Religions need to matter more

[razor436]

There are to problems I have with religion at the moment:

• goody huts that reward you with faith
• without correct choices for beliefs, there is no drive to spread your religion worldwide

Goody Huts

The early game is full of important decisions for the player, most notably which technologies to research and what to build in your cities. These decisions have a noticeable impact on city growth and must be considered beside other pressing issues: scouting, military, tile improvement, building improvement, faith, culture.

Focusing your early game on faith can significantly affect your civilization in the other areas, which makes it insulting when non-religious civilizations found pantheons and religions without putting the effort into it.

I have been playing hotseat lately In my games, i choose ahead of time how I would play each civilization, in particular which I would focus on faith and which to completely ignore it. It just so happened that two of the civilizations that were to ignore religion were able to found a pantheon thanks to goody huts, and later religions be cause of +faith beliefs from pantheon and becoming friends with religious city-states form completing quests.

In short, I believe goody huts should not reward civilizations with religion because it offers a reward, while civilizations who build shrines and temples are set back a bit.


Religious Beliefs

Religions is a cool idea for civ V, but be careful what beliefs you choose for your religion. The wrong thing to do is to choose only beliefs with benefits to faith. Faith in itself is a useless resource: it does not give you culture, happiness, culture, gold, or units. To reap the rewards, you need to choose a good set of beliefs, which may be gone by the time you found your own religion.

To make religion attractive for all civilizations, and worthwhile to spread around the world, I think each religion should have these beliefs by default:

• +1 gold for every 4 followers of this relgion
  or
• +1 culture for every 5 followers of this religion
• use faith to purchase cathedrals/monastaries/mosques/pegodas (only 1)
• use faith to purchase pre-industrial land units

With this list, there is a good reason for a civilization to want to spread it's religion. Each religion can build a religious building, and each religion can participate in religious wars.

 

[Gucumatz]

You can't found a pantheon from ruins.

Its if you find 1-3 religious city states you can found a pantheon. And I don't agree with your thinking here - religion in this game is meant for customization, growth, and management - and you seem to want to take that away.

 

[Polycrates]

I think it's fantastic that there's some religious beliefs that really reward the high-investment high-reward approach of temples everywhere and Piety tree and massive evangelism all over the world, and that there's others which work perfectly well with a minimal investment to just spread them to all your cities and maybe a few CSs. And others you probably don't want to spread (Holy Warriors, the buildings), but reward generating heaps of faith in-house nonetheless.
Anyway I think it's great that it's not such an all-or-nothing thing.
And don't forget all the great people that faith will get you later on.

But you can actually found a pantheon from a goody hut, I had it in my last game. Not sure I'm a fan but at least it keeps the Celts and Ethiopians on their toes.

 

[Peacemongerer]

The thing is that not all of the founder beliefs suit everybody's playstyle. They also explicitly want no two religions to have the same belief... those handful right there would be too short of a list.

But you sell some of the beliefs short... Some of them (Papal Primacy, for example) will allow you to be at least friends with any city state in the game of your religion (Which if you do it right could be all of them). That's a huge benefit.

Interfaith Dialogue and Initiation Rites are also valuable when you have a large number of cities... they're one-time bonuses to science and gold, but rinsing at repeating at an early stage of the game with them is pretty good and can give you a quick advantage in tech or money that you can exploti and could lead to domination in other areas of the game.

Peace Loving is good if you're having happiness problems and if you do the math, it's actually pretty powerful. I know that I've had games where I was at 320+ followers globally in other civs. That's +16 happiness. If you stack that with the -5% unhappiness per pop from liberty and the 10% from Forbidden Palace, you can add another 18 or 19 citizens to your empire for 0 gold maintanence cost. Huge benefit in the right hands, especially if you adopt Mandate of Heaven to get extra culture. Ceremonial Burial is equally powerful... I've passed 16 cities following my religion numerous times.

All and all, the only founder belief that I could see a nitpick with is Pilgrimage. That one would be fine if they just upped the faith you get from it to +2 or +3. +1 is underpowered. Having a founder belief that generates more faith is deadly with the right follower beliefs. If you have holy warriors, then adopting this with this kind of buff will give you a free unit basically every 2-3 turns when you have enough followers. If you adopt just war as an enhancer, this will give you a missionary every 2-3 turns to spread your faith to every city in the world, essentially buffing all your units by 20% in enemy lands. +1 per city is negligible.

Some beliefs have been rather marginalized in other departments, but the founder beliefs work just about right.

 

[triheptyl]

You can't found a pantheon from ruins.

