Which features to sidestep?

[eugenekop]

From the reviews I noticed that religion is too tedious to play, so I just won't use it for now. Anything else to ignore for now until DLCs will fix or improve it? I guess I can disable crisis, but this is too central to the gameplay, so I prefer to keep it for now.

[sprenkledavid]

I don't think you can actually "disable" either of those features, and I don't think you'll ever be able to, unless you play a mod down the road. But, as you say, you can certainly "ignore" religion, and it won't impact your game much. You can't "ignore" the crisis period at the end of each Age, since they require you to choose penalties to play with, but many of them aren't all that impactful (like taking a slight happiness hit when you're doing fine on happiness).

[wildcardbitches]

Honestly from reading the reviews it's probably best to sidestep the entire game. Losing ALL progress on anything and all units at an age change LOL. Zero workers, you just pick what you want on a tile and poof it's there LOL. Massive UI issues LOL

[gmsh1964]

In the Pravus Youtube, he runs to religion right away and gets some Missionaries to achieve some goal (I forgot what it was). Once he achieved that goal, he just stopped paying attention to it. Throughout his gameplay, I could see many cities flipped to other religions, but he did not seem to care. So I guess its like CIV 6 in that its still a pain, and maybe you can ignore it because it does not seem to be a victory condition. I guess we will find out once this drops tonight!

[plaguepenguin]

Religion itself is important in the Exploration Age partly because that age's great works, relics, can only be obtained once you get a religion. Getting relics is the way you progress up that age's legacy pathway for culture. Also, capturing cities that you have converted to your religion helps you up the military legacy path.

Legacies you get on the pathways let you get perks that carry over to the next age. Getting more and better such perks than the competition gives you a comparative advantage over them early in the next age, when all of the players have been pared back in many of the game's aspects.

That usefulness in age transitions aside, the relics themselves each have a small happiness and culture yield. The religious buildings also grant happiness and culture. Then there are beliefs that provide perks similar to beliefs in 6, though not clear that any of the beliefs are as nice as Feed the World. The beliefs all seem to grant yields for having cities that follow your religion, thus they create an incentive to build missionaries and do conversions.

So, religion is nice in Exploration, and has this advantage compared to 6, that every civ that builds a temple can get its own religion, and the competition cannot convert your holy city, the one with your first temple that founded your religion. You can ignore it, just as you can in 6. But, as in 6, it can get you some nice benefits. Unlike 6, there is no religious victory in 7,

Religion in the broader sense in this game also suffers from obsolescence. You have pantheons in Antiquity that are similar to pantheons in 6, but they just go away in the transition to Exploration. It is not clear just how much religions go away in the transition to Modern. Clearly relics play no part in getting you up a Modern Age pathway, and they may or may not disappear (not clear from what I've seen). You don't seem to be able to build Modern religious buildings, so all you Exploration Age religious buildings will lose their adjacency bonuses, if not just disappear. Your beliefs seem to just disappear.

This obsolescence factor may be what motivated the reviewer who found religion tedious. People hate it when a game takes something away from them, which is presumably why the age transitions are a controversial feature of the game. They take quite a bit away from you. So, you spend effort in Exploration making and spreading a religion for all the above benefits it gives you in that age, the game rolls over to the Modern, and all you're left with is a bunch of religious buildings that now have subpar yields.

It is possible that the reviewer was also disappointed by the streamlining and simplification of religious conversion. Missionaries are it, the only religious unit, no promotions and no theological combat. The wolfpacks in 6, made up of apostles with different promotions to convert or engage in theological combat, and gurus for healing, and missionaries for miscellaneous, those are just gone from 7. Your missionaries convert cities because your beliefs get you yields from cities following your religion, and the competition tries to convert cities for the same reason.

Tedious as its own separate feature, for sure, but religion is no longer even a pretend, half-way, separate feature as it was in 6, where religious wolfpacks could fight it out in a religious answer to military domination to give you victory, and Feed the World or Work Ethic could get you nice benefits, but for things you really could get otherwise. In 7 religion seems to be something of equally niche importance, useful sometimes for some things, but not really central to the game, with this difference from 6, it is no longer given complex mechanics that puff it up into something that seems to justify being given its own victory condition. That seems, before I've played the game and gotten a better impression, about where religion belongs in this game, a sort of uninteresting side-hustle of importance only in some times and circumstances.

[katzenkrimis]

Originally posted by sprenkledavid:

I don't think you can actually "disable" either of those features.

You can turn off Crises.

Someone was also recently complaining about natural disasters.

You can turn them down to 'light' but you can't disable them.

[gmsh1964]

plaguepenguin -- that was fantastic. Thank you