Replace Pacifism?

[Rhye]

ok, as I see the meaning of atheism can be debated and easility misunderstood, what do you think of "State Atheism"? The effect would be more or less the current one of the Free Religion, while Free Religion takes a kind of the old Pacifism (the GP bonus) (the name change to Secularism is debateable as well)

 

[Ravellion]

ok, as I see the meaning of atheism can be debated and easility misunderstood, what do you think of "State Atheism"? The effect would be more or less the current one of the Free Religion, while Free Religion takes a kind of the old Pacifism (the GP bonus) (the name change to Secularism is debateable as well)

That still means out of the four religious civics that actually have an effect, two actually do not have a state religion.

Besides that, I think we are not tackling the problem in the most efficient way here. Let's look at the problem here:

The problem: Pacifism as a religious civic never really existed. No country has had its dominant belief system actively oppose the military.
Not the problem: The game effects of the civic.

The solution:Rename Pacifism into something that did exist
A solution, but IMO not a very efficient solution: change the entire civic tree, and also add yet another questionable civic name.

Perhaps a renaming to "scholasticism" would suffice, to explain the abundance of the great people. Early humanists and renaissance men often still had a religious education, though after their education they did not become part of the church.

 

[Ravellion]

One more thing: If you would change it to Atheism, would it still be available as early? Or would you move it to the industrial age? I don't think it would make sense to have it be available so quickly.

Also, would you forbid the building of temples and cathedrals? I reckon it also wouldn't give one happiness per religion? Would you be able to build missionaries?

I'm sorry about all the questions, but I am a rather loud opponent of Atheism as a civic, because it historically was a byproduct of totalitarianism. If it is not meant to be that kind of atheism, we are left with the same problem as with pacifism: a civic that so far has never been enacted in any historical civilization.

I hope my renaming to "Scholasticism" sticks ;-)

 

[Spearthrower]

One more thing: If you would change it to Atheism, would it still be available as early? Or would you move it to the industrial age? I don't think it would make sense to have it be available so quickly.

I still think that switching Free Religion back to the current position of Pacificism, and having the "new as yet unagreed upon civic name" as the last position. It really is only a very short blink in time where we have had societies that aren't heavily founded and guided by a governing religious or spiritual belief system.... and I still think it best ties in with Scientific Method.

 

[Rhye]

as I already said, the effects (and prerequisites too) would be swapped

 

[Surtur]

Does that mean most civs will have "State Atheism"? Doesn't sound very realistic to me.

 

[Blasphemous]

I think this discussion basically has two trends going on in it. One is renaming existing civics and possibly moving them around in the tech tree; the other trend is rehashing the last two civics in the Religion Civics list and rearranging them entirely.
I wish it were so simple that a rename would suffice. But I don't think it's so - we need to reshuffle those two, at least. For lack of time, I won't repeat the argument and ideas in favor of making Religion Civics into Religious Attitudes. If we don't do that entirely, Civics will remain vague pieces of policy relating to certain areas - Religion Civics are not styles of religion or what the people believe, they are government policy relating to religion. So this is what I propose for the last two RCs:

Liberalism (or Liberal Secularism, or Secularism, or whatever) representing states where the government doesn't force any given religion or doctrine on the people. This represents America as well as it represents classical empires where there was a state religion but others were tolerated well.
Effects: State Religion allowed. Each non-state religion gives its city +1 +1. +1 in any city without the SR. All religions spread fast in your cities. You cannot build Monasteries. +10% in all cities. Upkeep low.
The Result: You can keep your State Religion but its only real benefit becomes diplomacy. Your cities will be happier if you don't have any SR, and they won't need the SR to be happy and thrive.

