Religions of the New World [ACCEPTED]

[raystuttgart]

Spoiler :

One of my oldest concepts for a feature to be implemented in RaR was "Religions".
It actually also o major reason to name the old mod "Religion and Revolution".

Recently some team members asked me if I cound post the concept and explain it, so here we go.
(Also sorry for posting so many new feature concepts recently and thus scaring some community members. )

The concept I post now by the way is only "the light weight" version of my last concept.
So don't worry it is not extremely game changing.

The "heavy weight version" I had designed for my "Sci-Fi total conversion spin off of RaR" ("Path To the Throne" - which was "Dune Inspired" but never even close to being finished and thus abandoned)
would cause too much disagreement and would probably not be accepted anyways.

Disclaimer:

• This feature concept is not about religion A is better than religion B. They will just be balanced a bit different.
• This feature concept will also not have Religious Wars or anyhting as controverse as that.
  
• This feature might not represent "Native Religions / Believes" appropriately because it simply does not add to the game play. Still we do not intend to be disrespectful to "Native Religions / Believes" at all.
• This feature might also not represent all believes from the Old World that were brought to the new World like e.g. Judaism. Still we do not intend to be disrespectful to those believes either.

Sorry for writing this, but I know that "Religion" is a relatively hot topic for some people.
In a game however you sometimes need to be allowed to do some abstraction to keep this simple.

Feature Concept:

General:

This concept will change the game play of course but really only a little bit and mainly add immersion, flavour and some small events.
It would add a tiny bit more "managing aspect" (by adding a new game mechanic) and would feel a little bit more like Civ4 BTS.

A) Adding more / actual Religions that are "authentic" to the theme of Colonization

The basis of this feature is, that every European Nation (Colony and King) will have one specific Core Religion - ideally authentic to the time period and the Nation. (e.g. Anglican, Lutheranian, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox ...)

• I have not yet done enough research to know exactly which religion would fit best to which European Nation.
• Generally it does not really matter for the game concept if a few European Nations share the same Religion (e.g. Catholic being more common than Orthodox)
  
• Native Nations will just all have "Native Believes" as Religions

B) "Core Religion" advantages and disadvantages and effects of other features to it

• It will generally be similar to Traits currently (but configured in a new XML) and will give Nation Wide modifiers (e.g. on Immigration, modifiers for different % of believes immigrating, Diplomacy Relations to "Archbishop", modifiers on Yields, ...)
  
• Thus every Colonial Nation will get a bit more unique.
• Those advantages and disadvantes might get modified by other features like Civics (e.g "Free Religions" or "State Religion") or Techs (e.g. like "Printing Paper").
• The Core Religion of the Nation can not be changed (e.g. by something comparable to "Declaration of Independence" or whatever)

C) Start Religion of Colonists (only Units that can work in a city)

• Not all Colonists acquired for your Nation will however have that Core Religion. Some might have one of the other Religions.
  
• For Immigrants the chances will be configurable in the XML for Nations. (CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml)
• For Growth the chances will depend on the current distribution of Religions in your City.
• For Captured Colonists they will simply inherit their religion.
• For Converted Natives it will be the Core Religion.
  
• For African Slaves / Native Slaves it will be "Native Believes"
• All other Units that can not work in a town do not need any Religion and will not display it.

D) Different Religion Rates in City and for Nation

• Well, this is what this feature is about. Religion rates need to do something.
• To simplify it, you should always try to have most of your population have your Core Religion.
• Having a high rate of your Core Religion will make your "Archbishop" and your population happy and trigger positive events and game effects.
• Having a low rate of your Core Religion will make your "Archbishop" and your poulation unhappy and trigger negative events and game effects.
• Nothing of that will be game breaking or overpowered though.

E) Effects and Events (examples)

On National Core Religion Rate:

• Archbishop offering Missionaries cheaper / more expensive
• Archbishop sending another Archbishop / event not being triggered anymore
• Achbishop asking for Gold less often / more often
• Conquistadores joining your cause
• Influences on Immigration Rate for Specific Religions (depending on XML settings for Religions)
• Affecting Attitude of other European Nations that have a similar or the same or a completely different Religion
  
• ...

On City Core Religion Rate:

• Python Events like "Heretics", "Wiches", "Religious Celebrations", ...
  
• Colonists from your Core Religion from other Nations joining your City.
• Colonists from "not Core Religion" leaving you for another Nation's City.
• ...

