(This is a continuation of my reply to the recent thread about the Civilization series.)
It's got some issues with, for lack of a better term, historical accuracy. There's some weird dodgy stuff in the tech tree. You may try to scoff and say that it's just a game, it's not meant to be accurate. Yeah, of course not, to a certain point. Old Man Redactor once saw me playing Darklands and pointed out that if you just changed the data files you could use the same engine to make a game about running a laundromat. What elevates games over spreadsheets is that there's some kind of story that it's telling you where the numbers mean something. In Civ, that story is history in general, so it had darn well better at least feel like it has to do with history.
I only realized later that actually my father is a Satanist who was trying to drive me away from good Christian games. One day on the solstice he made carry a bunch of 1-gallon milk jugs full of blood (I dunno what kind) from the garage to the trunk of his old Honda. Then he got in and it flew away into the night. That's when I put two and two together.
The way religion is handled I think is pretty butt-backwards. In the original Civ, it's all abstract. You build a temple and that's it, it's assumed that it's a temple for whatever these people believe in. It doesn't really matter what religion it is because, for the purposes of the game of Civilization, people from different religions act pretty much the same for the most part because we're all human.
The other approach you can take is what they do in Europa Universalis. (I dunno if they still have the guts to do this but they did when I played it.) Where you decide which religions are good or bad and give them bonuses and penalties. This obviously has some disadvantages. Like it's really fricking obvious what's going on when the game is made in Sweden and the good religions that get bonuses are in northern Europe. You can't get away with that if you're making a game outside of an extremely ethnocentric culture like Sweden.
Swedes always score themselves as the happiest country on Earth when they make those rankings, yet all the Swedes I know complain about how their husband just drinks all day and won't do anything even though she physically beats the shit out of him. Curious.
Civ IV tried to have their cake and eat it too but you end up with nothing and you're still hungry. The religions use the superficial trappings of ones from the real world but in gameplay terms they're completely generic with nothing differentiating them except which tech activates them. If they're generic why do we need them? Why not just leave it completely abstract like in Civ I? If we're assigning them to real world religions, why don't we give them their own special bonuses like we do with different civilizations?
The approach in Civ IV is kinda stupid both in terms of gameplay and theme. You might as call the religions pokemon because you're best off just collecting them all. Each one in a city adds happiness and gives you the opportunity to build more improvements. Honey, please. This is a stupid gameplay mechanic where you're encouraged to build missionaries to convert all your cities and build the same improvement several times for each religion. I consider this to be what Soren Johnson (designer of Civ IV) himself called a "degenerate strategy" in his seminal piece "Water Finds a Crack". You're doing something that's stupid and not interesting because the game rewards you for it. There's no interesting choices going on here. The other gameplay impact religion has is that basically it makes some of the AI civilizations hate you for no reason. This was obviously intended to stop you from just turtling and being friends with everyone, but it's annoying when you're left with fewer options to pursue in diplomacy.
In terms of history, this is all really stupid. Religious diversity works in America because the Founding Fathers designed our nation around it. In the rest of the world in the rest of history, having many different religions in one city is not a recipe for everyone to love each other. Let's look at the late 1500s, when religion was perhaps the most important in history that it's ever been. You had stuff like Protestant mobs surrounding the convent and yelling lewd suggestions of what the nuns should do. Today in Beirut they've got 15 religious sects and it's not giving them +15 happiness points. It's giving them continuous simmering animosity. Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, great cities that have "stood the test of time" like the ones represented in Civilization are not finding that diversity is their strength. By ignoring these real issues, I feel that Civ IV is demeaning both to America, where we actually solved them to some extent, and to the poor bastards living in those shithole countries where they have to deal with sectarian bullshit on a daily basis.
In 1976 the Lebanese decided that their happiness bonus from being multicultural society was so great that they asked the Syrian Army to come and violently put down sectarian violence experience it for themselves.
Also, what do you do with the Jews and Hindus? If you're putting real world religions into the game they're incredibly important so you have to include them, but they're not like the other ones featured in the game. They're not sending missionaries around trying to convert people. So what do you do? Write special rules for them? Who's gonna do that? You'd need to hire some guy from Hebrew University who also loves 4X to do any justice to it.
