Missionaries

[UWHabs]

Converting your cities solely to "blocks the founder's benefit from your opponents" is not a well-designed system.

Consider a game with four players: A, B, C, and D, each with different strategies:

- Player A: Focuses entirely on converting Player B's cities.
- Player B: Focuses entirely on converting Player A's cities.
- Player C: Splits efforts between converting Player D's cities and maintaining their own.
- Player D: Splits efforts between converting Player C's cities and maintaining their own.

In this scenario, the likely winners are A and B, while C and D struggle. Even though C and D might perform well in a one-on-one match, the dynamic changes drastically with more players. Those who ignore their own cities' religious integrity and focus solely on aggressive conversion gain a significant advantage. Meanwhile, C and D waste resources countering each other, ultimately weakening themselves while A and B prosper.

Adding a single policy that provides a marginal benefit for maintaining religious control isn't enough. While the policy offers decent advantages, it requires substantial investment in missionaries, culture/ civics, making it costly and inefficient.

It feels historically inaccurate that, during the Age of Exploration—an era marked by intense religious conflict—players can neglect religion in their core cities without consequence. Religion becomes merely a tool for military purposes (you get military points to convert your cities on distant lands) rather than a reflection of cultural or societal influence. Converting distant lands should be a secondary concern; maintaining religious cohesion at home should carry more strategic weight.

A more balanced system would reward players who invest in their core lands cities while still allowing strategic flexibility for offensive religious play. As it stands, the current mechanics encourage a counterintuitive approach that should definitely be improved, because playing converting your cities not in distant lands will not be optimal in 99% of scenarios.

Yeah, I just finished an exploration age, and the only time I cared to circle back to converting my settlements was to convert my distant lands settlements to get the military points, and then at the end I started converting some of my core cities because I was kind of bored. Otherwise I never even bothered to worry about my homeland cities, since it's better to spend the charge converting a 1 tile island city vs converting my former capital city.

Definitely there's too much bonus to converting other settlements, and not enough to converting your own. I mean, there are those couple policy cards, but policy cards compete with other slots. I think a better balance would be:
-Relic belief is all about converting other cities. They can do a little re-balance on that one IMO, but those can be focused on specific types of cities or settlements of others to convert, and you gain your relics from that.
-The Founder belief can be a smaller but generic boost for Any city following your religion. So maybe have it like the current founder beliefs, but have it count all cities, but only at like half the bonus we have now. Most people would pick those beliefs based on their own lands, and I think that would make the most sense - if I have a lot of cities with wonders, my religion probably makes sense to focus on that.
-Next, the Enhancer Belief can be like the current one, either giving you extra charges, or starting with it in founded cities, or stuff like that.
-Then give me another level of belie, that can be an extra bonus like those policy cards. Give me "Work Ethic" as an enhancer belief that gives my cities following my religion a 15% production bonus, or a production bonus based on the happiness output of the temple, or a happiness bonus based on the city's culture, etc... But the key here, don't make it fight for policy spots, make it a core part of the belief. It can be as simple as basically picking which yield you want to get your 15% bonus on, or have the more complicated bonuses based on city specifics.
-Finally, the last beliefs maybe can be back towards the current Founder beliefs, but have them relevant for foreign settlements. Or even have them only count in foreign cities, but make them even stronger. So that you really have to fight to get those big boosts.

 

[bumpyglint]

I guess you only read the first sentence.

No, but I guess you've read only my first one.

You talked about:

the policy bonus from reformation --> I commented it
the bonus from converting other cities --> I didn't comment it, but it's not related (you get 0 bonus for converting your core cities, which is not the point I was discussing)
the link with the military path --> I commented it
"I think religion is fine" --> I commented also this comment, it's not fine for me with incentive only to convert other people

What relevant part of your message wasn't commented in your opinion?

 

[bsones]

I think it's improved over Civ VI in that it's simpler and less fiddly, and you only have to actively manage religion for 1/3 of the game. On the other hand, the Missionary mechanic in the Exploration age is the same sort of conversion Wack-A-Mole system that they had in Civ VI (minus the theological battles), and it's just as tedious here as it was there.

I honestly prefer how religion works in the Antiquity age--select a bonus and then get the bonus in any town that builds an Altar. The bonuses are first come first served, so anyone that rushes religion gets their pick of bonuses and any latecomers get to pick over what's left. They could expand it in Exploration so that your religion can accumulate a list of bonuses, with opportunities to add a new one spread throughout the Civics tree, so that focusing on religious development requires sustained effort to go after the Civics that expand your religion. Get rid of religious units altogether and just have religion spread passively, with pressure based on where you build religious improvements and how "strong" your religion is (aka how many beliefs you've accumulated).