Religion after 1.4

[Valkrionn]

Some discussion of what will happen regarding religions has taken place on the official forum, so I thought I would summarize it here as well.

First, Alignments and Diplomacy:

Religion will no longer affect diplomacy, whatsoever. Rather, alignment will, and religion affects alignment.

This has a few notable effects. First off, it minimizes the impact of multiple religions, particularly on smaller maps; As things are now, all civs can have their own religion, which can hurt diplomacy. As religion is essentially the driving force behind diplomacy in Civ4, this is bad.

Second, it allows for alliances between religions, so long as they are not too far apart; Order (Lawful) would be fine with either RoK (Lawful Good) or WH (Lawful Evil), but WH and RoK would not be fine with each other. This maintains the strategic choice behind which religion to follow, while allowing the player more freedom to pursue bonuses he or she wants.

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New Alignment Axis (yes, a third )

When assigning leader alignments, designing Broader Alignments, creating religions, there has always been an issue; Good and Evil do not mean what you expect them to mean in Erebus.

Or rather, they don't always. Evil, as we think of it, is still Evil... But Evil is also the Fallen Gods. Good is still Good... But so are the Unfallen. Basium, a character who would undeniably be Chaotic Evil on Earth, is instead Chaotic Good; this dichotomy has spawned many many arguments on #erebus.

Our solution: Add a new alignment axis, purely to represent affinity to each group of gods. Good and Evil become simply personality alignments, representing only what you expect them to.

The axis is tentatively titled Allegiance, with the alignments Loyalist/Unaligned/Renegade. Definitely subject to change, and only given an icon on the scoreboard (no text). It will be quite difficult to change, and have no affect other than a small diplomatic impact, and controlling how quickly hell is able to spread into your lands (HINT: Even Loyalist leaders will suffer hell).

This means that Order will simply be Lawful; Basium becomes Chaotic Evil, just like Hyborem; OO becomes Chaotic, no longer Evil; etc.

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Next, the religion lineup after 1.4:

There will be one religion for each alignment, with a tenth that is unaffiliated. Esus is being cut, as a religion; It will instead be a cult.

• Lawful Good - RoK
• Good - Empy
• Chaotic Good - Aurora Invicta - Based (with heavy modifications) on Dawn Invictus by Viatos.
• Lawful - Order
• Neutral - FoL
• Chaotic - Deep Ones (renamed, less demonic OO)
• Lawful Evil - WH
• Evil - Repentant of Temeluchus - Death cult based on Temeluchus, a 'god' created by Laroth. Yep, Laroth based religion.
• Chaotic Evil - AV
• Unaffiliated - Airandamar. This religion is "special"; rather than affect alignment, alignment controls which temples/units you receive from the religion. IIRC, there have been threads on this religion before, won't cover it again unless I have to.

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Repentant of Temeluchus:

Some discussion on the Neutral Evil religion...

Name: Repentant of Temeluchus (Original cult: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=7940639#post7940639 )

Flavor: Corrupt priests; Ostentatious, dark temples; Self-flagellation; Complete and utter devotion amongst the masses; Priests aware of the lie and manipulating things in their favor. As Shoggi put it, a very corrupt Catholic Church. Or any other church you want to name, really.

Spells: Not quite set yet. We want a self-harm mechanic, where spells damage the stack (aside from the caster himself). Settled on a method where there is a set amount of damage, and this is divided between all units in the stack; Additionally, the RoT military unit will be able to asbsorb more of the damage than standard units, enabling you to better protect them.

Military units: Flagellant, at least, able to soak up more of the spell damage than a normal unit.

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Aurora Invicta:

For those who didn't see the discussion on them on #erebus, here's a short description of the Chaotic Good religion we're adding, Aurora Invicta.

