Kongo's ability, is this bugged or not? (Should be Fixed)

Hi all, I'm Kongo and I got 11 cities: 6 of them are Zoroastrian, so I should get the "Founder's belief" (if I intended the Kongo's ability right), but this doesn't happen.
Rome chose the "+2 gold per cities" but I don't get any of this bonus as you can see from the screenshot.
Is this a bug or there's something I didn't understand?
I play with AI+ and production queue mod, but I'm pretty sure they have nothing to do with this.
I won anyway and this bonus would have not changed my game so much, but I'm pretty curious to understand why that wasn't working. Thx all!
Screenshot from the game:

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As you can see from the following picture, the game counts me as "Zoroastrian" for religious victory.

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I'm pretty sure that it's bugged and always has been. I've never once gotten the religious bonus from religions spread to me when playing as Kongo.

 

...How is it possible nobody noticed it?
The developers of this game are incredible, it's like they totally don't care....

 

The primary objective of this development team is to come up with cool new ideas for civ. That's what seems to motivate them.

Implementing those ideas, double checking to make sure things work as intended, fixing issues that are raised, meshing all the ideas together, teaching the AI to make use of those ideas. That stuff's work, takes time, costs money.

For at least as long as Beach's been in charge, this has been Firaxis' approach. Cool ideas sell. Get most of those ideas to work, then move on to the next release. Tracking down and fixing all of the game's problems is for chumps working on indie games.

 

Well let us just dig into this a little.

If we spy our fanatical eyes on /steam/steamapps/common/civ6 we can look into Base/assets/gameplay/data, and locate in the Leaders.xml just what ol' Mvemba's ability is defined as:

Now, what have we here! it looks like his ability is coded to include a trait that relates to getting a founder belief. So it's not like the devs outright forgot about this.

In modifiers.xml, we can see that this modifier is indeed defined:

So, we have learned that this modifer defintitely exists and isn't just fake news written into the text description.

Let's look at what a founder belief looks like in Beliefs.xml:

Every founder belief follows this pattern.
I'm no XML whiz, but from an engineering perspective would appear that there is a conflict between two moving pieces:
The effect that's supposed to be triggered by playing as Mvemba:
EFFECT_ADJUST_GAINS_FOUNDER_BELIEF_MAJORITY_RELIGION
and
that effect properly allowing you to inherit founder beliefs:
PLAYER_FOUNDED_RELIGION_REQUIREMENTS

As for what these things are actually coded as in more depth, those aren't conveniently sitting out in XML and I don't know where they keep readable versions of them or what tools you'd need.
But a common situation would be something like, the check to see if you get the founder belief is only checking whether you actually founded it and is missing a line or two to check if you have Mvemba's unique trait.
Another hiding spot would be that when your civ acquires a majority religion, things happen- like it updates in various panels, diplomacy changes, and so forth. It's possible that that test fails to look to see if you have the trait to give you the founder belief.

Maybe a more enlightened Fanatic can jump in if they are more familiar with how this stuff actually runs under the hood.

 

This is sad Do you think somebody can mod it? I still find this incredible, it means that they literally didn't even check if their leader were working...

 

It definitely wasn't alway bugged. Back in Vanilla, I distinctly remember a game where I chose the pilgrimage belief (+2 faith for every foreign city converted) and converted an A.I. Kongo. I was getting tons of faith per turn, and clearly they were too, because as soon as they switched to the theocracy government, they started pumping out tons of military units out of nowhere.

Still, considering the last update was months ago, it's mindblowing that no one noticed this until now.

 

I wouldn't be so sure that it always worked. Maybe it only worked for AI. Maybe the Kongo AI just coincidentally started spamming troops.
Cynical as that sounds, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

I'm only on my second playthrough, and I've already encountered several huge bugs like this.
Another fun one was when a city flips due to loyalty pressure, any unit that was there remains in the city. If the city belonged to a civ you're at peace with and became a free city, you can't attack it due to said unit being there.
This happened several times in one game.

The devs are either completely incompetent, or are forced to new tasks as soon as something appears to work on the surface.
I don't know who exactly to blame, but one thing is damn certain. I'm never buying anything from 2k again, not until it's going for $5 at a sale five years later.

 

I can confirm that it is not working.
I picked +2 Gold from Cities for Egypt and converted all Kongo's cities (3). Egypt is getting +6 Gold and Kongo is getting 0.
There are no modifiers attached to any of the Kongo's cities nor the Leader. It means that either:
a) effect EFFECT_ADJUST_GAINS_FOUNDER_BELIEF_MAJORITY_RELIGION is bugged and simply doesn't work.
b) the effect works, however since the belief'f modifier has a condition PLAYER_FOUNDED_RELIGION_REQUIREMENTS which is not met, then it ignores it.
I would go with a) because even if Kongo isn't the founder, I would expect that all belief's modifier would be attached to Kongo and then the condtion checked. This is how it works normally - belief's modifier is attached to all players but active only for one. I would expect that EFFECT_ADJUST_GAINS_FOUNDER_BELIEF_MAJORITY_RELIGION is supposed to "trick" the system into believing that we (Kongo) are the founder and then we can get the benefits. Anyway... not working.

 

I just wanted to comment that the bug may only be present for that particular pantheon "+2 Gold per city".

I've played Kongo before specifically to exploit the Reliquaries founder belief, where I was able to pull in 3000 faith per turn by the late renaissance. So I am positive that their ability to use founder beliefs works in that situation. Therefore, I can say categorically that their ability used to work in some fashion in the past. Whether it doesn't work in specific instances with specific founder beliefs, e.g. +2 Gold per city, I cannot say.

 

Reliquaries is a follower belief. The bug is about founder’s belief.

 

Just did another test game to see if Gathering Storm fixed this.

Spoiler alert: It didn't.

 

Don't want anyone getting the wrong idea. Its still not fixed. I'm on vanilla and should have the +2 gold per city following that religion, but naturally, i do not have it.

 

[1.0.6.9]

Mvemba "Gains all Beliefs of any Religion that has established itself in a majority of his cities."

Islam is dominant in my cities (9 of 13).

Islam has Missionary Zeal "Religious units ignore Movement costs of terrain and features" but my Islamic apostles are NOT ignoring the movement costs of hills, woods, or marsh.

Islam has Papal Primacy "When you send an Envoy to City-State it adds 200 Religious pressure to that City-State" but it doesn't. I sent 3 envoys to Preslav, and I also checked next turn in case the calculation needed a turn to update.

You're welcome to try both in the attached saved game.