How would you like to see religion changed, if at all?

[moysturfurmer]

I feel like a common complaint I see in discussions of the game pertains to the Exploration Age culture gameplay. I’ve seen people say it was extremely dumbed down, and I’ve seen people say it’s overly complex. It doesn’t seem like it’s got many fans.

So I ask, how would you do things differently?

 

[moysturfurmer]

I personally wonder if too much emphasis is placed on converting foreign settlements. All the religious bonuses are like “+2 Culture for every Tundra Tile in foreign settlement you convert” or “+1 influence for each foreign settlement with a Menagerie of a civ following a different government than you you convert.” It’s not really something you can control all that well. Currently I’m not sure there’s a reason to convert your own population. A small thing they can do, to make it a little more “predictable” is make a handful of beliefs that are focused on domestic conversion. Like maybe a belief could be “+10 Happiness in Towns following your religion.” Kind of like Pantheon bonuses, but now you could weigh the cost/benefit of providing those bonuses to your opponents.

Speaking of opponent, I’d be interested in being able to skip Piety entirely and just adopt someone else’s religion as your state religion, and form your own denomination of it. Maybe it’s got the same reliquary and initial belief as the original one, but you can add your own belief onto it. And maybe when you do a schism, you grant the OG religion and extra belief. So if Chola sends Bugism to Hawaii and Ming, and they both create their own spin off religions, Hawaiian Bugism and Ming Bugism both have two beliefs each, but Chola Bugism has 3.

And for the more cosmopolitan civs, what if there was a social policy that gave you bonus science in cities that had two competing religions in the same city?

Too much?

 

[Scrabbler]

I have said this so many times, but I would prefer to see a system where each civ does not "own" a specific religion, but where religions are independent entities and civs have the freedom to choose which to spread or adopt. It would mean completely completely reworking the existing legacy system in the Exploration Age, but if done well could lead to a much more nuanced system that could interact with other mechanics and win conditions. In my opinion the best implementation so far was in Civ 4 where shared religion was crucial for diplomatic relations. This could be extended to give each religion unique bonuses, so a player has interesting decisions about whether to adopt a state religion and which religion (if any) to spread around the map.

 

[Mr Jon of Cheam]

Disclaimer: I've not played yet.

Complete overhaul needed imo. Basically agree with above, religion should be a major influence on the game but not tied to the cultural legacy path. Ability to choose your state religion should be a thing. It should have diplomatic consequences. Religious spread should be passive not with the use of missionaries.

I haven't thought through all the details but I'd start from this basis and build from there. I do like the customised nature of the religions, i.e. the fact that a player can make up their own religion and its set of beliefs.

 

[The Economy]

Missionaries is just more busywork and micro, which this game already has too much of. Religion should be passive imo.

 

[Black Gate]

I'll also chime in as in favour of unowned religions and passive pressure. Having to constantly produce an army of missionaries just to keep the AI from beelining to my one city on the opposite side of the map that they just must convert has been an annoying experience.

As for how you'd do the above while also keeping customisable religions - I could see religions spawning without names, just basic colours. So you'd see the notification "A religion is now growing in popularity in your city Ostia!" but once you adopt it as state religion (if you're first) you get dibs on naming it Catholicism or Buddhism or the Cult of the Bug and pick a belief. The more states adopt the religion of your lands, the more beliefs are added and the more appealing it becomes. State religions would have greater religious pressure than unadopted religions, and sharing religions would increase relations. You could have an espionage-like diplomatic endeavour to increase pressure of your religion in a target city - kind of like the current one, but not as powerful (but able to be used faster perhaps?). Build temples, altars, cathedrals etc. to increase your city's religious pressure and resist foreign influence.

I don't think this is perfect but I think I'd like it more than the missionary minigame and detaching religion from the culture legacy would keep religion malleable enough to join other ages.

 

[King of Prussia]

Outside of some policy cards, and the possibly crisis, idk if there is a reason to convert your own cities.

The ways to get relics seem a little too focused, and remembering all the cities you converted before is a pain. Missionaries are a bunch of busy work as well. Having to covert twice is eh. If you pick the wrong one, you are just SOL for the whole era. Id rather they be wider in scope.