F) Converting to Core Religion

• Producing lots of Crosses in the City (just like increasing "Revolutionary Rate" by Bells)

To sum it up:

• Lots of Immigrants with other Religion will impact your religious stability negatively
• Lots of Native Slave and African Slaves will impact your religious stability negatively
• Conquering lots of Cities from AIs with other Religions will impact your religious stability negatively
• Producing Crosses (and thus Converting) will improve religious stability again.
• More events and a few effects (positive if religious stability is high, negative if religious stability is low)

Spoiler :

List of things that this concept does not use from "heavy weight concept" for "Path to the Throne"

• No separate Yields for each Religion (You only produce Crosses for your own Core Religion)
• No different Religious Parents (We will still have only the "general" Archbishop.)
  
• Converting Religions in both direction (You only convert for your Core Religion)
• Religons to be founded
  
• Religious Wonders to be build
• No way of sending Missionaries to European Cities (but of course you still do that for Native Villages)
• No changing of Core Religion (by a big event like a "Religious War")
• No Religious Wars between European Nations
  
• ...

All of this simply does not fit the Colonization theme.
It would also make this concept way too complicated.

Technical Considerations:

A) Graphics:

• We should already almost all of the graphics we need.
• Maybe a few buttons for Colopedia for "Religions" would still need to be created.

B) Visualizsation:

• New Category in "Colopedia" for listing the Religions.
• Visualization of "Core Religon Rate" on Map Screen and in City Screen
• Realtively simple adjustment for Mouse Over / Selection Texts for Colonists (e.g. Map Screen, City Screen and Europe Screen).

C) Effort:

• This is quite some effort to implement and considering balancing. (But other suggested concepts are way more.)
  
• Some parts of the implementation could however eventually be adapted from Civ4 BTS.

D) Risk of Bugs:

• Well yes, this could introduce bugs of course if implementation is messed up.
• But it is generally quite well isolated to other game mechanics and should not have too many side effects.

E) Potential AI Problems:

• Only very little problems for AI to be excpected.
• It should however produce more crosses than now.
  
• But to be sure, negative effects / events could be deactivated for AI.

F) Performance:

• The calculations are mainly on City Level and on Nation Level. Thus the impact should not be that much.

G) Configurability in XML

• Very highly configurable in XML.
• But it cannot simply be made completely deactivateable by XML without considerable effort.

--------

Let us see what community and team think.

 

[Nightinggale]

I generally like this idea. It will make the different countries more unique and less "simpleminded" like Spain is for conquest, France is for converting natives, Dutch is for trade etc. It would be nice if the different countries are unique, but at the same time so diverse that if you are say Spain, then you shouldn't go "I picked incorrectly because conquest is the wrong choice in this game".

I wonder about how this should influence the natives. (long historical summary of colonization through missionaries in the 16th century)

Spoiler :

The Native Americans didn't write much of what happened and what they did write is lost (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa who burned anything, which wasn't the bible). However other people did write stuff, which is preserved. During the 16th century the Portuguese discovered Japan (at first Japong as that was what the Chinese called it. Japan has always called itself Nippon). The king of Portugal realized Japan was rich, which meant it was God's will that it should become a Portuguese colony. Also it should be easy because it was a bunch of individual countries all at war with each other. The question was how to make it a colony. Buying them was out of the question because they were too wealthy for that to work. Conquest was out of the question because due to the war, 10% of the population was in the military and they started training at age 5. The plan was then to use religion and make converts pay to the Pope, but by not having direct contact with the Pope, Portugal would become a proxy, which collected the money.

The plan was set to work and unlike America, we actually have a lot of written accounts from locals about what happened and how it turned out. Portugal started selling guns, but only to leaders who would convert first. This didn't cause any less tension in the ongoing wars and it created the Sengoku era (warring states era). The number of converts steadily increased while the leaders were busy fighting each other. The conversion rate went up because converts started to convert other people.

There was this leader called Oda Nobunaga. He was blinded by all the new stuff from Europe and had a "I must have all of it" view. Good for the plan, but Nobunaga died in a fire and so did was his son. The Emperor then crowned Akechi Mitsuhide as the new leader, but he only ruled for 3 days before he was killed in battle as payback for intentionally starting the fire. The new leader was then Tomotoya Hideyoshi (you might know him as the guy who built a castle in one night) and he was viewed with respect because he gained the throne honorably by killing a traitor. Nobunaga had used the guns to conquer half of Japan meaning suddenly the Europeans had helped to create a local superpower, but lost the leader they hoped to turn into their puppet.

Now the Portuguese plan really backfired. While all this happened, the converts came up with a new idea. Tell people to convert or be killed. They also started destroying Buddhist temples. When Hideyoshi realized what happened, he used his newly gained power to completely ban all missionaries in Japan. After all it was Nobunaga and not Hideyoshi who had bought the guns meaning he didn't feel like he owed anything to the missionaries. Things got more peaceful and then Hideyoshi died of old age.

