Islam is not a medieval invention!

[Overcast32]

I can't see how you could really fix it either - unless maybe you slowed the entire game down - or made some kind of restrictions on the years a religion needed to be researched before it "crops up on it's own". Of course - that would require a religion to just randomly appear in a town by a certain date.

So if Divine Right's not founded by say.... 900 AD then Islam just randomly starts in a town somewhere. Of course, this could impact your Civ - but hey, I guess that wouldn't be so un-historical...

[samspock]

How about this for an idea: Increse the number of religions but not the total you can have in a game. What I mean by that is set some of the religion giving techs to have multiple possible religions that can be founded and you get a different one depending on what civ founds it. If the civ is from Asia and they get Poly then the will get hinduism but if they are a european civ (rome, france etc) they get a pantheon religion like the greeks/romans had (not sure the name to use.) That might make it a bit more interesting. Also, set up a bonus for each relgion that you only get if that is your state religion. Sort of a mini leader trait. Maybe even give this mini-trait to the civ with the holy city even if it is not the sate relgion. Perhaps even make this trait random to prevent anyone complaining about sterotyping.

[Son of David]

I'm currently playing a game at Prince level where Islam was not founded until about 1500AD!

[OzzyKP]

I think the placement of Islam is appropriate, but like others said Buddhism & Hinduism is totally out of whack.

Hinduism predates all the world's religions, it should certainly come before Buddhism.

Rewiring the entire tech tree would be too much of a chore, but a bit of balance could be created quite easily. The first three religious techs/religions come in the following order:

Meditation/Buddhism
Polytheism/Hinduism
Monotheism/Judaism

Switch the order to:

Polytheism/Hinduism
Monotheism/Judaism
Meditation/Buddhism

And things will be improved. Easy to do.

[Martin the Dane]

Hinduism predates all the world's religions, it should certainly come before Buddhism.

Hmm. that depends on what you meen by Hinduism. To be absolutely exact Hinduism, isn't a religion but a groupe of related religions some of witch share the same gods. Try walking up to a follower of Harre Krishna and tell him he is Hindu They are very peasfull people so you will get a very interesting explanation as to why that is not the case, still Harre Krishna is regarded as a Hindu sect. Likevise in some places Buddhism is not an independent religion but a Hindu sect, while in other places it is closer to Taoism.
Why does having a Jewis and an Islamic temple in the same city give you +2 happiness?
And why isn't Atheism a religion, I have seldom met any as devote as atheists?
So why am I saying all this? To say that from a gameplay perspective I would much rather have religion being as it is than try to simulate any real world religious system. But I do agree that it is a shame that later religions seldom bocome state religions.

[breffie]

From a gaming perspective I think it's a shame that once a city has a religion that will never go away. I think each city shouldn't be able to have more than three religions within it, and whenever a fourth missionary is successfull he will kick out one of the earlier religions present in the city. (Never the state religion though.) This would give some additional strategy to the game.

[Bhruic]

Originally posted by Locutus
I agree that it's a bit of a pity that the game is always dominated by the same religions. Different things were tried to remedy this during the development of the game but nothing really worked (without breaking something else), so they just settled on giving a free Great Prophet to Islam to give them a chance to catch up. Not really the greatest solution of course.

Free Great Prophet...?

Actually, I think the "choose your Religion" option does a nice job of making sure the same religions don't always dominate.

Bh

[Kuciwalker]

Thread necromancy

[Krill]

Wow, Thread from teh dead!

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Willem
Incidently, Buddhism isn't right either. It's an offshoot of Hinduism so it should appear afterwards, not before.

Well, that actually depends on how exactally you define Hinduism.

[Kuciwalker]

And how you define before.

[wodan11]

I'm not sure it's fair to say Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. It happened to arise in a Hindu society, so of course there was interplay between the two. However, it seems to me it could have arisen in just about any culture/religion (or lack thereof).

Wodan

[duuk]

While we're discussing religion weirdness, anyone that knows anything about early Judaism should know that Judaism should not be founded at Monotheism, but at Priesthood.

Old Testament Jewish belief doesn't say that there is one god, only that Y**weh is the god of Israel and "Thou shalt have no god before me". Several books of the Torah detail not just the history of the early Jewish tribes but also, in great detail, the establishment of the Priesthood line of Aaron.

If someone was to ask me...

Polytheism -> Hindu
Priesthood -> Jew
Meditation (moved to follow priesthood) -> Buddhism
Monotheism -> Christianity
Theology -> Islam

I'd leave Tao/Philo Confucion/CoL mainly because I don't know enough about these religions to know if that is right or wrong.

[breffie]

Originally posted by duuk
While we're discussing religion weirdness, anyone that knows anything about early Judaism should know that Judaism should not be founded at Monotheism, but at Priesthood.

Old Testament Jewish belief doesn't say that there is one god, only that Y**weh is the god of Israel and "Thou shalt have no god before me". Several books of the Torah detail not just the history of the early Jewish tribes but also, in great detail, the establishment of the Priesthood line of Aaron.

If someone was to ask me...

Polytheism -> Hindu
Priesthood -> Jew
Meditation (moved to follow priesthood) -> Buddhism
Monotheism -> Christianity
Theology -> Islam

I'd leave Tao/Philo Confucion/CoL mainly because I don't know enough about these religions to know if that is right or wrong.

Being a monotheist in a polytheistic belief is called henotheism, and there are plenty of other such words and concepts that could have made it as techs into the game. (Mythology for instance.) I do think it's a mistake to lump Taoism and Philosophy together. When we think of philosophy here we think of the ancient greeks who never ever were close to taoism.

And I wonder if you consider the consequences of your setup: When meditation follows priesthood and you get judaism from priesthood and buddhism form meditation, the result is that buddhism is now most likely to "originate from" judaism in the same sense christianity did. In the real world buddhism originated from hinduism, not judaism, and this is what many here have tried to achieve by slight modifications.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by wodan11
I'm not sure it's fair to say Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. It happened to arise in a Hindu society, so of course there was interplay between the two. However, it seems to me it could have arisen in just about any culture/religion (or lack thereof).

Wodan

Well, some of the ritual and religious aspects of Hinduism were around before Buddhism, but some would argue that "modern" Hinduism didn't appear until after Asoka encouraged the spread of both Buddhism and other religions in India, and several different regional variations, along with some aspects of Buddhism, combined and throughout India.