversion, especially for military legacy path.

2. What goal are you trying to achieve here? Making it harder to convert settlements together with religious pressure will take out player control even more. And without religious pressure it probably would make religion more dependable on other resources.

3. Relics affecting religious pressure is fine mechanics and it would look cool in Civ6, but I think religious pressure itself is really out of place in Civ7.

I think Firaxis should (and probably will) start improving religion iteratively. The most obvious now are almost unreachable additional believes.

Also, I'd look at the ways to further specialize on religion conversion if they want to. So far we only have a resource for cheaper missionaries and a policy card for +1 movement and +1 charge, which is not much.

 

[Krikkit1]

Overall I like the idea, I think pressure from one settlement to another should be low. Most pressure should be internal rather than from one settlement to another.

ie Religious Wonder gives pressure for the religion it was built under to the Settlement it is in.
Relics same.
Adopting certain policies provides pressure for your religion to your settlements.

Connected Settlements (through trade routes or internal connections) would only provide one religious pressure a turn if they have a Temple.

If they are going to stick with each civ gets its own religion, then free spread should be minimal (enough to help getting started

Also, I think Influence would be the yield best suited for Missionary work. Spend X influence and your missionary gives Y pressure per turn for Z turns.
X and Y would be determined by the religious pressure there already so that one Missionary will always be able to convert either the urban or rural population IF they have enough influence.* (I would still treat the rural and urban separately since they could have different means of getting pressure)

So missionaries would still be the Major source of Religious pressure

*There could be policies/civics/beliefs that allow using gold (or culture or science or happiness) to pay for missionary work as well.

 

[Melkus]

No time to elaborate, but: founding one religion per civ is the most unimmersive thing they could have done imo. Within these constraints, I'm fine with the system as is - refining it would just make it more integral to the game and I don't want that..

I want an expansion with Religious IPs that spawn and spread - wait for it - religions (maybe with unique abilities, like the city states in Civ5). You could make a soft version in Antiquity, then get more serious in Exploration. They could survive transitions (but don't have to) - that's all manageable.
Maybe certain civs or leaders have the special ability to spawn a religion, too.
Build the system around that, players can then interact with the religions on the map (takeovers, reformations, schisms etc. included) as they see fit - even fight the spreading into their land (for a price). The important thing is to give religions some autonomous life. The whole temple / relic thing can then be built on top of that.

 

[uppi]

2.) make conversion with missionaries an actual effort and relate it to culture and/or gold. Missionaries should be expensive units (similar to commanders, for example) that you don't build/buy a lot of. They should lose their charges for conversion. Instead, they gain the ability to exert religious pressure on a settlement (regardless of district) when standing on a respective tile. The pressure is not just any value, but you as the player can decide how much culture and gold you want to invest in the conversion.

I like the proposal in general, but I don't think setting a value for how much culture you are going to invest is very Civ7-like, which never requires you to fiddle with values or sliders. My counterproposal would be to have conversion modifiers in the religion civics tree. So would need to invest culture anyway, but you do it by researching a civic. Or maybe not a straight up bonus, but a policy which you could slot in and could reduce your gold income and could slot out when no longer needed.

Honestly, I don't see this as fun:

1. Religious pressure could look like more realistic (although looking at real world religion spread I really don't think so). But it has little control from player and a lot of complexity. But more important, it's out of place for Civ7 which requires precise control on conversion, especially for military legacy path.

2. What goal are you trying to achieve here? Making it harder to convert settlements together with religious pressure will take out player control even more. And without religious pressure it probably would make religion more dependable on other resources.

3. Relics affecting religious pressure is fine mechanics and it would look cool in Civ6, but I think religious pressure itself is really out of place in Civ7.

I think Firaxis should (and probably will) start improving religion iteratively. The most obvious now are almost unreachable additional believes.

Also, I'd look at the ways to further specialize on religion conversion if they want to. So far we only have a resource for cheaper missionaries and a policy card for +1 movement and +1 charge, which is not much.

