AltarisGreyhawk
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jul 6, 2006
- Messages
- 21
I've been playing around with a mod for balancing the way Civ4 handles religion, and I wanted to throw some ideas around here to get some input from anyone else interested in seeing changes in this area of the game.
I really like the concept of religion in Civ4, but unfortunately, once you learn the in's and out's of the religion system, it's way too easy to take advantage of stockpiling the religions in the game. This has two bad side effects IMO. First, the player gains a heavy advantage over the AI by being able to manipulate AI attitudes through religion spread and racking up gold/espionage benefits via holy cities. Secondly, there tend to only be 2-3 dominant religions, the others being overwhelmed by the dominant religions, typically the early ones the player spreads.
Now, I like the role religion plays in the game for spicing up foreign relations. However, I feel like religion should be a largely uncontrolled force, one that the player can play upon, but can't directly manage, as tends to be the case in the vanilla system.
So, here are the ideas I'm working on at the moment:
1. Gaining Religions To help better distribute religions, I am looking at changing the way religions are gained. Instead of being side effects of tech gains, religions would be granted randomly at certain turn intervals in the game. When the time comes for a religion to be founded, all players would be cycled through, and one chosen at random to found the religion. Civs with spiritual traits would be checked first, and would receive a 50% to 100% bonus to the chance to receive a religion. Also, religious techs (Mediation, Polytheism, Monotheism, etc.) would grant a bonus to the chance to gain a religion, giving them some purpose in this functionality. The chance to gain a religion would drop drastically if a Civ already had a religion, in the effort to keep a Civ from having 2 or more religions to a minimum. The idea here is that spiritual Civs would typically receive religions, and religions would be distributed widely around the globe, much like it is in the real world.
2. Spreading Religions To keep religions from running rampant like they currently do, religions would gradually spread out from the holy city. Population and culture would directly effect how far a city can spread its religion to other cities, even within the religions civ. Once the religion spreads to another city, its culture and population would determine how far it can spread from that city. That way, large cultural cities would extend greater chance of religion spread, while small cities would have little effect on their neighbors. In such a way, religion spread would be gradual, and in a large empire, it would be quite possible that other religions would take hold in its border territories, away from the religious holy city center.
Also, a religions Spread Factor would be used to determine how far and easily it can spread. Early religions would have lower SF's, while SF's would go up the later a religion appeared. I feel this is fair, as later religions such as Christianity and Islam rarely have much effect in vanilla, while Buddhism and Hinduism often dominate the map. The new system would localize early religions, while giving later religions a stronger, farther reach. This also mirrors the real world more closely, having the early religions closer to their origination points, while later religions spread in various spots throughout the globe.
3. Controlling Religion Spread As a city gains religions, each subsequent religion becomes exponentially difficult to acquire. Each religion's Spread Factor would also serve as a sort of shield factor, with higher SF's making it less likely for new religions to appear in the city. So, cities with Islam or Christianity would be less likely to acquire new religions than cities with Buddhism or Hinduism. Again, this is in the interest of making the timing of the religion appearances more balanced, so that by the end game, religions are more equally distributed throughout the world.
I'm also thinking of taking out missionaries completely, as they give the player an unfair advantage in distributing his/her religion(s). Instead, monasteries would grant a bonus to a city's chance to spread that religion to another city in reach.
4. Putting the "Spirit" back in "Spiritual" Since Spiritual Civs now have the higher precedence of gaining religions, they will likely become the centers for civ relations in the first 2/3 of the game. As it stands in vanilla, a smart player can easily outmaneuver Spiritual Civs by quickly taking most of the religions, robbing them of much of their strength. Now, though, that power will be distributed back to the Spiritual Civs, and the human player will lose the advantage of controlling AI behaviour largely through religion.
5. Holy Wars!! My theory is that combining all these factors will create better tensions between civs, both human and AI. With a wider range of religions spread around the globe, I hope to see the level of AI bickering and warmongering increase. In most of my games, the AI tends to be too passive towards one another, and that often makes for slow, boring games at times. With these changes, I hope to see an end to all that, and see AI civs fight and compete more often.
I've been doing a lot of calculations in Excel up until now, trying to fine tune the numbers and get a good idea of how to handle this. I've implemented several versions in-game, but haven't quite gotten the results I'm looking for. Each version gets better, though, and the above ideas seem to be very feasible to implement.
I'm interested in seeing what others think of this. Religion plays such a large factor in the game, and I think with a little fine tuning, it can be made into a very dynamic system that can really shake up the events ingame and make them quite interesting. Please feel free to share any ideas in regarding or in addition to the ones above.
