lemmy101
Emperor
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2006
- Messages
- 1,064
Hello all, just announcing our first mod which will be out *at some point*. We'll post any information on the development of the mod here. Any suggestions, discussion and feedback welcome. 
Written, designed, coded and arted by some combination of CaptainBinky and lemmy101.
The purpose of this mod is a continuation / rewrite of the Civ 4 Indie Stone Gameplay Mechanics, and its goal is to provide deep and interesting new gameplay mechanics which we hope to make fit as much as possible within the ethos of Civ V's design and feel like natural extensions to the base game.
A brand new, from the ground up Religion System designed for Civ 5 and to fit within the Civ 5 gameplay. It will replace the piety social policy branch as the representation of religion in the game, with a new policy branch built around the advisor system (see second post) instead of the Piety branch.
This system will be quite different from Civ 4's religion system, as it will allow players to create, name and define their own religion based on a tree (well two, really) very similar to the technology tree in the current game.
A new type of yield is introduced called piety
which is accumulated by certain buildings, wonders and specialists in your cities. Monuments, temples and various other buildings and wonders will generate piety.
Note we've used the city state icon as adding new font icons is currently not possible.
The piety fills up toward a threshold in the same way as culture does for social policies.
Polytheism
When it hits the threshold for the first time, you are prompted to...
You are given the opportunity to name your religion, then press okay to be introduced to the Polytheism tree.
(Click for full size. This is an in-game screenshot. Note this is WIP and not a complete tree, it is likely to change massively before release)
This is where the leader can then work their way through a wide tree representing different gods their culture worships, from worshipping a Sun God, The Creator, the Fertility Goddess, the God of War, or Lord of the Underworld, and numerous others. Each god you choose will give you a bonus (note we're not necessarily implying whether worshipping gods would have any real world effect, it would possibly just be the effect of a culture revering and becoming more adept at the relevant things that they worshipped. For example a culture built around worshopping a water god would likely be more adept at sailing or fishing.) and each god can be further specialised with branches following off them.
Note a key factor here is that the player is forced to spend those piety points, he has no choice. This plays a huge part later.
The player then progresses, choosing as many of the gods as they wish to. They could stay with a Polytheism for the rest of the game if they wish, but at some point they can decide to adopt a Monotheism.
Monotheism
Travelling down the tree is in most cases further refining one particular god. Once you hit the end of the Polytheism tree, you will unlock 'Declare X to be the one true God!', by which you can turn into a Monotheism. At this point the path you chose through the tree will be picked as your Monotheistic God, and you will lose the bonuses from all other branches down the tree you have unlocked. This means that most players who prefer to play with a Monotheism would be likely to bee-line one god to get to it.
At this point you unlock the Monotheism tree:
(Click for full size. Mock-up of the first section (or 'age') of the Monotheism tree. Note again this is WIP and not a complete tree, it is likely to change massively before release)
Here you will be able to travel down various paths to further tailor your religion toward war, philosophy or culture, by selecting the different 'doctrine' on the tree. Sometimes paths will be unlocked with techs, and as you go down, at the end of each 'age' or 'section' of the tree you will hit chokepoints, the first of which (seen in the above screenshot) the 'Divine Scripture' doctrine. This is the point that your holy texts are scribed, and at this point you get a 100% boost to your piety output Civ wide, and as well as this the entire section above is permanently locked off, allowing you to unlock no additional branches.
Each of the ages of the religion ends with a similar chokepoint, which both multiplies your piety production and locks off the preceding section from being explored any more.
The further down the tree you get, the more powerful the effects are, but with the later ages come more restrictive and potentially dangerous doctrine.
With the discovery of Scientific Method, this unlocks a new technology to research called The Enlightenment.
Age of Enlightenment
This is a dead-end tech that provides a unique effect. It's effect means that you are no longer REQUIRED to spend your piety points on advancing down the Monotheism tree (or Polytheism if you stayed there and by some chance you've not filled it by now) this simulates the rationalisation and moderation of religion, along with secularism. The player can then choose exactly when and how far to advance down the tree. This tech will also unlock the Rationalism social policy branch, and is now the only way to obtain it. This makes The Enlightenment tech, while not required, instrumental to scientific progress in your Civ.
An important aspect of The Enlightenment tech is its cost is proportionate to the number of piety points you have accumulated. If you have been modest with temples, and therefore you are only generating a small number of piety points per turn, then the cost of The Enlightenment will be cheap. If however, you have focused heavily on piety through the entire game so you could get the more powerful effects earlier, not helped by all the piety multiplying choke points following each age, the cost of the tech will continue to rise so much that after a certain tipping point it may become literally impossible to research with your current science levels, since its cost is rising faster than you research. At this point a piety heavy Civ will need to build various buildings in their cities to help stem the flow of piety to make the tech researchable.