Now this is a nice campus.
The way that religion affects diplomacy in the game is stupid in the other direction. Countries won't make alliances with the "infidels"? How fricking naive do you have to be? Are like 4 fricking years old? Let's look at the late 1500s again. I don't have the book at hand at the moment, so this is from memory, but there was an alliance against the Hapsburgs that was something like this: Sweden, Denmark, England, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Morocco, Algeria, various parts of Italy, and the Ottomans. They'd have added the Moros in the Philippines if they had better communications technology. In Lebanon they've gone through every possible combination of different sects allying with each since 1975. Most hilariously the Druze who have been both allied with and fought everyone else at least once since then. The elites running the country or the faction usually don't give a shit about sectarian hatred except as a tool they can use to manipulate the plebs.
Sana'a Mehaidli. Carried out a suicide bombing against the Israeli occupation force in 1985. I guess nobody ever told her that as a Christian she wasn't supposed to be on the same side as Muslims. 
Which takes me back to my original point about how Sid Meier did it with generic temples. It's not because he's some atheist who hates religion. (He's actually a Christian of the actually going to church kind btw.) It's because trying to fit too much low-level detail about religion into a 4X game is really tricky and probably won't work in terms of gameplay or theme. I've always had a strong impression that this feature was basically put in because there was a feeling among (mostly atheist) 4X fans that religion was a big thing in history so we need a gameplay mechanic for it. And my feminine masculine intuition is rarely wrong.
After all this time I spent writing this I really feel like... starting up a new game of Civ IV. It's a great game. 
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Civ IV party on rDrama
Finally a Sid and Soren themed website 
Civ IV religions do leave a lot to be desired, but it gets credit for being the first civ game to really have religion. Each religion is just a superficial trapping as you said, but whether you have a religion or not is very important. The religious civics only work if you have one, so that's the difference between bonuses like faster building construction or free xp for military units vs getting nothing
These bonuses are so strong that they force players who don't found religions to adopt existing ones. Even taking on your rival's religion is worth it if the alternative is nothing.
This in turn answers the question of why one civ would ever take another's religion. It's part of the meta so you kind of have to lol
Of course, if you are the one to found a religion, you're getting a considerable amount of income per turn from having the holy city shrine plus free good relations with other civs of the faith. These bonuses require you to actually spread that faith though, so now you're on the grind churning out missionaries when you might have otherwise focused your production on something else.
The Apostolic Palace from BTS is very interesting because it's like a medieval UN (And I'm not sure why they never brought it back
) You can use it for a diplomatic victory, ending the game before the renaissance even starts! But that requires a hustle since multiple civs have to adopt your religion for that to be viable.
So religion does a lot for the gameplay of Civ IV, and it even recreates historical behaviors -- founder civs have every reason to furiously convert others and deny blasphemers, other civs willingly convert if they didn't get their own religion not unlike how "organized" religions almost universally displaced ethnic pagan faiths in the late classical/medieval period.
But I do agree that the RP potential is limited. The customizable religions from Civ V were pretty cool. The mechanic just needs to be in a better game
On that note, there are two Civ IV mods that did religion really well, and in two very different ways too.
Dawn of Civilization
So Rhye's and Fall is a mod that turns Civ IV into an Earth history simulator instead of a sandbox. You're always on an Earth map. Civs spawn where and when they're supposed to, so for example no America until the 18th century. AIs are programmed to follow history i.e. the Euros will colonize the world roughly how each country did irl and an abundance of defensive pacts starting in the late 19th century eventually cause global wars.
I could write a whole post about this really and I feel the need to apologize for underselling it. If it sounds unbalanced there are a number of mechanics to help later civs catch up. It's still kind of unbalanced, but now in a fun way
You have to believe me when I say a lot of the !historychads (I apologize for a vidya ping) on this site would probably love it.