I think the goal is to reduce the whack-a-mole gameplay. An opponent can erase centuries of religious history with two clicks and there is literally nothing you can do about it. For me this is not very fun and I would have much more fun with a system like the one outlined above. I think you will need some kind of religious pressure concept to be able to implement some kind of defense mechanism, which is sorely needed.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I think the goal is to reduce the whack-a-mole gameplay. An opponent can erase centuries of religious history with two clicks and there is literally nothing you can do about it. For me this is not very fun and I would have much more fun with a system like the one outlined above. I think you will need some kind of religious pressure concept to be able to implement some kind of defense mechanism, which is sorely needed.

1. There's no whack-a-mole gameplay unless you try to convert as many cities as possible. All regular game goals could be achieved without converting settlements back and forth.
2. Relying on religious pressure instead of missionaries means not just removing whack-a-mole gameplay, it means removing any gameplay, because it's totally automated behind the scenes process.
So, when I see the desire to reduce whack-a-mole gameplay, I could unfold it into - players who decide to target a (completely optional) goal of religious domination want less management of missionaries.

Stated that way the goal itself is questionable (are we sure the majority of players who want to play religious domination want to play it without active missionaries play?) and it looks like religious pressure is not the right answer, as you'll still need a lot of missionaries to unroot bases of other religions. Instead you may want things like policy card which lets your missionaries convert both rural and urban population in one action to greatly reduce micromanagement. Not sure if such policy card would be balanced, but the direction for ideas should be something like this.

 

[Siptah]

Yeah, I realize that neither sliders/sending lump sums of gold and culture nor religious pressure is very civ 7-style. However, the one-click-insta-convert throw-away spam-able missionaries we currently have is just a very stupid and annoying system. In means religion is based on only two variables: gold and player's nerves. Luckily, one of them is often plentiful in civ 7. Yet, I think culture needs to play a stronger role for religion in general, alongside the thematically also fitting gold investments. Maybe, as @uppi suggests, through extending the religious civic tree.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Yeah, I realize that neither sliders/sending lump sums of gold and culture nor religious pressure is very civ 7-style. However, the one-click-insta-convert throw-away spam-able missionaries we currently have is just a very stupid and annoying system. In means religion is based on only two variables: gold and player's nerves. Luckily, one of them is often plentiful in civ 7. Yet, I think culture needs to play a stronger role for religion in general, alongside the thematically also fitting gold investments. Maybe, as @uppi suggests, through extending the religious civic tree.

Yes, I see it that way too. Players who want to convert as many settlements as possible could dive into religious civic tree and get policies to make conversion and, probably, protection from it to take less efforts.

 

[Leucarum]

It seems as if the devs have tried to add alternatives to religious whack-a-mole. You can convert via espionage, and there is a belief to convert cities you trade with. I'd favour going further down this route to give more options to players who don't want to be endlessly converted. Beliefs which spread your religion to a random city when you research a tech mastery. Make the trade belief trigger every time the trader returns to the city.

A diplomatic "don't convert my cities" agreement, and also a "I'll let you convert my cities" is also sorely missing.

Another mechanic I'd consider is maybe to borrow from EU4 where the cost to convert a city increases if it was already converted recently. Maybe have a 5 turn timer when a city is fully converted where it can't be converted back?

 

[stealth_nsk]

It seems as if the devs have tried to add alternatives to religious whack-a-mole. You can convert via espionage, and there is a belief to convert cities you trade with. I'd favour going further down this route to give more options to players who don't want to be endlessly converted. Beliefs which spread your religion to a random city when you research a tech mastery. Make the trade belief trigger every time the trader returns to the city.

A diplomatic "don't convert my cities" agreement, and also a "I'll let you convert my cities" is also sorely missing.

Another mechanic I'd consider is maybe to borrow from EU4 where the cost to convert a city increases if it was already converted recently. Maybe have a 5 turn timer when a city is fully converted where it can't be converted back?

Prohibitive mechanics would cut off many beliefs as they require converting foreign settlements, I don't think they are needed. And restrictive, like increasing cost are also quite questionable for the same reason.

I'd say the current gameplay when you don't try to get religious domination is pretty fine, no need to break it, maybe some adjustments. It's when you try to dominate the world the problems start to appear and those problems are mostly in micromanagement.

