Help In modding Religion

[tartan spartan]

Hi am trying to plan a moddified treatment of religion, I was wondering if any more experienced modders would be able to comment on the ease of doing some of the following things.

1) Introduce additional categories of civics to add further religous flavour

2) Change the importance of religion in foreign relations as different technologies are discovered. (or with different civics choices)

3) Re arrange the tech-tree so that the first religous technology allows generic "pagan/national pantheistic" temple, which everyone can build.

The religions as currently implemented would then be founded by great prophets

Grateful for any advice

 

[Kael]

Hi am trying to plan a moddified treatment of religion, I was wondering if any more experienced modders would be able to comment on the ease of doing some of the following things.

1) Introduce additional categories of civics to add further religous flavour

2) Change the importance of religion in foreign relations as different technologies are discovered. (or with different civics choices)

3) Re arrange the tech-tree so that the first religous technology allows generic "pagan/national pantheistic" temple, which everyone can build.

The religions as currently implemented would then be founded by great prophets

Grateful for any advice

I am using 7 Civic categoris and a Pagan temple in my mod. Both are easy to do, you should have no problems.

As for the 2nd I don't know of a way to do it. In my mod I want different religions to have different foreign relation impacts to different relgions (my evil religions have a greater negative relation to a civ with a good religion than one with a neutral religion). But I haven't found a way to do that either.

I understand that the American Revolution pretty much wrote a seperate relationship system outside fo the normal one that it uses to do this kind of stuff. You may want to look at that. The current relationship system is pretty limited.

 

[Kidinnu]

Ooh, I like #3. It turns out it only takes three XML changes to make a test case work:

Technology/TechInfos:
create TECH_TP_NONE, iGridY = -1, bDisabled = 1
Negative iGridY makes this not show up in f6. bDisabled means it doesn't ever show up as a research option.

GameInfo/ReligionInfo:
set all tech prereqs to TECH_TP_NONE
If you set them to NONE, they get automatically discovered a few turns after cities are founded. But setting them to a disabled technology means they'll never be produced by the normal mechanisms.

Buildings/BuildingInfos.xml:
set all SHRINEs to HolyCity NONE
This lets them be built anywhere. Once they're built, they automatically found the religion they're for without any further changes to the files.

I as the player grabbed Stonehenge, so it'd take quite a while for the AI to get a great prophet for me to see what they'd do. I suspect AI will do the right thing, but we'll need to see.

One possible exploit is that somebody who wants to focus on religions might have an easier time getting them all. I didn't found Islam until 1640 BC, but then my capital was putting out 12 GPP/turn and I'd have my next religion in 17 turns. (As a Philosophical leader - Industrious would have gotten Stonehenge built faster, but take longer to get the first religion. Analysis here would help balance.)

Next up (tomorrow morning?): add a pagan temple attached to mysticism with a high FLAVOR_RELIGION score that generates GPP and see if the AI builds it. If that works, I'll package the changes up and post to the completed mod thread. Kael, hope you don't mind if I steal your pagan temple graphic. Once that building's in, Philosophical will probably have a clear advantage in grabbing religions, but I'd guess that it'd be hard for anybody to get more than two.

Ooh, this is so cool.

 

[RED DIAMOND]

I just love seeing threads like this. I too was not satisfied with the way religion was implemented vs how important it can be in building an economy and international relations. I felt early religions had too much of an advantage so I made religious techs to be researched at the start. Totally new game now. You are going to enjoy the change this can make in CIV4.

 

[Kidinnu]

At a first playthrough I'm enjoying the change in #3, but it'll need some balancing.

My current scheme:

• Created seven new "buildings" that great prophets can build, each of which founds the relevant religion.

• Put +1 prophet GPP on obelisks, strong religion flavor to encourage AIs to build them (rather than introducing some sort of Pagan temple).

• Leave the current shrines intact, so that there's some temptation not to spend your second prophet on taking more religions - instead build the shrine, increase your spread rate (while it's still early and you won't have many competitors), and get an early cash trickle.

I need to do some debugging and add all the flavor text before releasing. Unfortunately, this week looks busy. Current bug: having a prophet create the 'founding' building does found the religion, but it doesn't set the religion's holy city. Should be easy to patch over in Python.

I'm still trying to figure out two design questions:

• Put the early GPP bonus on obelisks, on a pagan temple, or somewhere else? Now cultured civs are going to want obelisks; not needing them was (at least in my gameplay) one of their advantages.

• This gives philosophical civs a really strong advantage in grabbing religions. How to get the spiritual civs back in the game? Making an obelisk half-cost is really not much of a gain; should they get bonus GPP just towards philosophers? Towards their *first* philosopher?

 

[Crayton]

Interestingly, I've set the Pagan Temple to be destroyed upon the city's adoption of any religion; and some civs switch to Theocracy even if they don't get a world religion, so that they preserved these Temples. This was kind of cool, so I added a Pagan Academy(Cathedral).