RFC programmed each civ to be biased towards its actual religion. The spiritual continuation Dawn of Civilization takes this even further and actually does force the Civ IV religions into their historical niches. AI civs are programmed to trigger the religions about when they came about in history, and they're now soft locked to parts of the map (For example Judaism is almost always in Jerusalem and same with India and Hinduism) Holy cities can't be razed anymore so they become the centers of longstanding religious quarrels and you can't just cut the knot there. Smaller religions like
, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism are harder to convert to so they don't spread unrealistically, but the player can still spread them by force of will 
Hinduism/Buddhism and Confucianism/Taoism can coexist without a diplo penalty. Some religions have unique spawn conditions, for example Buddhism appears automatically when a Hindu temple is first built and Taoism requires a tech and for a civ with that tech to own a city in the Confucian map zone.
Christendom is extra interesting because the religion simply called Christianity was replaced by the three denominations. The religion first appears as Orthodoxy with all the Roman world as its new flip zone. But when there are more Orthodox cities outside of the control of Christian civs than inside (usually caused by Rome collapsing -- civs in RFC/DOC can actually collapse
-- or the Arab conquests) or when an Orthodox civ that doesn't control the holy city first builds a cathedral, the Great Schism happens and Catholicism steals western Europe. Much later in the Renaissance, Protestantism is founded with a tech and immediately causes a semi-scripted Reformation. Catholic loyalists have to declare war on new Protestant civs to keep it from spreading in their cities. Tolerating the religion keeps the peace but causes Catholicism to be replaced randomly in your cities. Fully Protestant civs go to war with the loyalists but get free money from looting Catholic monasteries 
Of course by this point the civs will have colonies and their own politics going on, so the resulting war can shake up the world.
Every civ also has a default pagan religion, which is what you are if you leave "no religion" selected. It's a nice new mechanic for the ancient civs because it lets you build things like temples, so now even the Aztecs and Inca can get the culture and happiness from those buildings without having to wait for Columbus to bring them an old world faith. Organized religion "beats out" paganism as it spreads, with pagan temples even being abandoned when any religion spreads to a city, but it's nice that some religious benefits can now be enjoyed from the get go. It's also interesting that literally every civ, even late spawning ones, has a pagan religion as a "back up" (The Ottomans inherit Tengrism from their Central Asian ancestors, America and Canada inherit Druidic shamanism from England, Mexico can revert to Aztec sacrifice, etc.)
Finally DoC introduces the religious victory, with every organized religion having unique conditions to be fulfilled. The fun thing is that you can pick which civ you think would be best for each religion's win. Like maybe you think America would offer better advantages for a Catholic or even Buddhist victory, but you'd have to grind to set that up. Each pagan faith also has a victory, so you can change history be refusing to ever convert (or just win the game early as an ancient civ) Lastly there is a secular victory for taking the late game secularism civic and rejecting the non-euphorics
Fall from Heaven
The other mod goes in the opposite direction of realism but addresses each Civ IV religion being mechanically identical. FFH is a high fantasy mod based on the guy's longrunning DnD campaign. The gameplay changes to the Civ formula here are incredible even if you can't get into the writing (Which I actually really like
)
Regarding religion, each one gives you tons of extra and unique content like units, buildings, wonders, OP hero units, and even powers. The evil Heck religion gives you rewards for bringing about Armageddon, which is its own huge thing in the mod. A Cthulhu religion can brainwash away unhappiness. Council of Esus is like a secret Illuminati UN that only these civs benefit from (and your true religion is hidden on the diplomacy screen) The wood elf Fellowship of Leaves makes forests into good tiles and spawns Treants, etc.
Another mod quirk is that the good, evil, and neutral thing from DnD is applied to entire civilizations. The evil devil religion and good knightly religion allow you to change your side and shake up the formula, and the mod even comes with appropriate unit graphics. Even the Orc and literal Demon civs can adopt the The Order, at which point you do indeed get Orcs and Demons in spritely Don Quixote armor.
More so than any official Civ game to come out even since, FFH makes your choice of Civ really alter your gameplay experience and the religions dial this up even further. As the FFH community says, there are really seven different versions of each civ in the game -- one for each religion you could adopt.
!g*mers Come learn more about the complexity of Civ IV's still active modding community
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Civ VI was also better at throwing on constraints toward conquering. Each city would increase your social policies and technology increments, so you couldn't steamroll everyone simply by grabbing cities. You had to carefully choose some to raze.
Civ 5 and 6 throw all that out because
it's too hard! (for whiny cute twinks).
