The consequence is opportunity cost, you could have picked a belief that scales well with spreading. But you choose to save your faith and get bonuses later through holy sites and GP buying. That is a strategic choice not a flaw in the belief design.
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Going for Gold: Enhancer Beliefs
- Thread starter Stalker0
- Start date
The consequence is opportunity cost, you could have picked a belief that scales well with spreading. But you choose to save your faith and get bonuses later through holy sites and GP buying. That is a strategic choice not a flaw in the belief design.
pineappledan
Deity
If not getting an enhancer that scales is such a sacrifice, why do the non-scaling enhancers have so much power?
What is the appropriate power level for a non-scaling enhancer to have relative to a scaling one? 200 followers? 25 cities?
Mendicancy and Iconography are also the only enhancers that dont require any
Faith investment to use. All the others are at least faith sinks in some way or another. balancing 7 faith sinks with completely faith-agnostic beliefs is too difficult.
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telelavoro
Chieftain
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2018
- Messages
- 31
I think you both agree more than you disagree. The problem is that the scaling beliefs are worse than the non-scaling beliefs at the low end, but often still inferior to them at the high end.
I think non-scaling beliefs are fine as a concept - it introduces a niche for non-spreading religions, but they shouldn't just be straight-up better in al situations. So I agree with Stalker0's suggestion for a nerf (or buff the others, whatever you prefer).
I think non-scaling beliefs are fine as a concept - it introduces a niche for non-spreading religions, but they shouldn't just be straight-up better in al situations. So I agree with Stalker0's suggestion for a nerf (or buff the others, whatever you prefer).
If not getting an enhancer that scales is such a sacrifice, why do the non-scaling enhancers have so much power?
What is the appropriate power level for a non-scaling enhancer to have relative to a scaling one? 200 followers? 25 cities?
Mendicancy and Iconography are also the only enhancers that dont require any
Is anyone saying Mendicancy is OP? We all seem to agree on Iconography, which simply requires a nerf....over and done with. I feel the problem is being overexaggerated, only enhancers I think are bad are Inquisition and Syncretism (which is not necessary weak but the mechanics have issue). Icon is then a little strong, I get solid use out of all of the rest of them.
pineappledan
Deity
I stopped using it even for most games where I am using ITRs... Maybe it's not horrible, but it feels like a follower belief
The relative power is not my main point. We have 2 enhancers that are at odds with the other 7 in an essential way. It is a balance issue somewhat, but it's also that these 2 beliefs don't require a faith investment to use. Mendicancy looks like a follower belief and Iconography plays like a weak reformation belief
This will be my last reply on the topic as I think you and I have both stated our points on this and its time for others to weigh in and see where the consensus lies. What I have bolded is our disagreement. You think that the spreading benefit is essential for enhancer, I do not.
Here's my spiel on this topic. I think religion as a whole is extremely powerful, and sprinting to enhance is generally a really good play. Ethiopia, India, Spain, Maya and a few others are monstrously strong because they can do this. Stuff like Korea's extra faith on university, or Egypt's on caravansaries, those come too late. The free great person in artistry comes too late. You want to be the first to enhance every game. The choice between spreading and enhancing has a correct answer most of the time, you should enhance.
Dioceses is 10 culture without condition, you can get it a time when you might have like 60 culture per turn. It's a huge deal. 10 faith per turn will probably double the religious pressure from your holy city. It is pretty average compared to the other enhancers, but it lets you snowball like crazy. I find beliefs like zealotry or prophecy, which might play directly into my strategy, get skipped because they mean giving up so many immediate yields. Culture is king in VP, and religion is a huge source of mid-game culture.
Just some things I'd like to see:
Dioceses is 10 culture without condition, you can get it a time when you might have like 60 culture per turn. It's a huge deal. 10 faith per turn will probably double the religious pressure from your holy city. It is pretty average compared to the other enhancers, but it lets you snowball like crazy. I find beliefs like zealotry or prophecy, which might play directly into my strategy, get skipped because they mean giving up so many immediate yields. Culture is king in VP, and religion is a huge source of mid-game culture.
Just some things I'd like to see:
- I would move Dioceses so that it gives the Grand Temple X culture and X faith, and makes your missionaries stronger. That makes rushing it a lot less potent. You don't need the per city effect at all really.
- I think mendicancy could be just the trade routes thing, no free shrine and monument in every city. Or at least make it +2 faith and culture on temples, or attach it to the East India Company or something. The culture you can get from early enhancing is just too much.
- Syncretism ought to be redesigned IMO, intentionally not spreading your own religion is bizarre. The yields are huge if you can take over a single civ who had a foreign religion. You can get like a 1,000 production capital that just builds everything. feels like a gimmick to me. I think this belief generally puts zealotry to shame (zealotry!)
