Why is there going to be no religion?

[OzzyKP]

I've seen several sources say that great people are in.

[Kuciwalker]

I suspect they'll just drop Great Prophets.

[Theben]

Maybe Great Diplomats... you get Henry Kissinger.

[prelynmax]

You are all speculating.

We don't know FOR SURE if religion will be removed in Civ 5.

[Ming]

From another thread, they quote the lead designer who says religions have been rmeoved

[Tattila the Hun]

What does he know, hmph?

[SpencerH]

I think removing religions may be a mistake and I'd like to know why, and what other, 'non-essential' parts of CIV are getting axed. Are they designing a simplified CIV for the unwashed masses? I'd hate to see CIV go down the same (bad) road as TW.

"If it aint broke dont fix it" seems appropriate in this instance.

[SpencerH]

IIRC wasnt there some mention about a CIV version that would be playable over phones or facebook or something? That might account for a potential "dumbing down" of CIV. If so,

[Kuciwalker]

AFAIK the facebook civ is totally independent.

[KaiserIsak]

I also agree that religions were a very fun gameplay element of civ 4 even though the religions are not that important. I liked to play the arabs and spread Islam, or the romans and spread Christianity and so on. Civilization can be played in a lot of the different ways of course, but one of them (and the one i normally use) is to play it a bit like SimCity or Europa Universalis, where I never have *one* big goal, but rather make up my goals as I play. One such goal can be a building a specific wonder, getting control of a specific territory, or just spreading the religion that I have founded. Even though it does not do much, it is still fun to check out the religious stats and see that my religion is the biggest in the world. So when I do agree that religions don't bring a lot of strategy into the game, and therefore might be unfitted for a pure chess-like strategy game designed to be as competive as possible, I still think they should keep it to appeal to that not-so-competive player that just want to play the game, make their own goals, and generally see their civilization prosper.

However, I am 95% certain that they are removing religions because they want to reintroduce them in a later expansion. Same with reducing the number of civilizations (again). I just don't understand why they don't reserve the expansions for actually new stuff instead of reintroducing stuff we already had in the last iteration of the series. If anything makes me want to pirate the games, this does, as it feels as i does not get the "full" game before with the third game anyways.

[Ming]

We will get a "full" game. And I can see their reasoning.

First, they are in business to make money. Civ V, while it will be a new game, will still be civ. But from what they are telling us, there weill be MAJOR differences on core elements of the game (combat, hexes, ect...) It only makes sense for them to milk it and leave room for growth.

Second, with the big changes, it's best that they learn more about the game after it's released before they start adding elements. They made a lot of changes after vanilla Civ IV from lessons learned from the first version. In the end, we got a far better game with BTS...

So I have no problems with the lack of certain elements, or the lesser number of Civs. But I do want a game that actually works out of the box, and was well thought out. The tweaking will begin after the release date.

[KaiserIsak]

Well, honestly i bought civ4 when it came out, but even though the groundwork for a great game was there right out of the box, i did not really jump from civ 3 to civ 4 before the Beyond the Sword-expansion. Why? Because the game did not feel complete, and even if that might have been more of a feeling than anything grounded in reality, just the fact that they reduced the number of civs from around 30 in civ3 with all expansions, to 18 in vanilla civ 4 was enough to warrant such a feeling. And while i do agree that there should be expansions, and welcome them to "milk it" a bit like everybody else does, I can not see one single reason why we should not have 34 civs right out of the box (hell, Europa Universalis does like ten times more). And this also applies to the very simple concept of religions in civ 4. If they want to expand on the religious system? Fine, wait for an expansion, but at least give us what we already have in civ 4 from the start in civ 5. I guess its a matter of feeling that Civ 5 vanilla is not only an improvement over Civ 4 vanilla, but also over Civ 4 with both expansions

[Ming]

Im sure if they had more civs, and more game features, it would take them even longer to release it.

For me, I'd rather have them release the vanilla version ASAP, so that we can start finding the real problems with it. It means we will get a "finished" game much sooner.

[MikeH]

2) Trip went on a big "destroy all parts of the game that aren't essential so that we can refine the parts that are" spree. Done properly, this can have amazing results (see: Mass Effect 2). Done improperly you get CivRev.

I optimistically hope that is the reason.

Whether or not to shoot for an early religion was an interesting early gameplay choice, but later in the game managing it just became a distraction from running the economy/military.

[Ming]

I optimistically hope that is the reason.

Whether or not to shoot for an early religion was an interesting early gameplay choice,

True enough. It is one of those "decisions" you have to make that could have a big effect on the game.
And even if you didn't go for one, religion often dictates your "targets" early in the game. Some civs that managed to get an early religion would spend much of the early game spreading it, at the expense of building an army... making them an easy and "tasty" target in the early ages.

but later in the game managing it just became a distraction from running the economy/military.

[/quote]

I never found this to be the case. I usually set a side one city that cranks out any needed missionaries for religions I want to spread. Plus, I'm usually running free religion at that point, so it has less impact on diplomatic relations.