[Mod]Religious Policies Pack(updated: 11 of july)

Hi,
Having recently fallen in love of this game, I have decided to try to mod it by using the Khornel’s modding tool. This is my first ever attempt to mod and I was quite unsure about balancing and how it exactly works.

Edit:Here is the newly updated pack (now a real “pack”!)
religiouspoliciespackv0.5.rar (11.6 KB)

Edit: Here is the updated pack (now a bit bigger!)
religiouspoliciespackv0.3.rar (3.09 KB)

Edit: Here is the updated “pack”(it is still VERY small)
Religious Policies Pack V0.2.rar (7.98 KB)

The concept here is a new policy called Interfaith dialogue subsidies. It is a religious-friendly way to lessen racial tension although it pisses off the patriots.
Interfaith Dialogue V0.1.rar (6.47 KB)

I’m very excited about this game and its possibilities so I’ll try to learn and expand my mod from here. I thought I’d work on religion, a subject that the vanilla game doesn’t really address beside the education.

I’ve added a new policy: scout movements policies.
It’s basically the same policy as youth club subsidies but it profits to the religious and conservative rather than the socialists. It also slightly increase racial tension and helps a bit to fight antisocial behaviour.
I’m still unsure about weither or not it should piss off a bit socialists and/or liberals.

I’ve slightly changed the Interfaith dalogue subsidies to make it help fight race riots.
Icons are still vanilla ones.

Please, let me know if you think it is unbalanced!

I haven’t had a chance to try this out properly yet (though I definitely will and will feed back), but I wanted to say first that I think this is a great idea for a mod, and I hope you develop it further. I definitely think it’d be great to see religion in the game developed further, and see more positive aspect to religion in the game.

  • El

Thank you for your support! I intend to keep up but I’ve never modded before so progress is tedious.

After testing it myself, I noticed I screwed up on the interfaith dialogue policy which currently makes racial tension worse. I also have to understand how to prevent scout movement subsidies to contribute positively to crime rate at low funding.

I also have some plans for further development:
-“Church renovation subsidies”: a policy which would satisfy the religious (and conservative?) and enhance tourism. I’m not sure about who will get pissed off about it: socialists, liberals or capitalists.
-“Organized Secularism subsidies”: a policy which would satisfy liberals and anger religious.
-“Cult minister wages”: an expensive policy vastly satisfying religious and religious income.
-“Church tax”: if it’s possible to link the income of a policy on the membership of a faction.
-“Religious properties tax cuts”: well, the title says it all.
Possibly a “cult” situation created by low education, high crime, organized crime and high degree of religious satisfaction.

Apologies for taking some time to get back to you, but I have some feedback and thoughts now!

I like the Scouting Movement policy, though I think maybe there should be some who dislike it? Perhaps liberals, who might not like the conservative/religious elements. Also, I think the political capital costs associated with it are rather high.

I think the interfaith dialogue has effects that are too weak and/or it costs too much money. At the moment, the size of the effects don’t really make it that worthwhile. Otherwise, I think it’s affecting the right things/people.

I like the descriptions in both cases, which I think nicely describe the policies and positives/negatives, they read the right way.

One thought I had for future development is that I wonder if it might be worth looking at adding some kind of ‘religious tension’ simulation value? For the moment, I think using racial tension makes sense for the moment, but as many situations around the world have shown (e.g. Ireland), a lot of the time these things aren’t down racial lines, so it might be nice to add that as a new thing as you develop more.

On Church tax - it is possible to do this, the variable you need is ‘religious_freq’.

I wonder also if something to do with cults might work well as a dilemma? A new, small religion has proven controversial, do we brand them a cult and investigate them, or do we respect their beliefs, or something along those lines?

Anyway, those are all just thoughts and you should feel free to ignore any and all of them, though I hope at least some of it is useful!

-El

In Ireland’s case class warfare would cover it. If it wasn’t for the discrimination in houses, jobs and votes Catholics and Protestants would have gotten along fine like in the rest of Europe where there wasn’t institutionalised bigotry.

Possibly Ireland isn’t the best example. Look at, for instance, the tension between the Muslim community and Christian communities in England, which are not down clear and simple race or class lines. I would argue that this tension has inspired racism as well, but there at people on both sides of various and overlapping races and classes.

-El

Quick note: I think that the icons_interfaithdialoguesubsidies.dds file is possibly corrupt, it is too small and won’t open in photoshop. it probably needs re-exporting?

Other thoughts:

yes religious tension sounds like a great idea for a simulation value (blue icon), I think you could feed that into situations too, such as religious protests, maybe even riots? (happens in some developing world countries for sure).

also…

I need to correct a common misconception amongst modders. If you want to scale an income/expense or other effect by the size of a group you use _perc, NOT _freq. I know it’s confusing so I’ll explain:

religious_freq is the variable you target if you want to increase or decrease the likelihood of voters being in that group. This pushes up their tendency to affiliate with that group and may push them over the threshold to join it.
religious_perc is a simple measure of what percentage of the population are in that group. it is totally different. They may be ‘born’ into that group, or they may have been pushed into it by a high level of religious_freq.

Hope that makes sense :smiley: Great idea for a collection of mods. let m,e know when it’s finished and I will add it to the list of mods on the website to ensure it has a permanent hosted link.

Thanks for that clarification, Cliffski. That was something I hadn’t appreciated at all! I think I may have made that mistake in my own mods, so I will check and correct if necessary.

-El

Thank you all for your input! It almost feels a bit undeserved (I’ve even seen a mod requiring my mod to work oO) due to how small it is so far. I’m currently going through exams so I won’t be able to work on it for a couple of weeks.

Thank you cliffski for the input on those various elements. It will come very handy! Also, thank you for the offer of uploading it on the website.

Interfaith dialogue is currently broken. I’ve noticed I did something wrong as it currently influences positively racial tension while it should influences it negatively.

The Scouting movement policy was based off the youth club policy. I was going for the idea that scouts don’t anger anyone but talking about it. I feel like it’s one of those questions where you don’t really care about it unless it’s brought to public attention, in which case it becomes more sensible as some people are very attached to it and some people are very reluctant to adapt it. Hence the high political cost.
But perhaps you are right. I guess I can’t escape in all policies the battle between liberals and religious. I’ll try to balance it.

Religious tension is an awesome idea but last time I was working on that mod, I was still a bit far from being able to integrate a working simulation.

After quite a long time, here is a new version of this mod with bugfixing, balancing and additions! This new version includes several new policies:

  • Mandatory religious courses: a nationalist policy introducing mandatory courses of an official religion. Expects liberals and minorities to grind their teeths.
  • Comprehensive religion courses: an expensive policy introducing optional classes of recognized religions and secular morals. Everybody is happy! Except nationalists and the young. (inspired by the system in belgian public schools)
  • Church tax: voluntary tax based on the number of religious citizens. (inspired by the german church tax)
  • Churches renovation subsidies: renovate churches to satisfy religious citizens and help tourism.
  • Organized Secularism: secularists are angry that you pay for religious activities? Pay for theirs too! (inspired by Belgium)

There are no icons at the moment. When there are some, I will try to upload this to the steam workshop.

Any feedback is welcome!

I was pretty motivated today so I made a new update with six new policies and icons! The icons are a bit cheap but I hope they will do for now.

I will upload the mod to the steam workshop too.

Now on steam!

The upload on steam apparently doesn’t work but it works just fine for me. Can anyone help me figuring out how to solve this?