The Civ4 Religions

[TechWins]

joncnunn in the New Civs thread gave me the idea of discussing which religions ought to be in Civ4. Here is what I'm thinking based on this from Locutus's update thread:

"Religion will spread through your lands and offer myriad tools to control your people more effectively and keep them happier. At some point you’ll even be able to create Great Prophets to act as immortal icons to the devout. Early screenshots (see below) seem to indicate that the religion of a city will be visible on the main map."

Indigenous or Pagan -- maybe all Civs start off as one of the two?
Christianity - possibly split up into Catholicism and Protestantism.. maybe Orthodox as well
Judaism
Islam - I'm not familiar with all the different sects
Hinduism
Janism
Buddhism
Confucianism
Taoism
Shinto


I'm not sure how worthy it is for Taoism or a religion like Janism to be included, though. The best idea is probably not to split up major religions, like Christianity, into sub-religions, and also, only including the VERY MAJOR religions to not over do it. In that case indigenous and/or pagan, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto.

Although, maybe specific religions won't be used at all and instead religious terms. Pagan, atheism, polytheism, monotheism, agnostic, pantheism, etc...


Has there been any other speculation on this already?

[Brent]

Civs can start "indigenous" or Pagan out of the box, but I'd want to mod it so they start out with some form of monotheism. Your 2 or 3 way split for Christianity sounds about right to me. Judaism I guess would be unified, at least at first. I reckon the main sects of Islam are Sunni and Shia (Shiite), but I'm no expert on the subject, especially the spelling or nomenclature. Maybe realworld religious symbols would represent madeup religions? But I doubt it.

[TechWins]

Some problems I foresee with using real worlds religions are offencing people on the idea of indigenous religions being "basic" or "underdeveloped" and which countries exactly are to become Judaic? Even if an Israeli Civ is included that would be the only Civ to be Judaic. Plus the whole idea of different sects of religions on which ones to included and disclude. I'm interested to see whether real world religions will be used and to what extent if they are.

[Brent]

I guess we'd have to have a kingdom of Israel as well as a kingdom of Judah... or more than half the slots would have to be taken up by each of the twelve tribes... or we'd have to include a ficticious civ for Israel to share Judaism with... or... we could treat monotheism as a specific realworld religion.

[TechWins]

The problem with using monotheism as a religion is that it sums up basically all of the major religions in the world depending on interpretations. Also, which Civs will have which religions then must mean indeginous will be a religion, since how else can you represent the different religions of the Aztecs, Vikings, Zulu, and other nations of that sort? Then comes the idea that all religions should be able to have the same effects as one another not to make one religion "better" than another, especially when it comes to the idea of monotheism, polytheism, and pantheism.

The whole Great Prophet idea I wonder if it will similarly to the MGL and SGL. Maybe after a city reaches a certain culture there is a X% chance a prophet will be spawned. Beijing reaches 10,000 culture and Lao-Tzu is spawned would be the way I'm picturing it. Maybe they help decrease war weariness and increase happiness as long as they are alive for maybe X amount of turns.

[Brent]

Maybe Rome will be the only Christian civ. Or maybe what we're discussing requires multiple denominations of Chrisianity: Roman Catholics, Scandinavian Lutherans, Russian Orthodox. And the Americans can be officially secular or something.

[monolith94]

Dude, Zoroastrianism. I mean, come on! It's an essential religion, historically.

[DRoseDARs]

The thing about Eastern philosophies is it's hard to seperate them. In Asian cultures, people don't necessarily identify themselves as Taoist, or Confuscian, or Buddhist as they tend to overlap, particularly in China. Indeed, it's hard for non-Christian to tell the different Christian sects apart. So perhaps having Major->Minor classifications would correctly be the way to go. Civs would fall into either just one or multiple Major Catagories, which would have the effects, while in the demographics we would see the Minor catagory breakdown.

6 Major catagories with included Minor catagories I can think off:
Christianity-
-Roman Catholic
-Greek Orthodox
-Protestant
-Anglican
-Baptist
-Mormon
-Evangelical etc.
Judaism-
-Orthodox
-Kabbalah etc
Islam-
-Sunni
-Shia
-Sufi etc
Hindu-
-etc
Eastern-
-Confuscian
-Shinto
-Taoist
-Buddhism etc
Indigenous-
-etc

Giving the Minor catagories unique effects might complicate gameplay too much, and more ominously would likely be offensive to someone somewhere at sometime.

