Religion mod idea: Would/could this be balanced?

[Iapetus303]

I've been thinking about how the development of religions could be made more historically accurate, and come up with an idea:

Certain religions would be founded by a Great Prophet, in a city containing the "parent" religion.

So e.g. Hinduism would be founded by the first person to discover Polytheism. Buddhism would require Meditation, but rather than founding automatically, you would need to use a GP in a city already containing Hinduism.

Similarly, Christianity would require Judaism, and Islam would probably require one or the other of those.

I see someone else has had a similar idea, but what they're proposing goes in a slightly different direction to what I have in mind.


My main question is: would this be balance (or could it be tweaked to make it balanced), or would it result in horribly skewed games?

On the one hand, I can see a big problem in that if someone can found the parent religions and stop/delay their spread, it will make it very hard for anyone else to found religions. (Especially if they start on an isolated continent).

On the other hand, founding successor religions requires more resources - you won't be able to hog all the religions just by getting the techs first.


This would also allow you to chose the Holy City, which would probably be a big advantage. (Probably - It may be that only one of your cities has the parent religion, forcing you to found it in an inconvenient place).


What do you think of this idea, and what additions do you think would be advisable? (Having more religions would help with balance, as well as making things more interesting, but would require a lot more moding that I'm currently familiar with).

 

[Nightinggale]

I don't quite get what you plan to do. I read it like you contradict yourself meaning there is a high chance that I don't get what you are talking about.

Say a player invents Polytheism and he has a Great Prophet. He can then move the GP to a city of his choice and found Hinduism. This city will then be the only source of Hinduism and other players will have to get it from this city.

I get the idea, but then you say he can only found in a city, which already has Hinduism. How can it already have Hinduism if it is to become the first one to have it

If inventing Polytheism give you Hinduism like it does if somebody else already invented Polytheism (like no holy city) and a GP can then make a holy city if none exist, then it would make more sense. It's not really what I think you wrote, but it would make more sense. For the rest of this post, I will go with this concept.

Gameplay
I'm not sure if it really adds fun to the game. I fear it will end up being annoying instead. Sure it would be nice to select the holy city, but all the stuff with getting great people seems to be a major task. It would likely make traits with bonus towards great people unreasonably good compared to other traits.

Implementation
First of all, it should remove the code to generate the holy city. It would likely be 1-2 lines of code. Vanilla has code for first city and following cities meaning somewhere it checks if the holy city exist. "Jam" it into thinking it exist would prevent the holy city from appearing automatically.

Units would have to learn how to make holy cities. It would likely be a build, meaning most of the implementation would be in the build xml. A new tag would have to be added, which should hold a religion. CvUnit::canBuild() should then check the religion and if it is set, it should only return true if the unit is in a city, it has the religion in question and the religion lacks a holy city. CvUnit::build should somehow set the holy city if the religion is set in xml. I would say this should be doable for most modders skilled enough to mod the DLL. I don't think it can be done without modding the DLL.

AI implementation
Yikes. Getting the AI to not ignore this feature and place holy cities in cities where it would make sense could be quite difficult. It would by far be the hardest part.



Alternative idea
Make a build option for each religion where a GP will sacrifice himself to move a religion to the city he is standing in. The city should have the religion in question and you should own the holy city. Or should you really own the holy city? Imagine the gaming impact of player A getting a religion first, then player B gets a great prophet and convince everybody that player B has the real holy city and player A's city is downgraded to a regular city with the religion in question. This would likely be much easier to teach the AI.

Perhaps a GP should be able to build a building in the holy city, which prevents movement for that religion. The AI can be taught to do this as well. In fact it might be able to do it now given the right xml setup.

Imagine a religion focused mod like FFH2 where players keep stealing holy cities from each other. That could be interesting. Racing to get them first isn't important. Becoming the first to lock them in place is what really matters.

 

[Akbarthegreat]

Not a bad idea, but to make it effective you would need to buff up the religions appearing later (like Realism Invictus). For instance, there can be a fairly large time gap between a player founding Judaism and Christianity. In that time, Judaism would spread everywhere and dominate, while Christianity and Islam especially woudln't stand a chance.

Another issue would be that it wouldn't be hard to create monopolies on religions. Simply beeline polytheism and montoheism, and you've reserved 5 religions for yourself. To counter this you could prevent any player from taking more than one "founder" religion (by founder I mean the religions that would be a basis for other religions, i.e hinduism and judaism).

 

[Iapetus303]

I don't quite get what you plan to do. I read it like you contradict yourself meaning there is a high chance that I don't get what you are talking about.

Say a player invents Polytheism and he has a Great Prophet. He can then move the GP to a city of his choice and found Hinduism. This city will then be the only source of Hinduism and other players will have to get it from this city.

I get the idea, but then you say he can only found in a city, which already has Hinduism. How can it already have Hinduism if it is to become the first one to have it

No, Hinduism would be founded the same way as it is now.

Buddhism would be founded by a Great Prophet in a city that already had Hinduism.

 

[Nightinggale]

Oh like parent religion. I think that would suck big time because it would cluster religions with the same few players who already has religions. Also some people aren't really objective regarding real life religions. Making some easier to obtain than others or some more beneficial than others might not be wise. If you want to make religions more diverse, go the FFH2 approach where they can't be linked to real life religions.