State Cult (or Personality Cult, or Forced Ideology) representing the ideological systems forced upon people under Hitler, Stalin, Turkmenbashi, etc. This has always been sorely lacking in the Civics system.
Effects: No State Religion. +10% culture in all cities. 6 biggest cities get +3. Can't build any religious buildings, religions don't spread in your cities. -10% war unhappiness. Upkeep very high. (Explanation: The extra culture makes sense because the totalitarian governments that have a state cult always invest huge amounts of effort into building culture around the state cult. They do this even more in the big cities. This is also why the big cities will be happier. War unhappiness is reduced because the state cult has been used to justify things that people normally don't like.)
The Result: Expensive to maintain but extremely effective for warmongers (the extra culture is also important in wars because it expands your borders.) Fills in an important gap in realism.

 

[knigh+]

I like Blasphemous' suggestion best so far.

 

[knigh+]

I disagree with you about part of this statement. You say that the civics column should relate to the implementation of religion, well one approach to the implementation of religion is to actively oppose it. This in effect then, is state sanctioned atheism, and its intent is to prevent the spread and practice of religion. Just as a state can have an organized religion or act as a theocracy, it can take what I see as the exact opposite approach. The discussion about whether "atheism" as a civic title is sufficient is entirely different. In my opinion, that name is preferable to something needlessly more complicated (I don't think we need to go as far as "Personality Cult" or "State sponsored Ideology"). However, I think it's something that should certainly be discussed, as I'm on the fence about it anyway.

I tend to disagree, as I view Atheism as a religion. So what you call "state sanctioned atheism" is nothing more than Organized Religion or Theocracy, where atheism is the state religion. But since we are not discussing to include atheism as a religion, I'll go back to our subject.



As for the needs of the game, I agree that this unnamed civic is necessary, as there had been its examples in history. But what must be decided is its boundaries. Let me organize our thoughts in the rest of this post:

We need to represent all civilizations in history that were not pagan, not fully theocracy, not organized religion. And we need to do it within the two remaining religious civics yet to be decided. Here are the civs to represent.

1- Theocratic Freedom: Ottoman Empire before 1850s. State religion matters only in foreign relations and missionaries. Citizens have freedom of religion, but they have to obey the laws of their own religions in the society. Citizens can't be secular in this. A Theocracy trying to get the bonus of Free Religion, or Free Religion trying to base itself on religious teachings?

2- State Sanctioned Atheism: USSR and other communists. No state religion, no freedom of religion, no religious building counstruction etc.

3- Ideological or Personal Cult: WW2 Germany, Turkmenistan. No state religion, but people can have religion. May be a subset of #4.

4- Strong Secularism: Turkey, France. Religion is free, but it is not allowed to affect citizens in neither personal nor societal scale.

5- Freedom of Faith: Many developed countries. Religion is free, people can do whatever they want with their life. Religion is only prohibited from affecting foreign relations.

6- Unbalanced Freedom: USA. Religion is free, but with unbalanced demographics of religion. The country's policies are often influenced by religion and the state almost has a state religion. This is a more secular and modern version of #1. This has the happy of the Free Religion civic without all the science bonus (look at all the fuss about stem cell research).

Keep in mind that even if you disagree with my assessment of one of the countries I gave as example, don't waste your breath on argueing against it, as individual countries aren't our topic. Just replace the name of the country with Exampleland and re-think about it.

 

[Zetetic Apparat]

Don't argue based on real examples? What? That does indeed make it quite hard to argue against your ideas, so I'm ignore it on the basis that it's a ridiculous condition.

I don't see how the USSR, DDR, PRC, DPRK, didn't/don't promote an ideological cult. State-sanctioned atheism has only ever been repression of religions in favour of ideology ; to all intensive purposes #2 and #3 are the same.

#4-6 are interesting but I'm not sure that this justifies three civics. Is it possible to have 'Free Religion' but then to chose to or not to have, a state religion reflecting whether the government is truly secular or still dominated by one particular group? Can this be done in a nice way (effectively splitting the civic ; some common effects and some specific to secularism or otherwise). Might be able to represent Ottomans & Moors system like this.

Generally, I think Blas' suggestions aren't bad.

