Is there a gameplay reason for not being able to adjust the number of religions?

[King of Prussia]

Not sure it's true that AI cheats (how?),

My reference to the cheats they get was about the free techs, extra settlers, and extra workers in higher difficulties, plus any other modifiers that make it far easier for them to get a religion. Cheats was the best word that came to mind when describing those in my post above, but i guess you could use others like bonuses or something.

and to be clear, when i am going for a religion, i do keep an eye on it progress, and run projects if i think it is warranted. i do wish the UI was better in the great person screen, so i didnt have to view the religious tab and that screen to see how the race is going.

 

[shaglio]

My reference to the cheats they get was about the free techs, extra settlers, and extra workers in higher difficulties, plus any other modifiers that make it far easier for them to get a religion. Cheats was the best word that came to mind when describing those in my post above, but i guess you could use others like bonuses or something.

and to be clear, when i am going for a religion, i do keep an eye on it progress, and run projects if i think it is warranted. i do wish the UI was better in the great person screen, so i didnt have to view the religious tab and that screen to see how the race is going.

"Advantages" seems like a reasonable word. "Cheats" sound more like the AI is doing something underhanded, when in actuality they were just given a leg up by the programmers.

 

[PSG]

Having religions spontaneously appear would work and part of the player either supporting, controlling and or destroying would also mimic real life. Look what China has done by creating a second Dali Llama. Look what the Soviets did with the Russia Orthodox Church. Henry the 8th need I say more?(Heck this gives me the idea that there could be inter-empire marriages that could give benefit or perhaps detriments depending on how an empire is ruled).

 

[Kotofei]

For me, lowering the number of religions is the only way to simulate the kind of religious blocs that formed in real history.

And this is why it should be a slider to set the number of religions. Everyone thinks there's a sweet spot, just they can't agree on where it is. I would personally set it to 1 more than is currently available, so I don't as easily get sniped out of a religion when I'm playing Khmer.

 

[Hakan-i Cihan]

Players IMO shouldn't even be founding religions. They should just spring up. After that players could fight over controlling or destroying a religion(s).

I agree with this. Religions should either be randomly found in player cities or (religious) CS cities. Each religion's bonusses should be randomly chosen. The player themselves have then the option to choose which religion to adopt and how to reform them. For religious victory it should not be looked at in whose (original) city the religion is founded, maybe whether the player holds the holy city for that religion.

 

[PSG]

No need to limit them. The later religions would be far behind others and would appear to be just cults, but a cult whose word was spread far and wide by a player in the game could turn into a major force at the expense of another religion. I am not judging, but the Mormons aka LDS started in the 1800s and they are pretty wide spread.

 

[PSG]

I don't think they "cheat."

The Ai is all about the cheat and always has been since Civ I. It has become less obvious over the versions, but it's still a big bag of cheat. If they spent more than a few days coding an Ai script they wouldn't need to have so many bonuses. The way the game is now the Ai tends to go limp somewhere in the middle of the Renaissance. I will give them some credit with the Barbarian revamp where their actually seems to be some thought behind the actions of the barbarians even though it's pretty much ignore two or three city states and make a beeline for my holy sites just to pillage them even though it's a suicide mission.

 

[Alaindor]

The Ai is all about the cheat and always has been since Civ I.

Any evidence for this accusation? I've seen other threads asking for evidence and none have ever provided anything conclusive.

Assuming we have the same definition of 'cheat': which is, not playing by the same rules (as opposed to having bonuses, which are known beforehand and actively chosen by the player when selecting the difficulty level).

 

[shaglio]

Any evidence for this accusation? I've seen other threads asking for evidence and none have ever provided anything conclusive.

Assuming we have the same definition of 'cheat': which is, not playing by the same rules (as opposed to having bonuses, which are known beforehand and actively chosen by the player when selecting the difficulty level).

Agreed. I've said this many times in the past, but I'll reiterate: "cheating" is an intentional act performed by a creature with conscious thought. The AI is a program that acts in accordance to how its code is written and ,thus, is incapable of cheating.

 

[PSG]

Any evidence for this accusation? I've seen other threads asking for evidence and none have ever provided anything conclusive.

Assuming we have the same definition of 'cheat': which is, not playing by the same rules (as opposed to having bonuses, which are known beforehand and actively chosen by the player when selecting the difficulty level).

I have caught the Ai generating barbarians under the fog of war seemingly just to capture an unescorted settler. I reloaded the game and moved a military unit into the same area as I had moved the settler before and low and behold there was no barbarian. There are many little things that are impossible to prove without looking at the code, but I suspect that there is code that places NPC cities further away from the player when they are playing a conquering leader like Montezuma, fewer forests in the tundra near the Russian starting location, minimizing the breathtaking tiles nearby Teddy's starting location etc... I should say that things like this do not always happen, but there is a bias for them to happen.

At least CIV 6 is not socially engineered coded to make sure players do not win or lose too much like Hearthstone is.

Agreed. I've said this many times in the past, but I'll reiterate: "cheating" is an intentional act performed by a creature with conscious thought. The AI is a program that acts in accordance to how its code is written and ,thus, is incapable of cheating.

You can argue semantics all you want, but it's still cheating. Instead of programing the Ai to play better it is programmed to give it extra advantages.

 

[shaglio]

You can argue semantics all you want, but it's still cheating. Instead of programing the Ai to play better it is programmed to give it extra advantages.

Advantage =/= cheat. When two golfers go head-to-head, they compare their respective handicaps and the player with the worse handicap is given the difference in "strokes" to subtract from his final score. This is an "advantage," not "cheating," because it is agreed upon and understood before the round has started.

In Civ 6 the AI bonuses from difficulty level, for example, are known to players at the start of a game. They are advantages, not cheating. You can try to decry it as "semantics" all you want, but words have definitions for a reason.

 

[Linklite]

Agreed. I've said this many times in the past, but I'll reiterate: "cheating" is an intentional act performed by a creature with conscious thought. The AI is a program that acts in accordance to how its code is written and ,thus, is incapable of cheating.

That's not what cheating is. As per a quick Google: cheating is to "act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage." There is no need to have conscious thought, so the AI can, in theory, cheat. At most, you're saying that the devs cheated when they wrote the code...a distinction without a difference.

Are the declared difficulty bonuses cheating? No, not really. I guess you could call it cheating in the sense that it was a shortcut rather than altering the abilities of the AI, but that's a more idiosyncratic terminology. It's explicit that when we put it on Deity (or whatever) that the AI will get x, y and z.

Still, I've seen things that make me suspect that the AI can and does bend or break the rules. Having the Switch makes it very difficult to prove. One example is that an AI managed to build something like 5 GDRs...despite me owning all the uranium mines on the map.

Anyway, this thread is going way off the topic of numbers of religions.