Fundamentalism
The thing is though that the Monotheism tree starts to become more fundamentalist as you start continuing down the tree, and while you are forced to spend your points, you will continue down the tree whether you want to or not, with the religious leaders having more and more power over governmental affairs. Later down the tree you may even find yourself being forced to declare permanent war on another Civ with a different religion, or certain luxuries being banned, researching of specific techs slowed dramatically, and various other negative effects that get more extreme the further down the tree you go.
Depending on your focus in the game and victory conditions you're going for, this route may be desirable, but it will be very difficult to win a science victory without the investment in The Enlightenment tech.
Religion Spreading
The main core difference between the religion spread in Civ 4 and Civ 5 is that religion is no-longer city-wide. Each citizen of a city has their own faith. So for multiple religions to be present in the same city, they each have a particular strength depending on the amount of followers. Also it's common to have some population that do not follow a religion at all:
Note that only one of the four population is a Duckist. Also the piety produced is 7. That's 4 from the temple, 2 from the monument and 1 from the one citizen worshipping the religion.
In cases where you have 100% of your population following your state religion, the city is said to be 'Devout' and has a special sun frame to the religion icon:
As well as a convenient way for your opponents to tell where the weaknesses in your armour are. A lot of the doctrine tie into devoutness, only affecting devout cities, only having an effect when all your cities are devout, or having severe penalties when any of your cities are not devout.
Religion spreads from city to city in a similar way to in Civ 4. Except of course in DUCKS we have a unit of religious strength in the 'piety' yield, so it is this that determines how the religion spreads.
Every turn, piety is transmitted from any source of piety (a city being the prime example, but there are others) outward toward any cities in its vicinity. There is a falloff in strength down to zero at the maximum range, and it is this value that determines how much piety of the religion is added to the target city.
Piety is totalled up by that produced by buildings, specialists and the faithful population in cities, as well as the piety projected onto this city from around.
For example, you have a city with 3 devout Duckists, a temple and a monument. This will generate 9 piety per turn (two from the monument, four from the temple, and three from the citizens).
If there is another player's city 3 tiles away, then the will get a proportion of this piety in their city each turn. Supposing the city gets 5 piety after the falloff (the actual amount of falloff is still very much in the balancing phase) This is then used to calculate a base chance of one unreligious citizen converting to that faith every turn. This factor is modified by several things, such as open border agreements, road networks and so on.
After 20 or so turns, finally one population converts to Duckism! Hurrah! Now the city is producing one piety of its own, and with the 5 piety it is getting that means it is now totalling 6, meaning there is a higher chance per turn for the next citizen to convert.
Not only this, but that city is transmitting its 1 piety back to the original city, and once its piety output increases enough to survive the distance falloff, it will be increasing the chance of population conversions in the original city. This effect bounces back and forward around the map magnifying piety production, meaning the more concentration of piety in an area, it will lead to a magnified more powerful conversion force.
It is important to note, however, that your piety that's collected toward doctrines only counts piety produced in your cities. Piety in other people's cities is used purely for conversion.
Priests and Great Prophets
Priests - A new specialist who generates extra piety when working in Temples / Monasteries etc. Collect great people points toward:
Great Prophet - Yep, they're back!
Abilities:
Start Golden Age - Golden ages also increase the range and/or strength (balance determining), of your piety emission, making it easier to convert other civs.
Build Shrine - The GP's great improvement. It can be built in neutral terrain as well as in your borders. Has a range of 5 hexes and adds 5 piety with no falloff to any city within range, yours or other players cities. Instead of missionaries (at least until the SDK), your new way of attacking far away civs with your religion is to send a great prophet out to build a shrine near to their borders, these will then start transmitting piety to any cities in range over the border every turn, though taking an armed guard is a must, not only to protect the GP, but then you'll need to station guards at the shrine indefinitely to make sure it's not torn down by another Civ.
Other Civs can counter this without declaring war by getting control of the tile the shrine is in, giving them ability to eject the unit and pillage / replace the improvement.
They can also be used in your own civ borders to bolster your own cities piety production (the only way it will count toward your doctrine unlocks)
This also allows for combo moves, since your own cities get bolstered by the shrine, they will become more effective at transmitting their piety to other player's cities. If you get a shrine in range of your own cities and your opponents, then they will not only get the piety from the shrine, but also increased piety from the cities that shrine strengthens. This makes shrine placement very important and strategic.
