[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Religions in freeciv?

[Bernd Jendrissek <berndj@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <fc.005b8f0101a067313b9aca00518b5c35.1a067d3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
"Daniel Speyer" <Daniel_Speyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Christianity?  Do libraries aid Confucianism?  Does war encourage
>Buddhism? or discourage it?  The history of unpersecuted religion is weird
>(e.g. Buddhism gained few converts in India but quickly dominated
>indochina) and I doubt that *anybody* really understands it.  Trying to
>simulate it with any realism is essentially putting it under a randomizer,
>which really isn't fair.

How about making prophets another "player kind"?  Prophets would not be
controlled directly by the nation-players, but rather by players who
have control only over prophets.  Sort of like an orthogonal political
dimension.

Maybe the prophet-players could compete against each other, gaining
converts by all manner of means.  Their source of "income" would be city
improvements like libraries, temples, etc. and maybe happiness.  They
can then "spend" their tributes on gaining new converts, sort of like
going to war against other prophets.

This way religion would not be restricted to the existing real-world
religions, but each religion-player would be able to evolve her/his own
flavour.

Of course, prophets would totally ignore ZOC; probably they should also
be (really) invisible to other units.  Maybe the most direct interaction
they should have with regular players would be travellers' reports of
prophets, and maybe "gifts from the gods" (here, I'll help you with that
cathedral, here are another 100 shields).

>I think that just as you can control the placement of workers, the goal of
>scientest, and city productions in Anarchy, you should be able to control
>the distribution of religions.  Sort of like the tax/research/luxury, you
>can divide your population among as many religions as have been developed.
> Sure governments can't do that, but you're not the government; you're the
>nation (I think).

Yes, although I wouldn't *directly* divide the population into groups.
I'd rather have "religious resources" (whatever they should be) be
allocated among the candidate religions, and let the religion-players
decide how to reward their most loyal nations.

Bernd Jendrissek