The early religions

[Tarquelne]

Has anyone experimented with making those weights more aggressive? ie greater magnitude than +25 or -25? (Excepting -100 in specific cases of course)

Yes. I didn't do any controlled experiments but it seemed to work. I used pretty high numbers. It doesn't stop the adopting of "improper" religions but it slows it down and makes civs more willing to switch to another religion when they've got the chance. That combined with lowering the spread factor for RoK/FoL satisfied me.

 

[Mesix]

What about changing the passive spread of religions. Adding a prereq tech before passive religion spread happens would fix a lot of the issues that people are complaining about. Perhaps religions will not passivly spread to another player until after Trade and/or Philosophy have been researched. This would clean things up nicely as everyone would have opportunity to research the various earily religions, and none of them would dominate the map.

 

[PaleJackal]

I do like the idea, Mesix. Though maybe once you research those techs, passive spread would be increased to current levels, and at a [significantly, say 75%?] reduced level, until you do.

Edit: Actually, preventing inter-civ passive spread is okay, you can always use missionaries to convert others before hand, and that's not a bad idea.

 

[cvlowe]

Grr... yes something needs to be done, even if I don't know what. After setting up 3 games and quitting when all my opponents turned out to be neutral/good (bad luck I guess).

I finally set about a huge map, aincient, epic, 16 civs, at a minimum 3 randon evil civs. After the game started, I saved then went into worldbuilder and added a scout near everybodies starting point, and found out 5 evil civilizations (yaay!)! Reloaded my save and played on, by turn 200 I had contacted 16 othher civilizations (only started with 16 including me- huh? new feature??)

At some point 3 of the 5 civs converted to RoK on the same turn. I wasn't happy, but OK. At around turn 400ish, all but 5 of the NPC civilizations all simultaneously adopted the Order. Leaving only Perpentach as evil. Not much of a chance of the Infernals ever being summoned unless I do it myself. I wanted to BATTLE the spreading evil destroying the world, not CAUSE it.

Extremely disappointing, this was a huge problem with the (in every other respect completely awesome) FfH ~2 mod years ago and still hasn't been fixed.

 

[notque]

Snarko's option mod slowed down religion spreading based on alignment. I've added this to my mod, and I've noticed a great difference.

 

[PaleJackal]

Replying to cvlowe: Yeah, everyone becoming one faith (and on top of that, often one alignment) is lame. Anything which would encourage religious diversity would be appreciated.

Notque: then that's more reason to get your version 1.7 modmod up and running, if it isn't already.

 

[Mesix]

Since the religions in FfH are more than just a different icon (like they are in Vanila), perhaps each civ sohuld have a preferred religion. This would be like a preferred civic where the AI is more prone to adopt it and has diplo modifiers besed on its use by other players (bonus for holy city, and higher bonus for having state religion seem appropriate...also a penalty for opposing religion, i.e. Order vs. Veil). Giving the AI a malus to adopting a state religion that would change alignement could also have a beneficial effect.

 

[Lone Wolf]

This would be like a preferred civic where the AI is more prone to adopt it

There already are modifiers in the Civ4LeaderheadInfos.xml. They are just too weak to stop that stuff we are complaining about.

 

[Gedwyn]

I've been doing a lot of xml modifying lately due to religion...still tweaking them, but some of the changes I've made to make things more along the lines of what I want:

OO, RoK, Fotl all had their tech requirements changed from Mysticism to Philosophy.

Modified relgion spreading (spreadfactor) greatly. In general, most religions have the spreadfactor at 10 or 20 instead of the higher 175, 100, 150 weights that were there previously.

Played around with the leader iWeightModifier for religion adoption greatly...have made 2 passes at this over the last couple weeks. Too many changes to list, but essentially, evil civs will almost never adopt Order (-99 weight), Good civs will never adopt AV (-99 again), and everything else in between. As well, both FoTL and RoK have had thier iWeights dropped to -30 for almost everyone except for the elven and dwarven leaders, and a few select others (like Clan and Doviello who have a -50 RoK).

Right now things seem to be going fairly well in my 2nd game with these tweaks.

I'm playing a Capria led Amurites Civ that founded Order, Sab with Bannor, Ethne with Elohim have both adopted that. On my immediate East border was Perp and the Balseraphs who despite having Order in almost every city didn't adopt it...doesn't matter anyways as he upset Sab who spammed him with axemen and horse archers.

Further east: Amelanchier has FoTL but it hasn't spread anywhere. Kandros has RoK and managed to get Tasunke to convert to it (I didn't do much changing in Tasunke's modifiers, esp for RoK since it's neutral and so is he). The 2 of them took out Mahala and the Doviello, who didn't adopt RoK even though he had it in a few cities (he had a -50 RoK weight to him...I cringe everytime I see the Doviello go neutral from evil when they adopt RoK...so that seemed to work even though it probably got them killed off).

To the West, I have Alexis, Tebryn and Fearyl...with almost no contact to the east as I control and hold the middle ground, and I'm not letting any of those bad guys into my borders. Especially Faeryl with her kidnapping recon units.

Turn 650, AV hasn't been founded yet but should be soon...

Things are progressing along the lines of what I would like them to. I know not everyone has the same vision/expectation for thier games...so be it.

I'll update again soon...and if anyone wants to see what specific weights I've given to the leaders in terms of relgion etc, I can upload the xml files.

Great thread! Some really good ideas/discussion in here and some very useful info regarding xml tweaking.

 

[Lone Wolf]

The 2 of them took out Mahala and the Doviello, who didn't adopt RoK even though he had it in a few cities (he had a -50 RoK weight to him...