 

[uppi]

1. There's no whack-a-mole gameplay unless you try to convert as many cities as possible. All regular game goals could be achieved without converting settlements back and forth.
2. Relying on religious pressure instead of missionaries means not just removing whack-a-mole gameplay, it means removing any gameplay, because it's totally automated behind the scenes process.
So, when I see the desire to reduce whack-a-mole gameplay, I could unfold it into - players who decide to target a (completely optional) goal of religious domination want less management of missionaries.

Stated that way the goal itself is questionable (are we sure the majority of players who want to play religious domination want to play it without active missionaries play?) and it looks like religious pressure is not the right answer, as you'll still need a lot of missionaries to unroot bases of other religions. Instead you may want things like policy card which lets your missionaries convert both rural and urban population in one action to greatly reduce micromanagement. Not sure if such policy card would be balanced, but the direction for ideas should be something like this.

It is not about converting as many cities as possible, it is about getting a real benefit from your religion. Right now, I do exactly as much as is necessary to get legacy points and then forget about religion. The founder belief does not even matter, because I am not going to get much out of the 5 turns an enemy capital stays with my religion. I am not even bothering with the reformation civic and policies, because I have no desire to ensure any of my cities have my religion. The best thing about religion right now is that you don't lose out on much if you refuse to engage with it.

Religious pressure would not be eliminating gameplay, because the religious pressure has to come from somewhere and you have to have some way to influence it. For me, it would be much more fun to identify the key religious cities of my opponents and take them down (with active elements like missionaries) and then the unimportant backwater towns will eventually convert passively.

 

[Leucarum]

Prohibitive mechanics would cut off many beliefs as they require converting foreign settlements, I don't think they are needed. And restrictive, like increasing cost are also quite questionable for the same reason.

I'd say the current gameplay when you don't try to get religious domination is pretty fine, no need to break it, maybe some adjustments. It's when you try to dominate the world the problems start to appear and those problems are mostly in micromanagement.

I'd say the diplomatic agreement is pretty interactive (you can say no!) and is honestly pretty sorely missing.

I'd like to see some way to get the AI not to convert you, as there are benefits to having your own cities converted (traditions, policies, civ-specific abilities), which are just outweighed by how annoying it is to play whack-a-mole.

 

[stealth_nsk]

It is not about converting as many cities as possible, it is about getting a real benefit from your religion. Right now, I do exactly as much as is necessary to get legacy points and then forget about religion. The founder belief does not even matter, because I am not going to get much out of the 5 turns an enemy capital stays with my religion. I am not even bothering with the reformation civic and policies, because I have no desire to ensure any of my cities have my religion. The best thing about religion right now is that you don't lose out on much if you refuse to engage with it.

That's exactly how it's supposed to be played when you're not focused on religion. I don't see any problems here, in previous civ games you were able to completely avoid religion by not founding it at all, why it's a problem now?

And if you want to focus on religion, the game has nice benefits for you to carry to the next age, although that part of the game needs some improvement.

Religious pressure would not be eliminating gameplay, because the religious pressure has to come from somewhere and you have to have some way to influence it. For me, it would be much more fun to identify the key religious cities of my opponents and take them down (with active elements like missionaries) and then the unimportant backwater towns will eventually convert passively.

My main problem with religious pressure is mostly the same as with tourism and loyalty. There's some shady math behind the scene which governs some process, which will result in something in X moves, unless parameters of those calculations will not change. They will.

It's possible to achieve similar level of micromanagement reduction. For example, a policy card, which lets you automatically convert all connected towns if you fully convert a city (maybe with some negative effects as this doesn't look balanced) will serve the same function, but without any shady math.

 

[Taefin]

I agree that religious gameplay current feels dull. That said, I think the current system hits a balance between reducing micro and increasing player agency.

I was disappointed with my experiences of religious pressure in HK and Millenia. After 100-150 hrs of each, I still had no idea how to leverage religious pressure in my favor. The UI fiasco of nothing else shows that civ players have little tolerance for systems they cannot learn the fundamentals of by their second game. At higher difficulties especially, religious pressure seems like it would take a lot of investment of micro and resources to fight through.