[TechWins]

Originally posted by monolith94
Dude, Zoroastrianism. I mean, come on! It's an essential religion, historically.

That's a good point for the Persians, but I'm not sure how specific the religions will be. At any rate, I'm sure I left out many important religions that could be named.

DRoseDARs, that wouldn't be a bad idea splitting the religions into different categories like that. An idea would be to have a major category called Indian and keep the Eastern category, as well. The seperation could be like this:

Indian-
-Hinduism
-Buddhism
-Jainism-

Eastern-
-Confucianism
-Taoism
-Shinto

With those two categories each having three religions apiece it could be a good rule of thumb to have each major category only contain three minor categories.

Giving the Minor catagories unique effects might complicate gameplay too much, and more ominously would likely be offensive to someone somewhere at sometime.

I'm very interested to see how Firaxis implements religion and whether each religion will have different effects or not. I think the religion a Civ will become might relate to the Civ-Uniqueness and no particular religion has any benefit over another; it would merely just be a name for labeling. Considering Firaxis' politcally correct nature, which I hope doesn't spell over into the game too much, that's a likely outcome for religion.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by TechWins

I'm very interested to see how Firaxis implements religion and whether each religion will have different effects or not. I think the religion a Civ will become might relate to the Civ-Uniqueness and no particular religion has any benefit over another; it would merely just be a name for labeling. Considering Firaxis' politcally correct nature, which I hope doesn't spell over into the game too much, that's a likely outcome for religion.

Sounds logical.
Some kind of State Religion, which you can spread to other cities by means of Prophets/Priests (well, I hope that it can also be spread by trade [which was AFAIR the means by which the romans got knowledge of other beliefs, like the egyptian gods, which lead to many romans including them into their belief system])

[Brent]

And there are those who mix Christianity with other religions, like in parts of Latin America and the Philippines, I think.

Do we want the game to make Anglican, Baptist, etc, separate from Protestant? Maybe LDS and I don't know, Seventh Day Adventists should be covered by a more generic label covering restorationists and others who consider themselves neither Catholic, Orthodox, etc or Protestant. Does anyone think any actual religious organizations might object to their portrayal in the game? I'm wondering if mine would, although personally I think it might be fun to be in. I think religious Traits are best left to the individual player, or maybe people could post options to choose from on Poly.

Hmm... a handcart unit...

[Nikolai]

I'd like the religions to not be real life religions, but rather have random names, random stats etc. In essence, I'd like something like proposed in the old List.

[Brent]

I guess what would really be best is if those religious symbols we saw in screenshots are simply assigned to generic religions, as I mentioned earlier.

[TechWins]

Originally posted by Nikolai
I'd like the religions to not be real life religions, but rather have random names, random stats etc. In essence, I'd like something like proposed in the old List.

What sort of stats would there be? I'm having a hard time figuring what sort of implementations religion could have in the game. IF religion X is monotheistic what differences would it have over polytheistic religion Y? All religions (outside of some Eastern religions which are closely related to social orders or philosophies) serve basically the same purpose; I don't see how one religion could have different benefits than another. What were some of the ideas explained in the Old List, if you know off-hand? I don't see how religions could be differently represent from one another; it seems to me they should all serve the same purpose within the game regardless of what type of religion it is.

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
Some kind of State Religion, which you can spread to other cities by means of Prophets/Priests (well, I hope that it can also be spread by trade [which was AFAIR the means by which the romans got knowledge of other beliefs, like the egyptian gods, which lead to many romans including them into their belief system]))

I would imagine religion will almost definitely play a role coinciding with culture, but how that would play out I don't know. What I would like to see is a new system for determining borders. Possibly make it a combination of cultural, religious, and military influence. Culture would be gained by building Libraries, Colosseums; religion would be gained by building Temples, Cathedrals; military would be gained by military units and manning fortresses/bases could be a nice touch, as well. The overall sum average of the three would determine how far a Civ's borders would extend. At the very least, my concept would be a vast improvement over the complexity and dynamics of the current culture only system.

[DRoseDARs]

Another option would be to emulate the way religion was handled in Europa Universalis II (I never had the first game). If I recall correctly, special traits were never given to individual religions, instead it was a matter of either cohesiveness of religion or tolerable levels of instability between multiple religions.