I really like the concept of religion in Civ4, but unfortunately, once you learn the in's and out's of the religion system, it's way too easy to take advantage of stockpiling the religions in the game. This has two bad side effects IMO. First, the player gains a heavy advantage over the AI by being able to manipulate AI attitudes through religion spread and racking up gold/espionage benefits via holy cities. Secondly, there tend to only be 2-3 dominant religions, the others being overwhelmed by the dominant religions, typically the early ones the player spreads.
Now, I like the role religion plays in the game for spicing up foreign relations. However, I feel like religion should be a largely uncontrolled force, one that the player can play upon, but can't directly manage, as tends to be the case in the vanilla system.
So, here are the ideas I'm working on at the moment:
1. Gaining Religions To help better distribute religions, I am looking at changing the way religions are gained. Instead of being side effects of tech gains, religions would be granted randomly at certain turn intervals in the game. When the time comes for a religion to be founded, all players would be cycled through, and one chosen at random to found the religion. Civs with spiritual traits would be checked first, and would receive a 50% to 100% bonus to the chance to receive a religion. Also, religious techs (Mediation, Polytheism, Monotheism, etc.) would grant a bonus to the chance to gain a religion, giving them some purpose in this functionality. The chance to gain a religion would drop drastically if a Civ already had a religion, in the effort to keep a Civ from having 2 or more religions to a minimum. The idea here is that spiritual Civs would typically receive religions, and religions would be distributed widely around the globe, much like it is in the real world.
2. Spreading Religions To keep religions from running rampant like they currently do, religions would gradually spread out from the holy city. Population and culture would directly effect how far a city can spread its religion to other cities, even within the religions civ. Once the religion spreads to another city, its culture and population would determine how far it can spread from that city. That way, large cultural cities would extend greater chance of religion spread, while small cities would have little effect on their neighbors. In such a way, religion spread would be gradual, and in a large empire, it would be quite possible that other religions would take hold in its border territories, away from the religious holy city center.
Also, a religions Spread Factor would be used to determine how far and easily it can spread. Early religions would have lower SF's, while SF's would go up the later a religion appeared. I feel this is fair, as later religions such as Christianity and Islam rarely have much effect in vanilla, while Buddhism and Hinduism often dominate the map. The new system would localize early religions, while giving later religions a stronger, farther reach. This also mirrors the real world more closely, having the early religions closer to their origination points, while later religions spread in various spots throughout the globe.
3. Controlling Religion Spread As a city gains religions, each subsequent religion becomes exponentially difficult to acquire. Each religion's Spread Factor would also serve as a sort of shield factor, with higher SF's making it less likely for new religions to appear in the city. So, cities with Islam or Christianity would be less likely to acquire new religions than cities with Buddhism or Hinduism. Again, this is in the interest of making the timing of the religion appearances more balanced, so that by the end game, religions are more equally distributed throughout the world.
I'm also thinking of taking out missionaries completely, as they give the player an unfair advantage in distributing his/her religion(s). Instead, monasteries would grant a bonus to a city's chance to spread that religion to another city in reach.
4. Putting the "Spirit" back in "Spiritual" Since Spiritual Civs now have the higher precedence of gaining religions, they will likely become the centers for civ relations in the first 2/3 of the game. As it stands in vanilla, a smart player can easily outmaneuver Spiritual Civs by quickly taking most of the religions, robbing them of much of their strength. Now, though, that power will be distributed back to the Spiritual Civs, and the human player will lose the advantage of controlling AI behaviour largely through religion.
5. Holy Wars!! My theory is that combining all these factors will create better tensions between civs, both human and AI. With a wider range of religions spread around the globe, I hope to see the level of AI bickering and warmongering increase. In most of my games, the AI tends to be too passive towards one another, and that often makes for slow, boring games at times. With these changes, I hope to see an end to all that, and see AI civs fight and compete more often.
I've been doing a lot of calculations in Excel up until now, trying to fine tune the numbers and get a good idea of how to handle this. I've implemented several versions in-game, but haven't quite gotten the results I'm looking for. Each version gets better, though, and the above ideas seem to be very feasible to implement.
I'm interested in seeing what others think of this. Religion plays such a large factor in the game, and I think with a little fine tuning, it can be made into a very dynamic system that can really shake up the events ingame and make them quite interesting. Please feel free to share any ideas in regarding or in addition to the ones above.
![Impaler[WrG]](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/73/73222.jpg?1475248346){kind=avatar}
shrines that cost enough to make it a real investment so you don't end up with shrineland, (com'n down folks and visit Shrineland in the Tennessee mountains, we have rides, games, the kids will love it) 