Why does everyone say this? Yes, you can. You get significantly less faith if you don't already have a pantheon, but you can always get faith ruins. I think its something like +20 pre-pantheon, and 90 faith after a pantheon. I've founded many a pantheon with ruins.

 

[bonafide11]

Why would you want to take the uniqueness out of religions and make them all standard and boring again? This is a terrible idea.

 

[Huaojozu]

20 Faith pre-Pantheon, 60 post-Pantheon. That 20 should be enough to start a Pantheon in most cases.

 

[PhilBowles]

There are to problems I have with religion at the moment:

• goody huts that reward you with faith
• without correct choices for beliefs, there is no drive to spread your religion worldwide

Goody Huts

The early game is full of important decisions for the player, most notably which technologies to research and what to build in your cities. These decisions have a noticeable impact on city growth and must be considered beside other pressing issues: scouting, military, tile improvement, building improvement, faith, culture.

Focusing your early game on faith can significantly affect your civilization in the other areas, which makes it insulting when non-religious civilizations found pantheons and religions without putting the effort into it.

I have been playing hotseat lately In my games, i choose ahead of time how I would play each civilization, in particular which I would focus on faith and which to completely ignore it. It just so happened that two of the civilizations that were to ignore religion were able to found a pantheon thanks to goody huts, and later religions be cause of +faith beliefs from pantheon and becoming friends with religious city-states form completing quests.

Ruins give a one-shot faith effect, and unless they build faith structures or actively make an effort to ally religious city-states there's no way they'll accumulate any more (unless they've chosen a faith-granting pantheon, which produces a rather small effect past the early game). Anyone can have a pantheon, and there's no restriction on duplicating pantheon effects (in one game both I and another civ had Fertility Rites). This isn't an issue. You might as well say that huts shouldn't give culture because they reward civs who don't aim for cultural development intensively; generally the early social policy you can get from a culture hut trumps the benefit of a quick pantheon.

Religious Beliefs

Religions is a cool idea for civ V, but be careful what beliefs you choose for your religion. The wrong thing to do is to choose only beliefs with benefits to faith. Faith in itself is a useless resource: it does not give you culture, happiness, culture, gold, or units.

Yes, that's the whole point. And it makes a lot of sense that faith wouldn't have any effect other than providing the rewards believers' religion grants them.

To make religion attractive for all civilizations, and worthwhile to spread around the world, I think each religion should have these beliefs by default:

• +1 gold for every 4 followers of this relgion
  or
• +1 culture for every 5 followers of this religion
• use faith to purchase cathedrals/monastaries/mosques/pegodas (only 1)
• use faith to purchase pre-industrial land units

And so take all the strategy out of it? Why would you want to do that? You can found a religion with these beliefs if you want to.

With this list, there is a good reason for a civilization to want to spread it's religion. Each religion can build a religious building, and each religion can participate in religious wars.

There already is a good reason for a civilization to want to spread its religion - if it has these beliefs. There's also the default bonus to diplomacy if you share your religion with a majority of cities in another civ. Why would you want to force a civ to choose a playstyle that requires spreading its religion? In reality the majority of religions weren't/aren't proselytising religions, many still aren't (Judaism, for instance, is seen very much as the religion of - mainly ethnic - Jews by its practitioners, and does not actively seek new converts).

 

[afedyuki]

Not all religions encourage their followers to proselytize (seek new converts) in real life so it makes perfect sense that the game reflects that.

I think it is implemented pretty much perfectly. The only features I would add would be:

1) the ability to rename the individual beliefs not just religion itself.

2) The ability to expend another great prophet to replace up to 2 obsolete beliefs with new ones (if they were not taken by someone else) once you reach Industrial era. That would be realistic, I mean the Catholic Church no longer mandates that the Earth is the center of the Universe, does it?

 

[compwiz1202]

Why does everyone say this? Yes, you can. You get significantly less faith if you don't already have a pantheon, but you can always get faith ruins. I think its something like +20 pre-pantheon, and 90 faith after a pantheon. I've founded many a pantheon with ruins.

Yes, 20 is enough to get the first pantheon on Quick or Standard. I'm not sure how much the first pantheon costs on Epic and Marathon. You do have to wait until the next turn to found the pantheon though.

 

[Billy Rubin]

Not all religions encourage their followers to proselytize (seek new converts) in real life so it makes perfect sense that the game reflects that.

True

2) The ability to expend another great prophet to replace up to 2 obsolete beliefs with new ones (if they were not taken by someone else) once you reach Industrial era. That would be realistic, I mean the Catholic Church no longer mandates that the Earth is the center of the Universe, does it?

