Rhye's of Europe Religion Discussion Thread

[Tigranes]

As it should not. As appealing as it was, paganism was never an organised religion, which is why it ultimately failed against the philosophically bizarre but highly organised and ruthless Abrahamic religions.

I don't want to start anti-New Age religous dispute here, even though every part of your statement calls for the heated debate My point was that as of right now Paganism is never an option even for the civs who known to be pagan for a long time within the timeframe of this mod. Lithuania became Christian at 1387, but if you play her you feel like converting the very moment any religion gets in your city. However there must be some situations when the player of the certain civs could use Paganism for some time with certain goals in mind. Not all the time, but some time. More options means more interesting game, plus it reflects historical reality.

You see, we have agreed amoung ourselves to see No Religion as Paganism -- but AI doesn't take it that way (it converts the moment it gets any "real" religion, Uppsala never gets built, etc) and mod does not reflect it that way. So I proposed more systematic approach to represent Paganism in this mod.

 

[steerpike_swe]

• Remove the pagan shrine as soon as a city gets the State BUT We already have a problem with the Shrine of Uppsala not being built...
• The player should be able to choose the he wants to remove when he uses Inquisitors. e.g."Expel those Muslims but let the Jewish merchants stay. We need their money."
• When conquering a city with a different the player could get the option to 'burn the heretics' (remove the other , only when using a persecutive civic, citizens or spawn some barbs or diplo hit with civs of that religion) or 'show them their wrong ways' (convert the buildings; certain chance that buildings of a certain type will stay, e.g. catholic temple becomes a protestant one, only when using a tolerant civic) Maybe only between Christians?

Most games I have played AI civs with different religions are way to friendly. For example Catholic Spain and Protestant England are nearly always pleased and/or friendly towards each other and even have a defensive pact ( perhaps because of both fighting France for centuries?).

Serious conflicts on the scale of the 30 years war is mostly absent from the game. : (

I would like to have less tolerance and more conflict over religion. Since the AI is happy to prosecute, diplo hits when persecuting another civs state religion could be a solution. Maybe this mechanism could be borrowed from SOI?

 

[AbsintheRed]

As it should not. As appealing as it was, paganism was never an organised religion, which is why it ultimately failed against the philosophically bizarre but highly organised and ruthless Abrahamic religions.

I like your style when handling religions
But Tigranes is right. We shouldn't get into lengthy and pointless debates about them

@others:
I agree that pagan religions should get a slight boost
Cheaper Pagan Shrines, and they obsolete a few techs later. This would also pretty much guarantee the Shrine of Uppsala is built in most games
/Note that pagan shrines stay in the city. Only the abilty to build them goes obsolete - this is standard BtS mechanics.
Thus Shrine of Uppsala can be built even after this tech. On the other hand, we should only allow it with Paganism civic/

Back on pagan religions:
This of course won't solve the issue that none of the later civs "want" to stay pagan.
We should add a unique bonus, so there would be at least some small benefits, at least early in the game. Eventually all civs should and will convert of course
All the major religions have huge benefits if you get some faith points

An idea just hit me
What if paganism would add a pagan promotion for all your early units? Axeman, Spearman, Archer, Horse Archer, nothing else
The promotion can be +1 strength, or +1 movement. Anything really
And Lithuania's UP could be that they can have this promotion for all their units.
This way they can stay pagan longer than any other civs

 

[AbsintheRed]

I would like to have less tolerance and more conflict over religion. Since the AI is happy to prosecute, diplo hits when persecuting another civs state religion could be a solution. Maybe this mechanism could be borrowed from SOI?

This is a good idea
Will look into it
You sure it works this way in SoI?

 

[rrosen]

At least the human player get a diplomatic penalty when you persecute/massacre, which is increased if you do it many times.

 

[AbsintheRed]

So, my plan for the pagan buildings:
Pagan Shrine and Shrine of Uppsala only buildable when you have Paganism as civic
Pagan Shrine: has +1 happiness and +1 culture under pagansim, never obsoletes
(I want to keep the civic as restriction, not a tech - so actually switching out of Paganism makes them obsolete)
Shrine of Uppsala: bonus isn't final yet, probably boosting Pagan Shrines, or cities without a (main) religion. Also never obsoletes directly, but connected to paganism.
Or maybe boosting the Pagan promotion on your early units, this way it will go obsolete after you have better units

 

[Tigranes]

Paganism promotion is great! "Morale" (+1 movement) promotion is very fitting -- alludes to the connection to nature and terrain. The problem is -- how to get rid of those promotions the moment you switch from Paganism?

