Keep Religion in Civ V?

[Thormodr]

Some pretty good ideas here.

Hopefully religion will make its triumphant return in Civ VI.

I don't think it going to happen with Civilization 5 to be honest.

 

[Becephalus]

Personally I am not interested in them reimplementing religion.

On the scale of the game religions were kind of an awkward fit With 7 religions and a similar number of relevant civs they just didn't match up well.

You already have temples and monasteries, and it diplomatically was too dominant. There are about 1000 things I would rather they work on before religion or espionage. More feature is not always better.

Most of them involve balancing things and improving the ai. I would really like the industrial revolution to be handled a little better and the pacing of the late game (you go from muskets to Mech Infantry so quickly).

 

[nokmirt]

I really like this idea too, altogether. How would you earn these RPs though? Through culture? That would mean that to achieve a cultural victory, you could never touch religion. I also worry that it might just become a sort of copycat SP. If it was done well, it would be great, if done badly, it would be a waste. I like the idea of those specific religious buildings. I agree it would be a great idea to go beyond the simple wonders founded by great people in civ 5. However, if we were to do this, it would have to be for made up religions or just for religions that nobody believes in any more. If you make Christianity and Islam have different traits, there is a chance that people could be offended if they believe one to be better than the other. You can just imagine the idiotic threads now with people saying that firaxis are 'commie b*****ds that are making muslimism look better' or someone complaining that firaxis are biased towards Christianity due to their 'blind american patriotism'. I'd really like to have certain religious buildings like you suggested to help identify certain civs and to enhance certain things. All in all, I think your ideas are great.

Thank you. I was thinking we could have religious points, or if you gain a SP through culture, you can also pick a religious policy as well. Kind of a two for one deal. I was also thinking about the religions themselves, it would be better to have them set up as in Civ 4, with a more equal foundation, each could have its own religious buildings, temple, and monastery, along with one religious wonder. This wonder would be the seat of the religions power, whatever city it is built in becomes that religions holy city.

Another thing that would be interesting, is a religious building that can create a UU for that religion. Say we built Shaolin Temple, a UU temple that builds a Shaolin monk unit. The Catholic Church could build a Temple of Solomon, which produces the Knights Templar.

An example of how this could be used, say your playing as England. You build the Temple of Solomon in London, it becomes the holy city, where you can produce this Knights Templar, or it could produce one every ten turns. Not only that this Temple could increase banking, adding a percentage of gold say +5 or 10% to every city with a marketplace and mint. The first International Bankers were the Knights Templar. So religion could be put in place to help a civ through making money, and building units. It does not have to be added to the game for diplomacy, although I believe it should. Diplomacy should be improved and religion is one way to accomplish that.

 

[danieladler]

Even though i would prefer corporations more than religion, i think both these features would be nice. Religion was fresh when it came in IV, but i grew tired of it very soon. All those missionairies... Instead of bringing depth it just became a safe way to control other civs attitude towards you and another moneymaker. Didnt feel very realistic. I would like to see religion coming back but not as controlable as in IV, but more of a random feature that could spread spontaneous, perhaps with cultural expansion, and have a lesser impact on gameplay.

 

[Stormbolt]

Should be added, but in a different form. You should start out by choosing a broad category of religion (monotheism, paganism, pantheism, polytheism, etc.), then gradually acquire more specific religious denominations as time goes on (i.e. monotheism would lead to Christianity, paganism to Wicca, pantheism to Buddhism, polytheism to Hinduism, etc.). Each would have its own benefits, similar to social policies, except you'd have to choose between having one or the other, rather than being able to buy everything. You'd be able to change, but only within your category (could go from one monotheistic religion to another, but not to a pagan one).

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

As I understand it, there were several key reasons why religion had an undue influence on Civ4 diplomacy:

(1) Diplomacy Modifiers were always visible, & thus highly manipulable.

(2) All Civilizations reacted equally to the sharing of religion.

(3) The bonus grew over time.....even if you never did anything else except share the religion.

Well (1) is solved by the fact that Diplomacy Modifiers are hidden.

(2) If different Civs weigh religion differently, then you won't know if its worth ditching your existing religion for a new one.

(3) This is the one which needs to change the most. IMHO, switching to another Civs religion should give you an initial *larger* bonus (+3 to +7, depending on the religion weighting of the Civ), then have this bonus decay over time if you do nothing to advance the religion further (like spreading it to other cities, building Temples, Monasteries & Cathedrals....eliminating other religions from your cities, that kind of thing). Different actions on your part will grant different bonuses-which themselves will eventually decay if you don't maintain your mantle of "defender of the faith" ;-). Similarly, refusing to adopt a foreign religion should also give a temporary large penalty, which will decay *unless* you act specifically against the other civs religious interests....like removing their religion from your cities, adopting the religion of an enemy civ-that kind of thing).

Aussie.

 

[zekeand]

There are really interesting items discussed here....

I am waiting for CiV religion expansion, as well as spionage... The game is incomplete without this subsystems.

I agree with hid all diplomacy modifiers (in lower dificulty levels they can keep them visible), but I must say that diplo in Civ IV is more intresting than in Civ V


Greetings

Zeke

Excuse my english, I am doing my best

 

[Furycrab]

Religion should totally affect diplomacy. It's not something for the player to abuse. It's something to give leaders personalities. They should do things based on their personallities. You could clearly difference leaders in civ4. You learnt to know them.
In civ5 they are just one single AI playing chess.

Improve AI by making it take better decisions at unit management, city placement and developing, and such. Don't try to make them better by taking away personallity and only caring about winning. It's not working anyway. And it takes away the feeling of different leaders with it's own personallity.

