Further religion changes
As promised a quick update on the religion changes.
From the reaction to the update changelog it seems that people already get the idea behind the new Catholicism founding condition, i.e. that Orthodoxy is supposed to spread in Rome and that when Rome collapses the 50% threshold will be exceeded and the schism occurs. This evokes how the collapse of secular power in the west enabled the papacy to establish its privileged position. The possibility of Catholicism (and by extension, Protestantism) never appearing is now an intentional aspect of the game. Test games suggest that this works out most of the time, but the alternate history is still an option in a minority of games. People who want to play in a world with the other denominations can still play 600 AD. I will of course be open to future feedback on how both the initial spread of Orthodoxy and the Schism play out in your games and adjust accordingly.
There's still a couple of things left for religions I want to do over the next days:
- religious building and missionary names: I think we can adopt individual names for the temples, monasteries and missionaries of most religions, to give them additional personality and in some cases accuracy. There will be a thread for discussion soon
- make sure that Congo can complete its first UHV goal with the new spread rules
- improved implementation for missionary spread chance and persecutor remove chance (I think they can use similar code) that reflects religion spread factors in the affected city
- independents cannot have state religions
- observe how barbarians razing European cities affects the schism, and if necessary do something about that
Religion in the future
I still have further plans for religions that also have been discussed in some detail here. I think they are not as pressing as the recent changes have been, and some are dependent on other stuff I want to do first. To give you my updated thoughts on that:
Additional (minor) religions
I went over which possible religions to add in some detail in this thread. Since then, I have revised my thoughts a bit. I'm still considering the following (rough order of priority):
- Tengrism
- Jainism
- Shinto
- Sikhism
Judaism is now already in and provides a good model of how to handle this kind of religion. The changes I have made to region based spread will also vastly help to quickly implement this type of religion that needs more custom rule to work historically, so less awkward scripting is required which initially turned me off from their implementation.
Shia Islam is also a strong possibility, since I also got to practice denominational splits with Christianity now and have laid some conceptual ground work to implement this.
The Mediterranean and Native American religions will not make it into the mod as by my current plans. I still think the Pantheon + Pagan Temple combination works well for them, mechanically.
However, I think it would be great to have more flavor for this kind of choice. So what I plan to do instead is to give most civilizations a (text and graphical only) unique building for Pagan Temples (e.g. a Mastaba for Egypt or a Ziggurat for Babylonia). This makes sense because those planned religions were very civ centered anyway. I know this affects various already existing unique buildings for the Pagan Temple, but I think I can work around that after I am done with some yet unannounced changes. Maybe those religious Pagan Temple replacements can even have slightly diverse effects, but that's another topic.
Encouraging state religion centered play over multiple religion centered play
I think that strategies that rely on getting all religions are still too powerful. The most important factor is that having a religion still gives you access to wonders, and wonder stacking seems to feature in most OP strategies. It's also a problem that religions with a lot of wonders (Pantheon, Catholicism) are privileged over others. While it is true that there are also more civs competing over these wonders, the player is usually able to beat the AI to most of them and still has the advantage.
My current idea for this is to introduce a religion based resource called for example "piety". You have a piety value for all religions in your civilization (if you do not have the religion, it's simply 0) that depends on its spread in your cities, the existence of other (non-tolerated) religions and the existence of buildings of that religion. This treats "no religion", i.e. Pantheon, as a religion for piety purposes.
To build a wonder of a religion, you need to "spend" a certain amount of piety. After that, piety recovers to its original value over time. Having a higher original piety value means you can construct more wonders of that religion over time, and that the piety will recover faster.
This system could also be extended to include other aspects of the game. For example, priests and great prophets could be used to refill state religion piety faster. Stability also uses a concept similar to this so this would make religion stability more transparent.
Another idea is to modify the shrine income by piety so that it becomes harder to combine multiple shrines within the same empire, because currently shrines make civ balance harder in some respects.
Religion specific powers
Something that could tie in with piety is religion specific powers, i.e. with a high original piety you receive additional benefits that depend on your state religion. For balance purposes Pantheon could receive a similar deal. As above the purpose of this is too make focusing on one religion more worthwhile, and to make religions more distinct.
This religion individualization can also apply to religious buildings, in particular monasteries. Not sure if that should also depend on piety or simply take the form of different innate monastery effects.
So as you can see there is a lot for religion in the future, but unfortunately there are other things that are more pressing. Also I want to get some stuff done first that will make such a system work better. More information on that coming soon.
Progress on v1.14
I think I'm close enough to release to disclose the remaining to do list until that point:
- religion stuff as mentioned above
- slight improvement to the culture spread rules (e.g. unreachable tiles cannot be covered anymore)
- civ balance as mentioned in the other thread
- fixes for some minor bugs (e.g. ships finish their turn after unloading units)
- include some additional dynamic names
- make GPs for some remaining civs era sensitive
More information on what comes after v1.15 when we're closer to release.
