Godly Spies

There’s a nice article about the upcoming Civ 5 expansion on IGN highlighting the new features.

Each religion gets to pick a single Founder Belief, two Follower Beliefs and an Enhancer Belief (the Enhancer and second Follower Belief are established with a second Great Prophet later in the game). The Founder Beliefs are benefits that affect you, the founder. For instance you might gain culture for every single city that follows your religion. The Follower Beliefs apply to any city owned by you or another civ that follows your religion, often giving benefits like increased city growth. This might mean that people will want to adopt your religion, or that you might want to adopt theirs, because the benefits are just that good.  And finally there are Enhancer Beliefs, which directly influence the spread of your religion, giving stats like +30% distance that your faith will spread, or maybe giving you a benefit to attacking a city that follows your religion. Just like the Pantheon beliefs, all others are only selectable by a single civilization, so there’s a reason to rush to found a religion.

I like the sound of this design for the religion system. It avoids any judgment about any particular religion while still giving the concept some interesting mechanical benefits. You can even create your own. The Cult of Wayne or Jediism here we come.

Of course, a lot will depend on what these founder and follower benefits are. If only a handful have any value, then it really will be just a race to found first so you can get the uber combination. But I suspect there will be many different combinations depending on the style of the game.

It’s unclear if cities can follow multiple religions, or how the civilization traits, such as free religion, will affect this system. In Civ 4, having multiples caused conflict in a city, unless you had free religion. But I’m not thinking it will work that way this time.

The espionage system also plays into how you’ll achieve victory in Gods and Kings. Once you hit the Renaissance period, your civilization gains access to its first spy. Each spy is an individual, complete with a name and the ability to level up. Spies become important in the later game because they not only allow you to steal technologies from your friends and enemies, but also to gather intelligence on what they’re working on. Spies can also work inside city-states, rigging elections (important if you’re looking for a political victory). But would-be 007s have to be careful, since every civ can install their spies inside their own cities to act as counter-agents. As you’d expect, having a spy caught in a foreign city wreaks havoc on your relationships.

I’ve not been a huge fan of the previous espionage systems in Civ. But the ones where you had an actual spy unit were always preferred. Being able to promote the unit and specialize them sounds really cool. So I am actually excited by this feature.

It’s just to bad we still have a month to wait before the game comes out. That’s to far to be excited to play, but not far enough that I have any real chance of finishing writing book 3. Either I have to wait even longer to play, or accept that my productivity may decrease. Assuming I even have any once the wife is back at work and I’m home with the baby all day alone.