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Isn't that like saying you shouldn't have to build military units to defend yourself? Missionaries are just war by other means in this game. Though the diplomatic part of it is stupid, yes.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 16:19 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:06 |
You can also just kill foreign religions before they get off the ground, though that requires you to make a concerted effort to do so and to have planned for it, preferably with a Great Prophet in position. Actually I the Prophet's probably necessary to completely remove the religion from the holy city.
Staltran fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Jun 5, 2016 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 16:30 |
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Nah the ai prophet and missionary spam is pretty bad
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 17:50 |
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Fister Roboto posted:Isn't that like saying you shouldn't have to build military units to defend yourself? Missionaries are just war by other means in this game. The problem is that first inquisitors cost faith to make, so that's a cost. Second, they are a civilian unit on a city, so you can't rest other units there. Third, it's just a silly mechanic since the computer gets unlimited missionaries that spawn faster than you can generate inquisotors. If yiu have multiple cities this means they can convert certain cities before you can protect them. Now you have to convert your city back to your religion AND generate enough faith to make another inquisotor to park in the city. It'd be different if you had the ability to generate faith faster relative to the ai and their missionaries, but you often can't. It's just a frustrating mechanic. Religion is best used as a civic and diplomatic tool with I'd say relatively minor productivity and city building benefits rather than a generator for other things.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 18:17 |
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Gort posted:The beliefs are atrociously unbalanced. At least one is bugged to the point it does nothing. You're right. I should be more specific. The structure of how religion was implemented was great. I liked how it spread, the idea of follower beliefs, etc. They just had some really poorly thought out beliefs stuffed into it. I'd be very happy to see a similar religion system in VI only without some more thought about the beliefs themselves.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 18:18 |
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:Nah the ai prophet and missionary spam is pretty bad The AI spams everything once you start raising the difficulty. It's the only way it can keep up.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 19:32 |
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Jastiger posted:The problem is that first inquisitors cost faith to make, so that's a cost. Second, they are a civilian unit on a city, so you can't rest other units there. Third, it's just a silly mechanic since the computer gets unlimited missionaries that spawn faster than you can generate inquisotors. If yiu have multiple cities this means they can convert certain cities before you can protect them. Now you have to convert your city back to your religion AND generate enough faith to make another inquisotor to park in the city. How is any of that different from defending yourself militarily? Military units have a cost. The AI is better at producing them. The AI will conquer your poo poo if you don't pay the cost to defend yourself, and you'll have to pay even more to take it back if they do.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 19:43 |
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Gort posted:The AI spams everything once you start raising the difficulty. It's the only way it can keep up. There's a difference between the AI spamming military units and the AI spamming missionaries. With military units, you only have to deal with them if you're at war, and if you are at war then there's effective tactics to employ to deal with their numbers advantage. You can't do anything to stop missionaries, nor can you effectively counter them outside of your own territory. It's just flat-out impossible to spread your own religion on higher difficulties unless you're in a weird situation, like, say, on a continent with two other AIs neither of which founded their own religion. And even then in that game, as soon as the AI got ocean travel, enemy missionaries started swarming my shores...
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 19:44 |
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Yeah you can't really compare it to the military game. The AI gets a production bonus on military, sure, but that's to counter the superior combat intellect of the player. The player can't apply that kind of advantage to the religion game.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 20:03 |
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Is religion a more balanced mechanic in multiplayer? I only play against the AI, and I inevitably just ignore whatever is happening with religion.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 20:18 |
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Prepare yourself for an Unpopular Opinion: Religion should never have been introduced to Civ as its own mechanic in the first place and it's a better game without it.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 20:21 |
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Bubbacub posted:Is religion a more balanced mechanic in multiplayer? I only play against the AI, and I inevitably just ignore whatever is happening with religion. Well, sort of. You don't have the AI spamming missionaries, but the first couple of guys to religions take all the overpowered beliefs and everyone else is left with trash.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 20:22 |
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Clearly the solution is to play as Armenia.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 20:59 |
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Eric the Mauve posted:Prepare yourself for an Unpopular Opinion: Religion should never have been introduced to Civ as its own mechanic in the first place and it's a better game without it. What didn't you like about Civ4's implementation? The only criticism I've seen is that it wasn't interesting enough, but I've not seen anyone claim it was a poor mechanic so I'd be interested to hear your take on that.