Splinter Religion - If you have a state religion that you're not in control of (was founded by someone else) you can use the GP to break off your own religion using theirs as a basis. Your new religion will still retain the same holy city, and all the doctrine unlocked to that point, but then you can develop it on your own. You can also edit the name by adding a prefix or suffix to the original root name to make your offshoot religion.
Influence, Requests and Demands
With the mod comes a new system that ties deeply into religion, but also other areas of the game. The mod will define various groups in your Civ who can get more or less influence down to social policies or religious doctrine you choose.
Each group starts with 0 influence, and some policies/doctrine will say +/- <group> influence, meaning that group has more influence in society and therefore more sway to make requests or demands off you.
The Democracy social policy, for example, gives +2 Citizen Influence. When influence is greater than zero, occasionally if a city is unhappy the population may make a request for a building or an improvement with a bonus if the request is completed in time. As the influence rises, the requests will become bigger, at higher levels of happiness, and will become demands with more and more severe penalties for not completing.
The different groups are:
Citizen
Either general population or the population of a city. Will make requests for stuff such as building a building / unit / improvement, will give rewards such as an X turn happiness bonus, extra culture, food, gold etc. Punishments include extra unhappiness, or in extreme cases create pillage improvements or create rebels around a city.
Faithful
The pious population of a city or of your Civ. Will generally make requests relating to religious buildings, demand a priest specialist for X turns.
Religious Leaders
The religious authority for your religion. The later, more powerful doctrine will slowly raise the religious leaders power in your civ, and these can be quite problematic if you let their influence get too high. They will make requests for religious buildings, as well as in extreme cases demand wars, or the permanent banning of resources and so on.
-------
Please note that the progression of religion has been designed to explore all the themes of religion, negative and positive, whether the mechanics are realisticly representing how these themes come about or not, and we're not making any statement or judgement on any real world religions, so please no offence is meant. We've stayed away from representing real world religions, giving players the choice as it means we can have more variety and depth hopefully without offending anyone.
New Leaderheads
Between 'one' and 'some' new Leaders! (undetermined amount depending on how difficult it proves to be to get them in-game once Nexus is repaired)
Alfred the Great
Boudica
More later!
More details coming soon!
Thanks!
lemmy101 & CaptainBinky
Written, designed, coded and arted by some combination of CaptainBinky and lemmy101.
The purpose of this mod is a continuation / rewrite of the Civ 4 Indie Stone Gameplay Mechanics, and its goal is to provide deep and interesting new gameplay mechanics which we hope to make fit as much as possible within the ethos of Civ V's design and feel like natural extensions to the base game.
Religion System
A brand new, from the ground up Religion System designed for Civ 5 and to fit within the Civ 5 gameplay. It will replace the piety social policy branch as the representation of religion in the game, with a new policy branch built around the advisor system (see second post) instead of the Piety branch.
This system will be quite different from Civ 4's religion system, as it will allow players to create, name and define their own religion based on a tree (well two, really) very similar to the technology tree in the current game.
A new type of yield is introduced called piety
which is accumulated by certain buildings, wonders and specialists in your cities. Monuments, temples and various other buildings and wonders will generate piety.Note we've used the city state icon as adding new font icons is currently not possible.
The piety fills up toward a threshold in the same way as culture does for social policies.
Polytheism
When it hits the threshold for the first time, you are prompted to...
You are given the opportunity to name your religion, then press okay to be introduced to the Polytheism tree.
(Click for full size. This is an in-game screenshot. Note this is WIP and not a complete tree, it is likely to change massively before release)
This is where the leader can then work their way through a wide tree representing different gods their culture worships, from worshipping a Sun God, The Creator, the Fertility Goddess, the God of War, or Lord of the Underworld, and numerous others. Each god you choose will give you a bonus (note we're not necessarily implying whether worshipping gods would have any real world effect, it would possibly just be the effect of a culture revering and becoming more adept at the relevant things that they worshipped. For example a culture built around worshopping a water god would likely be more adept at sailing or fishing.) and each god can be further specialised with branches following off them.
Note a key factor here is that the player is forced to spend those piety points, he has no choice. This plays a huge part later.
The player then progresses, choosing as many of the gods as they wish to. They could stay with a Polytheism for the rest of the game if they wish, but at some point they can decide to adopt a Monotheism.
