RELIGION (ver1.0): Hosted by Stefu

[yin26]

Everybody, the topic and Thread Master that even God has been waiting for, here's Stefu on Religion!

[Stefu]

Thank you, thank you, I love you all.

Anyway...

Here's my view of religion (can thread masters do this?) feel free to comment or present alternate views or whatever.

When some of your city grows beyond the size of, shall we say, 5, there is a chance that some prophet begins to spread his dogma there. Note that religions born and prosper without any act from your civilization. Well... at start this is. Anyway. This dogma may be standard "Worship my god" one or maybe something more unusual, for instance prophet may say that everyone should be vegetarian. This would have some effect on his worshippers, I can't say exactly. Anyway. If this religion is left unchecked, then it slowly it converts all members of this city, and begins to spread to other cities. Trade routes are good religion-spreaders, in fact big trade cities may, and propably will be multi-religional. However, you have some options about how do you tolerate this religion.

Prosecuted: Religion is very, very disliked. Members or religion are brutally hunted down, if this is ancient times they meet the sword, if this is modern times they try to immmigrate to more friendly cities. This is good way to get rid of some pesky little religion, but if it is pesky big religion its members get quite unhappy. Revolutions have big chance of happening. Also, if one religion is fundamentally worshipped in one nation and prosecuted in other, conflicts will happen.

Tolerated: Religion is not actually hunted down, but looked down to. Members of church have to pay heavy taxes, don't have all citizen rights and they cannot spread their religion. Example could be Christians in Istanbul after Turkish conquest. This is not a good way to make people happy either.

Official: Default setting. Religion is official and can be spreaded. Believers don't have to do anything. No pluses or minuses.

Fundamentally worshipped: Religion is the only official. Others are automatically disabled. All unconverted people are converted in one turn. This gives you some bonuses, like morale and happiness, and you can use the religion as a political weapon against the unbelievers. Fundamentalist states with different religions don't get along very well. Fundamentalist states with same religion are best friends.

Anyway. Churches have got some diplomatical power. This means that their heads sometimes appear to your screen and demand something like "Proclaim us to be only official religion, or I will start preaching against your nation."

You can encourage some religion by giving them monetary gifts. These help these religions to grow faster.

Anyway, life should be very fun indeed in multi-religional empire.

Well. Comments?

[willko]

very interesting...

and i thought this thread would be empty forever! silly me.

i like the idea of these soapbox religions popping up out of the growing cities and vying for dominance. it adds another element of social engineering in a way. instead of fundamentalism being merely a social choice, if we follow your model, stefu, and decide to espouse religion x over religion y, then the spaniards (devoutly worshipping religion y as we speak), might denounce us as infidels and heathens! cool.

my spin on matters would be to introduce religions that espoused different social tenets at the core of their belief systems. whether or not "real" religions are used is a dicey matter in some ways, but here goes:

let's say a pantheonic religion similar to ancient greek, roman, or norse mythologies pops up and you decide to hook onto it. this may allow you in game terms to gain small bonuses in several areas (seeing as how the people are placated in various ways by their belief in different gods for different needs). i.e. small bonuses to production, growth, luxuries. but the flipside is that pantheonic religions require more upkeep in terms of sacrifices and temples (to a whole family of squabbling gods rather than one unified deity). this introduces inefficiency through lost tax revenues that go toward various sect's upkeeping their separate god's agendas.

let's say a monotheistic religion starts up (after the proper tech advances are found). this is where some of the bread and butter of the whole religious soup of effects will probably be found. for who is to say that the one true god is a nice guy, or a clockmaker, or a judge, or an executioner? as these various gods vie for dominance, espousing one over another will yield different social effects. let's say the god of a renaissance era scientist is deterministically removed from human events but has laid down a set of laws for his believers and the world itself to follow for all time. this model of religion would yield a scientific bonus in helping people root out the nature of the physical world that their god has created while stifling discoveries of a more unorthodox nature (again, this is dependent on a variation of the current tech tree paradigm in which different _types_ of advances are effectively scaled in research by different socio-economic factors... another topic entirely).

at any rate, you could have ancestor worship, something akin to zen buddhism, nihilism, who knows? but the question of how to model these societal choices is the difficult and interesting question.

how would this vast departure from previous civ titles be accomplished to satisfactory results?

i'll have to think on this some more but these are the preliminary thoughts.