This also leads into a mini rant about movement. The movement system combined with the UI is annoying. You have 9 movement left but its all used up on 1 tile. Urban tiles dont have roads? You are constantly zig zagging over random tiles, taking forever to get to one place or another at times. You cant easily see if your movement will be used up when moving to a tile if there are other stuff covering it up. Some of the towns dont have any urban districts, so you cant covert the urban pop of other civs. You cant convert holy cities at all, but you dont see that until you are there to try and convert?

Anyways the system isnt horrible, but it could be vastly improved. I think there are other routes they could of taken that would of made religion far more interesting. As is, with some tweaks/fixes it could be way more enjoyable. I wish they had less busy work with it or make it more rewarding.

 

[DukeSammael]

I just decided to quit the game in exploration age because religion is so opaque and bizarre that it's frustrating.

I founded my religion, converted my own settlements and started sending a few missionaries around. At the same time, I kept getting messages that my cities are starting to follow another religion (which was founded after mine), and presto, 10 turns after it, all of them are following another religion except for my holy city. How? Why? What could I have done differently in those 10 turns? No idea. I didn't even see foreign missionaries, except for 1, and there is no way in hell he could have converted everything in that short of a time.

 

[Hawke9]

I've found that they removed every single thing that made religion fun for me in previous games, and only kept the one thing I DIDN'T like: the annoying micromanagement of manually sending out missionaries. I loved the faith economy, the variety of different bonuses and effects you could choose, now you can mainly just choose ways to earn relics. I loved the religious pressure system where religious blocks organically form through trade and war, now there's only missionary spamming and there's no logic to which cities follow which religions, purely where everyone randomly sends their missionaries.

So yeah, I'm waiting for a complete overhaul. Religion in civ 7 is simply put: just not fun

 

[stealth_nsk]

It looks like the basis of religion is more or less right from gameplay perspective:
1. Civ7 requires some great work collecting mechanics for each age with a victory/legacy path based on it. Religion looks good for it.
2. Moving some additional units around feels very right for ages after antiquity. After you scouted your continent and placed core settlements, you lose some activity which involves moving civilian units in peace time, so that's a great replacement.

So, the religion is generally split into 2 parts:
1. Gameplay mandatory part of moving missionaries and producing relics
2. Optional part of converting cities and getting benefits from founder believes.

I believe that's the latter part which was messed a bit. It's not a surprise, providing it's an optional part of a mechanic actual for one age only, but a bit of attention is needed there.

 

[Isengardtom]

I’m actually glad the faith economy as it was in Civ 6 is gone, at least in the way that you could use (abuse) faith in Civil 6 with the golden age option where you could just buy settlers and builders and such with faith.

I’m also more in favour of religion being passive and offering you maybe some bonuses to boost culture, or to give you production boosts to religious wonders for example or give interesting buffs / bonuses to those wonders.
Founding a religion could also unlock special buildings you can’t build if you don’t have a religion and those buildings could be ageless and retain their bonuses in Modern.

In any case if religion is to stay as it is now, I would like to see an alternative legacy path for culture in exploration so I can at least ignore it

 

[untitledjuan]

I wish they went back to the Civ4 system. It was waaay more fun and it made much more historical sense. Religions don't tend to be owned by specific nations and many nations have shared religions that cover entire continents. You don't see Spain, France, Portugal, etc. each with their own religion, they're all Catholic. Or Islam, which has many followers from many nations, cultures and languages, not a single civilization that "owns" it (well, at least nowadays and for many centuries by now). Of course various indigenous groups have their own religions linked to their cultures, but these particular "ethnic" religions weren't meant to be proselitised like the large "world-religions".

The current system, which basically appeared back in Civ5 with some changes, i sees religion as something managed by the State, but during most of history, it was more of an external and internal force that governments had to deal with, not much something they directly controlled (of course, with some major exceptions, such as China).

 

[Fat Bastard]

Religion was really boring in Civ 6 for me, what with all the apostles the ai would spam. I like how simplified it is now.

 

[Melkus]

I think @stealth_nsk is on to something in regard to gameplay mechanics - and the complete abstraction of population in Civ7 makes it hard to implement a spread-based religion system as we know it. But if the game needs some reason to move units around in Exploration (not sure we do btw, there are ships, traders and armies to move already), it needs to be more interesting.
It just feels tedious at first (and second) glance with these weird conversion tasks. Not to mention I have to actively fight the opaque UI to figure out where to send them.

