Many of you have met nothing but various forms of Polytheism and Shamanism, leaving the religions followed by the different empires to blur together. The historic religions and their unique Holy Sites, meanwhile, remained largely unnoticed. In an earlier version of the game, these were adopted as a Tenet, so both players and the AI would pick them up as they developed their religion to get more Holy Sites. When we separated Historic Religions and Tenets to give players more flexibility, the Historic Religions unfortunately faded into the background. With the Vitruvian Update, we want to bring them back to the foreground.
To that end, we are introducing two changes:
Firstly, AI players will adopt historic religions, changing the name of their state religion and the appearance of its Holy Site accordingly. With this change, you should no longer see Shamanism and Polytheism everywhere in the world until the very end of the game.
Secondly, we noticed that many players had trouble finding where to adopt historic religions or did not realize this was even possible. To make this feature easier to notice and use, we have made some changes to the tenet screen. Adopting the name and Holy Site of a historic religion will now have a dedicated button, instead of turning the name of your religion into a dropdown menu as before. Furthermore, the tenet effects will be displayed in their own dedicated box to show their effects and description.
That’s it for the last of our previews of the Vitruvian Update, but this is by far not the last improvement we have in mind for the future of the game. So, stay tuned for news about future updates!