 

[knigh+]

Don't argue based on real examples? What? That does indeed make it quite hard to argue against your ideas, so I'm ignore it on the basis that it's a ridiculous condition.

I said that in defense against over-optimistic Americans who might get annoyed at #6 and the standard Turk-bashers who don't know the difference of Ottoman history in 19th century and the prior 5 centuries. I meant, even if you don't think the example country belongs to this item, the item remains as a possible implementation of religion on administration.

I don't see how the USSR, DDR, PRC, DPRK, didn't/don't promote an ideological cult. State-sanctioned atheism has only ever been repression of religions in favour of ideology ; to all intensive purposes #2 and #3 are the same.

Yes but #2 and #3 are still different. Besides many even a theocracy can be a personal or ideological cult (such as post revolution Iran). I shouldn't have named the six items, it generated misunderstanding.

#4-6 are interesting but I'm not sure that this justifies three civics. Is it possible to have 'Free Religion' but then to chose to or not to have, a state religion reflecting whether the government is truly secular or still dominated by one particular group? Can this be done in a nice way (effectively splitting the civic ; some common effects and some specific to secularism or otherwise). Might be able to represent Ottomans & Moors system like this.

Generally, I think Blas' suggestions aren't bad.

Those are NOT one civic suggestion each. As I said before...

As for the needs of the game, I agree that this unnamed civic is necessary, as there had been its examples in history. But what must be decided is its boundaries. Let me organize our thoughts in the rest of this post:

We need to represent all civilizations in history that were not pagan, not fully theocracy, not organized religion. And we need to do it within the two remaining religious civics yet to be decided. Here are the civs to represent.

which means these six items should be covered by the possible aspects of the TWO civics we are to innovate.

 

[KrakenRouge]

I think this discussion basically has two trends going on in it. One is renaming existing civics and possibly moving them around in the tech tree; the other trend is rehashing the last two civics in the Religion Civics list and rearranging them entirely.
I wish it were so simple that a rename would suffice. But I don't think it's so - we need to reshuffle those two, at least. For lack of time, I won't repeat the argument and ideas in favor of making Religion Civics into Religious Attitudes. If we don't do that entirely, Civics will remain vague pieces of policy relating to certain areas - Religion Civics are not styles of religion or what the people believe, they are government policy relating to religion. So this is what I propose for the last two RCs:

Liberalism (or Liberal Secularism, or Secularism, or whatever) representing states where the government doesn't force any given religion or doctrine on the people. This represents America as well as it represents classical empires where there was a state religion but others were tolerated well.
Effects: State Religion allowed. Each non-state religion gives its city +1 +1. +1 in any city without the SR. All religions spread fast in your cities. You cannot build Monasteries. +10% in all cities. Upkeep low.
The Result: You can keep your State Religion but its only real benefit becomes diplomacy. Your cities will be happier if you don't have any SR, and they won't need the SR to be happy and thrive.

State Cult (or Personality Cult, or Forced Ideology) representing the ideological systems forced upon people under Hitler, Stalin, Turkmenbashi, etc. This has always been sorely lacking in the Civics system.
Effects: No State Religion. +10% culture in all cities. 6 biggest cities get +3. Can't build any religious buildings, religions don't spread in your cities. -10% war unhappiness. Upkeep very high. (Explanation: The extra culture makes sense because the totalitarian governments that have a state cult always invest huge amounts of effort into building culture around the state cult. They do this even more in the big cities. This is also why the big cities will be happier. War unhappiness is reduced because the state cult has been used to justify things that people normally don't like.)
The Result: Expensive to maintain but extremely effective for warmongers (the extra culture is also important in wars because it expands your borders.) Fills in an important gap in realism.

I really really like this idea but I think we should add diplomatic modifiers and other prerequisites.

Countries with State Cult should be more hostile to democratic and free trade countries, and vice versa.

State Cult should only be allowed if the state has state property I think.

 

[Zetetic Apparat]

Those are NOT one civic suggestion each. As I said before...

Apologies.

