Why so few beliefs?

I don't follow. with the exception of Holy Law and Transcendence, every founder belief affects behaviour and rewards maximizing its potential through synergies and changing your playstyle.
Divine Inheritance emphasizes minmaxing your capital and focusing GAs
Theocratic Rule is entirely WLTKD-focused, so you need to make that core if you are going to adopt this belief
The spreader founders (council of elders and apostolic tradition) force you to spread quickly to maximize the benefit, which usually means delaying enhancing
Choices in the game should affect playstyle and reinforce other choices, I think that constitutes good design.

My Hero worship rework doesn't really take that away...

That's the point of adding more beliefs, so that a late founder will still have a bit of choice after the other beliefs are taken. If we increased the number of beliefs to 11, even a huge map leaves the latest founder with 4 options. the only time this becomes a problem is with 43 civ mode, but those maps are so massive that adding enough beliefs for 23 religions would mean an enormous amount of samey, overlapping beliefs.

This is all very speculative at any rate. I'm not wedded to my holy war/Hero worship proposal, it's a ton of work and would be very hard to balance. @kenneth1221's yields on tech unlock is cleaner and better than anything I proposed anyways

 

It's already taking me 15 minutes on average to choose, don't give me more choices
That said, redoing the balance on / changing some of them sounds better! I never ever picked some over several thousands hours of play!

 

I hadn't properly appreciated that suggestion for Reincarnation when I read it. Very cool!

Yeah I often feel this way, though many of the notable offenders have been shaken up recently.
It is still especially true for some of the Celt-specific ones, which just mystify me.

 

I don’t think the tone of the existing beliefs is overtly Christian. Western, perhaps, but really they’re pretty darn generic descriptions of many facets of world religions.

G

 

Dioceses and Jesuit Education are the two big ones.
Crusader Spirit - Crusading doesn't really exist in any other religion, though there is the concept of similar holy wars in Islam and Hinduism
Defender of the Faith - This sounds innocuous unless you know that fidei defensor is a very specific title for various very Christian monarchs throughout history. I'm not aware of a similar title present in other religions. I can’t think of a good replacement name though.

I also have a bit of a bone to pick with Orthodoxy, since I don't think the bonuses reflect the meaning of the word. This is why i suggested naming a reformation belief with different bonuses 'Orthodoxy'

 

moar

 

Something that bothers me is the lack of religious building diversity. There's three Christian-oriented and three Asian religion ones for example.

A Mesoamerican, Punic, and Celtic religious building would be cool.

I suppose Maya have the pyramid UI but does that really count? Celts stand out. A mod gives Punics the tophet and you can pretend with the Synagogue.

 

I mean, there's not really a more generic term for 'religious district' that isn't clunky, so diocese it is. Jesuit education is pretty overt, I'll give you that, but that's mainly because it was the Firaxis name and I'm not in on change for change sake. If we wanted to call it 'parochial education' (parochial is still a loaded term, but whatev).

'Crusade' has Christian overtones but we use the term outside of religious circles as much as, if not more than, religious ones these days.

Defender of the Faith - again, it has religious connections to Christianity, but it's also a fairly generic term at face value.

G

 

Could call Jesuit education Ordination, or maybe just Catchetism/Catechesis
Crusader Spirit is easy: Holy War is a far more general term for basically the same thing
Defender of the Faith... Yeah I got nothing.

As for crusade being a general term. Maybe that depends on where you are? We had a university group that was forced to change their name because "campus crusade" was getting too many complaints.

 

"Defender of the Faith" is great because it has both a historical meaning, AND a clear nod as to its function in-game. You could change it to "Marriage of Faith & State" or "Religious Nobility" or something to try to divorce it from its specific roots, but nothing is really gained and meaning is definitely lost.

You could disambiguate from history and specificity completely and name it something like "Religious Guerrillas," which definitely paints a useful picture, I suppose.

I'm all for generating new religious beliefs, and even going out of our way to avoid western naming conventions for them, but I'm not really sure we need to change stuff just because it obviously has roots in western history or western thought.