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# ? Jun 5, 2016 21:06 |
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Gort posted:OK, so science is one bucket you fill up for bonuses, culture is another. Yeah its kinda dumb. I don't really see the point in having two tech trees if they aren't going to be mechanically different from each other, other than the resource you use to fill the bucket. That's a big complaint I had with Religion and Ideology from Civ5, both were basically just another Social Policy tree, put there to give the illusion that more is going on now.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 00:12 |
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Borsche69 posted:Yeah its kinda dumb. I don't really see the point in having two tech trees if they aren't going to be mechanically different from each other, other than the resource you use to fill the bucket. That's a big complaint I had with Religion and Ideology from Civ5, both were basically just another Social Policy tree, put there to give the illusion that more is going on now. I assume the idea would be that you could focus on one or the other tree and end up with a totally different style of gameplay depending on what kinds of techs you have available at any given time. As opposed to classic Civ where just shooting up the single tech tree as fast as possible would make you better at everything at once.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 00:20 |
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They just need to get rid of the whole 'majority religion' concept for cities, its what led to dumb and boring missionary spam. Go back to Civ4's 'every religion can exist in one city, but you only get benefits from the state religion'. Or just remove religion completely and have a decent spy/espionage system for once
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 00:21 |
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Clarste posted:I assume the idea would be that you could focus on one or the other tree and end up with a totally different style of gameplay depending on what kinds of techs you have available at any given time. As opposed to classic Civ where just shooting up the single tech tree as fast as possible would make you better at everything at once. That's better solved by just making a more balanced tech tree with multiple branching paths that are viable for different strategies. Civ4 does a decent job of this, though certain paths are a little weaker (Aest-Lit-Drama-Music, Myst-Med/Poly-Priesthood/Mono are both fairly weak, even with the wonders and the first-to techs) but that's something that can be fixed by changing the tech costs and buffing some of the techs. I'm not saying they should straight up use Civ4's tech tree, but a lot of the changes they're making (using culture instead of beakers to unlock techs in a separate tech tree, and freebie bonuses for doing actions associated with certain techs) feel like a very backwards way of giving the player more options with the tech tree, instead of just creating a balanced and branching tech tree (I know this is a simple request) from the get go.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 00:31 |
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I hope there won't be anything like the Liberalism tech in Civ4. Oh you are the tech leader? Here have a free tech.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 00:45 |
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Away all Goats posted:They just need to get rid of the whole 'majority religion' concept for cities, its what led to dumb and boring missionary spam. Go back to Civ4's 'every religion can exist in one city, but you only get benefits from the state religion'. The fun thing about religion in V is that it can be something independent of your civ. It's a force that changes the game that you don't have complete control over. If you just have a state religion then you are effectively just getting another bonus and not interacting or being interacted with.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 00:52 |
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The Human Crouton posted:The fun thing about religion in V is that it can be something independent of your civ. It's a force that changes the game that you don't have complete control over. If you just have a state religion then you are effectively just getting another bonus and not interacting or being interacted with. "It's a force that changes the game that you don't have complete control over." applies to religion in Civ 4 too, and that didn't involve spamming missionaries
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 00:59 |
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To me it seems like the most interesting change, but it really depends on how it is implemented. From a gameplay perspective it adds more complexity by making necessary to manage two different development fronts. From a historical/realism perspective it makes a lot of sense. I'm expecting that both trees will have intersecting requisites, like requiring culture advance empirical though to unlock tech research lab, or tech printing press to unlock cultural advancement free speech, things like that. The culture tree could be different from the tech one in the sense that you have to specialize, instead of eventually having everything, like tech If it's something like that and they manage to balance it properly, it will be a nice change
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 01:01 |
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I mean, what lack of control do you have with Civ5 religion? It's all able to be micromanaged by the player. Maybe just the holy city has RNG involved, but everything else? Religious pressure has an area of effect mechanic. After all, Civ5 expansion was so slow, that it's trivial to predict the spawn point of a holy city. Like Civ4 had even more randomness, and that wasn't very fun. Like you'd get random spreads of a religion (okay), and the holy city was random (kind of okay), and missionaries would randomly fail (really loving annoying).
