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C15's Advanced Religious Preferences

This mod improves on Firaxis' code for determining what Religion an AI Player should pick if their Preferred Religion has been taken without interfering with the expected behaviour in the case where the Preferred Religion is available.

In Firaxis' code, the response to a Preferred Religion being taken is to iterate through the Religions in a fixed linear order until a valid candidate is found. This functions sufficiently well in the base game, where the small number of Religions and thus higher chance that a given Religion has been taken or has been earmarked for another Civilization obscures this consistent behaviour; however if a mod such as Historical Religions is being used, the Player will quickly notice that the same Religions get used in fallback situations every time - Arianism, for example - despite there being a hundred options and a myriad of more appropriate ones available.

This mod implements three interlinked systems which work to alleviate this issue: Support for a Civilization to have multiple Preferred Religions, the grouping of specific Religions together so that they may be given priority consideration if no Preferred Religion is available, and an actual random selection of a Religion in the case where neither of the previous systems can provide an "appropriate" fallback.

The random selection works naturally, and should work as a welcome addition to games featuring a large number of available Religions; unlike the existent Religion Randomiser this mod does NOT affect the Preferred Religions defined in Civilization_Religions, and consequently only takes effect if the Preferred Religion has been taken but doesn't force a Civilization to forsake its Preferred Religion unless it has to.

On the other hand the Religious Groups and capacity for additional Preferred Religions must be defined explicitly, and this mod provides a framework for users and modders to define such information as they like. At base, this mod provides a small selection of Religious Groups but DOES NOT implement any additional Preferred Religions. Explanations on how this framework works, and how one can go about writing their own additions to the tables, are provided in the mod's SQL file and I would encourage those interested to try implementing support or writing ModMods for their favourite Religion mods themselves.

This mod requires one of either Gods and Kings or Brave New World. Obviously.

Manual Download: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/c15s-advanced-religious-preferences.31032/

Bug Reports: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/c15s-advanced-religious-preferences.686856/