Firaxis: Can the religious side of the game get a re-do?

[gunnergoz]

I'm loving Civ VI to the point I have almost 280 hours on it so far but the fly in my soup is the religious game. It just does not click for me. I find the entire affair too busy and annoyingly the map fills up with religious units to the point that you can hardly move around at times. I think a religious game could be devised that would work entirely based on buildings exerting a religious pressure without need for religious units at all. Given enough time I suspect a like-minded modder may well provide such an alternative to the vanilla religion treatment but I'd prefer it if Firaxis took a hard look at this side of the game and gave it a massive do-over. Thanks.

 

[OranHarken]

Several people have brought this up here already, myself among you. I would also prefer city and district based pressure.

 

[Ogaw]

Sounds like a good idea to keep this to cities / districts. I would also suggest reshaping the way you aquire a religion. Now you need to 100% go for a religion on Immortal or higher or you have no chance. I dislike that and I think there should be a better way to do it

 

[chillbaka1]

I agree, especially with the overcrowding of units. If you don't found a religion, your borders are completely filled with apostles from other civs and you cant even get a builder to mine aluminum in the late game. The AI needs a major rework in terms of religion and what they need to produce to be effective. I had an idea the other day in one of my games, get rid of units spreading faith and instead build improvements similar to spain's unique building. These buildings do not override existing improvements and behave like mini holy sites. Their production can be chosen depending on what beliefs you chose. They can focus on spreading religion, inquisition, religious research on faith, science, culture ect. up until the industrial era (similar to actual history) or acquiring relics.

 

[CaiusDrewart]

Totally agree that the decision to emphasize moving dozens of religious units through traffic jams, rather than passive spread, was a big mistake. Personally I would scrap religious units and the religious victory altogether, but if they're going to keep it, they need to make it way less of a grind.

 

[DrJones87]

I think each individual unit should cost 10x as much and be 10x more powerful.

 

[steveg700]

assssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssWhile I loathe the spam of religious units, and agree that passive pressure works far too slowly, the notion of making a religious victory boil down to district and buildings with no need for religious units at all is also a bad idea. It's basically turning a victory condition from something requiring active efforts to something passive, insular, and paint-by-numbers procedural. What in this scenario would allow one player to triumph over others? Sounds like it would just boil down to production capacity and city-sprawl.

I personally think that apostles should be capped in a hard or soft fashion to ensure a civ can't have too many on the map at once. Either some factor limits how many you can have, or makes each one incrementally more expensive to purchase.

Beyond that, I think the end goal of making your religion the majority religion in every civ is a mistake. Rather, have players race to convert enough cities to unlock some quests that progress you towards a religious victory, like building a wonder or using GP points to generate a messiah. Ideally, by the time you reach the late game, apostles are a thing of the past and conversion of cities would be de-emphasized.

 

[gunnergoz]

Of course, they could just make the religious war optional. As opposed to the victory, since the AI still spams units apparently even if there is no reason to.

 

[Zenstrive]

The only thing I want Firaxis to really look at is the way religious pressure work. I think it's weaker than in Civ V, and there is no transparent number on how strong the pressure is. All you see is pulsing circles and circling arrows. Confusing.
The religious units are fine, but AI need to really stop spamming them.

 

[TomKQT]

The only thing I want Firaxis to really look at is the way religious pressure work. I think it's weaker than in Civ V, and there is no transparent number on how strong the pressure is. All you see is pulsing circles and circling arrows. Confusing.
The religious units are fine, but AI need to really stop spamming them.

I agree. I was very happy when I first saw (before game release) that they added religien lenses and that you will be actually able to visualise and study the religion on the map (pressures, believers in a city etc.). But the actual implementation is extremely bad and in fact you have even less useful info than in Civ5... For example until a city has some dominant religion, there is no way to see the number of believers of individual religions in the city and you have no idea how much is needed to convert it and/or which religion is leading.
And I hate that the lense activates automatically when you select a religious unit and you cannot turn it off, because the coloring of terrain is incredibly annoying for me. You even don't see roads, you see nothing. My eyes hurt. (The same applies for settlers, I always have to select another unit, plan the destination and then just move the settler there...)