However it WAS something the player was abusing. If you got a religion first you basically had a "pacify" option where your neighbors treated like some long lost friend... However 30 tiles further if someone got another religion, this guy somehow hates your guts, but likely didn't have the tech to fight you just yet anyways.

So you ended up with Holy Wars with people at very impractical distances, and BFFs with the guy you should smack first... and this was a game where Distance from capital was still important. Until one of the two got free religion and then it's like some spark lit up in the AIs brain that went: Oh hey... That guy could make a good Vassal and not the guy two continents away.

Like I posted earlier, it wasn't all bad, it gave you more policies to manage your empire from things like building bonuses to bonus gold. It also gave you more things to try and get first other than Wonders. However if your goal is to get an AI to play as close or better than what a Human would do, tying all it's decisions to RP modifiers will always make it look dumb. "Not wanting to take candy from a really big juicy baby" dumb. So I absolutely want them to stay away from RP diplo modifiers in favor of modifiers that make sense. "

I would love for them to add more layers to empire management, religion could be one of them, but I don't think it needs to be religion either.

 

[BranjoHello]

Not a fan of how religon worked in cIV so I hope they drop it.

 

[Becomedeath]

If they bring back religion they would have to seriously overhaul how it worked.

In Civ4 I used to play on contients, part of my spacerace strategy was to get all possible religions, conquer my continent and then sit back and enjoy a massive boom of science through monestary while everyone on the other contient was trapped in an unreligous hole until ocean trading came about, and even then you could hold them off by going with Merchantilism (or whatever the non-foreign trade routes was).

The impact on diplomatic relations was just an utter pain to deal with and as in the later game pretty much everyone ended up going with Free Religion, you have to wonder what the point was.

Not sorry to see it gone, but wouldn't lose too much sleep about it's return if it was well thought out and not just thrown in to fix the diplomacy issues.

People being upset that you've fallen under the influence of a heathen religon when they've only just bought a copy of the Bible themselves was a tad too annoying for words.

 

[Wyte_Majik]

It should be re-introduced. Like maybe change it so that any religion u adopt will say grant u extra happyness (perhaps +5) extra research and culture. And maybe make it function like the policy tree where u adopt a religion and then from a set of 5 diff options u choose 3 of them. each could be like "Christianity- Orthodox -> 1+ Happyness, Units gain more xp" "Christianity-Catholic-> +25% research, a free great person of ur choice" etc. Maybe not exactly my way but a little modifed.

 

[Becomedeath]

The problem in having religion involved in anything (including real life) is that you can't favour any of them as having attributes greater than any of the others.

People tend to get offended and end up making life awkward for game makers so their hands are tied to create equal bonuses and benefits.

There are so many jokes I'd like to make here now...but I'll restrain myself.

 

[kris159]

Religion is an undeniable part of world history. In a game trying to emulate the concept of history, you simply cannot ignore it. Granted, civ 5 was released before it was fully completed, and religion isn't an aspect which makes the game functional - at least, not as much as culture or combat - but at least some of the money gained from sales of DLCs or not should go in to the developement of religion.

Disclaimer: This is all my opinion and I used no other resources for knwolege of civ 5 than from other forums I've read, playing the game, and some websites I've read up on Civ 5 on. =)

 

[Drawmeus]

I voted no. If they did reintroduce it, I'd like it to be a totally different system. (Religion is modeled in the game at about the same level as global trade, by the way - there are temples, technologies and an entire social policy branch which are basically an abstraction of the effects of religion on your civ)

Eliminate player agency over it. Religions get founded and spread, your population follows them, and they have a variety of effects. They can basically step into a similar role to the random events from III/IV, but in a less totally random and more powerful way - they make the game feel much more dynamic and force you to adapt game by game to the situations.

That's where I'd go with them. The game doesn't need yet another "Choose a set of bonuses" system. Civ IV religions would be actively bad for the diplomatic game, in my opinion. The trick to bringing them back would be doing them in a way where they bring something to the table that Civ V needs, as a game.

 

[gingerbill]

I don't want religion in the game i think social policies offer enough. I'm sure if they did bring it out and it was brilliant i would soon change my mind , i just dont think it can be implemented brilliantly.

 

[Becomedeath]

Ok, but I want the option to have an athiest civilisation from the start.

 

[Peng Qi]

No offense, but most of these propositions are needlessly complex and wouldn't bring much actual gameplay value to the table.

If there were religions added to Civ V, I'd hope they'd simply be like communal policy trees that nations could buy into or out of with happiness effects having a simple formula based on your population. For example:

You have 3 cities that are Buddhist and 2 that are Hindu. If you select Buddhism as your state religion, you get +3 happy. Hindu would give you +2 happy. You could also select another religion if you don't like the policies that have been adopted by Buddhism or Hinduism, but then you'd get +0 happy.

As for policies, the way I see it, each player who has adopted a religion as his state religion contributes +X points (X being the number of cities he has of that religion) toward a policy tree which all members of that religion share. Each leader picks which policy they want to work toward, and each one unlocked closes off other branches. For example:


Duty|Piety

Valor/Justice|Pacifism/Spiritualism

Every religion would have the same tree, and each unlocked policy would have differing benefits. Additionally, you could not be pacifist and valorous, for example. I almost feel like anyone should be able to start a religion at any time using a previous religion as a base. For example, if you've been Hindu this whole time and those other jerk Hindus decide to go down the Justice tree but you wanted to go down the Valor tree, you should be able to schism the religion for a diplomacy hit with others of that religion, keep the Theism/Duty part of the tree, ditch the new Justice thing, and continue on your merry way.

Just some quick rambling thoughts.