Protestantism in RFC

[Panopticon]

RFC Reformation
A modification to the Rhye's and Fall of Civilization mod by Rhye
by Edward Gaffney

http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=12749

Salutation:

RFC Reformation is a sub-mod that adds the Protestant Reformation to the Rhye's and Fall of Civilization mod. In it, Judaism is replaced by Protestantism, and Christianity is replaced by Catholicism.

Protestantism is founded by the first civ to discover Printing Press which has Catholicism as its state religion. To simulate the Protestant Reformation, there is a chance that any civ which controls a Catholic city will choose to embrace Protestantism instead. All their Catholic cities and buildings are converted to their Protestant equivalents (though large cities will retain a Catholic minority), and if a Catholic civ chooses to embrace Protestantism, their state religion is also switched. On the other hand, they can choose to resist the Reformation; in that case, they may end up with Protestant minorities in their cities instead. For human players, there is a prompt, which allows you to choose between the two: for the AI, this happens at random.

The modified assets from the main RFC game include changed text and artwork, new icons and logos for Protestantism, and a number of amended Python files which handle the programming routines involved. Due to the changes involved, it is unlikely that save files from the unmodified RFC game will work with this mod.


Installation:

1. Make a copy of your main Rhye's and Fall of Civilization folder, so you have a back-up.

2. Copy the files in the various folders of the uncompressed .zip file into the same folders in your RFC directory.


Valediction:

I hope you enjoy RFC Reformation. If not, I hope you can provide ideas which will make it more enjoyable. The author can be contacted on the Rhye's forum on the Civilization Fanatics' Forums, under the account name "Panopticon" (chosen in honour of Bentham).

forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=204.


Opening message, before edit:

I have been thoroughly hacking my version of RFC for the last day and a half in an attempt to integrate the Protestant Reformation into the mod. This was inspired by kairob's "Great Zoroastrianism Challenge" which actually ended rather quickly.

I now have a version I am happy with. First, I edited the XML files for Judaism to turn it into Protestantism. Second, I learned Python. A lot of Python. This allowed me to create the special Protestantism foundation event. Protestantism is founded by the first Christian civ to discover Printing Press. Upon this event, there is a random chance that each civ with a Christian city will "convert". This is compared to a threshold which is somewhat reflective of history - tiny for the Netherlands, huge for Rome. If a civ "converts", its Catholic buildings turn into their Protestant equivalents, and Catholic cities gain the Protestant religion, with small cities losing Catholicism also.

There is still a lot of work to be done.
The art at the moment is just the standard Christian art - that might be OK for buildings and missionaries, but it will need a new icon, to distinguish it from Catholicism. I will use this thread to keep everybody updated, if there is interest in the project.
I want to introduce a popup which makes conversion optional for the human player.
Finally, gameplay. There needs to be something to make up for the loss of Apostolic Palace benefits, which hurts production, and the presence of non-state Catholicism, which hurts stability. The obvious choice is to cut corruption for Protestant civs. In short, I have no idea what the effect is on game balance.

I'll try to have a version that others can test out available soon. Please feel free to help in any way which is convenient for you. One thing which does strike me is that this change has consequences for the Indian and Ethiopian UHVs. I am prepared to ignore these for the time being.

 

[KaiserBenjamin]

Awesome. Sorry I can't say anything constructive or helpful but I will be one of the first users to download it once you get some of the kinks worked out. I know there will be people to say that this shouldn't be a high priority because there are lots of other world religions of greater significance. This might be true, but for gameplay purposes, it's definitely a good change for Europe to improve the chances of European infighting and complicating the European diplomacy a bit.

How are you planning to handle the Protestant holy city? Is it the first city to flip over after the Printing Press and random variables are checked?

 

[Panopticon]

Well, Protestantism is founded like other religions. The first Christian civ to discover Printing Press gets the holy city, even if they don't undergo the bigger conversion process.

Naturally, though, we don't want Japan to be hosting the Reformation, so there is a small bit of modding to ensure the event only triggers in the situation we want. Specifically, I used a Python function to trigger the founding of the religion, and created a hidden tech that is the "official" tech to found the religion, like Theology or Divine Right, but which no-one can research. I think the code is messy, since it's my first ever Python application, and it probably slows down the game a little, though I haven't noticed.

Gameplay is the justification. I think it might be fun! That's the only reason I did it. (Well, that, and I have three papers due that I really didn't want to work on this weekend.)

 

[kairob]

This does sound very interessting and I will certainly download it once it is up .

Also about the balance, if the was a diplo hit every time a Catholic civ declared war on another Catholic civ with all other Catholic civs then the ability to declare war without pissing off half of europe might be usefull enough in itself?
Although I can understand if you didn't want to mess too much with catholocism, or the Apostolic Palace.

 

[Al-Iskander]

Would it be possible to use both this and the Zoroastrianism mod? Or would that exceed over the number of allowed religions?

(I'm guessing it's not doable, since you said you removed Judaism completely)

 

[Úmarth]

Yes, but they'd have to be merged first and another religion lost, but Taoism is a bit of a waste of space I suppose.

Sounds good so far. May I suggest for the icons that you keep the vanilla Christian icon for Protestantism, and then change Catholicism's icon any one of the more ornate cross and crucifix styles eschewed by most Protestant sects.

 

[Al-Iskander]

Yes, but they'd have to be merged first and another religion lost, but Taoism is a bit of a waste of space I suppose.