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 01:08 |
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Well, the really galling thing is the combination of a) the AI has a limitless supply of missionaries IIRC, the AI doesn't get any free missionaries. They can just easily go wide and take Piety without being hampered, which grants lots of faith and cheap missionaries.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 01:19 |
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Byzantine posted:IIRC, the AI doesn't get any free missionaries. They can just easily go wide and take Piety without being hampered, which grants lots of faith and cheap missionaries. They also have the benefit of not getting exhausted at playing the missionary game unlike a human.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 01:20 |
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Byzantine posted:IIRC, the AI doesn't get any free missionaries. They can just easily go wide and take Piety without being hampered, which grants lots of faith and cheap missionaries. Yeah, that was hyperbole. But the fact is that the AI will trivially have more than enough missionaries to undo any progress you make on spreading your own religion. Especially since the AI has zero interest in saving faith points for buying Great People.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 01:22 |
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Especially since the AI has zero interest in saving faith points for buying Great People. yeah what the gently caress is with that? what a weird mechanic to keep faith point generation relevant in the endgame
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 01:34 |
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Are you complaining about it or praising it?
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 02:49 |
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:What didn't you like about Civ4's implementation? The only criticism I've seen is that it wasn't interesting enough, but I've not seen anyone claim it was a poor mechanic so I'd be interested to hear your take on that. I apologize in advance for not having a more interesting answer, but... I didn't object to the implementation, in 4 or 5. Religion's just an extra system to have to pay attention to that doesn't really add anything new or interesting to the game; it's just bonuses in the same old categories. Civ 4 uses it as an important element governing formation of diplomacy blocs, but it's a clunky way to do it and diplomacy should be more dynamic and centered around an AI civ looking around and thinking, "Who do I like? Who do I hate? From among those I don't feel strongly about, who does it make sense for me to buddy up to?" Religion was put into Civ because ~realism~ (look how crucial religion has been to the development of human civilization all throughout history, how can it NOT be in the game?!) but, well, it's easily abstracted/assumed that each individual Civilization comes packaged with its own religion, that it wants to spread the same way it spreads its culture, government, etc.: expansion and conquest. I don't think adding religion as something you can put effort into spreading WITHOUT expanding or conquering is a meaningful addition to the game; it's a meaningless sideshow and a waste of developers' time and players' time. Now that it's in the game though, it ain't coming out, I get that. There would probably be a player uproar if Firaxis announced there won't be a religion mechanic anymore.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 02:53 |
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:Are you complaining about it or praising it? i don't like it because it's a shoddy way to keep the mechanic relevant in the endgame, when everything's been converted. it all comes from the decision to make religion points a separate resource pool: there's nothing to spend them on after a certain time, and turning them into great people is a cop out. because then you simply treat it as a source of great people after a certain point in time
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 03:19 |
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Away all Goats posted:"It's a force that changes the game that you don't have complete control over." applies to religion in Civ 4 too, and that didn't involve spamming missionaries Religion didn't do anything in Civ 4. All I remember is that every religion did the same thing: give you some gold and let you see more tiles. The base religious system in V is great. The fact that the AI can spam missionaries doesn't change that the idea was fundamentally sound.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 03:22 |
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Phobophilia posted:I mean, what lack of control do you have with Civ5 religion? It's all able to be micromanaged by the player. Maybe just the holy city has RNG involved, but everything else? Religious pressure has an area of effect mechanic. After all, Civ5 expansion was so slow, that it's trivial to predict the spawn point of a holy city. The lack of control is that your citizens can become a different religion than you want them to be. You can't just make a royal decree that everyone follows your religion. Religion put another force on the map that you couldn't just stamp out with a decision.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 03:25 |