But my bigger problem is narrative immersion.
That's why I'm Team Complete Overhaul on this one. @untitledjuan hits the nail on the head for me, except that the Civ4 implementation is still a bit too state-centred for my taste. Religion should be an expression of this unruly desire in people that you have to handle somehow if you want to build a state.
"This nearby city state has developed some strange ideas and our people start falling for them and don't listen to us anymore. Should we fight it with fire? Or we could kill the source entirely... But what if we build them some kind of religious building to appease them? Eventually it might even turn into a useful tool for us...."

This iteration gets the religious narrative the most wrong of the last four Civs, it just feels hollow. There's not even a connection with the former pantheon I chose or any kind of buildup. I just decide to build a temple and people start believing in my arbitrary concoction. But why? And why does conversion by missionaries yield "Relics"?
Also absurd: the fact that you don't even need to build a powerful religion or keep your hold in cities, just have to convert your targets once and forget about it. (Really hope I'm missing something here.) I need at least some flimsy justification in my head that this somehow constitutes a "cultural legacy".

 

[evonannoredars]

So, the religion is generally split into 2 parts:
1. Gameplay mandatory part of moving missionaries and producing relics
2. Optional part of converting cities and getting benefits from founder believes.

I initially hated the religion system, but when I realised that it's seperated in that way, i.e. all that matters for the cultural legacy path is just converting whoever it is I need to convert according to my reliquary beliefs and the religion of my own cities is irrelevant, I don't mind it. I'm doing well enough at the game anyway atm to not worry about if my founder beliefs are being fulfilled or not.
But of course the fact I can ignore it doesnt make it not-bad, it definitely needs improving to be fun to engage in imo.

 

[Krajzen]

Low chances of happening: I would like religions to be not controlled from HQ in the underground bunker under your palace, but phenomenons being born somewhat independently of civilizaitons' agency, and then civs having to choose what to do with them, adapt to them, reshape them to their needs, stomp them out etc. Low chances because it would essentially require turning the entire 2012-2025 religion system upside down and redesigning it mostly from scratch. I also think Firaxis would say "no, it's crucial for dopamine shots into the vein that the player personally designs religion", even though I genuinely think this alternate approach could allow much deeper, more strategic, more interesting religious gameplay.

Slightly higher chances of happening: I would like religions to be much more structurally varied - so not every religion is Christianity/Islam style "hurr I have prophers and this is my state religion and I send missionaries from my capital, wanna convert the entire world, all other religions should disappear" etc.

So you could also:
- Be perfectly fine and benefit from converting to already founded, culturally alien religion, and still have agency in reshaping it to your need (IRL: all the time everywhere, most obviously with Rome and Christianity or Iran and Islam)
- Found two religions, with this option having benefits and drawbacks like dual classing in RPGs (IRL: India, China)
- Syncretise different religions, make them blend into one another (IRL: African religions and Islam/Christianity)
- Be perfectly fine with several religions coexisting in your empire, with some limitations (IRL: Rome)
- Have religion spreading only culturally/politically, with no prophets or missionaries (IRL: Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism? Zoroastrianism??)
With special sort of bonuses to compensate for that
- Be perfectly fine with keeping your old style pagan pantheon, which is usually clearly inferior option but sometimes it is good option thanks to the special set of strong nature-, tile-, resource- focused bonuses of your ancestors
- Have non-proselytysing religion, akin to Judaism, focusing instead of spiritual mastery of the chosen people (the problem: in civ7 civilizations can't stand the test of time like Jews did )
- In the modern era get to choose between fundamentalism, state religion, secularism, and state atheism (with the latter enabling you to have anti-missionaries converting people to atheism, sort of like Communists did with more ro less success)

 

[kaspergm]

I think the question of religion is rather difficult. From what I've seen (not having bought the game yet), I'm leaning towards complete overhaul, but this is without having tried it, so take that for what it is.