Founded during the Age or Rebirth, in the Sheaim border territories, where war, plague and famine made life hell for people. After seeing her people suffer for years, a Duskbringer (name undecided at this point) decides to defy convention, and prays to Agares for an end to the suffering they're going through. Eventually, her prayers are answered, by what she thinks is Agares (in truth, it was Sirona that answered her), and she is given the power to make a difference for those who suffer. She begins to heal the minds and bodies of those she can, and builds up a following around her. As her prayers were to Agares, she is soon established as a priestess of a risen Agares, once again thought to embody Hope and Redemption, rather than Despair.

After this movement has been building for a time, they catch the eye of the Emyrs and the Sheaim leadership and are driven away, scattering throughout the world, spreading their faith further and establishing themselves as a world religion.

So far, we have little detail worked out; what we do have is the tech name: "Litany of the Forlorn", and the name for their temple building: "Aedis".

Aurora Invicta is empowered by Sirona (and possibly Lugus), but is aimed at Agares. It is basically an experiment of Sirona's, an attempt to redeem the precept of hope directly and thereby force Agares to rise.



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Alright, that should be everything. Lots of new info for you all here.

 

[arcticnightwolf]

yay ...

 

[The Flame8]

Sweet, religions make this game so much better, but will Order still convert to good or no?

 

[Valkrionn]

No. Order is simply Lawful. It is already more lawful than good anyway.

 

[Aoleleb]

So I hope Hyborem and Basium have a massive diplo modifier against each other, otherwise things might get weird what with them both being Chaotic Evil and all. (I've never played either, so they might already without me knowing)

 

[Valkrionn]

They do, actually.

 

[The Flame8]

They should get a -100 modifier so there is no way to make peace, and it would be funny

 

[Del Valle]

The New Alignment Axis is something I'll get used to.

I also love that you are including Aurora Invictiva. I loved the concept when I first saw it months ago.

 

[Verdian]

I must admit, I am dissapointed. You've moved away from your goal of small changes to better capture the intended spirit of FFH2. That's fine, I can understand wanting to create your own game. But that goal was what attracted me RiFE and kept me playing. Now you're adding new religions and changing alignments, effectively rewriting lore. My heart is feeling pretty heavy now.

 

[Valkrionn]

I don't see it as rewriting lore (nor is this any larger a change than, say, completely revamping the Malakim, which was what created the mod in the first place ), nor have I ever said we would just be making small changes.

It's no secret that the next version is intended to completely revamp magic, add multiple new unitcombats (although relatively few new units), change the design of buildings, completely redo the tech tree, etc.

It will be an entirely new game; The game that we (the RifE team) want it to be.

 

[Elder Methyl]

I suffer Memory Allocation Failures when I get too advanced in RifE, but that won't stop me from playing Aurora Invcta when it comes. Go Viatos and Valk!

 

[black_imperator]

I must admit, I am dissapointed. You've moved away from your goal of small changes to better capture the intended spirit of FFH2. That's fine, I can understand wanting to create your own game. But that goal was what attracted me RiFE and kept me playing. Now you're adding new religions and changing alignments, effectively rewriting lore. My heart is feeling pretty heavy now.

I just want to clarify something. We don't rewrite lore. We add to it , trying to keep the whole thing coherent. The changes in alignent are just gameplay elements. As for the religions, it's a smaller thing than the fully fleshed civs that were added before, and easier to justify lorewise (/me looks at D'Tesh ^^)

The rest of the revamp is done to make full use of new mechanics which were added but only goodies for some of them and getting a better balanced game than what was rife before

 

[Verdian]

I just do not understand why you would add new religions when there are so many other established religions you could have chosen to implement.

 

[Valkrionn]

Such as? Pick a religion.

Then try to implement it as anything more than a cult, or schism of an existing religion.

We tried Stewards, but it suffers the same issues as Esus.

Emyrs? Part of AV, more or less.

Anything for the other gods? Cult. We even tossed around something for the cult of Tali; Doesn't work as a religion.


So let's look at it this way; Our goal, to enhance gameplay, was to make Alignment, rather than Religion, the king of Diplomacy. To do this, we want to allow players to modify their alignment reliably (though it's quite difficult to flip back and forth, unlike religion). This means we want one religion per alignment.