Monotheism
Travelling down the tree is in most cases further refining one particular god. Once you hit the end of the Polytheism tree, you will unlock 'Declare X to be the one true God!', by which you can turn into a Monotheism. At this point the path you chose through the tree will be picked as your Monotheistic God, and you will lose the bonuses from all other branches down the tree you have unlocked. This means that most players who prefer to play with a Monotheism would be likely to bee-line one god to get to it.
At this point you unlock the Monotheism tree:
(Click for full size. Mock-up of the first section (or 'age') of the Monotheism tree. Note again this is WIP and not a complete tree, it is likely to change massively before release)
Here you will be able to travel down various paths to further tailor your religion toward war, philosophy or culture, by selecting the different 'doctrine' on the tree. Sometimes paths will be unlocked with techs, and as you go down, at the end of each 'age' or 'section' of the tree you will hit chokepoints, the first of which (seen in the above screenshot) the 'Divine Scripture' doctrine. This is the point that your holy texts are scribed, and at this point you get a 100% boost to your piety output Civ wide, and as well as this the entire section above is permanently locked off, allowing you to unlock no additional branches.
Each of the ages of the religion ends with a similar chokepoint, which both multiplies your piety production and locks off the preceding section from being explored any more.
The further down the tree you get, the more powerful the effects are, but with the later ages come more restrictive and potentially dangerous doctrine.
With the discovery of Scientific Method, this unlocks a new technology to research called The Enlightenment.
Age of Enlightenment
This is a dead-end tech that provides a unique effect. It's effect means that you are no longer REQUIRED to spend your piety points on advancing down the Monotheism tree (or Polytheism if you stayed there and by some chance you've not filled it by now) this simulates the rationalisation and moderation of religion, along with secularism. The player can then choose exactly when and how far to advance down the tree. This tech will also unlock the Rationalism social policy branch, and is now the only way to obtain it. This makes The Enlightenment tech, while not required, instrumental to scientific progress in your Civ.
An important aspect of The Enlightenment tech is its cost is proportionate to the number of piety points you have accumulated. If you have been modest with temples, and therefore you are only generating a small number of piety points per turn, then the cost of The Enlightenment will be cheap. If however, you have focused heavily on piety through the entire game so you could get the more powerful effects earlier, not helped by all the piety multiplying choke points following each age, the cost of the tech will continue to rise so much that after a certain tipping point it may become literally impossible to research with your current science levels, since its cost is rising faster than you research. At this point a piety heavy Civ will need to build various buildings in their cities to help stem the flow of piety to make the tech researchable.
Fundamentalism
The thing is though that the Monotheism tree starts to become more fundamentalist as you start continuing down the tree, and while you are forced to spend your points, you will continue down the tree whether you want to or not, with the religious leaders having more and more power over governmental affairs. Later down the tree you may even find yourself being forced to declare permanent war on another Civ with a different religion, or certain luxuries being banned, researching of specific techs slowed dramatically, and various other negative effects that get more extreme the further down the tree you go.
Depending on your focus in the game and victory conditions you're going for, this route may be desirable, but it will be very difficult to win a science victory without the investment in The Enlightenment tech.
Religion Spreading
The main core difference between the religion spread in Civ 4 and Civ 5 is that religion is no-longer city-wide. Each citizen of a city has their own faith. So for multiple religions to be present in the same city, they each have a particular strength depending on the amount of followers. Also it's common to have some population that do not follow a religion at all:
Note that only one of the four population is a Duckist. Also the piety produced is 7. That's 4 from the temple, 2 from the monument and 1 from the one citizen worshipping the religion.
In cases where you have 100% of your population following your state religion, the city is said to be 'Devout' and has a special sun frame to the religion icon:
As well as a convenient way for your opponents to tell where the weaknesses in your armour are. A lot of the doctrine tie into devoutness, only affecting devout cities, only having an effect when all your cities are devout, or having severe penalties when any of your cities are not devout.
Religion spreads from city to city in a similar way to in Civ 4. Except of course in DUCKS we have a unit of religious strength in the 'piety' yield, so it is this that determines how the religion spreads.
Every turn, piety is transmitted from any source of piety (a city being the prime example, but there are others) outward toward any cities in its vicinity. There is a falloff in strength down to zero at the maximum range, and it is this value that determines how much piety of the religion is added to the target city.
Piety is totalled up by that produced by buildings, specialists and the faithful population in cities, as well as the piety projected onto this city from around.
For example, you have a city with 3 devout Duckists, a temple and a monument. This will generate 9 piety per turn (two from the monument, four from the temple, and three from the citizens).
