Well, you've proposed, as I've seen it, the following alternatives to the existing system:
1) Have a toggle for religion that sets it to vanilla standards
2) Provide an irreligious option that grants bonuses.
3) Religion is controlled by city-states
While these are good ideas, I really can't see how they're any more realistic than a player-controlled system of religion:
1) The vanilla system is grossly unrealistic, by equating religion with nothing more than a generic "culture" resource that is uniformly good for your people. Again, in vanilla, and all previous civs, religion has always been uniformly good for your people, even if the implementation has changed.
2) I still haven't heard any examples of actual irreligious cultures from history prior to the equivalent of civilization's renaissance era. Having an option to 'not be religious' contradicts your thread title of the planned implementation being unrealistic. I certainly won't argue that there weren't irreligious individuals, there were plenty; but irreligious societies? Who, where, when?
3) Having all religions controlled by city-states is counterintuitive and unrealistic when considering the theocracies of pre-modern times, of which there were plenty; Constantine set standards for state Christianity, Abu Bakr set standards for Islam, and every Pharoah was directly related to the gods for the ancient Egyptians. To have religion outsourced to a third party for these and many more would just seem odd.
I really think you may be stuck in the roleplaying mindset of being an actual leader of an actual nation, and that can't really be blamed; but that requires a pretty substantial suspension of disbelief for playing any game in the civ series, when your leader lives for 6000 years and you have direct control over all minutae of your citizens' lives, your military, your culture, your infrastructure, and all foreign policy. Even absolute monarchs weren't remotely that powerful. So I still fail to understand what the issue is with adding religion to that list (considering that you already tell your citizens exactly when and where to build temples and monasteries), and that's already been mentioned a few times.
While you might, say, institute 'liberty' or 'freedom' for your citizens, does it actually change your complete control over their every movement? Only from a role-playing perspective. You don't have to suddenly start worrying about public opinion or elections, like you would in a more robust simulation like a Paradox game or a political sim.
Since when did Alpha Centauri have any implementation of religion? It left it to a single social engineering option of "Fundamentalism", represented by a crazy red-haired bi..scuit. While I certainly approve of that representation, SMAC was an optimistic game about the future, rather than a historically-themed one; and that implementation of religion wouldn't feel right for earth's history.
As for culture, I meant the *system* of culture in the civ series should feel repugnant to you; in the real world, not all culture is "good" (Art and Works dedicated to Racial/Ethnic supremacy, Art and cultural systems promoting war and violence, etc), but culture is certainly a unilaterally positive thing in civ.
This expansion has already been stated to be the "BTS" of civ 5 in interviews; I really don't think it will be long after that deeper source access for modders is made available.
Lastly: Yes, actually, I did take you for a militant atheist who just wanted religion out.
I agree, and do not dispute that. However, there is still way to make a more realistic system without endangering the points with more priority.
It is possible, there are several games that did it right. Sid even had a hand in some of those, such as Alpha Centauri.
Why should it be repugnant? Do you guys take me for some militant athesit on a crusade for equal rights or something?
Culture works. In real life, even if you ignore all the religion, organization and influence of the church, the simple fact remains: the Pieta or the Sistine Chapel is as culturally significant and artistically brilliant as the Mona Lisa. Am I supposed to hate them because they represent something you claim is repugnant to me?
And I shall probably be using them, if they are any good. However, there is only so much that a mod can do without access to the game core, as evidenced by the game so far.
Whee, I made someone come out and play!
I just posted a first minute idea kind of thing about how religion could work in the game, and I do not believe it would cause a disconnect from either the user or major historic trends.
I'm saying that the Freedom and Liberty policy trees are as close to a "no policy" legalitarian approach as can be, and that there appears to be nothing similar to it in the religion system. The only option is to not pursue anything and ignore it completely. When's the last time you played a no-policy game?
