Episode: 4250
Title: HPR4250: Playing Civilization IV, Part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4250/hpr4250.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:02:19

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,250, for Friday the 15th of November 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Playing Civilization 4 Part 3.
It is part of the series' computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Awukad, and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we continue our look at the mechanics of this game.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series on computer strategy games, and we're continuing with our look
at Civilization 4.
This will be part 3 of the look at the gameplay.
So we want to focus on this time as religion.
Now in earlier versions of civilization, the role of religion was basically to serve
as the opiate of the masses.
If a city was getting too much unhappiness, you could pacify the citizens by building
a temple or a cathedral, and each one of them would make some number of citizens more
content.
It was never a named religion of any kind, let alone any notion of competing religions.
As you might imagine, that could be a delicate subject, so I can understand why they did
it this way, nevertheless, it is hard to picture the sweep of history without religion
entering into it at any point.
In Civ 4 this begins to change.
There are a number of competing religions, though I don't think what they do is really
competing at this point, that will come later, particularly in Civ 6, but the religions
we have here are Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Taoism.
Now the way you get a religion in the first instance is by being the first player to discover
a key technology.
For instance, the first player to research meditation will get Buddhism.
Well, meditation is a very early tech, so that presents a strategic question for you.
Is researching meditation early on the best use of your scientific research, when techs
like animal husbandry or hunting are out there waiting to be discovered?
For me the answer is often no, and so I'm never really the one to develop Buddhism.
And in any case, one of the AI players will get it pretty quickly.
I may elect to convert to it later, or indeed to any other religion, and that can be beneficial.
In fact I would argue that it doesn't matter in general which religion you end up with,
where the choice of religion really matters the most is in diplomacy, where it can be the
key to either good or bad relations with other players.
So it is a step forward, but not a revolutionary one, in my view.
Now the main benefit to founding a religion is that you get to have a holy city for that
religion.
This does give you some benefit, in that a holy city will receive five culture instead
of the usual one for a city that merely has a religion.
And if you have a holy city, a great profit can be used to build the shrine appropriate
to that religion.
Now there are religious buildings.
When a city adopts a religion, you can build these religious buildings in it.
For all religions, the initial building you can build is a monastery.
Now the monastery will give you an additional 10% science generation in the city, though
that does expire when scientific method is discovered.
You also get two additional culture, and you can build missionaries.
And these benefits do not expire.
Note that you can build a monastery in the city for any religion that is present.
So you could conceivably build seven different monasteries if you had all seven religions.
The monasteries can be built as soon as you discover meditation.
Now, so the first person to discover meditation gets Buddhism, but after that as other players
discover meditation, they gain the ability to build monasteries.
Now the next level from monasteries is the temple.
Every religion can build temples as soon as you discover priesthood.
Each temple adds one additional culture and makes one additional citizen happy.
Also a temple can turn one citizen into a priest who is one of the specialist citizens
you can have.
As with monasteries, you can build a temple for every religion that is present in the city.
Now we're going to talk about specialist citizens more later.
The third level above temple is the cathedral.
Now it's a cathedral if you are a Christian.
It has a different name in other religions.
So for instance, Buddhism, it is the stupa.
Confucianism, it's the academy.
Hinduism, it's the Mandir, Islam, it's the mosque, Judaism, it's the synagogue,
Taoism, it's the Pagoda.
So you can build those, but you can build them twice as fast if you have the right key resource
available.
So for the Buddhism, stupa, the Confucian academy, and the Taoist Pagoda, the key resources
copper.
So if you have copper in your empire, great you do it twice as fast.
For the Christian cathedral, the key resource is stone, the same for the Judaism synagogue.
And then finally for the Hindu, Mandir, and the Islam mosque, the key resource is marble.
Now why would you want to build a cathedral or stupa academy, et cetera?
Well, they offer you a 50% increase in culture in the city and make two citizens happy
if this is your state religion, and make one citizen happy if you have incense available.
And they can turn two citizens into priests.
However, you cannot build as many cathedrals as you can temples.
A temple is required before you can build a cathedral, to be sure, but then it comes
down to one cathedral can be built for every X number of temples, and X is determined
by the map size you're playing on, ranging from two on small maps to four on huge maps.
Now, monasteries, temples, and cathedrals are all buildings you can build if the given
religion is present in one of your cities.
There is an additional level that can be built in holy cities.
Remember, holy city is the one where religion is founded.
So for a holy city, you can build something called the shrine.
Now, each religion has a shrine, particular to it, but you don't build it the way you
build other buildings.