 

I recently introduced VP to a friend, and he was really overwhelmed by the pantheon options. I know the general spirit is more choices = better, but there are cases in game design where that isn't true.

So I just wanted to say, maybe no more pantheons? We have a lot already, and a few of them are already tough to use.

 

We actually have one less than vanilla, but yes, I agree. Also our pantheons are meatier than vanillas, most feel like a 2:1 combo versus vanilla.

G

 

When I first started playing VP, the pantheons screen was a bit of a (good) surprise, but in part that was because there were so many more viable options than vanilla. In vanilla there are about 6 viable options if you want to play the religion game.

What was behind the design choice to make so many more of the pantheons mention a god of some sort, though? Vanilla has One With Nature, Religious Idols, Sacred Path, Fertility Rites, Desert Folklore, just to name a few, and while most of those have mechanical analogues (improvements) in VP, their flavor is lost.

 

There's 24 pantheons in the game... So maybe just 1 more? A nice, round 25?

My favorite pantheon proposal is still this one:
Trickster God - Faith for completing improvements, favouring starts that require a lot of 'terraforming'
10Faith and 5 when you complete a non-road Improvement or remove a feature. (does not scale with era)
+15% Worker improvement rate.

I think that fulfills an actual need in-game right now for a pantheon that you choose if you have a lot of forest/jungle plantations or marshes that you want to clear. This pantheon could make heavy chop starts feel like less of a handicap.

it’s also pretty incredible that there’s no trickster god pantheon. Aside from major figures like Prometheus and Loki, tricksters are a huge deal in non-European mythologies, and are an especially huge deal in west African and North American mythology.

 

While I'm ok with the current selection of pantheons, I do find Pineappledan's proposal of a improvement-themed pantheon very interesting, so if it's possible, it'd be nice to have a discussion about it. Not sure about the connection between the name and what it does, though

 

Trickster gods are usually gods of the common people. They are often culture heroes who get by on their wits, or teach morality lessons like Aesop's fables. Noblemen, merchants, and various other interests sucked up all the oxygen in religious life with their gods dedicated to war, commerce, craftsmen, and god-kings who enshrined values like justice, governance, and power. These things weren't available to the common man, so they came to value cunning and wit, and gods who acted on nature, rather than acted on man. In many mythologies, trickster gods are often associated with either the creation of the world or of mankind.

Examples of trickster gods and folk heroes: Reynard the Fox, Loki, Anansi, Coyote, Raven, Prometheus, Hanuman.

 

Ah, ok, but I don't quite understand how that (name) connects thematically to making improvements/changing the terrain? Most of the current pantheon names are more or less closely linked to the content of the pantheon.

 

Trickster gods usually act with or on nature (improvements), as opposed to acting on/against man, and they're greatest tool is their intellect ( ). As opposed to gods like Zeus, or Yahweh or Poseidon, who are always making up all sorts of bizarrely specific rules, telling people to kill their own children, turning into bulls to have sex with ladies, or having pissing contests to have cities named after them.

Prometheus was a crafty, hands-on god in his own right that sculpted man out of clay, then tricks the other gods, stealing fire for humanity and letting us keep all the best parts of sacrificial animals for us to eat. Anansi caught the python, the lion, and the bees so that he could get all the stories in the world from the sky god, and after realizing he was not great enough to keep them all for himself, gave those stories to all of humanity. Coyote tricks -- and is tricked -- by all manner of forest creature, stones, giants, etc. In many creation myths, it is Coyote who gives humans their intelligence.

A lot of the stories involving trickster gods are creation myths. Trickster Gods work with their hands, and they teach ingenuity and cunning. If that's not enough then I am sorry; we can just call it 'God of Improving Stuff' if that's more to your taste.

 

There would be no religious connotation behind it, but you could still technically go with something generic like "God of Efficacy" (or any of the related synonyms like virtue, benefit, usefulness, etc.).

I'm pretty indifferent to all the pantheon talk, though, and would preferably see refinement over addition; there are still pantheons that I've never taken once throughout all my hours playing VP, simply because of how niche they are compared to the regular choices available in a standard game.

 

Maybe something like Goddess of Change/Transformation?