Sounds good so far. May I suggest for the icons that you keep the vanilla Christian icon for Protestantism, and then change Catholicism's icon any one of the more ornate cross and crucifix styles eschewed by most Protestant sects.

Then I guess that means they're fully incompatible for Rhye's. I am extremely reluctant to tamper with Taoism as it's an integral part of the Chinese UHV.

(If someone could PM me [to keep the thread on topic] telling me whether it's possible to raise the max number of religions, that'd be cool)

 

[Úmarth]

Actually it must be possible because abbamouse's mod has loads of them.

 

[Zipzapzup]

Of course its possible, but not quite easy. You have to modify the CvGamecoreDLL (so you need to request the uncompiled files from rhye), the python files at some points and certainly the xml-files about religions.

 

[Panopticon]

It can be done, but you would also have to alter the Religions screen, etc. to accommodate 8 religions.

Since yesterday, I've compiled the popup and changed some of the graphics. (Catholicism has the old logo; Protestantism has a cross on a Bible, which is more important to them than it is to Catholics. The difference between a cross and a crucifix is too subtle to render properly at this level.) I've also rebalanced the Christian minority aspect; only big cities in Protestant civs will have Catholic minorities, and Catholic civs will have Protestant minorities, with the number depending on the same factor that affects how likely they are to turn Protestant in the first place.

I am now going to edit the DDS file to change the graphic of the big cross, then finally check how it plays in a real game.

 

[Úmarth]

...Protestantism has a cross on a Bible, which is more important to them than it is to Catholics...

That's a rather... controversial position.

 

[SadoMacho]

Check out Eusebius World Religions MOD. It has many religions in it. Maybe you can find some nice grafics. (It's a warlords MOD)

http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=3977

For the Thread

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=4975296

Keep up the work, it's looking great.

There is one point:
if a civ has protestantism, it shouldn't dislike catholic civs as much as other religions, IMO. It should dislike for example a muslim civ more then a catholic one and the other way around. They are after all christians, are the not. The other ones are just lost sheeps, aren't they?

 

[Aeon221]

That's a rather... controversial position.

No it isn't. Not in the least. All you've done is indicate a gross ignorance of the theological and historical reality.

Lutheranism was, at its base, a break from the Catholic tenet that an educated go-between was needed to intermediate between the layman and the Scripture.

As an example, John Wycliffe, the 14th century founder of Lollardism and one of the primary inspirations for the Hussites, was declared a heretic primarily because of his translation of the Bible into vernacular English.

Only in the 1960s, with Vatican II's strong stance in favor of active participation by the laity, did the Catholic Church truly renounce this position -- Vatican II also required the use of the local vernacular in the performance of the Mass for the first time, a radical break from millennia of Latin Masses.

 

[Panopticon]

@Umarth: I myself am a Catholic and I can confirm that what Aeon221 says is true. One distinction is that Catholics traditionally accept the interpretation of the Bible offered to them by church authorities. In contrast, many Protestant denominations urge their followers to read the Bible for themselves. You learn something new about Christian theology everyday, I suppose.

@SadoMacho: Thanks for the link. As for your second point, I don't know if it can be done, and for sure, I don't know how to do it.

Art really is the sticking point, at this stage. I try to create custom art, but it makes the other images in their files look grainy. I'm using GIMP (which I don't think is the problem) and the DXTBmp DDS converter. Does anyone know a better program which turns the DDS files into something I can use? EDIT: I found a plugin for GIMP, now let's see how it goes.

 

[Úmarth]

I'm not saying that Catholicism doesn't have a lot more extra-scriptural dogma than Protestantism, just that I don't think (I'm a "lapsed"/cultural Catholic myself) many Catholics would take kindly to the idea that the Bible is less important to them. They would [have] of course say [said] that Catholic interpretation, being correct, is ultimately the same as the Bible. Just because they believed, for whatever reason, the layman couldn't or shouldn't read the Bible themselves it doesn't mean they thought it less important. In reality, a critical observer would find that Protestant teachings are probably closer to those of the Bible than the Roman Catholic's but that's not what an un-critical Catholic observer would find.

@Aeon221
Thanks for the history lesson. Totally irrelevant, unnecessary and condescending. But thanks anyway.

 

[kairob]

There is one point:
if a civ has protestantism, it shouldn't dislike catholic civs as much as other religions, IMO. It should dislike for example a muslim civ more then a catholic one and the other way around. They are after all christians, are the not. The other ones are just lost sheeps, aren't they?

I don't know I think gameplay wise it would be good to break up the christian civs, and this will help to do that. Also the Islamic civs don't dislike other people of the book less than pagan civs in the game.

@Úmarth
All cultures are stereotyped and put into boxes so that the game can function properly, the trick is not to get offended. I think the group of people with the most right to complain would be the Germans, whose whole civilization (UHV, UP, UU + UB) is centered around the one period of history few of them like to remember.

 

[Panopticon]

The other point on Catholic-Protestant relations is, of course, that the Thirty Years' War was not exactly a walk in the park for the German states of the 17th century.

 

[Úmarth]

It's not a game play issue, it's just an icon. Why use something which can potentially be construed as offensive or anti-Catholic when any number of arbitrary distinguishing features could be employed (a simple change of colour perhaps)?

 

[Panopticon]

Now that I have some screenshots, you can judge for yourself! (It's not a real game, but you get the picture... get it...)

 

[musicfreak]

Gameplay is the justification. I think it might be fun! That's the only reason I did it. (Well, that, and I have three papers due that I really didn't want to work on this weekend.)

Making a modcomp is a good way to procrastinate. XD