Religion dying out

[shulgi]

The question is fairly obvious, what are the mechanics associated with a religion dying out? It seems that during my previous game, it never happened.. or I never noticed it. I think I've lost a religion around three times in my current game which is only around 1000CE or so. I think the idea of a religion dying out is okay, sometimes I am unlucky and that might be happening now.

I haven't played with the mod enough yet to have a real understanding of the changes. I think it is probably a real improvement over BtS and I think it will only get better in time. Is there a list of changes that have been made? In short, the beginnings are much more challenging and you can either be in poor or good shape after that. After getting whupped on emperor I dropped to monarch and hope to get back to emperor soon.

I'm not sure if the standard in this forum is to post into the uber thread but 1600 posts there... nope. too daunting for a newcomer. Topics!

 

[karadoc]

Fair enough for a topic. I think there is a post somewhere in the main thread where I described this in some detail, but that was before we had a whole forum to talk in. -- I'll just give a quick description here.

The gist of the dying out mechanics are that when a new religion spreads to a city, if the new religion is significantly stronger than one of the existing religions, then the weakest religion as a chance of dying out.

One key point is that a religion can only ever die out when a new religion is spread to the city (either by chance, or by a missionary). The probabilities are balanced in such a way that cities will tend to have roughly the same chance of having multiple religions as in the unmodded game; but the specifics of which religions are in each city is a bit more in flux, and religions founded later in the game have at least some chance of becoming dominant.

As I said, it is the 'weakest' religion which dies out in a city. The strength (or "grip", as it is called in the code) is affected by the following things:

• Distance to the holy city. (closer is stronger)
• Turn the religion is founded. (more recent is stronger)
• The presence of religious buildings. (every building associated with the religion makes the religion stronger. eg. temples and monasteries)
• [If the religion is already present in the city.]
  • The population of the city. (existing religions are stronger in bigger cities)
  • State religion. (if the religion is the civ's state religion, and it's already in the city - then it is stronger)
• Finally, a bit of randomness.

 

[shulgi]

Thanks, I will see if I can find this discussion and form a more complete opinion. I do like the way this can add more benefit to some of the later religions while older religions must make an effort to remain in power. The standards for the possibility of a religion dying out are reasonable. It might be a bit of a hindrance to the already questionable value of early religions and those who found them but the priority is indeed down a bit in the mod. How much would this hurt the Izzy strategy?

Well, since I've already started thinking on this and I'm not sure if I can find it in that mega thread, how much value do temples and monasteries have in preventing a religion dying out relative to the other factors? Do they have the same value?

Sorry for rehashing old issues, I am late to this party.

 

[karadoc]

Actually, I can't find the post in the mega-thread either. All I can find are some small posts which mention various aspects of the changes.

Roughly speaking, the affect on early-religions strategy is that early regions will only become big if the civ spreads the religion with deliberately with missionaries. Otherwise the religions will essentially just stop spreading once they start to get a bit old and some later religions are founded. -- It is still not uncommon for the early religions to be dominate in the late-game, it just isn't 'automatic' anymore.

Regarding the strength of those different things I listed, that stuff is defined in GlobalDefinesAlt.xml. Here are the numbers:

• POPULATION_WEIGHT: 2 (per population)
• BUILDING_WEIGHT: 20 (per religious building)
• DISTANCE_WEIGHT: 40 (scaled as a portion of the size of the map. eg. if the holy city is half way around the world, then the weight will be 20)
• TIME_WEIGHT: 70 (this one is a bit tricky, because it's non linear, and asymptotic. It's quite difficult to guess how big this will be in any given example, but generally it's roughly the same size a the distance weight.)
• SHRINE_WEIGHT: 15
• STATE_RELIGION_WEIGHT: 20
• RANDOM_WEIGHT: 80 (a random number between zero and this number is used every time the religion's 'grip' needs to be calculated. This number is quite high and so religions are rarely 100% safe. The weights are really about skewing the probabilities rather than creating a deterministic result.)

All these numbers are moddable.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Will the religion ever die out in it's Holy City?

 

[karadoc]

No. The holy city is special case. A religion cannot be removed from its own holy city.

 

[shulgi]

This adds a nice aspect of competitiveness to the religious side of the game. It's interesting because in some games, the player may never be effected by this change while in other games, it'll be present in greater degrees. I'm going to keep your defaults for now but thank you for telling me how to change them.

 

[Danwood]

I also think this mechanics are brilliant. Now mastery victory mod is even more enthrilling with k-mod.