Next came Tokugawa Ieyasu. We all know this guy because he is the leader of Japan in BTS. He acted quickly with the new power vacuum and conquered all of Japan in 2 years. No more wars because it has been a single country ever since. A few years later (10 or so) a group of converts decided to take over a castle, declare independence from Japan and make a Christian country, which would only answer to the Pope. That was short lived because the army attacked and took back the castle. A new law was passed, which made it illegal to be Christian and it would result in death penalty because obviously Christians are up to no good. They didn't actually execute every single Christian and it wasn't some McCarthy era or anything like that. It was just a tool to convict everybody involved without having to proof precisely who did what when it was known they were all involved. Christians stopped trying to convert other people overnight, but we know of named converts, who didn't commit any other crimes and were as a result not arrested or anything, though admittedly they all decided to hide their faith.

Just before all this happened (the revolt and castle capture), a group of Japanese people built two ships and set sail for Europe. They went on a tour of a number of kings and the Pope and while they were all very friendly and wanted to talk with those people from the end of the world, the Japanese realized it was all just nice words and no actions. Nobody in Europe would do anything to aid the converts. They were pawns in a chess game and they were being sacrificed by the leaders at that point. Some decided to stay in Europe because they preferred staying with people of the same faith rather than going back. They picked a port in Spain and settled there, married locally etc. Their children were baptized and they should have the family name of the father, meaning the local priests had to write whatever those men said. Eventually they gave up and wrong Japong (what they still called Japan). Today around 500 people are named Japong in Spain.

When the ships returned, Christianity had been banned in the meantime.

For the record, the missionaries were Jesuits. The Jesuits of Lisbon caused major problems at home too later on. In 1755 a giant earthquake and tsunami hit Lisbon (well hit Portugal and Spain, likely parts of Africa too). The damaged buildings caught fire due to the fireplaces and people started to pour water on the flames. Some Jisuits decided to take holy relics around in the streets and made people kiss them because God was angry because they were not kissed enough.. or something like that. They killed anybody who would put out the fires because it was God's will that the city should burn. After that Jesuits got banned in Portugal too and they all went to South America. As such the history of early Christianity in Japan is likely not at all like what we consider modern Christianity.

Also a disclaimer: I'm not 100% sure of the timeline regarding what the converts did vs what the local leaders did. The whole era is so full of history that you can spend a lifetime studying it.

This reveals the thinking of colonization through missionaries. It's something worth thinking about relative to this proposal.

We should also consider what happens to native settlements with a mission. Do they change the religion of the population units? What happens to a fully converted settlement?

give Nation Wide modifiers (e.g. on Immigration, modifiers for different % of believes immigrating, Diplomacy Relations to "Archbishop", modifiers on Yields, ...)
[...]Those advantages and disadvantes might get modified by other features like Civics (e.g "Free Religions" or "State Religion" or Techs (e.g. like "Printing Paper").

This really screams for an implementation through CivEffects. We add a new xml file with Religions and each provides a CivEffect. Not only will it make the xml setup easier, it is likely the fastest possible implementation.

 

[Tugboatspotter]

I am not sold on this concept.

I can understand the value of religion in a civ game but not so much in this one.

I don't think it fits the theme, and I don't like the idea of too many modifiers, whether from a new tech tree or religions or anywhere else.

Once modifiers start creeping in from everywhere it becomes far too difficult to understand where the numbers are coming from.

 

[raystuttgart]

I generally like this idea.

Cool.

It will make the different countries more unique and less "simpleminded" ...

Exactly.

It is just supposed to add a bit more uniqueness to Nations a bit of immersion and flavour (e.g. events), as well as a small new game aspect to play with.
Nothing in there is game breaking or forces the player to completely change his game strategy.

I wonder about how this should influence the natives. (long historical summary of colonization through missionaries in the 16th century)

I would rather not try have this concept applied for Natives. (European Colonies and Kings only.)
It would just be too much work (since we have so many Native Nations in WTP) and change nothing considering gameplay for Human Player or European AI.

This really screams for an implementation through CivEffects. We add a new xml file with Religions and each provides a CivEffect. Not only will it make the xml setup easier, it is likely the fastest possible implementation.

Really a good idea.

Spoiler :

Instead of investing the efforts to build the modifiers in "ReligionInfos.xml" they could directly be build in "CivEffects.xml".
We might use those modifiers in other game concepts as well and could thus access them easier through CivEffects.

"ReligionInfos.xml" would then basically just provide balancing and references to TXT_KEYs, buttons and the CivEffects.
Thus we will just need some basic "ReligionTypes" in that XML.

 

[raystuttgart]

I can understand the value of religion in a civ game but not so much in this one.

