Religions!

What would you like to see in Freeciv? Do you have a good idea what should be improved or how?
Sereniama
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Re: Religions!

Post by Sereniama »

heilkitty wrote:
Arbogast wrote:"Becasue civilization should be free!"
Free of politics, religion or race.
That's why Freeciv is progressing.
This is a game depicting states fighting each others and killing dudes in the process. It can't be free of politics at least.
Anyway, religions are good for modeling international relations (alliances, holy wars and stuff) and happiness (by good I mean, gameplay becomes more complex and, potentially, more interesting and maybe realistic). Dunno why everyone became so politically correct all of a sudden.
PS Although, it don't make much sense to introduce religions into game without advanced government system, IMHO.
Well, Religion is apart of humanity whether you like it or not. Religion is pretty much our power of curiosity, and to keep our spirits high. Religion was added to Civ 4-5 to spice up the game for Holy wars and such. I'd love to play my Liechtensteiners as Confucists and conquer the heathenish Islamic Incas, or the Christian Mayans or Hinduist Zulus! Confucianism shall be spread across the land. Just imagine the possibilities!

In addition, Custom Religions can be added, so you can have Cthulhuist Americans or Satanist Papals.
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Alien Valkyrie
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Re: Religions!

Post by Alien Valkyrie »

Sereniama wrote:so you can have Cthulhuist Americans
Yes. You convinced me. I am for religions now.
Also, since they will probably go to the experimental ruleset first(like most new features), there will be enough time to test and balance them.
~ AVL
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Arbogast
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Re: Religions!

Post by Arbogast »

As a reminder, there was a Tileset with heavy religious overtones available a few years back.
It has been deleted everywhere -not just *.freeciv.org- although some traces can still be found elsewhere. It was a beautiful Tileset with good overall improvements except for that darn religious angle. And I am glad it's been nixed!
sveinung
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Re: Religions!

Post by sveinung »

cazfi wrote:We should not make statements about religions by implementing rules that "religion x is so much better at y that it gives bonus z".
Agreed. Taking (or appearing to take) positions on that kind of issues is a can of worms we shouldn't open. Driving people away isn't the only issue. The quality would suffer if bonus X was added to real world religion Y in a rule set distributed with Freeciv. The huge flame war about what effects each religion has, what granularity to choose when dividing them and what should and shouldn't be considered a religion would hopefully stop it. If it didn't the support would probably end in a compromise. A compromise will suffer from not stepping on toes even before the patches to "fix" it starts coming in... (Rule sets distributed and developed outside Freeciv could of course avoid this problem)

Arbogast: When you read the rest please remember that I'm not a native English speaker. It is hard to express disagreement in a way that is accurate and that sounds polite when you don't master a language well enough. To make up for that I have tried to flatter you by using French examples*.
Arbogast wrote:Free of politics, religion or race.
I agree that Freeciv shouldn't take positions on those issues. (Cult of Reason, Cult of the Supreme Being, Laïcité, Roman Catholicism and Calvinism are all positions.*) When that is said 100% neutrality is impossible. In the civ2 rule set time is counted BC and AD. In the default rule set it is counted BCE and CE. In alien it is counted BGE and GE. Each way of counting has its own religious implications. A religious idea they all share is the Christian idea of linear time. In the story line of the alien rule set you will see many religious ideas (that are common in science fiction). Take a look at any rule set to see the consequences of the various governments. Take a look at everything a player can or can't do. The only way to create a truly neutral game is to remove the story AND the game play. That is: not create it at all.
Arbogast wrote:There is NO such thing as a Fictional Religion.
There is. If you make up a religion and no one, including your self, believes it that religion is fictional. If someone would start to believe it the religion would no longer be fictional but the religion would still be fiction (since you made it up).
Arbogast wrote:That sounds like fanaticism to the power of 10.
The intention behind a feature like that is to be able to model "fanaticism to the power of 10" in the game. An example of where it could be useful is in a scenario with a custom rule set based on the French revolution.* It can be used to model what the Committee of Public Safety did to those that refused to convert. Note that someone playing or creating a rule set like that say as little about their real life positions as someone reading or writing a novel about it.

* I see your location is in France. I therefore assume you are French. I really hope you French feel as flattered when a foreigner know stuff about France as most of my country men are when foreigners know stuff about Norway. If not I just wasted the time I spent on Wikipedia checking that my memory was correct.
Last edited by sveinung on Mon Oct 07, 2013 1:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
cazfi
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Re: Religions!

Post by cazfi »

sveinung wrote: I really hope you French feel as flattered when a foreigner know stuff about France as most of my country men are when foreigners know stuff about Norway.
Say something flattering about Finland, and my morning newspaper will have headlines like "World-known Norwegian says that Finland..." (Actually, while Finns consider us as part of the same Nordic family, I've heard that Finns have quite a bad reputation in Norway (it's not like those heading to Norwegian oil-drilling platforms were typically the more civilized ones))
Sarilho1
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Re: Religions!

Post by Sarilho1 »

I like really like this idea. There is some more:
1. It's easier to have relations with nations that share the religion than with countries with different religions. (already suggested)
2. It could have percentages of citizens by religion, for any city. The percentage would be based on the history of the city, migrations... In non secular states, if a majority of the city has X religion and the official country religion is Y, some unhappiness would be generated.
3. A nation, initially secular, could choose remain in that way or change (the same way governments are changed, with a special religious anarchy). Secular states are good when negotiating with religious nations, because they cause no penalty. But there is also no advantage!
4. The possibility of religious revolts, that could be applied in 2., 5. or 6.
5. It could be possible to change the official religion of the nation, but this would cause unhappiness if the new religion is different of the religion of the majority of people. (This could be a useful way of improve relations with neighbors that now share the same religion).
6. A spy could make religious minorities in cities to revolt.

Religions had a major role in human history. Most of the times, allied with social problems, or political interests.

[quote="Arbogast"]"Becasue civilization should be free!"
Free of politics, religion or race.
That's why Freeciv is progressing.[quote]
How can you say that, when you use different forms of government as you wish (politics) and when there are proposes to create ethnic groups - for example the French that may be conquer by the nation Spain, but they still exist as a people - (that's a form of race). Making this featuring in Freeciv is not discrimination, but represent the reality as it is or it was (historically).
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GriffonSpade
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Re: Religions!

Post by GriffonSpade »

So long as the religions are primarily an arbitrary designation, and their actual name has no effects, it'd be a good expansion. The only major divide I could see being important is whether the religion is polytheistic, monotheistic, atheistic, or otherwise, in which case it would change which buildings, technologies, or effects it affects.
archeologistfossils
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Re: Religions!

Post by archeologistfossils »

very cool.
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