 

[MrThing]

I would rather it be replaced by something like pluralism than forced athieism.

 

[Blasphemous]

KrakenRouge, thanks for bringing up the diplomacy issue. I believe no matter what, there's at least one diplo hit to add: "We find your lack of faith disturbing", equal exactly to the "heathen religion" diplo hit, so religious civs dislike civs without a religion. For the State Cult we really would need to add a new diplo hit, "We're disgusted by your state's ideological indocrination" which should be determined by how much the leader likes freedom (as opposed to how much they like religion - Isabella shouldn't hate Stalin as much as Roosevelt hates Stalin, but Isabella will hate pagans more than Roosevelt does.) The State Cult civs should dislike religious civs a little "We cannot respect your silly, backwards beliefs!".

 

[Zetetic Apparat]

I would rather it be replaced by something like pluralism than forced athieism.

Isn't that just an optimistic form of Free Religion?

You could make the State/Ideological cult diplo hit related to how out of sync the other civics are between two civilisations, and indeed perhaps give a bonus if they are all the same. I don't think that it should be forcibly linked to State Property ; the stability system should deal with that.

 

[KrakenRouge]

Hmm... State Cult doesnt seem as balanced as the Secularism/Free Religion/whatever civic

I think that ideally, the State Cult idea would have +1 per military unit, like the Hereditary Rule, or a modifier making military techs easier to research. This could be justified by the example given to us by totalitarian governments, military parades to make the +1 by intimidating or impressing them, and/ or the military tech bonus could be justified as the militaristic focus most if not all totalitarian states have had.

The Secularism civic, to take the place of Pacifism, should have the +1 and the +1 per non state religion, but it should also be made to have higher culture bonuses, and it should make war weariness more of an issue. Secularism would lead to more cultural differences amongst your people, which while helping your culture, would pose a problem when declaring war on a more uniform group of people, possibly being still guided by one religious faction.

 

[MrThing]

Isn't that just an optimistic form of Free Religion?

You could make the State/Ideological cult diplo hit related to how out of sync the other civics are between two civilisations, and indeed perhaps give a bonus if they are all the same. I don't think that it should be forcibly linked to State Property ; the stability system should deal with that.

You might be right, but the Free Religion civic seems to be more like a modern liberal view of religion, which is essentially secularism (and implicitly atheistic) as opposed to many pre-monotheist socities in which religion was still very central to life but pluralistic by way of extended polytheism.

 

[Enkidu Warrior]

My vote would be for an earlier 'Free Religion' or 'Religious Pluralism' civic to represent the many civilizations that had greater diversity in and tolerance for religions than the current system allows for (Rome, the Mongols and Persia being great examples). This might also solve the Judaism argument if done right. It would be the natural civic for civs with scattered, multiple religions. Depending on balance implications, civs with no religion might get some or no benefits. It's likely that upon its introduction (Philosophy) most existing civs would have one or more religions.

The final civic should surely be 'Secularism', since that is how almost everybody would describe the lack of state religions in most of the developed nations in the world today.

Both would have no state religion, Free Religion would grant cultural or great people bonuses, Secularism a scientific boost. One or both could be given happiness penalties for balance to represent reduced cohesion and conformity.

One or both could result in diplomatic penalties from civs with state religions.

I'd argue against the inclusion of some sort of Soviet-style Atheist theocracy, just because I'm uncomfortable at the thought of the only representation of Atheism in the game being a unforgivably negative one. Soviet doctrine is sufficiently represented by other civics such as Police State and State Property. Atheism would be sufficiently represented under the umbrella of secularism.

EDIT: Whatever the solution agreed upon, I think it's a great opportunity to provide some satisfying option for the polytheistic and/or religiously tolerant civs around the mediterranean who are currently stuck with Judaism, or later Christianity. This is a big historical irritation.

 

[Spearthrower]

I agree totally with Enkidu!

More than anything else, I just dont want some kind of soviet style enforced Atheism to be the top end of the religion civic, it just moves too far away from realism.