/willko.

[Stefu]

Gotta say unh. I just realized that I was shooting down an idea. I feel sorry.

[This message has been edited by Stefu (edited May 20, 1999).]

[MBD]

While it's certainly true that many of the wars in history were based on religion (and I for one am always happy to help my opponent die for his beliefs), if you're going to make religion a major aspect of the game, then you're also going to do the same for ethnicity/race.

[crusher]

What religoins do you plan to have? Monotheism, Polytheism, idol worship, Nature lovers, Cults?

Also, what would cause a certain religoin to be formed. Religion as a tech is ludicrus! Maybe certain govs would cause religions to form,or a war would create certain religions. Oh,how about cults and nature lovers begin near the end of every millenium.

Next, wouldn't fudamentally worshiping one religion be the same as prosecuting all others? Turning off all new religions so there is not backlash should not work.If I hated cults all I would have to do is make a free religion sociaty,then when monotheism comes into my sociaty also,make it fundamentally worshiped. And Heavens gate is not soposed to be mad about this?

Oh,by the way heavens gate is\was a cult.

------------------
"War does not determine who is right,It determines who is left."
-Crusher-



[This message has been edited by crusher (edited May 20, 1999).]

[kmj]

there should definitely be more than one type of monotheism in the scenario you guys are proposing.

And shouldn't that be persecute, instead of prosecute?

[VaderTwo]

I also these ideas on religion, especially multiple competing ones. However, they should not be based on current religions if possible, as that might cause some legal problems. We could use some religions that have died out or fictitious religions.

Also if a religion appears in a certain region, it would be interesting to make that area a holy shrine where happiness would increase or unhappiness would decrease and/or make it an area of competion for control of that area. For example, if nation A controls the holy shrine of a certain religion that nation B follows, but nation A does not follow - there would be extremely strained relations between nation A and B.
Like: "Your heretic nation occupies our holy land, give it back or else feel our wrath."

[evil conquerer]

Another suggestion/elaboration: The government you're using will determine which tolerance settings (i.e. persecute, official, etc.) you can use. The closest ways I can explain that in non-CivIII terms are:

<h3>SMAC</h3>
Pacifist nations (-3 police) cannot persecute religions

Nations with the fundamentalist social engineering are required to pick some religion to fundamentally worship.

<h3>Civilization II</h3>
Republics and Democracies cannot persecute a religion.

Fundamentalist governments are required to pick a religion to fundamentally worship.

Communist governments cannot fundamentally woship any religion at all. Optional: Communist governments cannot have any setting higher than "tolerated". This might weaken communism too much, though.

Also, size 5 seems a little low for a religion to develop. This would cause way too many competing religions. I would recommend a threshold of 7 or higher.

[Ecce Homo]

I think all civs should start out with Animism. Then they can build Megaliths (stone formations like the Stonehenge) which will give a chance that a more advanced religion develops.

As a new religion advance comes, the ruler could accept it or reject it (with the risk of a schism).

[Trachmyr]

Religion has been disscussed somewhat in Socail Engineering\Goverment Thread...
I glad it has it's own thread now.

My suggestions:

Religions should be customizable, similar to social engineering ala SMAC.

You should be able to select the primary structure: Monotheism, Polytheism, Pantheonic, Animism, Mysticism

Important aspects such as the Afterlife and the status of priests (Druids had power, Catholic priests "hear" god's word, ect.).

You should also be able to add TENETS (Aescetic, Malthieism, Monastic, proselytic)


In order to inact changes, you need DOGMA (I suggested CULTURE earlier, to be used for both Social engineering and Religion). You can get Dogma from priests (a city proffession- Dogma used to "change" the religion, will subtract from the priests ability to instill FERVOR, see below) or from Religious-Type wonders (instead of absurd advantages).

Dogma then slowly changes the religion to your presets.