If there is another player's city 3 tiles away, then the will get a proportion of this piety in their city each turn. Supposing the city gets 5 piety after the falloff (the actual amount of falloff is still very much in the balancing phase) This is then used to calculate a base chance of one unreligious citizen converting to that faith every turn. This factor is modified by several things, such as open border agreements, road networks and so on.
After 20 or so turns, finally one population converts to Duckism! Hurrah! Now the city is producing one piety of its own, and with the 5 piety it is getting that means it is now totalling 6, meaning there is a higher chance per turn for the next citizen to convert.
Not only this, but that city is transmitting its 1 piety back to the original city, and once its piety output increases enough to survive the distance falloff, it will be increasing the chance of population conversions in the original city. This effect bounces back and forward around the map magnifying piety production, meaning the more concentration of piety in an area, it will lead to a magnified more powerful conversion force.
It is important to note, however, that your piety that's collected toward doctrines only counts piety produced in your cities. Piety in other people's cities is used purely for conversion.
Priests and Great Prophets
Priests - A new specialist who generates extra piety when working in Temples / Monasteries etc. Collect great people points toward:
Great Prophet - Yep, they're back!
Abilities:
Start Golden Age - Golden ages also increase the range and/or strength (balance determining), of your piety emission, making it easier to convert other civs.
Build Shrine - The GP's great improvement. It can be built in neutral terrain as well as in your borders. Has a range of 5 hexes and adds 5 piety with no falloff to any city within range, yours or other players cities. Instead of missionaries (at least until the SDK), your new way of attacking far away civs with your religion is to send a great prophet out to build a shrine near to their borders, these will then start transmitting piety to any cities in range over the border every turn, though taking an armed guard is a must, not only to protect the GP, but then you'll need to station guards at the shrine indefinitely to make sure it's not torn down by another Civ.
Other Civs can counter this without declaring war by getting control of the tile the shrine is in, giving them ability to eject the unit and pillage / replace the improvement.
They can also be used in your own civ borders to bolster your own cities piety production (the only way it will count toward your doctrine unlocks)
This also allows for combo moves, since your own cities get bolstered by the shrine, they will become more effective at transmitting their piety to other player's cities. If you get a shrine in range of your own cities and your opponents, then they will not only get the piety from the shrine, but also increased piety from the cities that shrine strengthens. This makes shrine placement very important and strategic.
Splinter Religion - If you have a state religion that you're not in control of (was founded by someone else) you can use the GP to break off your own religion using theirs as a basis. Your new religion will still retain the same holy city, and all the doctrine unlocked to that point, but then you can develop it on your own. You can also edit the name by adding a prefix or suffix to the original root name to make your offshoot religion.
Influence, Requests and Demands
With the mod comes a new system that ties deeply into religion, but also other areas of the game. The mod will define various groups in your Civ who can get more or less influence down to social policies or religious doctrine you choose.
Each group starts with 0 influence, and some policies/doctrine will say +/- <group> influence, meaning that group has more influence in society and therefore more sway to make requests or demands off you.
The Democracy social policy, for example, gives +2 Citizen Influence. When influence is greater than zero, occasionally if a city is unhappy the population may make a request for a building or an improvement with a bonus if the request is completed in time. As the influence rises, the requests will become bigger, at higher levels of happiness, and will become demands with more and more severe penalties for not completing.
The different groups are:
Citizen
Either general population or the population of a city. Will make requests for stuff such as building a building / unit / improvement, will give rewards such as an X turn happiness bonus, extra culture, food, gold etc. Punishments include extra unhappiness, or in extreme cases create pillage improvements or create rebels around a city.
Faithful
The pious population of a city or of your Civ. Will generally make requests relating to religious buildings, demand a priest specialist for X turns.
Religious Leaders
The religious authority for your religion. The later, more powerful doctrine will slowly raise the religious leaders power in your civ, and these can be quite problematic if you let their influence get too high. They will make requests for religious buildings, as well as in extreme cases demand wars, or the permanent banning of resources and so on.
-------
Please note that the progression of religion has been designed to explore all the themes of religion, negative and positive, whether the mechanics are realisticly representing how these themes come about or not, and we're not making any statement or judgement on any real world religions, so please no offence is meant. We've stayed away from representing real world religions, giving players the choice as it means we can have more variety and depth hopefully without offending anyone.
New Leaderheads
Between 'one' and 'some' new Leaders! (undetermined amount depending on how difficult it proves to be to get them in-game once Nexus is repaired)
Alfred the Great
Boudica
More later!
More details coming soon!
Thanks!
lemmy101 & CaptainBinky
)
