Player created Religions

[Sean289]

I feel that's a good idea like the colour bonus thus making alliances more allied. But I feel you first have to allow them to make their own religon.

[James II]

On 5/8/2018 at 12:19 PM, Alex said:

I think religions being inter-alliance mechanics is more interesting.

One quick thought, let people create their own custom religions, icons and everything, and then tier some sort of bonus based on the total score of all nations in the religion (don't want to do member count, as that creates an incentive to create multis.)

The bonus should have diminishing returns, so that one religion doesn't completely dominate and ruin the point of it. Something I've learned over the years introducing mechanics similar to this.

So maybe top X religions (10, 25, some hard cap so as to prevent "mini-religions" from flourishing. Not that I have anything against new and small player groups, just that at some point it gets too confusing and arbitrary) get some sort of bonus, maybe something new like a population bonus. That would weight religions more toward commerce than resource production, but any nation would benefit from an increased population (more tax revenue.) So maybe a bonus with a formula like:

1.1 - (x^2 / 1000)

And that would be a bonus multiplier to your nation's population. This example formula would be for the top 10 religions. It yields the following table of values:

So as you can see, the 10th ranked religion would have effectively no bonus, and the idea there is that for nations that don't want to participate in the religion part of the game for roleplay reasons or whatever (I imagine someone would make a "None" religion that would make it in the top 10 somewhere) they would have the same bonus as the 10th ranked religion (no bonus). And it scales up with diminishing returns from there, with the #1 religion getting an (almost) 10% population bonus.

Now I know that 10% is pretty hefty, but you'll note that the second religion also gets a near 10% bonus as well, that's the point of the diminishing returns. It would be best to be on top, but if you're at least close to top, the top religion nations won't exactly run away from you, so to speak. It's a good setup for allowing takeovers, comebacks, whatever.

Lastly, with religions I don't think it would make sense to mechanically prevent people from joining a religion. A nation should be able to convert to whatever religion it wants, and so for anyone who just wants to min-max, whatever, you'd probably just pick one of the top religions. For people interested in religion and pushing it on other nations (conquering and converting) you'd have something to fight over and could potentially impose forcing a nation to switch it's religion as surrender terms or whatever.

Anyway, I don't care if this is it, but I think something mechanical similar to this would make things a lot more interesting than just straight custom religion images, which again, you can get with VIP.

I'm for it