Instead, you have to generate a great profit, and the great profit can be used to create
the shrine.
You basically use up the great profit doing that.
And while each religion has its own name for it's shrine, the effects are the same for
all of them.
You get one added gold per turn for every city following the religion.
It's not just your cities.
You might be able to convert other cities into following the religion, and when we say
a city is following religion, we just mean the majority of the inhabitants are following
that religion.
And then, of course, having the shrine will itself help you to spread your religion, and
a shrine can turn three citizens into priests.
Now, spreading your religion.
If you have invested the resources into building up your religion, you'll probably want to spread
it.
You can do this in several ways, but one of the first ways you can do this is with missionaries.
You can train missionaries as soon as you build a monastery and send them out to spread
the good news.
There are two other ways religion can spread, though.
One is through diplomacy.
When two players are engaged in diplomatic discussions, one of the agreements that can
result is that one player adopts the other player's religion.
This will increase the closeness of the relationship in general, but can also happen when there
is a marked power imbalance such that a strong player can bend the weak player to his will.
But if you had never adopted a religion because you focused on other things, it might be
advantageous, even if you're not a weak player.
In addition to building the relationship, it would unlock some development paths if you
wanted, for instance, to build more temples.
There's also automatic spread.
If there's trade access between your holy city and another city that has no religion present,
there is a chance for your religion to spread to that city.
Or conversely, you might discover that one of your cities just adopter a religion from
a neighboring player, and that might be an example of automatic spread.
The chances of this happening can increase if the cities are close to each other and
will further increase if the holy city has a shrine present.
The other way is to train those missionaries and send them out to spread the holiness to
those heathen savages or even to any of your own cities that don't have a religion yet.
A missionary is a non-military unit that has no military strength, but otherwise can
move around, see things, and so on.
And when it enters a city, which does not have the religion of the missionary, a button
shows up to spread religion.
This will not necessarily have the same result each time since there is a probability of success
based on whether it is your city or another player's city and also based on how many other
religions are present in the city.
And regardless of the outcome, which you choose that spread religion option, the missionary
is consumed and eliminated in the spread attempt.
Now, you can always try with more missionaries, but note that no city can have more than three
missionaries at any one time, counting both the ones that are trained and active, as
well as those in the queue waiting to be trained.
Now, there is also the concept of a state religion, and that is an option you have.
You can declare a state religion.
Now, an example of this would be England, where the Anglican Church is the official state
religion.
You can do this if you have one or more cities following the religion, and this can give
you additional benefits.
Each city following the state religion will have one additional happy citizen, or two additional
if you have a cathedral of the religion present, and will generate one additional culture
per turn.
But in addition, you can have added effects from certain civics and wonders.
If you have the organized religion, civic, every city following the state religion will
have plus 25% production for buildings and wonders.
With the theocracy, civic, you get two additional experience for all military units produced
in the city, and with the pacifism, civic, you get plus 100% great person points produced.
For the wonders, the Sistine Chapel produces cultural bonuses, the University of San
Corps produces science bonuses, and the spiral minaret produces gold bonuses when they are
built by a player that has a state religion.
So should you invest a lot of energy into promoting a religion?
That depends on how you are trying to win the game.
Recall that with Civ 4, you now have more options than just military conquest or the space
race.
This will get better in future versions, but in this version it opens up some interesting
options.
You can always just ignore religion, and you can be successful.
But religion is in the game, and your cities will adopt religions even if you take no action
to promote it.
There is no such thing as a religious victory in Civ 4 that comes in later versions of
civilization.
But you can use religion to aid in your quest for victory.
The most important place where religion is useful is in attaining a culture victory.
When you see how all of your monasteries and temples produce additional culture and
that you can build them in any city where that religion is present, you can see how this
adds up.
Then adopt state religion, build the sistine chapel, and you get an additional boost.
Adopt the pacifism civic, and you can double the production of great persons.
And many of those will be great artists since you are on a culture path.
Now if you are going for a military type of victory, religion can be useful as well.
Monasteries give a science boost, and you need science to produce the best units.
And the added happy citizens from religious buildings can counteract the war weariness
that might otherwise hamper your military campaign.
And if you have a state religion and adopt the theocracy civic, all of your units will
be more powerful right from the start.
Now for my part, I don't find that I know enough to predict what kind of victory I will
go for in the early game, which is when religions are generally discovered.
Well I don't usually make a b-line for a religion, but it is an important part of the game
and you should learn to use it to your advantage.
So this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio signing off and encouraging you as always to support
free software.
Bye bye.
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