As promised a quick update on the religion changes.
From the reaction to the update changelog it seems that people already get the idea behind the new Catholicism founding condition, i.e. that Orthodoxy is supposed to spread in Rome and that when Rome collapses the 50% threshold will be exceeded and the schism occurs. This evokes how the collapse of secular power in the west enabled the papacy to establish its privileged position. The possibility of Catholicism (and by extension, Protestantism) never appearing is now an intentional aspect of the game. Test games suggest that this works out most of the time, but the alternate history is still an option in a minority of games. People who want to play in a world with the other denominations can still play 600 AD. I will of course be open to future feedback on how both the initial spread of Orthodoxy and the Schism play out in your games and adjust accordingly.
There's still a couple of things left for religions I want to do over the next days:
- religious building and missionary names: I think we can adopt individual names for the temples, monasteries and missionaries of most religions, to give them additional personality and in some cases accuracy. There will be a thread for discussion soon
- make sure that Congo can complete its first UHV goal with the new spread rules
- improved implementation for missionary spread chance and persecutor remove chance (I think they can use similar code) that reflects religion spread factors in the affected city
- independents cannot have state religions
- observe how barbarians razing European cities affects the schism, and if necessary do something about that
Religion in the future
I still have further plans for religions that also have been discussed in some detail here. I think they are not as pressing as the recent changes have been, and some are dependent on other stuff I want to do first. To give you my updated thoughts on that:
Additional (minor) religions
I went over which possible religions to add in some detail in this thread. Since then, I have revised my thoughts a bit. I'm still considering the following (rough order of priority):
- Tengrism
- Jainism
- Shinto
- Sikhism
Judaism is now already in and provides a good model of how to handle this kind of religion. The changes I have made to region based spread will also vastly help to quickly implement this type of religion that needs more custom rule to work historically, so less awkward scripting is required which initially turned me off from their implementation.
Shia Islam is also a strong possibility, since I also got to practice denominational splits with Christianity now and have laid some conceptual ground work to implement this.
The Mediterranean and Native American religions will not make it into the mod as by my current plans. I still think the Pantheon + Pagan Temple combination works well for them, mechanically.
However, I think it would be great to have more flavor for this kind of choice. So what I plan to do instead is to give most civilizations a (text and graphical only) unique building for Pagan Temples (e.g. a Mastaba for Egypt or a Ziggurat for Babylonia). This makes sense because those planned religions were very civ centered anyway. I know this affects various already existing unique buildings for the Pagan Temple, but I think I can work around that after I am done with some yet unannounced changes. Maybe those religious Pagan Temple replacements can even have slightly diverse effects, but that's another topic.
Encouraging state religion centered play over multiple religion centered play
I think that strategies that rely on getting all religions are still too powerful. The most important factor is that having a religion still gives you access to wonders, and wonder stacking seems to feature in most OP strategies. It's also a problem that religions with a lot of wonders (Pantheon, Catholicism) are privileged over others. While it is true that there are also more civs competing over these wonders, the player is usually able to beat the AI to most of them and still has the advantage.
My current idea for this is to introduce a religion based resource called for example "piety". You have a piety value for all religions in your civilization (if you do not have the religion, it's simply 0) that depends on its spread in your cities, the existence of other (non-tolerated) religions and the existence of buildings of that religion. This treats "no religion", i.e. Pantheon, as a religion for piety purposes.
To build a wonder of a religion, you need to "spend" a certain amount of piety. After that, piety recovers to its original value over time. Having a higher original piety value means you can construct more wonders of that religion over time, and that the piety will recover faster.
This system could also be extended to include other aspects of the game. For example, priests and great prophets could be used to refill state religion piety faster. Stability also uses a concept similar to this so this would make religion stability more transparent.
Another idea is to modify the shrine income by piety so that it becomes harder to combine multiple shrines within the same empire, because currently shrines make civ balance harder in some respects.
Religion specific powers
Something that could tie in with piety is religion specific powers, i.e. with a high original piety you receive additional benefits that depend on your state religion. For balance purposes Pantheon could receive a similar deal. As above the purpose of this is too make focusing on one religion more worthwhile, and to make religions more distinct.
This religion individualization can also apply to religious buildings, in particular monasteries. Not sure if that should also depend on piety or simply take the form of different innate monastery effects.
So as you can see there is a lot for religion in the future, but unfortunately there are other things that are more pressing. Also I want to get some stuff done first that will make such a system work better. More information on that coming soon.
Progress on v1.14
I think I'm close enough to release to disclose the remaining to do list until that point:
- religion stuff as mentioned above
- slight improvement to the culture spread rules (e.g. unreachable tiles cannot be covered anymore)
- civ balance as mentioned in the other thread
- fixes for some minor bugs (e.g. ships finish their turn after unloading units)
- include some additional dynamic names
- make GPs for some remaining civs era sensitive
More information on what comes after v1.15 when we're closer to release.
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