Much of what could be accomplished defensively can currently be accomplished by stationing a few new missionaries in the center of converted regions.

The two charges to convert gives me a sense of agency. In VI and Millenia, converting only with missionaries took so much more micro and resources toward something that felt impossible without using something like a promoted apostle to eliminate your opponents presence. Although dull, it is refreshing to actually convert 2 cities with each missionary.

The founder beliefs have been surprising useful to me, allowing for a sizable amount of culture or science to be obtained with a modest amount of focused effort. I like being able to ignore my settlements, and it feels like the AI is less inclined to convert their own cities back, reducing a good bit of the whack-a-mole tedium of what I could imagine otherwise.

I suspect FXS will add something to religion, and I appreciate the ideas and conversation. I think what they implement will feel much more built atop the current system than replacing it.

 

[queenpea]

Attaching religion to the culture victory and reducing its role to only impact one act of three was a mistake.

I miss faith as a resource. Using gold or production to produce missionaries feels wrong to me. And building missionaries in cities takes a lot of time away from building units or buildings. If you are under attack in the Exploration Age, it's very hard to justify diverting city production away from military units towards missionaries. So effectively, you've just lost the culture game.

I don't understand why religion has been boiled down (essentially) to a game of converting foreign cities in exchange for relics or military victory points.

I miss religious buildings. Religious works of art. Religion has zero flavor in VII.

I hate the rural/urban divide. I think the devs had good intentions here, but the system is extremely superficial and just results in doubling up the clicks (micromanagement) required in converting a city in pursuit of the points mentioned above. Instead of one or two clicks to convert a city, its move, click, move, click. This isn't interesting gameplay and adds nothing to the game.

I really do not like how the pantheon from Antiquity completely disappears in Exploration and how relics lose all importance in Modern. The system is currently extremely shallow and disjointed.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I really do not like how the pantheon from Antiquity completely disappears in Exploration and how relics lose all importance in Modern. The system is currently extremely shallow and disjointed.

I think in one of early streams developers talked that pantheon somehow could affect exploration through legacy bonuses, but looks like it was scrapped. Some more gameplay around pantheons and some ways for them to affect exploration would be nice.

For the rest of the points, Civ7 is different from Civ6 and religion from it just won't work.

 

[queenpea]

I think in one of early streams developers talked that pantheon somehow could affect exploration through legacy bonuses, but looks like it was scrapped. Some more gameplay around pantheons and some ways for them to affect exploration would be nice.

For the rest of the points, Civ7 is different from Civ6 and religion from it just won't work.

Thanks for pointing out that Civ VII is not VI. Got it.

 

[Krikkit1]

I don't understand why religion has been boiled down (essentially) to a game of converting foreign cities in exchange for relics or military victory points.

This is something I actually agree with.

The next step is to build on that by giving some ability to resist conversion and some non victory benefits to your own civ.

This can be done by making the cost to convert Not just 1 or two “Charges” but an amount of (Influence/Gold/Culture…etc.) that depends on the pressure.

I might even say “pressure” is unable to convert cities to a religion. Instead pressure just determines how expensive/cheap it is to convert a rural or urban population.

This way the actual Conversion is always in player control, but players can do things for defense.

 

[stealth_nsk]

Thanks for pointing out that Civ VII is not VI. Got it.

Yep, sorry, I probably needed to write a bit more. This thread is about suggesting some changes to Civ7 religion mechanics. Just pointing out that you prefer Civ6 religion doesn't look constructive in this thread, because those mechanics can't be copied.

 

[queenpea]

Yep, sorry, I probably needed to write a bit more. This thread is about suggesting some changes to Civ7 religion mechanics. Just pointing out that you prefer Civ6 religion doesn't look constructive in this thread, because those mechanics can't be copied.

It's ok. It was dismissive, but that's fair game. My point wasn't that Civ 7 should regress to Civ 6.

Faith and religious buildings would be a carryover from 6, but Civ 7 has a lot in common with 6 already. My other points are not related to 6, so I'm not sure where you are going with that.