Disciples

Although you are a God and as such seem to be very important, you only manifest in the world through your followers, the most important of which are your disciples. You begin with a single disciple, your prophet, who you originally appeared to and who, after gathering a few followers to your worship, managed to get exiled from his home. Soon you inspire two more disciples to act in your name and, as your following grows, you add additional disciples.

Your disciples act for you in the world. They help grow your Holy City, interact with your followers, and fight for you in holy combat during sacraments. In response, you inspire them to grow in faith and power through rituals, blessings, dreams, and various other God actions.

Properties
Your disciples have various attributes that affect how they perform in the world on your behalf.

Fundamental
In addition to their name, your disciples have several significant attributes.
 * Age
 * Disciples age two years during each mission. Their age affects how they perform (the age levels are affected by game difficulty):
 * Young Ones are generally less than 30 years old and gain an extra XP point from each mission they participate in.
 * Prime Disciples are generally between 30 and 60 and get a 10% damage bonus to all abilities.
 * Elders are 60 years and above and begin losing their base stats; they will eventually die, but you have a God action to take them to yourself to make room for more Young Ones.


 * Style
 * Disciples have a preferred style for combat abilities. This should affect how you inspire them to choose the abilities to concentrate on.


 * Relic
 * Disciples can hold a relic that can improve them. Relics are rewards from some missions and may be passed down to future disciples.


 * Totem
 * Each disciple has a totem that determines how powerful they can become. It determines how many miracles they can perform, how rapidly their base stats improve during rituals, and may provide other bonuses.

Each disciple has a pool of fervor that is spent when going on missions and recovers when they stay at home and through your intervention.
 * Fervor

Base Stats
Your disciple's power and actions are controlled by six basic statistics. These affect a number of derived statistics which determine the disciple's success in combat; three base stats affect physical combat and three affect morale combat.

Each base stat has a rank: F (1 - 4), E (5 - 9), D (10 - 19), C (20 - 39), B (40 - 59), A (60 - 89), and S (above 90). Increases in rank provide significant boosts in how derived stats are affected; however, they also lower the disciple's faith increasingly (0, 2, 5, 10, 20, 35, 55).

Faith
Each disciple has a degree of faith in you. High faith improves their performance in the world and low faith may eventually lead to them leaving.

Various conditions provide levels of faith and when combined determine the degree of faith:
 * The disciple starts with a base level of faith (based on difficulty)
 * Participating in sacrament provide temporary faith bonuses (victory) and penalties (loss)
 * Blessings of Faith each provide a small permanent bonus
 * Some building upgrades provide permanent bonuses
 * Dreams provide a one mission faith buff
 * Adoration tenets each provide a permanent bonus
 * Increases in base stat ranks provide permanent faith penalties

Abilities
active

passive

Development
Your disciples grow by gaining base stats through rituals and other inspirations and by gaining experience to unlock miracles.

Miracles
You can inspire a disciple to perform a miracle after they have accumulated enough experience points (XP) through winning sacraments and God actions. The follow miracles can be performed:
 * A faith miracle will raise the faith of the disciple.
 * A stat miracle will raise the development power of one stat by 1 and all stats by .25; each can be performed once and they are unlocked when there is a ritual to raise that stat.
 * An advanced miracle is unlocked by building one of the advanced temples and raises the development power of two stats by 1 and all stats by .25; each can performed once.

Before the first miracle, the disciple gets to choose a class; after each succeeding miracle, the disciple chooses a passive ability from a set determined by the class and number of miracles so far. The disciple's totem determines how many miracles the disciple may perform, after which the disciple can no longer earn XP.

Rituals
One of the duties of each disciple is to perform rituals. These rituals take several days to complete and develop the disciple's base stats. You can use blessings and God actions to speed up a ritual for a disciple.

Each type of religion has four rituals. The basic rituals target a single base stat; however, each time the city builds a new temple, you are able to customize a ritual to add up to two more base stats.

Blessings
Each day you may bless one of your disciples. A blessing provides a small nudge to the development of the disciple.
 * Bless Ritual
 * adds 1 day of progress to the disciple's current ritual.


 * Bless Dreams
 * adds 1 additional dream point resource to the city.


 * Bless Faith
 * adds 3 bonus faith permanently to the disciple (unlocked by the Night Shrine).


 * Blessing of Recovery
 * replenishes 1 fervor for the disciple (unlocked by the Gardens).


 * Blessing of Experience
 * provides 1 XP for the disciple (unlocked ???)

Dreams
After the days of preparation and before the start of the sacraments, you can send dreams to one or more disciples by spending dream points. Each dream provides a one mission buff to a disciple's faith one or more aspects of combat (some of these are unlocked by upgrading the Night Shrine). The available dream points may be used for combat buffs for a single disciple or spread among several disciples.

God Actions
God actions provide you a more powerful way to affect your followers. You may spend offerings to perform them once per mission; although some actions have a longer cool-down period. Your available God actions are determined by the building in your Holy City and the traditions you have adopted.