Mahala is a she.

That's pretty much what I did too, except I actually had a bit less determinism.

 

[Thunder_Gr]

There is only one minor(?) issue with this method, though. It does handicap the AI. Adopting a religion give + and +, plus access to religion specific units and heroes. If everyone has adopted a religion around a specific AI, but he hasn't, the bottom line is that he gets behind in production/growth/expansion and military power. So, I think this should also be taken into consideration.

 

[Honor]

Yes, hence the suggestions for giving penalties to civs that adopt religions that go against their flavor. Otherwise, implementing the aforementioned tweaks would have no foundation (i.e. there would be no logical reason for either the AI or the human player to refuse to adopt the first religion that spreads to their cities - religion is always better than no religion).

However, this is not enough on its own. Obviously every non-agnostic AI should be made to beeline some religious tech at some point (preferrably after they research education and spam cottages), and earlier religions should be made harder to research (preferrably changing their prereq tech from mysticism to philosophy as suggested before) so that Order-, AV-, CoE- and Empyrean-beelining civs are not at too much of a disadvantage.

 

[Gedwyn]

There is only one minor(?) issue with this method, though. It does handicap the AI. Adopting a religion give + and +, plus access to religion specific units and heroes. If everyone has adopted a religion around a specific AI, but he hasn't, the bottom line is that he gets behind in production/growth/expansion and military power. So, I think this should also be taken into consideration.

Yes, that's a definite drawback...which is why I tried to balance the 5 main religions (minus emp and coe) by moving the 3 early ones down the tech line a bit more.

Order and AV are still harder to research; but theoretically should be popping up around the same time. The problem there is that it seems none of the evil civs beeline for AV like there are civs that beeline for FoTL and RoK.

Calabim beeline for Feudalism which puts them pretty far out from founding AV...not sure what the Sheaim or Balseraph priorities are.

When I play a good civ and make Order my relgious goal, I take my time getting to it...I'm usually all over the tech tier that has Bronze, Warfare, Writing, Philosophy, KotE first, then I do Wise, CoL and finally Order. So I've got 90 to 95% of the t3 and under techs before I found Order (generally the only things I don't have at that point hunting, AH and Masonry...and Masonry gets researched next if I'm gearing up for a fight (for walls) or if I can build the Bone Palace).

You'd think with all that researching, someone would be close to founding AV...but it's usually 200 turns - in a Marathon game - or so later that it pops up.

 

[Thunder_Gr]

I think the fastest way to go to Order/AV passes through RoK/FoL or OO.
Instead of going for the metal line, you research up to FoL/RoK or OO to get Axeman equivalent military, without the metal line, and, since these religions share a part of the necessary research, you can go for the more expensive religions, having your defences covered...

 

[Verily]

The Sheaim beeline Sorcery. This puts them within range of Corruption of Spirit since Knowledge of the Ether is a pre-req, but Alteration and Sorcery take so long to research early in the game, and the Sheaim are crippled by their lack of early Workers techs, that they very rarely found the Veil anyway.

(On an aside: Shouldn't it be really easy to have the AI choose a magic tech flavorfully? That is, Sheaim choose Necromancy, Elohim choose Divination, etc. instead of having them all research Alteration first and then maybe the others later if they ever get around to it.)

The Balseraphs do not, to my knowledge, have any hardcoded beeline, although they do like Carnivals and Drama. Keelyn and Perpentach seem to found AV much more often than the other Evil leaders in my experience. Faeryl Viconia probably being the third-most likely to do so.

 

[Thunder_Gr]

(On an aside: Shouldn't it be really easy to have the AI choose a magic tech flavorfully? That is, Sheaim choose Necromancy, Elohim choose Divination, etc. instead of having them all research Alteration first and then maybe the others later if they ever get around to it.)

I think the thing here is that, if you try to research a technology with a Great Sage, after researching KotE, it is always Alteration. Until you research Sorcery,(or alteration, of course, where, then will insist to research Divination or Necromancy, I can't recall now) you have no other choice for researching with a GS but Alteration. So, if the AI uses a GS for researching, it will get Alteration, wheather they like it or not.

 

[Capn Charlie]

As much as I like pie, I have to chime in on this one.

I'm sure it's been suggested before, but early game mass adoption of religion is super annoying, i don't think a religion should spread passively until later, say, at priesthood.

 

[notque]

Another option I use which helps is that more leaders soft beeline to religions.

So there are religions quickly, but there are several of them, not just 1 or two.

 

[Lone Wolf]

The Balseraphs do not, to my knowledge, have any hardcoded beeline, although they do like Carnivals and Drama.

They beeline Festivals.

 

[notque]

The Sheaim beeline Sorcery. This puts them within range of Corruption of Spirit since Knowledge of the Ether is a pre-req, but Alteration and Sorcery take so long to research early in the game, and the Sheaim are crippled by their lack of early Workers techs, that they very rarely found the Veil anyway.

(On an aside: Shouldn't it be really easy to have the AI choose a magic tech flavorfully? That is, Sheaim choose Necromancy, Elohim choose Divination, etc. instead of having them all research Alteration first and then maybe the others later if they ever get around to it.)

The Balseraphs do not, to my knowledge, have any hardcoded beeline, although they do like Carnivals and Drama. Keelyn and Perpentach seem to found AV much more often than the other Evil leaders in my experience. Faeryl Viconia probably being the third-most likely to do so.

Yes. (Sorry to keep saying this) In the Minor Leaders mod I have each civ research a particular tech with spell flavour that matches their own as opposed to every civ getting alteration first.