Dead Religion Mod?

[chutney]

Is it possible to add religions (not merely rename?)

If so, I'd like to work up a mod that works in some dead religions that didn't make it, and maybe some newish ones too.

Dead ones:
Zoroastrianism. From Persia, influential on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Greek philosophy. Technically still around with the Parsis.

Gnosticism. Was Christianity's rival for Rome's heart before Constantine. Lots of cross-pollination between Christianity, Judaism and Gnosticism at that time.

Newish ones:
Humanism. Maybe give with Emancipation advance or some such. Would mean for it to include secularism, atheism, freethinkers, existentialism, etc. Not technically a religion, but, hey, I'm a Unitarian, and it's certainly been influential.

Neopaganism. Supposed to be the fastest growing religion in the US right now, probably in the UK too. Might also give somebody a small but significant boost in the end-game. Maybe give with Environmentalism.

My background is in religious studies (two degrees), so this would make the game feel just a little bit more rounded out to me personally (thought I'm pleased as punch to see the role of religion upped so much). It would complicate the religion side of things a bit, and might be better for 7+ player games (if we still have that in Civ4).

How's this sound? Interested in playing it? Interested in helping with it? (Not a coder, but I've been known to tweak things, so might or might not be able to handle all this.)

[Addled Platypus]

everything is moddable, if you know how

[Reader81]

I never heard of this Neopaganism and Humanism before? So who is their god?

[Blake]

.

Religions don't need a god.

[techumseh]

How about Mithraism?

[LDiCesare]

The thing I'd probably like to mod is other religions: Greek, Egyptian religions spread quite a lot under the Roman empire. Egypt definitely had a state religion, so I'd like to see "Pharaonism" in (Pharao was Horus on earth).
Zoroastrianism would be nice, though it's not dead. Mithraism would be worth including.
(Or have every civ start with its own religion, and new religions pop up as they currently do. Starting religions wouldn't be allowed to spread to other civs.)

[Martinus]

Actually I was about to post a similar thread, however imo what would be more interesting (if not necessarily possible to mod) is to have random religion chosen each time the relevant technology is discovered from a group of similar religions.

For example:

Monotheism - could start, determined randomly, one of the following: Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Cult of Akhenaton
Theology - Christianity, Manicheism or Gnosticism
Divine Right - Islam, Sufism, Catharism, Arianism

etc.

That way you will never know what religion you would have, and it would lend to the feel of recreating history rather than re-living it in Civ 4.

[Locutus]

Replacing existing religions is really easy. There are no hard limits on adding new religions, but the UI was designed for only 7. You can mod the UI to allow for new religions, but this might take some effort to get right (not because UI modding is hard, but designing something that supports many more religions is hard if you want it to look good -- it's easy to program but hard to design).

Also, for gameplay reasons having only a few religions is good: it should require effort to get one, and you shouldn't always be guaranteed to get one (esp. the one you want). In fact, for those players who consistently like to play with few opponents (7 or less), I would recommend considering to remove a few of the default religions. If you consistently like playing with a lot of civs (say, 15+), it you could probably safely add 1 or 2 new religions (but not much more).