Devotion Ideology

That's not my experience, no. I think it is probably a little too easy if anything.
I'm surprised that with Borobodur you couldn't get over 20% by that point. Were you up against some strong religious civs?
You will need to use a least some Great Prophets to spread your religion against other Founders, as they completely remove all enemy pressure which is devastating!

On the tenets themselves:
  • anything that gives :c5faith: Faith is helping you buy more Missionaries/Prophets
  • Glorious Dead's Cenotaph has 10% pressure
  • Paternalism gives -33% :c5faith: Faith cost on purchasing Missionaries -- you absolutely need this one!
  • Televangelism as you said
  • Fundamentalism lets you turn :c5production: into :c5faith: if you get to "process mode" as I call it
  • Finally yes Great Awakening, which is god-tier 👼 and probably too strong, at least twice as good as Borobodur
So I recommend your first 6 being like
Paternalism, Theocracy, Glorious Dead
Televangelism, Fundamentalism (Radicalization also an option, don't forget you can steal :c5faith: and reduce Pressure!)
Great Awakening
 
I've been taking a break from Civ for the past few months, so I just found this mod! I've done a lot of my own theory crafting on ideologies for VP, yet it had never occurred to me that Islamism and Christian Fundamentalism could be made into a fourth ideology distinct from the existing three. I think you've done a fantastic job here and if I start playing civ again soon I'll definitely give it a try. I have a few ideas for new abilities or potential changes though, if you'd like to hear them:

1. I'm not sure how hard this would be to code, but I think an IED-inspired ability would be very interesting as a new tenet or for one of the combat-focused tenets. IEDs would be represented through two abilites: 1) enemy units *lose* 5-15 hp when pillaging your tiles, and 2) enemy units lose all remaining moves when moving onto an owned road tile, and lose 5-15 hp. IMO the missile-related abilities on the Insurgency tenet, while very unique and pretty thematic, seem too niche to be really usable. Replacing them with these IED abilities would make the tenet more interesting/useful while keeping it thematic IMO. Could also roll these abilities in with Glorious Dead.

2. I think the ideology could really use a growth-focused tenet, both for the playstyle and to be thematic. IMO the abilities of the Gospel of Wealth tenet seem much more in-line with Freedom, so I would probably rework that tenet. I'm not sure exactly what the new effects would be, but I could imagine an x% of Faith counts as food or a growth malus from unhappiness reduced by x% type ability would work well.

3. For religious settlements, I'd replace the +100% border growth during golden ages with either "x% of faith purchases count as border growth points", "holy sites and/or religious buildings generate +x border growth points", or even "holy sites claim all tiles in a radius of 2 when placed". Unsure of how easy it would be to code the last one.
 
Welcome back! Glad you like the idea. To your points,
1. IEDs are referenced by the Glorious Dead's promotion. Indeed this is the name! As far as that sort of map-effect goes, this could maybe be done by an improvement, but there is no precedent (or more importantly code) afaik for policies to add improvements. I would have to think a bit more. We can also do AoE on pillage, but it doesn't fit the defensive aspect.

2. Yes I felt this Gospel of Wealth idea fit more into Freedom or the proposed "Prosperity", but pdan insisted it worked in Devotion so we put it in. Gameplay wise I am happy with it and the unique edge it gives to the diplomacy game. In terms of a growth tenet, Religious Settlements is meant to fill this role. Do you think there should be more than one? It's important to note, as you may have missed, in recent versions of VP you can still trigger border growth even after you have expanded to max borders!

3. What makes you want to change it? I chose the Golden Age trigger because it creates synergies with other tenets in the tree, but one could certain do it other ways. In terms of Holy Site having a culture bomb... this is a very interesting idea. Culture bomb radii are defined on the base improvement, so it's not super easy to implement (also the diplomacy and AI or it are problems), but it is cool enough to maybe work on in the future anyway. In the meantime you can try the Tibet custom civ, who have a combined Citadel and Holy Site UGPTI!
 
Thanks for the reply!

1. You're right, it totally does. When I read that promotion I guess I understood it more as a reference to su!c!de bombers than IEDs, but after reading it again I totally see how it also refers to the latter. Are plague effects on pillage for enemy units able to be coded? An IED-specific tile improvement feels a bit odd to me.

2. You're definitely right that the current version of the tenet gives Devotion a cool option to do something pretty different. My thinking for adding in more growth-related effects to Devotion mostly boils down to it just being thematic to the ideology. Fundamentalists of almost every religion believe in having large families. Large populations are also conducive to having a strong religion in VP anyway. While you're right that Religious Settlements would be an even stronger growth bonus now with the border yield changes, only having one growth tenet just seems too few to me. I would personally be in favor of swapping Devotion and Freedom's tile yield tenet bonuses, i.e. giving Freedom the bonus gold yields and Devotion the food yields. Ethical Finance is a very cool tenet though.