For Uppsala I really recommend to consider boosting the Forest (Woodland). Vanila BTS has health bonus with forests so choping them affects your cites. Uppsala could have -- "Forest tiles provide ..." <-- your favorite bonus here. One of the ideas is to make forest to damage foreight units in cultural borders of the Pagan civ.

After conversion Pagan shrines could produce extra unhappiniess and can be destroyed (removed) by Prosecutors. By the way, AI now builds them often, but does it use them effectively?

 

[AbsintheRed]

Paganism promotion is great! "Morale" (+1 movement) promotion is very fitting -- alludes to the connection to nature and terrain. The problem is -- how to get rid of those promotions the moment you switch from Paganism?

Indeed, that's the main thing to code. Could be rather hard
But IIRC I already saw it somewhere, probably in one of the bigger mods
Will try to find it, or something very similar...
Anyway, please post if anyone has some advice on adding this

 

[steerpike_swe]

This is a good idea
Will look into it
You sure it works this way in SoI?

At least it looks like it works that way when you play SOI.

 

[ezzlar]

Extra movement for paganism is unrealistic. Stick to some bonuses for pagan temple when running paganism civic, thats enough IMO.

I like the diplomatic penalty when you prosecute.

 

[Tigranes]

Why is it unrealistic? For Vikings it will represent their ability to sail quickly upstream and siege cities like Paris -- far from the sea. Hungarians made it as far as Spain, so this promotion will reflect that (but, I must admit, that 4 MP for Light Cavalry can be too much indeed). On the other hand after converting all the known Pagans usually become less restless and tend to stick to their homeland. Affecting the promotion by simple change of civics is a pretty cool thing to witness for human player .

 

[AbsintheRed]

At least the human player get a diplomatic penalty when you persecute/massacre, which is increased if you do it many times.

At least it looks like it works that way when you play SOI.

Cool, it makes it easier
But for the next version we have more dynamic diplomatic relations, your previous actions' diplo effects fade away quicker
So I'm only willing to add this if there is a memory decay for this too, and diplo hate from persecution won't stay there for all of the game

 

[AbsintheRed]

Extra movement for paganism is unrealistic. Stick to some bonuses for pagan temple when running paganism civic, thats enough IMO.

I like the diplomatic penalty when you prosecute.

Why is it unrealistic? For Vikings it will represent their ability to sail quickly upstream and siege cities like Paris -- far from the sea. Hungarians made it as far as Spain, so this promotion will reflect that (but, I must admit, that 4 MP for Light Cavalry can be too much indeed). On the other hand after converting all the known Pagans usually become less restless and tend to stick to their homeland. Affecting the promotion by simple change of civics is a pretty cool thing to witness for human player .

Extra movement is overpowered
If we think along these lines a much better (and realistic) promotion would be the Mobility - at least for mounted units
But we can just simply add an extra promotion with +10% strength

Anyway, having promotions with civics seems much harder than I thought.
I'm not sure anymore that we can remove them when switching from that civic.
Didn't anyone see something similar in other mods?

 

[Tigranes]

FhH has Cure Disease Spell -- Removes the Diseased and Plagued negative promotions that spread in the game.

P.S. On the second thought, +1 MP can be overpowered. Lithuania already has +3 EXP from her UB. Perhaps we could add some bonus against (fellow ) barbarians? Something like -- peace with barbarians while Pagan can look very cool. Imagine walking right next to that Barbarian Berserker and feeling to animosity ! Or 50% bonus when fighting barbarians. The only bad thing is that in Lithuanian case they were successfully raided by Tatars in 1259, so staying Pagan did not save from Mongols...

Why do you oppose the bonus from the forest? This could be more historical than any bonus units could get...

 

[Michael Vick]

I noticed when playing as Arabia that I lost faith points by having Christianity in my cities. This is kind of inaccurate as we can all probably agree because Muslims were very tolerant of Christians and Jews. Can we change this?

Now you might think this will result in high faith points for Arabia with no means of reducing them. I look at wine, pigs, crabs, and clams (all forbidden to Muslims) being worked by Arabia, Cordoba, and Turkey and I see the answer.

I counted, there are 7 Haram (forbidden) resources in Turkey alone. Then there is all the clam and crab along the African coast, wine and pigs in Spain and the Balkans...

