Ennies and Religion

Howdy folks! I just thought that I'd do a little bit of a write up, show you how the religion mechanics work.

First up: I'm going to be submitting to the Ennies this year! This means that I have until May 1st to get the generator to tip-top condition, as you can only submit in the year of publication- I talked to the fine folk at the Ennies, and explained that the generator has had what could be described as a public beta. They said that it was fine provided that the "full" release is before the entries close.

First off, we have two systems for deciding deity worship that work in tandem; there's the macro level, which deals with sociopolitical and racial demographics, and then the micro, for individual NPCs. I'll describe the macro, since I think it's really cool.

We start with our list of deities. Since they're open-source (and I have friends that are scholars specialising in it), the update will ship with the Greek pantheon. Each deity has its own list of probability modifiers, which can influence how likely they are to be worshiped. At the moment, this includes

• Economic Ideology
• Political Ideology
• Political Source
• Level of welfare, equality, military, punishment, gender makeup, and the other town rolls
• Race

So, if there's an ideology present in the town that particularly gels with a deity, they'll be more likely to worship that deity- if the town is made up exclusively of women, there's a good chance that they'll be worshiping Artemis, and if they're hell-bent on punishment, they're uh... Well, to be honest the Greeks weren't exactly a particularly forgiving lot, so most of them would probably be popular...

Anyways, the first step is to test for racial biases, since those are the easiest- Dwarves and Gnomes are probably most likely to appreciate the work of Hephaestus, whereas Halflings would be drawn to the revelry of Dionysus. We apply the racial bonus as a percentile of each race- if there's a town that's 60% halflings, then the bonus of 40 is ratio'd down to 24, but the few orcs that are huge proponents of Ares will have their 50 bonus portioned down to 1 since they only make up 2% of the population. 

We then apply any of the static bonuses that apply- Democracy loving deities get their democracies, war-loving gods get bonuses if the town is particularly militarily-focused. 

Lastly, there's a runoff- the bottom 60% get zeroed, and then the lowest 4 remaining also take a popularity hit. This is meant to reflect how a faith has to have a minimum number of people worshiping in order to actually be taken seriously. Then, the top two get multiplied, as well as one random one- this isn't a perfect system, but can result in some interesting spreads.