3. I would want to change it mostly because passive bonuses during GAs just feel a bit boring to me: they're just additional rewards for earning something good that you would already want to be earning anyway. I like the ideology system a lot in VP because it gives us an opportunity to create bonuses that are a lot more niche and interactive than would be practical/balanced for the earlier policy trees. Your outline for Devotion already includes some of these (such as the NYI city placement bonus in Religious Settlements or removing military unit purchase cooldowns in Just War), but why not include even more?
 
1. Plague effects on Pillage would be new, right now they only trigger on attack. I actually wanted to put a Plague effect on Missiles, but Air Strikes already don't count for it apparently so that went nowhere.

2. Swapping the Gold on tiles for Food between Freedom and Devotion is a good idea. I didn't want to encroach too much on other ideologies but I think we can get away with this one.

3. Aha right. Fair point just a matter of taste I suppose. I like how this one can really boost a border growth strategy by directly amplifying existing bonuses, so I see it more from the view of how can we make Devotion attractive to different strategies and I think this one let's us elbow-in on Order where a wide Empire might otherwise just auto-pick it.
 
I think the name 'Just War' feels a little generic (though Jihad, the obvious referent, would be much too on-the-nose). The title of 'The Struggle' mentioned by another commenter feels like it would fit well here. Would it be possible to make the purchase-cooldown-removal only work for faith purchases? I don't remember if cooldown-removal is a common thing that all the trees do or if it's unique to this one, feels pretty powerful in the latter case since it theoretically lets you spit out a ton of units at superspeed, especially if you can swap between faith and gold for it.

I don't know how useful Religious Settlements would be at this point in the game, but that's mostly because I'm not sure how much border-growth usually happens after the Industrial era. I assume that the removal of settler restrictions means that you could settle within 3 tiles of other cities? Pretty neat, although I think that might be counter-synergistic with the other half of the tenet since you'll presumably be settling mostly within already-covered territory.

The Kartarpur Sahib feels pretty wimpy for a World Wonder, even compared to the oft-derided Motherland Calls. To be fair I don't really understand the way that religious pressure works, so maybe stacking that additional 25% on top is a huge deal?
How about Holy War?
 
I feel like Armageddon should be renamed to Judgment Day. Also you didnt show what Mujahedeen unit's stats are.
Whatever the name, the theme of this tenet is very well designed. What would happen if religious fanatics get their hands on nukes?
 
A non-VP version?
The short answer is no.

The long answer is:
1) It wouldn't make much sense balance wise, but of course you can try to adjust numbers yourself.
2) There are tables and columns used in the code that only exist in the VP DLL. They won't work without VP so all of them would have to be removed and replaced. At this point you may as well just start from scratch with your own ideas!
 
Me again.
After a prophetic dream, I have realised how to make Nuclear Missiles purchasable with Faith.
Spoiler For the interested modder :

We do it like the ideology unique units are done, but just dont tell the player. I.e.
1. Make a new unit(class) that looks exactly the same and doesn't show in civilopedia
2. Make it require Armageddon and be faith purchasable always
3. Use the Policy_UnitClassReplacement table to override the normal missile on adopting Armageddon

Military supply from the Armageddon policy adjusted down to 25% to be more in-line with modern VP reduced supply standard.

Also touched up some icons to give more "pop". Shadows, contrast, and saturation. Hope you like it :)
edit: in first version posted the 64 bit icons had moved in their atlas a bit. fixed now.
 
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Good news everyone, the slime is flowing again.
Code:
The mod now includes a lua function that will sometimes reroute the AI to choose Devotion as its Ideology.
This is a random chance based on 1) the Leader's flavors and 2) the number of other people following Devotion (25% more likely per player)
I've tested it but since it's a bit hacky there may be unintended behavior. Please let me know.
For proper integration we would need a DLL rewrite of the hardcoded ideology logic.
 
Good news everyone, the slime is flowing again.
Code:
The mod now includes a lua function that will sometimes reroute the AI to choose Devotion as its Ideology.
This is a random chance based on 1) the Leader's flavors and 2) the number of other people following Devotion (25% more likely per player)
I've tested it but since it's a bit hacky there may be unintended behavior. Please let me know.
For proper integration we would need a DLL rewrite of the hardcoded ideology logic.
the sludge, the sludge is flowing
For proper integration we would need a DLL rewrite of the hardcoded ideology logic.
Btw I am confused on this. I mod almost every game I own so when it comes to civ I am always getting mixed messages with the DLL file. If the DLL is the source code of the game why cant it be altered. And if it is not why is it such a big deal that there is no civ 6 DLL available.
 
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