Religious diplomacy modifiers

[MartinHarper]

The current religious modifiers have the AI behaving irrationally and somewhat weirdly. We can do better, without sacrificing roleplay elements. Here's my proposal:

Same religion bonus
We don't want to declare war on civs of the same religion because we will have extra unhappiness. If we have the same national religion with a civ, the following bonuses apply:

• +2 relations if 75% or more of our cities have our national religion
• +1 relations if 25-75% of our cities have our national religion
• +0 relations is 25% or less of our cities have our national religion

There is no penalty for being a different religion, so Christian civs do not hate Muslims more than Pagans.

Shrine income bonus
We like civs that have a national religion that we have a shrine for, as they may spread the religion for us, and thus increase our shrine income. If they are of a different religion, then they may spread a competing religion and make it harder for us to spread ours.

• +2 relations if we control the shrine for the civ's national religion.
• -2 relations if someone else control the shrine for the civ's national religion.
• +0 relations if the civ has no national religion, or its religion has no shrine.

Theocracy bonus/penalties
We like theocratic civs if we have the relevant shrine, as it makes it easier for us to increase our shrine income. We dislike theocratic civs if we have other shrines, as we cannot increase their income. For a theocratic civ, the following bonuses/penalties apply:

• +2 relations if we control the shrine for the civ's national religion and can produce missionaries or monasteries for it.
• -2 relations for each other shrine we control for which we can produce missionaries or monasteries, up to a maximum of -8.

The requirement to be able to build missionaries or monasteries handles the case when a civ captures a bunch of Hindu cities, including the shrine, after discovering Scientific Method.

Apostolic Palace penalties

If we are a member of the Apostolic Palace, we may end up in wars/embargoes with heathen civs. Therefore we don't value relations with heathen civs, as we could easily lose them. This is particularly true if we are outvoted and we have many cities that would get Apostolic unhappiness. A heathen civ is one with no cities that have the Apostolic religion. For those civs we have:

• -1 relations if we have less than 50% of the Apostolic votes
• -2 relations if we have less than 25% of the Apostolic votes

These penalties are doubled if 50% or more of our cities contain the Apostolic religion.

Personality and Strategy multipliers

• Double the effect of shrine-related religious modifers if we are running the missionary strategy.
• Multiply negative religious modifers by the leader's iDifferentReligionAttitudeSomething
• Multiply positive religious modifers by the leader's iSameReligionAttitudeSomething
• Normalise to make the total range between -8 and +8

Demands to change religion/civics

• The AI will demand a switch to/from Theology only if that would improve its relations with the civ. It gives a +1 modifier for changing civics if a civ incurs anarchy to do so.
• The AI will demand a religion switch only if that would improve its relations with the civ. It gives a +1 modifier for changing religions if a civ incurs anarchy to do so.

 

[Afforess]

I would support this, as I get sick of Isabella hating everyone when she has some religion that no one else has, and get's killed easily because of it.

This looks like a much better way to do things.

 

[r_rolo1]

I do not disagree per se of some of the things you are sugesting ( in spite of strongly disagreeing with some, like the shrine thing.... it simply doesn't make sense to make a AI to like someone just because they have a shrine in a game where there is a quest to take their State religion holy city I find hard to rationalize the theo thing , especially I'm not running it ... the "holier than thou" thing in RL is more prone to hates than to love ) , but :

-rebalancing the diplo modifiers is definitely a area where it is easy to screw up and get either a game where it is impossible to get friends or lovefest and BBF stuff ...

- I think this gets a lot out of this mod objective. Not totally though....

 

[MartinHarper]

Take the Holy City is a fairly rare quest, and I don't think the owner of the holy city gets told about it, so I don't think that need be a factor.

Going into Theocracy will pick you up twelve points of hatred and two points of love once all the shrines are in the game. If anything, that's probably too much hatred.

The shrine-related religious modifiers should probably diminish as the average number of religions/city increases.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

I added some AI diplomacy modifiers for civics into my game for Theocracy. I wanted the love/hate under theocracy to be more pronounced. I also added a war target modifier for holy cities. So if someone is running Theocracy, they'll value the Holy City higher and be more inclined to go to war to capture it (provided its under the control of an infidel).

The Apostolic Palace idea could be interesting. First of all, I think it's lame that countries with a different state religion than the Apostolic Palace get a vote at all, but if we were to modify this to exclude civs with a different state religion from participating, a +1 to all civs in the Apostolic Palace members club and a -1 penalty to all who aren't might be interesting.

 

[kazapp]

The current religious modifiers have the AI behaving irrationally and somewhat weirdly. We can do better, without sacrificing roleplay elements. Here's my proposal:

I symphatise with your goals; however, since religion is intrinsically irrational, I'm not sure your changes make sense overall.

In other words: I'm not sure I think religious Civs behaving irrationally & weirdly is unrealistic or unattractive.

Having Isabella founding a religion and then hating the world is alright - that's what religious crusaders do. However, I can agree the religious zeal needs to be tempered with some self-preservation.
(Role-playing the historic Isabella does rely on being the world's super-power at the time)

But a strong, secure Isabella should definitely try to raze the heathen world around her; rather than to display the same rational traits as the more coldly calculating world conquerors there is. All IMHO, of course.