Well - but then, nobody really cared about what the catholic church said anymore way before that - at least in developed countries.

I think the game reflects that as well - religion tends to lose significance with growing development.

Considering the random element if you find a religious goody hut/natural wonder in the beginning, I think that reflects matters pretty well indeed - some cultures had a charismatic psychotic at some point during history, some didn't - may have been just one guy eating that mushroom he found and believing that mountain was holy - so indeed pretty random.

 

[afedyuki]

They may not have quite as much political influence as they did in Middle Ages but they have more than 1 billion followers worldwide. Personal feelings aside, it is hard to argue with success.

Well - but then, nobody really cared about what the catholic church said anymore way before that - at least in developed countries.

I think the game reflects that as well - religion tends to lose significance with growing development.

 

[Gali]

You can't get a faith ruin until someone has a pantheon and then less if you don't have one so Ive found like 2 since release

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

2) The ability to expend another great prophet to replace up to 2 obsolete beliefs with new ones (if they were not taken by someone else) once you reach Industrial era. That would be realistic, I mean the Catholic Church no longer mandates that the Earth is the center of the Universe, does it?

That would be such a good feature. Gives another reason for Great Prophets other than Holy Sites and super-Missionaries.

 

[Saqe]

I just finished my first game in G&K and I really don´t understand what good does it do to spread your religion. Could someone explain this? All I saw was some minor bonuses from some of the beliefs if you spread them, but they certainly didn´t seem to be worth while spreading.

 

[Drawmeus]

If you're going to do a religion that gives you more faith, make sure you're targeting at least two end-game Social Policies with useful GP buys. It can be viable to churn out huge amounts of faith, but only if you're going to spend that on GEs or GSes or something.

As far as spreading them - minor bonuses from the Founder belief is it, plus a diplomatic boost if the other civ converts to your religion. Note that the minor benefits can add up quite substantially, so while I don't recommend missionaries except in rare circumstances, you're generally best off if most of the rest of the world follows your religion.

 

[MadDjinn]

2) The ability to expend another great prophet to replace up to 2 obsolete beliefs with new ones (if they were not taken by someone else) once you reach Industrial era. That would be realistic, I mean the Catholic Church no longer mandates that the Earth is the center of the Universe, does it?

That's not a bad plan, but I'd limit it to 1 belief/Prophet - can't have strategies that whole sale changes religion based upon early game vs. late game or 'with no spread' (so the +100 gold/converted city or +2 gold/city) to 'with spread' after the spread (tithe).

I'd also likely consider having a 'followed' religion become a new religion (ala Protestants) with a changed founder belief if possible (or no founder belief to be fair).

 

[Babri]

All and all, the only founder belief that I could see a nitpick with is Pilgrimage. That one would be fine if they just upped the faith you get from it to +2 or +3. +1 is underpowered. Having a founder belief that generates more faith is deadly with the right follower beliefs. If you have holy warriors, then adopting this with this kind of buff will give you a free unit basically every 2-3 turns when you have enough followers. If you adopt just war as an enhancer, this will give you a missionary every 2-3 turns to spread your faith to every city in the world, essentially buffing all your units by 20% in enemy lands. +1 per city is negligible.

I agree with the pilgrimage point. 1 faith is too weak, I tried using it as Arabia & it was really disappointing. I think they should base it on the pop of the city like 1 faith per 5 citizens. After all it is the people that will go for pilgrimage so it should depend on pop.

 

[nefloyd]

I just finished my first game in G&K and I really don´t understand what good does it do to spread your religion. Could someone explain this? All I saw was some minor bonuses from some of the beliefs if you spread them, but they certainly didn´t seem to be worth while spreading.

Every Founder belief comes with a bonus for getting your religion into other cities. This is hardly minor, many of them are quite incredible. Ceremonial Burial gives you +1 happiness for *every* city with your religion as its major. Tithing gives you +1 gold if a city has 4 followers, +2 if it has 8, etc. These are huge sources of various income. It may be a minor or major part of your strategy which dictates how aggresive you are with it, but if you have founded a religion you absolutely have a reason to have your religion in every city in the world.

The wrong thing to do is to choose only beliefs with benefits to faith. Faith in itself is a useless resource: it does not give you culture, happiness, culture, gold, or units.

Faith is never useless unless you, for some reason, never pick up a single point in Order, Autocracy, Freedom, Rationalism, or Commerce, because you can always spend it on Great People. Playing Sweden, for example, it's not a bad choice to pick as many faith-generating things as you can and popping out as many GP as you can throw at the city-states.