Originally, I replaced the Obelisk with a Pagan Temple but then decided to create a totally separate building. Stonehenge would have been more powerful for religionless civs or useless to civs with a world religion. I gave the Pagan Temple 50% build time compared to other temples and 50% build time for Spiritual civs, +1 GPP.

Something I'm experimenting with is giving India, Polytheism; Arabia, Divine Right; etc.... It seems to work without much balancing issues. Each civs gets a Classical/Medieval Technology to help them along. This adds some realism to the game concerning religions. Of course, if India is not in the game, then Hinduism is up for grabs and some religion technologies are not assigned.

 

[Kidinnu]

Another choice to look at for early GPP is between a building that generates one and a building that has no effects but lets you assign one priest.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Well, as part of my civics mod, I am going to be adding new religious civics options-namely Pantheist, Sacrificial, Reformist, Orthodox, Militant and Orthodox. Pantheist will be available with Polytheism and, with a little python editing, will allow the player to build a Pantheon (think Greek, Egyptian or Roman Temple) and both the Temple of Artemis and Temple of Zuess Great Wonders.
Sacrificial will require the Blood Cult tech, and allow the construction of Sacrificial Altars as well as the Temple of the Sun/Moon Great Wonder (thinking of making one of them a Shrine!)
Anyway, one of the primary effects of the various religious civics in my mod will be what occurs in your holy city and what effects your specialists have (especially priests). For instance, I hope to make the Reformist Civic grant a hammer bonus to either priests-or just specialists in general-in your state religion cities, and the militant civic will grant either an XP or military production benefit in your state religion cities. Anyway, hope to have this part done soon, though it may require a great deal of Python to get it done!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Kidinnu]

Interestingly, I've set the Pagan Temple to be destroyed upon the city's adoption of any religion; and some civs switch to Theocracy even if they don't get a world religion, so that they preserved these Temples. This was kind of cool, so I added a Pagan Academy(Cathedral).

Originally, I replaced the Obelisk with a Pagan Temple but then decided to create a totally separate building. Stonehenge would have been more powerful for religionless civs or useless to civs with a world religion. I gave the Pagan Temple 50% build time compared to other temples and 50% build time for Spiritual civs, +1 GPP.

Crayton, does this mean you've got it working? I'm having trouble getting the AI to use prophets to found religions. At low difficulty levels, you can go into the world builder and give them a whole stack of prophets; the AI uses (n-1) to discover techs, and saves the last in their capital, apparently waiting until they discover a religion to build a shrine - even though those prophets are able to build a founding structure. I've been working on writing custom AI scripting in python, but that part of the API is undocumented and I haven't yet found anybody else who has released a mod with it to learn from.

 

[Jesus Civs]

Are you suggesting that there is one religion to begin with that is common to everyone and that there is no founding civilization?

Then, as great prophets are generated, you can found a new religion.

This might mean that new religions wouldn't need to be researched.

It also creates randomness, as normally I might chase for Monotheism and then Theology which would guarantee me Judaism and Christianity as the AI never researches these first.

Randomness in the generation of great prophets (and then religions) would add great character to the game.

Actually, come to think, lets scrap the entire tech tree and use the great people to make advancements in everything.

Great Scientist might be used for something scientific.

Great Writer might be used to initiate building libraries etc.

Great Merchant to start building banks.

Great Military leader to start building more advanced units.

God, this game rocks!!!

 

[tartan spartan]

Kind of, I was really hoping to do a few separate things,

create a happiness and culture building which allowed priest specialists without requiring a city to already have one of the big 7 present

divorce generation of religion from simple research prowess. how many religions were founded in the metropolitan powerhouses of the ancient world? ; )

I thought this might reduce the importance of early religions for the economy, encourage more wars in the beginning (because each nation has its own religion) and therefore make sharing a religion a more significant foreign affairs effect

Kidinnu, how is the work progressing?

 

[Kidinnu]

I had to write some custom AI code, but it's pretty close to working now. I expect to polish, run another alpha test, and release a beta in about 12 hours.

Given prophets, the AI doesn't found the new buildings on its own, so I had to make it do the following:

• Every AI will use its first Great Prophet to found a random religion if one is available

• The religion will be founded in whatever city produces the Great Prophet

• No AI will try to found more than one religion

• If the AI and the human player have great prophets born on the same turn, the AI's will *always* found first.

Since the religions are no longer founded in any particular sequence, founding 'late' religions doesn't give you a free missionary (this was a bug but I declare it's a feature).

This will be playable, but the feel will be a bit far from vanilla CIV, because there just aren't enough Great Prophets generated early enough. I want to have the AI play several huge games against itself just to see when religions are typiclally founded, but that'll be slow enough on my box that it won't happen today.

 

[Kidinnu]

Beta version is up. Please try and give feedback!

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=155941