 

[OranHarken]

I agree. I was very happy when I first saw (before game release) that they added religien lenses and that you will be actually able to visualise and study the religion on the map (pressures, believers in a city etc.). But the actual implementation is extremely bad and in fact you have even less useful info than in Civ5... For example until a city has some dominant religion, there is no way to see the number of believers of individual religions in the city and you have no idea how much is needed to convert it and/or which religion is leading.
And I hate that the lense activates automatically when you select a religious unit and you cannot turn it off, because the coloring of terrain is incredibly annoying for me. You even don't see roads, you see nothing. My eyes hurt. (The same applies for settlers, I always have to select another unit, plan the destination and then just move the settler there...)

Are you red-green colour blind? How does it hurt your eyes?

 

[Ikael]

The religious game could be massively improved with a couple of simple design choices, me thinks. Just add a religious unit hard cap based on your number of holy sites + certain wonders and policies, and there you go.

If you want to further refine it, add the option to spread any religion present inside your frontiers (no need for a city to be converted in order to build missionaries, just make the requisite to have pop of the indicated religion) for a better syncretic, defensive religious game, and there you go.

 

[TomKQT]

Are you red-green colour blind? How does it hurt your eyes?

No, I'm not. But when I want to move a religious unit somewhere, I need to see the terrain (where's the holy site to heal, where's a road, how many turns will it take etc.). Because the gray-ish color covers it so much, but not completely, it's wearing for me because the eyes keep trying to see through the silly colour.

 

[ShinigamiKenji]

As I suggested in another post:

Regarding the Missionary spam, my suggestion is to create a unit (Philosopher or Cynical, maybe?), which woud have less combat strength than Apostles and Inquisitors until the Enlightenment, but would be available even if you don't have a religion. It would also have a "spread" ability that decreases all religions in a city. And also allow stacking of civilian units from different civilizations (but you can't stack your own civilian units to prevent abuses), and 1 military and multiple civilian units (obeying the civilian stacking rule). Would it be hard to implement in a mod for testing?

And yes, a rework of the religion UI should be in order.

 

[Tamir Lenk]

Maybe allow normal units to kill religious units without starting a war. Slap a religious loss for secular kills in peacetime, so you're still better off using religious combat. But the traffic jams are absurd.

 

[Trebjonn]

Maybe allow normal units to kill religious units without starting a war. Slap a religious loss for secular kills in peacetime, so you're still better off using religious combat. But the traffic jams are absurd.

What if when you kill of pesky faith units your campuses in the modern era produces -science

 

[Tamir Lenk]

What if when you kill of pesky faith units your campuses in the modern era produces -science

Well you need to have it sting, or the rest of the religious set up falls apart

 

[CaiusDrewart]

Another thing about religious victories--why is there essentially nothing in either tech tree beyond the Renaissance Era which contributes to it? If you're going Religious, once you get Theocracy, the civics tree has basically nothing more to offer. As for the tech tree, you might need Caravels so your Apostles can cross oceans. Maybe in some games you need an up-to-date military to defend yourself. But nothing in there after the Renaissance Era is going to directly help you win.

It's very strange. No other victory in any Civ game I can remember has ever worked that way. Once you get the key religious stuff, which is all available about halfway through the game, your civ's development stops mattering at all. I don't think that's good design for a Civ game.

If the developers are serious about making the Religious Victory work, it needs:

--stuff in the latter half of the tech and civic trees that affects it.
--much more diversity of religious units. Missionaries and Inquisitors are very situational right now. Any religious game is going to be all about spamming Apostles. Add more religious units and make them all have different and useful functions.
--a way for Civs who haven't founded a religion to defend themselves against conversion without declaring war.
--a way to make moving 10 Apostles around a crowded map less tedious.
--an AI that is smarter about retreating wounded Apostles.