Outside influence can convert you people, or even generate dogma to cause changes in you religion(s) if you worship a religion the same as theirs (i.e., When you alter a religion, you alter it WORLD-WIDE unless you also change it's name.)... however you can spend DOGMA to counter foreign changes. (there will be a button to AUTOMATICALLY COUNTER FOREIGN DOGMA)

There should be a maxinum of about 50 religions in any one game. But your civ could contain all 100!

Your RELIGION MASTER SCREEN shows the breakdown of your total population by the % following each religion. From this screen you can edit (as mentioned above) the religion or set STATE ACCEPTANCE. Also, next to each religion is it's FERVOR, how strongly on average it's tenets are held. High Fervor multiplies afeects, low fervor reduces effect. Dogma can be spent (and is defaulted to be spent this way) to increase fervor or alter Acceptance (No repruccusions for altered acceptance via dogma, nasty repruccsions if done w/o dogma)

Micromanegement won't be much since you'll only change religions once or twice, and only make minor adjustments. You'll set allocation of Dogma to fervor likewise only a few times per game.

what do you think?

[Eggman]

Aha. You folks want to open a big can of worms, huh? Religion can be a very testy subject and I'm not sure that it would be a good idea for this game.

However, if you insist, it would probably be for the best if instead of having specific religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) or even categories (animism, cults, polytheism, monotheism, etc.) that you go with completely fictional religions. Just give them some sort of nice sounding name and give them random properties. Silly examples: Scooby-Dooism could produce higher morale in exchange for lower food supply while Hulkamania creates superior militaries with crap science. But the next game, Hulkamania produces a morale bonus and nothing else. And these religions would have different effects and start up in different locales every game.

This would be more realistic from a player point of view as you have NO CONTROL over which religions come into existence. You can only work with what you are dealt. Also, you don't have to worry about various religious folks getting very annoyed over how their religion is portrayed (I am still riled up at the portrayal of Christianity in SMAC - couldn't he come up with something more original than the right-wing fanatic stereotype? Like the other 99.5% of the Christian population?). With the random religion formula, you wouldn't know any of the specifics of the religion (monotheistic vs. polytheistic, views toward sex, women, etc.), just the effects it produces and hence no controversy.

Anyway, I would never pick any non-monotheistic religion even if another form of religion was available. I am sure that there are others out there like me. This generic religion treatment would allow me more real options. And I won't have to flame the newsgroups with BR makes me out to be a gun-weilding intolerant fanatic.

In addition, you should consider having "dangerous" religions that are just bad news in general. Dangerous cults or just evil garbage that can only hurt your civ. Gives even the most tolerant player some problems to deal with.

Also, you may consider giving each religion a "tolerance" property. This would be the ability of the religion to tolerate those that don't agree with them. It could range from zero (convert or die, heathen) to total (live and let live, join if you wish). You could even have tolerance for each specific religion (or groups of religions for simplification). This would rule those diplomatic and domestic relationships that you all have talked about.

My two cents.

[Trachmyr]

I believe the reason people feel that religion is inconsequential to game play is because the majority of us come from one of the MAJOR RELIGIONS (Catholisism, Christianity, Muslim, Judisim - forgive my spelling), they have a lot in common... but countries that follow eastern religions are MUCH diffrent cultrualy than the rest of the world. Similarly, in ancient times, the variety of religions went hand in hand with a variety of cultures... An Animistic society (take American Indians for example), have a hugly diffrent view and cultural attitude about things than any person from one of the major religions. To disclude the variety and diveristy of religions is to do a great disservice to the game.

On being PC, you are going to offend some one, no matter what you do (The term Heathen, which means "People of the Heath", refers to pagans in a negative conotation. I am pagan, and if I was whiny, I would be offended... but I'm not.)

Stay away from "evil" or "bad" religions, since their have truely been no real "Evil" religions in history. (A very few cults started by messed up people, but that's not the same thing as an ACTUAL religion)

[Mo]

This would also allow religous crusades. If the city where the religion was founded was captured by a different religion, then the church might ask you to go on a crusade. The units on the crusade would have a high moral, and they wouldn't cause unhappyness in their home cities.

[Lancer]

I think that whoever puts religion in Civ 3 should pray about it first.Just possibly an Act Of God could get it done without someones personal animosities against the faith of others screwing it up.