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Civ 5 had happiness to do that, and the entire game revolved around founding as many cities as possible while keeping your happiness net positive. Basically this means every city needed a new luxury resource.
Civ 6 still has this to some extent, but if you don't play it or you're bad at it maybe you wouldn't notice. The luxury resources only have a limited quantity so if you build a bunch of cities you don't have enough luxuries to go around, which results in lower amenities in those cities. The punishment is not as much of a cliff as Civ 5 (where I think you went from +0% growth to -75% growth with a single point of unhappiness, I forget the details) and it's not really shown in the top info bar so if you're not paying attention you wouldn't notice it. Civ 6 takes it further and gives you a bonus for extra amenities though.
I remember Civ 4 having that mechanic about social policies but tbh I haven't played that shit since Civ 5 fully released (with all expansions) and it was much better. I just remember Civ 4 retaining that dumb shit from the older games where you'd just create death stacks and go steamroll shit. At least in Civ 5/6 you need some amount of tactics (Civ 6 made it much easier w/ corps/armies/fleets/armadas letting you sorta stack shit with obvious limitations).
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No it fricking streamlined all constraints from previous games into one global "Happy Face" resource so r-slurred babies could understand it, it was fricking SHIT
Shooting an arrow over a unit is not rich tactical gameplay and tactics do not mesh with strategy on a global map
You were probably playing on Chieftain
SHIT post SHIT 5cel apologia
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yet another one filtered by having to worry about local terrain features around the battlefields they fight on
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Civ4:
Civ5:
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When they got rid of attack and defense stats for units, it made it extra r-slurred. Should've kept that, and the 1-unit per tile mechanic.
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Ranged units effectively have that - they have a separate (melee) combat rating that's typically quite a bit lower than the ranged combat rating.
I'll argue it wouldn't make much sense for them to have separate attack/defense stats for melee units though, with the lack of unit stacking. There's already different melee classes (melee vs "anti-cavalry") and adding more ("defense") would be weird to deal with without unit stacking. Short of defending cities or other static points, I don't think defense melee units would have any purpose in an offensive army, unless civ 4 and below where they do because they're needed to defend a giant stack.
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The funniest part about this is that siege units don't exhibit ZOC.
Didn't Civ 4 not even have ranged units? I seem to remember all units being the same melee units. Very tactical bb.
With Civ 6 this isn't the case, for example artillery can fire 2 tiles away (except if you have observation balloons then you get an extra tile) so you don't need to march your long-range artillery right up to the city gate to hit it. Because that's r-slurred. But I guess that's why r-slurs like u like it bb.
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Any time I talk with a 5cuck I come to realize pretty quickly they literally never played 4. Maybe you played it once when you were 6 or something and have a vague memory of moving a warrior around for 10 turns.
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okay bb pls enlighten me
which units in civ 4 can attack without being in melee range?
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The amenities are hardly a constraint and were harder in Civ 4. Remember hygiene/health? There's nothing like that in Civ 5+.
Yeah that's teh only improvement for Civ 5 and 6. That's it though.
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I legitimately didn't and had to look it up lol, it's been a long time since I played civ 4.
Looks like just a soft limit on city growth, much softer than the older games (never played 3 but 1 and 2 had a similar "happiness" mechanic which was far more punishing). Amenities are still pretty punishing in Civ 6 though, if you're negative then city growth is cut by 75% I think, which makes them really slow to grow, plus I think there might be production/science/etc. penalties that mirror the buffs you get with larger positive amenities. They also cause loyalty issues for border cities.
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It's -10% when you're at -2. I'm playing on Deity too. That may be only science, prod, etc though.
Maybe growth is cut more, but that's a good thing since you don't want more growth when you lack the amenities. I remember how bad that can spiral out of control on Civ 4.
Loyalty is -3 which is alright. Always helps to starve them out while seiging anyway.
It's all very manageable. The game's a breeze compared to 4.
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That was interesting. Thank you and Redactor both for your posts
I've got 800 hours in Civ V and 31 in VI. I should play IV some day.
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You should fire up DOSBox and play the real thing, kid.
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Digging these posts on Civ IV maybe I should try it
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Absolutely. Just plan on using some vacation time first.
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