This is really a completely different Religion System than in Civ4 BTS.

I don't think it fits the theme, ...

Actually historically the time period was exactly the time period where e.g. Protestantism was started and lots of different Religions were present in the New World.
The diverstity of new Religions had a huge influence on the societies / colonies of the New World. (e.g. by Immigration and considering Politics)

If you consider "Original Colonization of 1994" to be the only true "Colonization game", I can understand your point though.
But personally I do not think that is what WTP wants to be or should be. (RaR also always wanted to be much more.)

 

[Nightinggale]

Once modifiers start creeping in from everywhere it becomes far too difficult to understand where the numbers are coming from.

Maybe that's why the game has help text like

Producing 4 food/turn
base 3 food/turn
Trait A + 10%
Rebel sentiment +10%
Civic farming +25%

I'm not concerned as long as we maintain a way to get an overview like that.

 

[raystuttgart]

Maybe that's why the game has help text like
I'm not concerned as long as we maintain a way to get an overview like that.

I fully agree to that.

As long as all information necessary for the player to make decicions (or adjust game play) is explained / visible in "Mouse-Over" or "City / Map Screen" or "Event Texts" or "Colopedia" everyting is fine.
Civ4 BTS and especially some of its big mods have a lot more modifiers than WTP and players still understand.

 

[raystuttgart]

Hm, something is strange.

All votes in the poll are positive ...
This never happened to any of my concepts before.

Either community really likes the idea or the poll is broken.

 

[rah]

Concept, great.
Well save final judgement based on implementation.


I'd be most interested in the impact on Natives. Their conversion process.
Certain religions might not be so interested in the natives as potential followers but see them as heretics that should just be eliminated.

 

[Drunk-Monk]

I think the proposal is great, just that we need to handle things carefully to stop things becoming overly gamey, and to bear in mind that religious affiliation and its politics was not black and white. Catholic France and Spain were bitter enemies for much of the period, as were Protestant Sweden and Denmark and majority Protestant England and the Netherlands. France and England both had monarchs of a minority religion, or who were sympathetic to the minority. Most of the colonists of the 13 Colonies were Protestants, but disagreed vehemently on the 'correct' way to worship.

I think a series of event to simulate the reformation would be good. I also think adding a simple bonus/malus to diplomatic relationships to those who follow the same or a different faith would be ok. Also allowing the Indians to convert to a faith, once that faith has a certain amount of followers like in Civ would be great.

 

[Tugboatspotter]

Hm, something is strange.

All votes in the poll are positive ...
This never happened to any of my concepts before.

Either community really likes the idea or the poll is broken.

I would have voted no, but I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to new ideas I am unsure about.

At this point there is almost 300 views and only 9 votes, so maybe everyone is still in a state of deep contemplation before voting

 

[devolution]

This is essentially the same as giving each colonist a nationality, except that the colonist would be aligned with their religion rather than their monarch.

Some things to consider:

- This system should obviously "tie in" with a happiness mechanic at some point.
- Be a cause of conflict between the AI (religious wars!)
- Effectively nerf conquest gains due to having to suppress the religion of a conquered city. Perhaps requiring units to stay behind to quell a religious uprising which would slow down (human) warmongering a bit

 

[raystuttgart]

- This system should obviously "tie in" with a happiness mechanic at some point.

I have / had a "Happiness" concept (Similar to Health - just a bit more complex) but wanted to replace it with "City Needs".

There were 2 reasons for me to replace "Happiness" with "City Needs":
A) My old Happiness Concept it is the "same old same old" (Yield, Building, Profession, Specialst, some effects)
B) Community already did not like "Loyalty to the Motherland" and I felt they would probalby not like "Happiness" as well.

- Be a cause of conflict between the AI (religious wars!)

I purposely left it out because I believe community would not like it and thus not accept the complete concept.
(I feel that I should keep my features concepts as simple as possible - without totally killing the core feature purpose itself - for the moment.)

Let us keep it simple for now and see what we will do with it in the future.
But yes, this concept does have potential to be further expanded in the future.

- Effectively nerf conquest gains due to having to suppress the religion of a conquered city.

That basically already happens because you the city will be unstable because the majority of religions might not be your "Core Religion".
(Religious Stability of City / Nation could several different potential effects - depending on what we like to implement.)

 

[Schmiddie]

I would like this feature because it will make the nations a little bit more different (but not too different ).

 

[raystuttgart]

This feature concept seems to be accepted.
All poll votes are positive. All team members seem to like it as well.

It might take a while until we implement it though.
We will most likely focus on further improvements and smaller features first.

 

[raystuttgart]

Just bumping "ACCEPTED" old concepts so they get further up in the queue again.