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Phobophilia posted:i don't like it because it's a shoddy way to keep the mechanic relevant in the endgame, when everything's been converted. it all comes from the decision to make religion points a separate resource pool: there's nothing to spend them on after a certain time, and turning them into great people is a cop out. because then you simply treat it as a source of great people after a certain point in time Your viewpoints seem internally consistent and well thought out and I'm sure you have good ideas about civ design but I don't think I'm ever really going to be able to personally understand your perspective.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 03:26 |
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The Human Crouton posted:Religion didn't do anything in Civ 4. All I remember is that every religion did the same thing: give you some gold and let you see more tiles. Religion was primarily a political motivator in Civ4, and it did plenty in that regard. Your bedfellows in Civ4 were chosen primarily based on who you shared state religions with, and plenty of civs would get really pissy, really fast if you wouldn't convert to their religion. Phobophilia posted:i don't like it because it's a shoddy way to keep the mechanic relevant in the endgame, when everything's been converted. it all comes from the decision to make religion points a separate resource pool: there's nothing to spend them on after a certain time, and turning them into great people is a cop out. because then you simply treat it as a source of great people after a certain point in time I can't disagree with this. The entire idea of spending faith points on units and buildings always felt weird to me. Maybe something like the Civ4 slider in micro would have worked better: faith income could be converted into hammers, gold, or culture by the cities that produce it based on whatever settings you select, representing religiously-motivated work that your citizens undertake. No accumulation of faith points; they're always automatically converted as they are generated. Then you could have religious tenets that favor one or the other conversion (so e.g. Tithe makes you better at turning faith into gold, Holy Warriors or whatever it's called makes you better at turning faith into hammers for military units). Maybe the special religious buildings like Pagodas could only be built by faith-based hammers -- though obviously they'd have to have a vastly reduced cost in that case. The only problem I have with that idea is that the slider's probably too inelegant for modern Civ. So maybe instead you set the resource balance when you create the religion, and it's fixed for the game?
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 03:37 |
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The Human Crouton posted:Religion didn't do anything in Civ 4. All I remember is that every religion did the same thing: give you some gold and let you see more tiles. It also gave you relationship bonus to civs that shared your religion, and negative relations to those of a different religion. Combined with the way religion spread in Civ 4 (though roads, rivers, coastlines and trade routes) led to organically forming alliances based on geography. In my experience this is way less of a case in Civ5
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 03:49 |
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It also gave you a point of happiness for your state religion and one for each temple of any religion, which was a pretty big deal considering you could only grow to size 4 (5 in your capitol) without luxuries. Speaking of which, I miss slavery and I hope they bring it back Fister Roboto fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Jun 6, 2016 |
# ? Jun 6, 2016 04:04 |
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Wasn't slavery just pressing a button to lose a population and get some production?
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 04:20 |
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The Human Crouton posted:The lack of control is that your citizens can become a different religion than you want them to be. You can't just make a royal decree that everyone follows your religion. Right, thank you for putting that so succinctly. That's what's wrong with religion as a mechanic in Civ, IMO. The whole point of playing Civ is that you're effectively a god. You as leader ARE the civ's religion, the way the game is designed, and having a "your citizens can tell you to gently caress right off because of actions opponent civs take and/or random chance" mechanic violates that.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 04:31 |
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Eric the Mauve posted:Right, thank you for putting that so succinctly. That's what's wrong with religion as a mechanic in Civ, IMO. The whole point of playing Civ is that you're effectively a god. You as leader ARE the civ's religion, the way the game is designed, and having a "your citizens can tell you to gently caress right off because of actions opponent civs take and/or random chance" mechanic violates that. I disagree. Part of the fun is that I'm running a civilization of humans. I should have to manage both external forces created by other civilizations and internal situations created by my citizens.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 04:40 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:06 |
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The Human Crouton posted:Wasn't slavery just pressing a button to lose a population and get some production? And some unhappiness, yes. Part of the reason slavery worked though was that you could grow back from pop 1 to pop 4 pretty quickly. Carefully managing the unhappiness and your cities' populations could get you a lot more hammers than you could get otherwise.
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# ? Jun 6, 2016 04:53 |