The Muslim bonus for high faith points is city growth and something else, so I think that not building the winery or fishing boats might be a good tradeoff in some situations.

New players that aren't aware of this detail could be notified by advisor complaints after building an improvement much the same way an advisor recommends you build a building or settler/worker. You can choose to ignore the faith point penalties but then you start to get unhappiness in your cities...

 

[3Miro]

I noticed when playing as Arabia that I lost faith points by having Christianity in my cities. This is kind of inaccurate as we can all probably agree because Muslims were very tolerant of Christians and Jews. Can we change this?

Now you might think this will result in high faith points for Arabia with no means of reducing them. I look at wine, pigs, crabs, and clams (all forbidden to Muslims) being worked by Arabia, Cordoba, and Turkey and I see the answer.

I counted, there are 7 Haram (forbidden) resources in Turkey alone. Then there is all the clam and crab along the African coast, wine and pigs in Spain and the Balkans...

The Muslim bonus for high faith points is city growth and something else, so I think that not building the winery or fishing boats might be a good tradeoff in some situations.

New players that aren't aware of this detail could be notified by advisor complaints after building an improvement much the same way an advisor recommends you build a building or settler/worker. You can choose to ignore the faith point penalties but then you start to get unhappiness in your cities...

Christians and Jews are not Muslims, hence if a portion of the Arabian population are Christians or Jews, this leads to lower Muslim faith. Same goes for all religions.

While Muslims don't eat pork, Christians do. For example, pork has always been a big part of the diet of Christians in the Balkans, even when everything was ruled by the Ottomans.

We can probably make it so that pork doesn't give bonuses to Muslims, but this is knit-picking and will cause some balance issues (i.e. Muslims would be at a big disadvantage).

 

[ezzlar]

If we really want something in that direction we could make brewery and such require christianity. But then we are in for a new balance round. After all, the arabs were the first drunkards in the world

 

[Michael Vick]

We should make the brewery require barley and Christianity. It's weird that countries that didn't drink beer until the 20th century (Spain, Portugal) and countries where beer still isn't consumed (Italians) are building breweries in our mod. Seriously, beer was really rare back then. I'd consider maybe just renaming that building to something else so as to not mess up the balance.

 

[embryodead]

I counted, there are 7 Haram (forbidden) resources in Turkey alone. Then there is all the clam and crab along the African coast, wine and pigs in Spain and the Balkans...

I've made Pigs "obsolete" for Muslims in SoI, and also considered simply renaming Wine to Grapes, so this caught my attention. I never cared about crabs & clams, so I did some research and apparently the position that non-fish seafood is haram is specific to hanafi and ja'fari schools, and it developed over time. Other schools, including shaf'i'i and maliki, consider all seafood except eel to be halal. Hanafi is the most popular school today, but in the Middle Ages, shaf'i'i was the official law used in the Abbasid Caliphate and Seljuk, Zengid, Ayyubid and Mamluk sultanates, while maliki was and still is the law used in North Africa (hanafi was also by the Abbasids in different periods, and later Ottomans). So at least for clams & crabs, I think there're perfectly fine.

Cool, it makes it easier
But for the next version we have more dynamic diplomatic relations, your previous actions' diplo effects fade away quicker
So I'm only willing to add this if there is a memory decay for this too, and diplo hate from persecution won't stay there for all of the game

It does work like it and decays, just keep in mind that it's not a new memory, I just used the negative extra attitude (AI_attitudeExtra), which wasn't used by anything else in the mod.

 

[3Miro]

We should make the brewery require barley and Christianity. It's weird that countries that didn't drink beer until the 20th century (Spain, Portugal) and countries where beer still isn't consumed (Italians) are building breweries in our mod. Seriously, beer was really rare back then. I'd consider maybe just renaming that building to something else so as to not mess up the balance.

What about Pagan Lithuania? Shouldn't they be able to build breweries?

I think it is safe to say that all Muslim countries in the mod had enough of a Christian population to still get benefit from the resources despite being "forbidden" for the Muslims.

For the Brewery, we may change the Brewery to some sort of Winery for the southern nations (Spain, Portugal and the two Italians), but I do feel like we would be knit picking. Tailoring the buildings specifically to the culture of each individual civ is a bit too much. Some general considerations like the UB and religious specific buildings are good, but looking at every single building is a bit too much work.