Another type of mechanic here would be the orthodoxy precedent. You say Dioceses is +5, and then another +5 at a specific tech. It effectively does the same thing, but its uses a mechanic already present in another enhancer so you get some consistency there.
BiteInTheMark
Deity
- Diocese and Universalism are good and solid enhancer. Personally, I would decrease the inquisitor effect of Universalism a bit from 50% to 33% (cause its far stronger than 25% more missionary power) but buff the necessary follower for the yields from 10 to 8. Needing 20 follower per city to get the same amount of yields as Diocese needs far too long to get reached.
- What to say to Zaelotry, I think its balanced and I think a lot of people would be disappointed, if it would be removed or nerfed.
- Mendicancy is solid and good middle ground. It gives of course more yields than Diocese, if you have more cities than 5, but you are making yourself dependant on using ITR, else you would throw away a strong benefit, so its in my eyes fair.
- Iam not really seeing Iconography as that super power everyone sees, cause 2 GPP is less than a guild or working a specialist generates, but its for sure good. Maybe my suggestion is used in the end, maybe not, lets see which conclusion Gazebo is taking about the discussion in the other thread
- Prophecy is an enhancer I really like, best combined with Holy Land. But I agree, that it need a lot of faith/effort and time to be worth. I think, removing the extra spread power in exchange with an additional 5% discount and an increase of the holy site yields from 3 to 4 or 5 would be fair.
- Inquisition is something ive never picked. Never. Maybe I do unfair to this belief, but unless your are locked between India, Byzanz and Ethiopia, what do you get out of this enhancer? Why sacrificing religious benefits cause the cities will have no major religion only to get in the end a non-valuable yield like gold? (Weird thought.... try to get a foreign religion with Apostolic tradition in one of your cities and convert your own city to trigger the food/culture and then immidiatly use an inquisitor with Inquisition to trigger gold, doing this ad infinitum. Is this possible?)
- Syncretism is too strange. Is anybody picking this besides being a warmonger and letting all conquered cities have a foreign religion except your own cities to trigger this? I would really like to see this enhancer be replaced with one of my suggestions, really.
- Orthodoxy also feels so weak. Ive played India often enough to see the influence of +60-100% religious pressure and have to say, that even cities with +500-1000 pressure need far to long to get passivly converted, asking me what purpose an enhancer without any benefits have, if you end up with much less pressure than giant indian cities generate.
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Thibix Magnus
Warlord
- Joined
- May 19, 2019
- Messages
- 200
from a design perspective the Syncretism concept is interesting and should be kept, even if re-designed.
I don't see the inherent problem with the current syncretism, if yields for conquering another religion are too much they can be nerfed but the dynamic is fun for a large multi-religious (roman) empire, particularly if your founder doesn't depend on spreading.
An alternative, maybe favoring a more peaceful play: making the yields per-city based on city diversity and not empire diversity for capital yields. I wish there was a fun way to combine it with pagodas and fully play into a small religion unable to spread having powerful faith neighbors (very reliant on st basil for reformation I guess). Playing the cultural exchange, tolerance, the Cordoba vibe. Could be % GP for every present religion. Or it could be a way to re-introduce the vanilla religious tolerance, maybe even adding all pantheons from other present religions, or all follower beliefs of the second religion of a city.
(both could exists in different enhancers)
I don't see the inherent problem with the current syncretism, if yields for conquering another religion are too much they can be nerfed but the dynamic is fun for a large multi-religious (roman) empire, particularly if your founder doesn't depend on spreading.
An alternative, maybe favoring a more peaceful play: making the yields per-city based on city diversity and not empire diversity for capital yields. I wish there was a fun way to combine it with pagodas and fully play into a small religion unable to spread having powerful faith neighbors (very reliant on st basil for reformation I guess). Playing the cultural exchange, tolerance, the Cordoba vibe. Could be % GP for every present religion. Or it could be a way to re-introduce the vanilla religious tolerance, maybe even adding all pantheons from other present religions, or all follower beliefs of the second religion of a city.
(both could exists in different enhancers)
LifeOfBrian
King
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2019
- Messages
- 757
Regarding Inquisition, I have never ever picked it in the current iteration. The faith cost reduction of inquisitors is simply too small to be useful at any stage of the game and the cost of having to wait that your cities lose your religion before gaining the gold bonus from inquisition is too high compared to the (decreasing) gold you get. Plus 2 happiness from spies is very small, especially since you more often than not get your first spy when you or someone else reaches Renaissance era.
All in all, even on its own it's a bad options, made much worse by how good some of the other Enhancers are!
