Not to mention holy wars.  The question would be, how would one choose to be a religious or secular society, and what would the full consequences of being either be?

Personally I think an event chain would probably better represent it (and enable the AI to better cope with it).  Religion giving various bonuses to loyalty and morale from similar religion people, while secularism assists with research and money making.  However a religious society should have certain benefits like being able to actively spread their religion and influence the spread of all religions within their own territory, wheras a secular society, while less prone to religion overall, is less capable of dealing with religion as a disruptive force.

I'm curious to see how much religion plays.  I would have otherwise said "no, no religion.   we'll save that for a different game" but considering the importance of family, perhaps it will have a place after all.

I think religion should be some sort of initially set scenario condition and not some crazy mutating monstrosity like in civ. So maybe civs that are set to have similar religions will have improved relations and can fight holy wars together. Manually spreading your religion and always having it get in the way of diplomacy was just too cumbersome. I think in Elemental the player should have the option to not have his game's diplomacy centered around religion and simply omit it from the world.

An interesting thought, Lomion, and one that could easily be expanded into something really cool. As you say: It's not a stretch imagining, that people would worship an immortal sovereign wielding immense magic!

 

My early thought go a little like this: Religion could be a tech-branch starting with something like proclaiming yourself a God. This could then be expanded with techs such as theology, priesthoods and so on. In this way, religion would be a "generic tech-strat" that a player could go for. When proclaiming yourself a God, you would have the opportunity to name your religion (in the way of "making the world your own" concept). The religion tech tree could then provide bonuses: on top of my head, things like: resistance to foreign influence, expansion of own influence (perhaps with missionary tech?), it could boost the magic affiliated with your life/death choice (not the other elements though)(again through some teching?), give morale boosts to battles if the army had (magically empowered?) priests in the army.

 

The way I see it, this wouldn't make religion unbalanced, as it would just be another optional tech-strat. And it would make for some epic scenes as two players, both opting for religious doctrine could easily become enemies. Maybe there ought to be some victory condition relating to this choice. Victory Condition: Become God-Emperor of the World. Has a nice ring to it, eh?

Goodmorning all,

So i've been given this some thougth,  and since nobody added any questions, i'll set up and answer my own.

I propose that beliving in something be moddled in the game by being willing to preform a ritual.  The question isn't if you believe or don't belive i the channler (who is very nice and gives you extra tip when you serve them dinner at the local pub), but are you willing to take time out of your day (and possibly your own money to buy supplies) to preform a ritual in his/her name? In general the answer to that question is yes, since the channler gave life to the land, you kindof owe him one.  So the question of religion becomes who, if anybody does a citizen believe they owe thanks to, and how many times will they do the ritual? Unswayed people will not do it at all,  zealots will do it 3 or 4 times each day(this allows research to have an effect, more later), 

One of the nice things about this system is if you want to turn religion 'off' nobody does the rituals and there is no question of religion, (or everybody does the ritual of thier channler and it's just a static effect that you can't change by research or missionary work).  It should be noted that this would not have to be moddled on a citizen by citizen bacis, a town can have an average which all the citizenes of the town share of 1/turn, or 1.4/turn which can be made to go up and down.

Sure, if you can do the same ritual 2ice, you can do a ritual for one channler, and another for a second channler. You can even have a few 'true' gods (probably one per race and or one for life and one for death) which all members of that race also can choose to do rituals for.  [i would suggest that the positive effect of belive for rituals aimed and channlers be linear, while that of belife aimed at gods be geometric (start negligable, grow faster for each additional beliver, till much much more powerful, but needs a lot more rituals before breaking even)].

Rituals would have more or less then 5 stats,  length,  difficulty, power delivered, cost, tangible benifit to person preforming the ritual.

Each Channler/diety/whatever starts the game with a long and difficult, ritual that require expencive reagents, and provides very little power to the target.  I you choose to procue religious power, you would improve your ritual,

makeing it shorter would allow it to be done more often,
making it easier would allow it to succed more often and citizens would be more willing to bother (higher acceptance rate)
making it more potent would obviously make it more worth while to you to see that it is taken up

making it cheeper would boost the acceptance rate,
and giving it a tanglble benifit would greatly incease the acceptance rate, enough to send it to cities you don't control directly. (rituals can be effected by a global spell, that benifits those who do the ritual, say, if you do the ritual you can set the temperature of your boots for a day.[nice warm feet even in the coldest of nights yay... whatever]).

 

You get the bonus/power that the other channler would have got, had they done the other ritual.

Your a world changing channler, who forces his/her will on nature and bends it to conceed defeat, you don't need the petty prayers of the bairly trained masses.  A POX on them all . . . (or words to that effect)




This is not ofcours a complete system yet,  but it's a starting point.  What does everybody think.
are they any general effects that religion should have that this system lacks? does it fit with the precieved framework of WOM?

I welcome thoughts and critizims,

Take care all 

Robbie

Here's how I'd like religion to be handled in Elemental, in too many games the creation and spread of religion is entirely up to the player or rival nations determined by who researches what tech first. What I want to see is for certain NPC city states to crop up randomly over the course of the game or already exist in small "oasis" like areas in the gameworld. These powerful cities will be home to a few heroes and have a powerful army and maybe a specific guardian creature to make them an impossible target early game. Through random events these cities will evolve a religion based on their culture and/or guardian creature and start spawning missionaries that travel the world and spread them to your cities, it can also be spread if you have a working trade route to these cities and once established they confer advantages and disadvantages to your cities, for example having a good and evil religion present in the same city will cause unrest.

 

Religions could be based on race, for example an elvish form of buddhism or a cult of demon worshipping orcs who sacrifice children (reducing population growth) or just worship of a particular power or creature (dragon cult, philosophical differences). The players role will be to choose whether to embrace a religion to court power and unique spells from demons or convince a dragon to join you if enough of your people worship it. Or perhaps just a philosophy to give your troops the morale boost that comes with believing in a higher power. The possibilities are endless in this fashion and I think it could really add a great deal to the game.