Spiritualist Crisis Discussion

[Jin2188]

Put your ideas for the spiritualist crisis here.

[TreeM4n]

We have 4 main deities to cater to ( I will add the Warhammer names and some charactaristics because I can differentiate them better) :

1. Composer of Strands (Nurgle): growing your empire aka. gaining pops or colonies?
2. Eater of Worlds (khorne):This could be done via bombardment, colossus weapon on enemies or your own colony.
3. Instrument of Desire ( Slaneesh): Having good relation with other, passing laws ( amybe corrupting others this way)
4. Whisperers in the Void ( Tzeentz): getting tech?, espionage?, special projects?

I would make 70% of the progression path the same for every deity and 30% individualized.

Some Perks out of my head:

• Summon a mini version of your deity every time an admiral engages in battle as an allied fleet.
• Special resource ( aka. menace for BtC) could be zro or faith so maybe increase the faith you get from different sources
• I had this idea for a long time stuck in my head: You would get an avatar of the chosen deity (something like a star eater?, colussus weapon + big ship) which you have to feed souls?, via bombardment, and every time it kills a pop its stats would increase. With further progression, you would get more avatars. Souls could be the fuel for the poratl combined with faith?
• Upgrades to said mini version or avatar?

[Jin2188]

Maybe instead of a portal, we have a special habitable megastructure in the same vein as the Synaptic Lathe. The idea is that the covenant doesn't have a physical form, and can't exist in our reality without one, since it's more of an abstract idea than a sapient creature. Our job as the crisis then, is to make a physical form for the covenant so that it can merge with it and become our deity. This is where the previously mentioned habitable megastructure, the Providence Forge comes in. (name not final, although goddammit I want it to be because it sounds badass as hell) Spiritualist pops in this megastructure will become Faith Architects, producing Devotion to either create a physical form from scratch, or to empower a certain leader so that they can become the physical form. (I want to give the player this choice so that Imperial Cult empires can create the God-Emperor they've always dreamed of) Pops with other ethics will need to be indoctrinated/brainwashed into becoming Spiritualist before they can become Faith Architects. The time this takes depends on how far their ethic is from Spiritualist on the ethics wheel. Example of what I mean: Another thing I though about was a building for the Providence Forge which acts somewhat like the Synaptic Overclocker from Cosmogenesis, where it increases the Devotion output of Faith Architects, but slowly drains their faith over time, eventually making them Materialist and requiring them to be re-indoctrinated in order to become Faith Architects again.

I had this idea for a long time stuck in my head: You would get an avatar of the chosen deity (something like a star eater?, colussus weapon + big ship) which you have to feed souls?, via bombardment, and every time it kills a pop its stats would increase. With further progression, you would get more avatars. Souls could be the fuel for the poratl combined with faith?

Perhaps you could maybe spend Devotion to summon a "tendril" of the deity into reality, a special ship type with a colossus weapon that literally sucks the faith out of pops, leaving them as materialist with reduced happiness, like an inverse of the Divine Enforcer. You'd get Devotion from this of course, except in the case of soulless machines.

[Jin2188]

Here's my idea for the crisis progression:

Stage 1. Choose your covenant. This will define your primary civic (A custom one that you will gain when the deity becomes your ruler) and will immediately establish a covenant, even if you are not psionic. You will also not get any negative effects from the covenant for the duration of the crisis.

Stage 2. Choose a doctrine for your faith based on one of your ethics (This will be a secondary civic that will be added when the deity becomes your ruler, and your empire will shift to the ethic associated with this doctrine. I want these doctrine civics to be more than just modifiers, but that may require overwrites, so we'll see)

Stage 3. Choose another doctrine based on one of your ethics (If your ethics are just spiritualist and one other ethic, you will be able to choose a doctrine from any ethic that does not oppose your own)

Stage 4. Once enough Devotion is stored up, determine whether you're going to make a physical form from scratch, or choose a leader to act as the physical form instead. Imperial Cult empires must choose their ruler as the physical form. If a leader is chosen, less Devotion will be required, but the leader will become unavailable until the end of the crisis path. This is when we actually begin building the physical form, and when other empires begin to realize what we're doing and actually consider us a crisis.

Stage 5. No choices here, just a final objective to construct a device on the Providence Forge to create a localized merger between the Shroud and our reality, which will allow the covenant to inhabit the physical form. The rest of the galaxy will declare you a galactic crisis at this point, and will ramp up their efforts to stop you.