But I do see a very useful "niche" for it -> make it for civs that want their religion "to be left alone", kind of like Spain and the Celts, especially useful if you're surrounded by strong faith civs that will exert plenty of pressure on you either passively or by spreading, but you still want to keep your cities as full of your followers as possible (to keep the benefits from the follower beliefs as high as possible, to avoid religious unrest, to lower the benefits of the AIs religions they gain from every follower in foreign cities). I often play with Spain, Siam and some other civs that quickly get religion/enhance and are very aggressive with religious active&passive spread, and when I found a religion or enhance, I struggle to fight the pressure/spread because those AIs have been at it for a while, they have bigger cities at least in the early-mid game, they've already picked Churches, Orthodoxy, Pagodas, ..., so I'm having to often use inquisitors in my cities to remove foreign religions, but they get very expensive and I'd rather be using that faith for other purposes.
Some brainstorming ideas, some very strong, others less, all intended to be AI friendlynot exploitable by the human player:
1.) Picking it means you suffer no religious pressure and no one can spread their religion to you.
2.) You suffer no religious pressure, but others can use missionaries and GPs to spread their religion to you.
3.) You suffer no religious pressure and others can only use GPs to spread their religion to you (but not missionaries).
4.) Foreign religious pressure is decreased by __% and no one (or perhaps only GPs) can spread their religion to you.
(Maybe some options could be made a bit less powerful by eliminating (like the Celts) or perhaps decreasing the religious pressure you exert.)
5.) Inquisitors are 80% cheaper (75%? Perhaps 50%, but increasingly cheaper with each era?), plus some other small bonuses just so it isn't only about the cheap inquisitors.
All in all, even on its own it's a bad options, made much worse by how good some of the other Enhancers are!
But I do see a very useful "niche" for it -> make it for civs that want their religion "to be left alone", kind of like Spain and the Celts, especially useful if you're surrounded by strong faith civs that will exert plenty of pressure on you either passively or by spreading, but you still want to keep your cities as full of your followers as possible (to keep the benefits from the follower beliefs as high as possible, to avoid religious unrest, to lower the benefits of the AIs religions they gain from every follower in foreign cities). I often play with Spain, Siam and some other civs that quickly get religion/enhance and are very aggressive with religious active&passive spread, and when I found a religion or enhance, I struggle to fight the pressure/spread because those AIs have been at it for a while, they have bigger cities at least in the early-mid game, they've already picked Churches, Orthodoxy, Pagodas, ..., so I'm having to often use inquisitors in my cities to remove foreign religions, but they get very expensive and I'd rather be using that faith for other purposes.
Some brainstorming ideas, some very strong, others less, all intended to be AI friendlynot exploitable by the human player:
1.) Picking it means you suffer no religious pressure and no one can spread their religion to you.
2.) You suffer no religious pressure, but others can use missionaries and GPs to spread their religion to you.
3.) You suffer no religious pressure and others can only use GPs to spread their religion to you (but not missionaries).
4.) Foreign religious pressure is decreased by __% and no one (or perhaps only GPs) can spread their religion to you.
(Maybe some options could be made a bit less powerful by eliminating (like the Celts) or perhaps decreasing the religious pressure you exert.)
5.) Inquisitors are 80% cheaper (75%? Perhaps 50%, but increasingly cheaper with each era?), plus some other small bonuses just so it isn't only about the cheap inquisitors.
Option 3 sounds awesome. Does not give a civ Spain's UA like option 1 does, option 2 is effectively only for countering India.
But to make it a win belief and not a leave me alone belief, maybe your populace deifies you as the god emperor increasing production by x per cent while the inquisition keeps accusing people of heresy, making this production bonus come at the cost of happiness. Which could then funnel into religious divisions in syncretism giving your inquisition something more to do.
But to make it a win belief and not a leave me alone belief, maybe your populace deifies you as the god emperor increasing production by x per cent while the inquisition keeps accusing people of heresy, making this production bonus come at the cost of happiness. Which could then funnel into religious divisions in syncretism giving your inquisition something more to do.
What about
Inquisition
Religious pressure of this religion from owned cities applies to themselves. Inquisitors are 50% cheaper. For each citizen converted to this religion in owned cities (either passively or actively), gain X yields, NOT scaling with era.
Inquisition
Religious pressure of this religion from owned cities applies to themselves. Inquisitors are 50% cheaper. For each citizen converted to this religion in owned cities (either passively or actively), gain X yields, NOT scaling with era.
bullying lowers your resting level. Bully?
I hadn't bullied the CS.
Also, I thought it was only declaring war on CS that lowered resting level, not bullying.
BiteInTheMark
Deity
Really? How long does it stay like this?
Nope I hadn't done that - no DoW.
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