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Empiricism and Faith - Mort's Ideologies: Memes and Precepts

Dedicate your society towards finding truth, through either science or religion!

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This mod adds two new memes: Empiricist and Faith.



Empiricists are better at research, have access to the Research Specialist, and get mood bonuses from having an impressive laboratory (and mood debuffs for not having one), but have reduced ideological conversion power. Whether this is because they refuse to make unsubstantiated claims about their ideology to make it sound more appealing, or because they're nerds who spend too much time being shoved in lockers to convince anyone of anything, I leave as a roleplay exercise for the player. Empiricists also have reduced meditation focus gain speed and pruning speed, as both the Psylink and Gauranlen trees naturally resist those who try too hard to understand them.




Faith pawns are excellent at converting others to their ideoligion, and are less likely to be converted to other ideoligions. They also have an improved meditation speed and pruning speed, as their mindset is well-suited to such psychic connections. However, Faith pawns also have a reduced research speed, as they tend not to put as much value on hard evidence as other pawns do.

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The idea behind this mod is to create a more-balanced way of using the Research Speed precepts, which are normally just boring straight buffs or debuffs. In vanilla, this serves less as a way of specializing your society, and more as an awkward difficulty setting. This mod instead adds a set if meaningful debuffs in exchange for that research speed buff, and a set of meaningful rewards for accepting a hit to your research speed. I also wanted to add a way for players to have a tech-themed society without also going full transhumanist - just because you're a techy spacer scientist doesn't necessarily mean you want to replace your limbs.

Have fun reading the convoluted Ideoligion narratives I had to figure out how to write out for theistic empiricists.

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Q&A
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Q: Is this really an accurate representation of Empiricism? Empiricism is about how knowledge comes exclusively from our senses, and is opposed not to religion, but to Rationalism, which claims knowledge is primarily drawn from internal logic.
A: Okay mister philosophy major, but I'm using the more modern use of the term Empiricist to just mean 'using the scientific method and hard data'. More importantly Empiricist just sounds cooler as a meme title than 'Scientific' or whatever.

Q: Why have you put faith and science in opposition to each other, despite religions often being a center of academia throughout history? Do you hate God???
A: Rimworld ideologies are always going to be rough approximations that don't entirely line up with reality. In the broadest sense, the idea behind this mod was to represent the difference between a person who focuses on hard evidence and a person who focuses on devout faith. Both ways of thinking represent different methods of seeking truth, and an evidence-based worldview is probably going to be better at science than a faith-based one. At the very least, this dichotomy often shows up in fiction, and is something that I think people may want to play out in Rimworld. How accurate that dichotomy is to real life would be a matter for the philosophers, and they're apparently too busy debating me in hypothetical arguments about my mods to weigh in.

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Let me know what you think of this mod in the comments! This is a pretty simple mod so it probably won't cause many bugs, but let me know if you run into an issue.