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Religious Beliefs with Tradeoffs

sTAPler27

Prince
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Mar 18, 2018
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A lot of religions are based on sets of restrictions so it only feels rights that a lot of bonuses should grant debuffs.

Maybe you deem an animal resource as sacred and instead of its usual bonuses you are granted happiness and culture. Maybe your religion bans celebrations so instead you get a constant flat bonus to production. Maybe idoltry is banned, so your relics get replaced with special codicies. I always love it when games have policy type choices that make you decide to choose whether or not to specialize in certain areas at a price.

Given that a lot of the Crisis policies are designed this way I'm hoping we see some regular policies also designed with pros and cons in mind.
 
A lot of religions are based on sets of restrictions so it only feels rights that a lot of bonuses should grant debuffs.

Maybe you deem an animal resource as sacred and instead of its usual bonuses you are granted happiness and culture. Maybe your religion bans celebrations so instead you get a constant flat bonus to production. Maybe idoltry is banned, so your relics get replaced with special codicies. I always love it when games have policy type choices that make you decide to choose whether or not to specialize in certain areas at a price.

Given that a lot of the Crisis policies are designed this way I'm hoping we see some regular policies also designed with pros and cons in mind.
And, ideally, how should changing civ religion, or establishing freedom of religion or multi-confessional entrepots work?
 
And, ideally, how should changing civ religion, or establishing freedom of religion or multi-confessional entrepots work?
Humankind has a system like this with its policy tree. Once you reach one of the later eras you get the choice of a Secular State or State Atheism (of course you can pick neither). Secularism makes it so you no longer gain grievances against you for your religion spreading but you can no longer build holy sites, in Civ where the spreading is a bit less passive you'd probably lose the ability to build missionaries. State Atheism on the other hand is more of an offensive maneuver to be used when you either struggled to found a strong religion or lost yours to your ooponents. It grants no abilities but you can spread it to kneecap your opponents.

As for freedom of religion there's three related policies for this, you get the option to accept religious minorities and gain influence (culture) per territories (cities and towns) or persecute them to gain faith on territories and the ability to use religious spread as a grievance. If you accept them you get the opportunity to not tax them which grants non follower territories in your empire stability (like a combination of happiness in 7 or loyalty in 6) or you can tax them to recieve gold per turn instead. If you chose to persecute religious minorities you gain the option to pick a policy allowing you to banish them which grants you gold per turn or to eliminate them entirely to gain stability, both options leading to a population loss.

You can adopt any religion of a state you know and in doing so your population will begin to convert to that faith and you'll take a stability hit. In my opinion this is a bit too easy, If I were to design this mechanic I'd say you should have to do this manually given how monumental of a task it would be to convince a whole population to change faiths on a whim. You would be able to buy missionaries for the new faith and the price would depend on what percentage of your empire belongs to the faith.

The only issue with this system is that Civ 7 is ditching faith. Perhaps in the future they could adopt Humankinds version of it. In that game faith isn't a resource like Food, Industry, Money or Science. It can't be found naturally on tiles and isn't really a gatherable resource but more of a number representing the pressure the tile is exerting. The higher the faith of a tile the stronger the pressure on near by territories with it diminishing over distance. Imagine if the adjacency bonus of holy sites in Civ 6 weren't granting you a gold like resource so you could buy religious units to spread your relgion but simply did it on their own. Now do I wish there was a bit more of an active element in Humankind? Sure, but with Civ 7 you could have both systems so you could build a faith that grows more passively if you wanted to avoid dishing out gold on missionary work.
 
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I support your ideas because they are interesting and we really need something new and fresh in the religion systems after 13 years of stagnation, and I also like strategic tradeoffs and they particularly seem to fit religious systems
 
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