I think those who call for a more passive religion game is probably on to something, but on the other hand, the developers also have a point about religion having some sort of competitive element, as stealth_nsk also adresses above. As I see it, the current religion system is caught between these two opposing points:

1. Being an element of a strategy game, religion should have some sort of competitive element - i.e. compete with other religions in spreading your own religion. This also makes sense from a historic pov., at least from a eurocentric perspective, and fits the medieval/exploration eras rather well.
2. The missionary game is inherently repetitive and unfun and was one of the least liked designs of Civ6. The fact that each city now seems to require two conversions does not help with this issue at all.

So yes, one can go back to a more passive spreading mechanism, but without some sort of way to influence the spread, it will lose the competitive and strategic element. So if one wants to favor a more passive/off-the-map approach to religious spread, one needs to come up with a way to facilitate that imo. I'm not sure I have the perfect solution, but something like:

• Building holy sites and religious monuments/wonders
• Displaying relics (think Eleanor Civ6 mechanics)
• Running city projects
• Running specialists

could all be ways of enforcing passive spread, that would engage player but also not require on-map missionaries. Basically this would make religious pressure a bit like loyalty pressure from Civ6 (and we all loved that mechanic, yes). The problem would be: How do you cause this pressure to spread to very distant parts of world - cross-continent? But maybe this would play well with the must-settle-foreign-lands part of the exploration era. Some other thoughts on this:

• City states as local spreading centers?
• Tie into diplomatic system (i.e. use influence to allow local believers)
• Maybe an agent-like missionary unit similar to how spies work in Civ6? Actually this might work pretty well ...

Anyway, a few thoughts wrt. faith economy of Civ6: I liked this idea of faith as a currency, and if they do a complete overhaul, I wouldn't mind faith/piety coming back as a currency/multiplier for enforcing spread. However, the universal faith economy of Civ6 was a complete misstep. I know it was the public demand, but it was a mistake, because it broke the game. Obviously Golden Age Monumentality was the main culprit of this, but buying districts, units and great people with faith was just undercutting the main economy of the game and made faith way too powerful. The same goes for the passive religious bonuses of Civ6: It is on one hand one of my main gripes with the Civ7 religion - as it's sole benefit seems to come through unfun spreading - but the way you could get massive production/science/culture/food bonuses from passively sitting on your religion in Civ6 (yes, I'm looking at you, my beloved Work Ethics) was, at the end of the day, both silly and making loopholes in the game balance.

 

[ThichN]

Religions were often spread through migration and trade. What if the same were the case here? Somewhere in-between active and passive. Perhaps carried by units doing other things on the map, and not necessarily devoted missionary units.

I might be in the minority here in that I kind of like it being tied to the cultural legacy path. But generally speaking, I never much cared for religion in Civ games.

 

[wesplaysciv]

Definitely need passive religious pressure to return. That kind of stuff just makes the world come alive more IMO.

 

[UWHabs]

I didn't get a true impression, since I played as Mahajapit so basically I got 4-5 relics just by building my unique quarter, so I didn't have to get the rest by religion. I don't even remember what belief I picked.

I'm like 50/50 on whether I like it as the culture path. Like, I understand that you need culture to get deeper into the tree, to unlock more items. But it still feels a side removed from the actual culture that you have to search out.

As for what to change, I'm also not really sure. I think I would drop its involvement in the military victory path, and I do think something in the spread needs to change to avoid the micro. I wonder if maybe we should go back to the old pressure system, and whenever your missionary go to a city, instead of just converting half the pop, what you do is establish a permanent presence in the opposing city, that applies pressure on them. You could also add the other passive spread mechanisms from civ 6 (from trade routes, distance from converted cities, etc...). And basically instead of constantly feeding missionaries to fight, it's a race to basically position your churches to get maximum spread to fight them down. I think you'd also have to limit how you get them - maybe you gain a number of them through the culture tree, as well as getting one for free every time you build a temple or place a specialist on your temple, and maybe a few other narrative ways. Maybe you also give some other direct connection between culture and pressure - ie. each point of culture your cities of your religion produce is a point that contributes to the spread.

If you do that, I think you probably ditch the relic system, but maybe add in a counter more like the factory win, so you get like 1 point per turn per city of your religion, and maybe the VC is at like 200 points (500? Not sure). So it's a race to get there first, and then a race to spread. But you don't have to build a million of them, you just get them naturally, and then have to manage them.