[MOD] SD Religion Techs

[Stone-D]

This mod splits off all religions from their original technologies into their own. For example, if you research Meditation, you now have to spend an additional turn or two to research Buddhism... if you want that religion.

Once ANY civilization, including the barbarians, researches a religion tech, that tech is freely given to all other surviving civilizations behind the scenes, so you can't research it anymore. There's no point!

You may not have noticed, but this mod has a nice side benefit. If you are a modder, can use use this as a basis for expanding the tech tree as you see fit, without juggling with religion.

There is one additional bonus feature. If you want to simulate a basic religion war, you can 'cheat' and give your (and other) civ a missionary unit to start with. Use that unit to spread religion to your first city - this act founds the religion and sets that city as the holy city.

History
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v1.00 :
Initial Release

v1.01 :
Dropped 'Tech' from the mod's name. Tidied, rebuilt the python scripts. Implemented easy merging structure.

v1.10 :
Uses SdToolKit.

[Impaler[WrG]]

I had been experimenting with completly reversing the founding of religion from a tec based endever to a Great Prophet based system. The current workings of the game are all backwards, you have to found a religion BEFORE you can get Prophets (or atleast build some wonders).

I think things should be reversed, you can create prophets and other great people right from the start of the game and they can Build the Shrine of a Religion in any City with only the TEC limiting what they can create. The Shrine makes a City the HolyCity rather then the other way around. This will likly lead to a more even spread of religions throughout the world as its going to be very hard to make 2 prophets before atleast several other Civs have had their first. Like your mod it also has the advantage that you have complete control over WHAT religions you found (assuming no one else dose it first as with any other Wonder).

This will also tie in with changes to Specialists, first off we should probably dump the concept of using buildings to limiting the number of specialists that a city can have. Rather all buildings and various tecnologies should act to incresse the output of specialist. Obliscs would now incresse Great Prophet points from Priests.

In addition I am looking to include a few more religions spread a bit more broadly through out the tec tree. Definatly a "Helenism" aka Greeko-Roman Mythology, "Norse" and "Egyptian" religions need to be represented. These would be the earliest religions pushing the current crop up a bit. Protestatism could come along in the middle ages (with Cristianity being ofcorse a Pre-requisite), Anthism probaly with Comunism, and realy late game some goofy stuff like "Jedi" just for kicks.

[Stone-D]

Good ideas there. I admit I toyed with the idea of religiontech->prophet->founding, but I dithered about how the AI would handle it. Its currently on my 'to do' list for the weekend - not claiming first dibs here btw, just commenting. I'd love to see what other people do!

More religions? Definitely a must. However, there is a definite time constraint.

With more religions, the game length must be extended. I've been using my own glacial speed with good results, though spreading is a bit slow.

I wonder, in order to improve religion's impact on gameplay, if spread rates should be at least doubled. After that, allow for percentage weights within a city - if percentage drops to 0%, religion is expunged from that city.

[Impaler[WrG]]

This gets me thinking of another idea I had. I see that lots of people are making various EPIC+ settings. It seems that a lot of effort is getting duplicated here and yet their not a great deal of flexability once a person downloads such a mod.

What I think we need to do is have a Universal Speed Mod (perhaps call it the Throtle Mod ) which would give us a few sliders at game start which can be tweeked to our hearts content. All the relevent game data gets multiplied by a floating point value and rounded if apropriate. This would "hopefully" be able to satisfiy everyone.

Scales could include but would not be limited too

Movment - movment rates for units
Tecnology - tecnology costs
Building - costs of all units and buildings
Growth - food needed to grow a city
Time - covers misilanious things like golden age lengths and Religions spread rates (mainly ment to keep these things from getting way out of synch with the other scales). Also sets the game year scale.

Ofcorse this is an incredibly chalenging undertaking probably not possible untill the SDK (if then) but it would be realy realy cool.

[Stone-D]

Yep, that's definitely a problem. Not that there's so many, but that they're independantly affecting gameflow without matching adjustments in other areas.

Difficult? Damn right! :P

But not impossible. A new options page would have to be made, for a start. Lots of alt-tabbing there alone.

That's a task for someone else, if Firaxis doesn't do it (understandably, unless its in an expansion pack) as I don't have the time, inclination nor patience.

Plus, I *DO* have a life! =D

Anyway. Just by focusing on the religion aspect can yield alot of potential fun. Say a schism develops in a religion - spontaneous civil war? Demonstrations? Terrorism?

Note that by terrorism, I'm not pointing the finger at Islam. The Christians were doing it well before them, to their own people...

BTW, totally unrelated, but earlier today I decided to rename the Barbarians to the Independants. I'm finding it psychologically more acceptable, especially in the later game - in my current game, they've got half the planet. :P

[Hypatian]

I'd love to see a more interesting religion system, as well. (Lots of lots of work here, though.) Looking at history, you can see some indications of a couple of interesting things in ancient religion:

1) Deity/religion of the city-state. This shows up in Egypt, certainly. There were different major deities, certainly, between different city states in ancient Egypt. These deities sometimes merged with conquests. This suggests an interesting very early religious model that allows for more religious pluralism early in the game, and a way to merge that pluralism for the later game. Say, instead of Buddhism and Hinduism showing up right away, you get some chance of "cityism" for each specific city, with very little chance of spread.

2) Schism is another very interesting thing, with a long history. When we think back now, the most obvious examples are the protestant reformation, the split between the Rome and Constantinople. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not I think count as schisms, because while they all talk about each other, they're really founded on some different ideas. (And modern Judaism is significantly different from Judean religion in NT times, too.)

But there are signs of even older examples. For example, Zoroastrianism and Vedism (the root of the Hindu religion) are probably splinters of the same root (perhaps Zoroastrianism off of Vedism.)

In Z, the good guys are the ahuras, and the bad guys are the daevas. In V, the good guys are the devas, and the bad guys are the asuras. You might note that these words are more than a little similar to each other...


Anyway, it would be very interesting to make some of these elements more vivid in a C4 mod. Instead of specific technologies leading to seven specific religions, go for technologies leading to different types of religious spread. As soon as mysticism appears, there's a high chance of a city-state religion founding in any city, which increases happiness in the city, and can spread to other cities.

Further early tech would allow for the merge of religion by conquest, greater spread of religion, etc. Quite probably this would involve renaming some of the purely religious techs and rethinking their use.

Later on, factors like cultural contact, unhappiness, etc. could lead to the potential for religious schism, etc. etc.

Of course, this is all way too complicated and would probably be more interesting than it is fun. The key thing that the "seven religions" model has is that it's a very predictable part of the game, and the game sort of requires that. If you make it more realistic (schisms, etc.), then you also make it more unpredictable--which means you need to make the impact of religion on happiness and culture smaller, and the impact of something else on happiness and culture larger. And then religion is just window-dressing, and not having much mechanical influence on the game at all.

Ahh, well.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Made some progress, by using a CustomEventManager I can skip over the ReligionFounded call in the EventManager. This prevents the movie from playing or a notification from poping up. Unfortunatly the Holy City still spawns in one of your cities and this put the religion in question in your City and gives the ReligionSpread event with the little "Do you want to convert" option.

I am thinking that perhaps I can take some code from the Inquisitor Mod and use it to imediatly remove the HolyCity and resulting religion. The whole thing will be created and removed without registering any affect on the game. Then we can move on to placing and altering Holy Cities at are wims.