Can you come up with a Chaotic Good religion, that actually works well in game and lore, out of the existing cults? How about an Evil one? These were the two slots we had open.


Another thing to keep in mind: None of us are Kael. It gets fairly boring implementing lore someone else came up with.

 

[Elder Methyl]

Valk's right, Veridian. None of the other established cults can make a reliable religion. That said, I wish I had the modding ability to make my own visions come true...

 

[Valkrionn]

All you have to do is try. Modding really is not that difficult, and there are numerous people here who would be willing to answer questions.

It's how I started, afterall. I think I made about a quarter of the posts in the FF modder's guide.

 

[Nor'easter]

I think some of the coming changes aren't as earth-shattering as some of the criticism here (and in the "Alignment" thread) is making it out to be.

Kael repeatedly said that "good" and "evil" in FfH refer to which gods you serve, so the new Allegiance axis is really just renaming the existing Good-Neutral-Evil axis. The innovation is having a *new* Good-Neutral-Evil axis reflecting the conventional meanings of those terms.

Institutionalizing Broader Alignment is a more notable change. Still, the 9 alignments are the well-known alignments from D&D, and FfH has its roots in an old D&D campaign of Kael's, so this isn't that far off-base, either.

As for religion, you're basically going from 8 religions to 10. The main change here is associating each religion (except Airandamar) with a specific alignment, but again, that's not that far off from religion changing your alignment in base FfH, main difference being the Broader Alignments.

I think that what will have the most significant effect on gameplay are some of the things you mentioned in passing: redoing promotions, revamping magic, revamping the tech tree. (Revising civ and religious bonuses I'm less concerned about, tbh.) So this is what I'll be most curious about.

 

[Valkrionn]

The promotion design is nearly ready to implement (waiting on some remaining tags, maybe I can rush them out).

It's a pretty far-reaching redesign.


I might discuss the techtree in a future post... We decided to more fully embrace the idea of specialization in tech.

 

[Elder Methyl]

Kael repeatedly said that "good" and "evil" in FfH refer to which gods you serve, so the new Allegiance axis is really just renaming the existing Good-Neutral-Evil axis. The innovation is having a *new* Good-Neutral-Evil axis reflecting the conventional meanings of those terms.

Institutionalizing Broader Alignment is a more notable change. Still, the 9 alignments are the well-known alignments from D&D, and FfH has its roots in an old D&D campaign of Kael's, so this isn't that far off-base, either.

As I said, my main problem is that the 'conventional' Alignment axis is being put above Kael's original idea. However, I know full well that this is a minority view and that it cannot stop the changes from occuring. As I've said on the Alignment thread, I'm resigned to it, and I'm not going to stop playing RifE.

 

[Acrux]

I've never understood why Order is considered "Lawful Neutral" and RoK "Lawful Good". I haven't seen anything that suggests RoK is especially good, other than that they are no fans of Esus. Order definitely seems Lawful Good to me, but that may be because I've always seen it similarly to KillerClown's lore -- especially since they were singlehandedly opposing AV for a while.

I get the rebellious axis, I think -- Loyalist/Unaffiliated/Renegade assumes a relationship to someone or something. Is it Loyal to the One? To the Unfallen? A civilization/religion/civic precept? But I don't understand why that changes Basium's alignment to evil? Wouldn't he be Renegade Good, or maybe Renegade Neutral? And what happens to someone like Cassiel? Is he Renegade (technically, yes) or Unaffiliated (I bet he would say so)? Or the Risen Emperor -- even he doesn't know if he's Loyal or Renegade yet!

I am glad, by the way, to see that OO is getting a revamp to purely chaotic. I've always felt a little sorry for those guys since they've always been the lesser evil to choose from. And the revived Telemachus cult sounds cool. I'm guessing these worshipers are going straight to Laroth upon death?

While I'm at it (since this seems to be where the discussion is happening instead of "ideas not worthy of a new thread") any chance of adopting some of the civics ideas from Orbis related to religion? For instance, there's one that allows the player to build 2nd level religious units without converting to the religion, assuming you have an appropriate temple in the city.