Found all religions strategy?

[Fried-Psitalon]

Religions will not spread automatically to a city that already has a religion in it, alas.

And uh, don't knock shrine income. With enough devotion to it, you can pull in staggering sums. 50 gpt per religion? *7? Who here would like to run 100% research with, say, 160gpt still coming in?

Granted, that's a massive production effort to get that kind of missionary action running, but for someone on a continent to themselves with no real threats...

Yeah. Don't knock the power of faith. It's definitely a devoted strategy if you go after it seriously, but the financial side can be very powerful indeed.

[alva]

It's not really a problem, more of a theoretical discussion.
I haven't gotten more than three religions at the same time IIRC (never tried for more) and even this was on a lower difficulty level.
If it does happen in a single game (you or the AI) then all it would do is make it a unique game.

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by Platypus Rex
Hey Trip

What is your take on converting one of your own cities?

It took me a while to find all religons. I saw one of my cities "missing" being converted. So I sent that particular missionary over and ...converted my own city.

As long as you have the holy city for a religion it never hurts to convert one of your own cities - all it means is extra shrine income. If someone else has the holy city and its their state religion they'll get line-of-sight into the city though, plus you don't get the shrine income. It depends on whether you need the religion or not. I've not founded religions before and had one spread to a small city and then pushed that one around everywhere for the diplo/happiness benefits and it paid off nicely. Only issue came up when I attacked the guy who had the holy city and could see all of my cities.

[jones]

There's no need to spread any religions except the one you're running as state religion. The idea is to found as many as possible with the intent of keeping them out of the other civs altogether. In my last game as Napoleon Saladin beat me to Buddhism but I founded Hinduism (my sr, and the one i spread) Judaism Christianity Islam and Confucianism, and by the end of the game they had spread to 5-10 cities tops, to give an idea of how slowly the auto-spread works.

sheer number of missionaries you have to build

Amount of resources on missionaries (using the spreading one religion method, including infecting all of your own cities to reap the religion civic bonuses) is considerably less than the resources otherwise spent on a military in the late BC to 1000AD build/tech period. That is, the good relations I get thru religion allow me to keep my standing army small while expanding and building.

Rather than not spreading any you can spread one of them to every city and then all the others to 2/3 or 3/4 of their cities. Once everyone is your state religion you'll get the diplo benefits while also getting the shrine bonus.

yup.. it's not really about the shrine income, it's about staying alive while you get a tech lead and lay the groundwork to get huge. Beelining for religious techs is scary but it's worked in my last two games.

[Weltenreiter]

Does anyone have any findings on what determines where holy cities get placed?

My suspicion/hope (assuming cities tech contributions get accounted for city-by-city like in SMAC) is that it isn't random but that the city whose Research points caused the tech to actually be researched gets the spot. Don't ahve a save atm to test it with though, so maybe someone else has any ideas about the issue.

I'd really like holy city placement to be somehow controllable, 7 shines fueling a SSC-infrastructure sounds fun.

[vee4473]

Originally posted by Fried-Psitalon
Religions will not spread automatically to a city that already has a religion in it, alas.

And uh, don't knock shrine income. With enough devotion to it, you can pull in staggering sums. 50 gpt per religion? *7? Who here would like to run 100% research with, say, 160gpt still coming in?

Granted, that's a massive production effort to get that kind of missionary action running, but for someone on a continent to themselves with no real threats...

Yeah. Don't knock the power of faith. It's definitely a devoted strategy if you go after it seriously, but the financial side can be very powerful indeed.

I was under the impression that you only got the income from cities with your state religion.

And that you couldn't build the shrine enabling the income if the shrines religion wasn't your state religion.

[vee4473]

ok, never mind. I just looked it up. (should've done that before I posted).

You have to be the founder in order to build a shrine (which enables the income). State religions only increase the productivity of cities with the same religion.

[joncnunn]

I founded 5 of 7 as Gaudi in my first Civ IV game. [Prince]
(All but Hindism and Judism.)

The result of establishing even that many is no need to ever lower the science slider off of 100% nor ever establish a cultural tax.

[Weltenreiter]

Ok, did a run again and kept some saves to tinker with.
2 cities, jacking down Research percentage so nothing is produced in the second city still causes Judaism to be founded there. >_<

Any other ideas what influences holy city selection, and more importanly, how to manipulate it?

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Weltenreiter
Any other ideas what influences holy city selection, and more importanly, how to manipulate it?

Not really, but I'm guessing size and the presence of a previous religion (or the amount of other religions present) might be factors. I'd be interested if you figure it out.

DeepO

[stravaig]

This strategy sounds cool, but doesn't it have a drawback, in that the founding cities can't get the various civic bonuses for practicing your state religion?

[Matthew]

Seems like the main advantage to founding a few religions is in denying this advantage to others. You can spy on them, but they can't use religion to spy on you. You get the shrine income, and someone gets none. Ypu get founding city culture, and they do not. You don't have to deny these things to everyone to get some big adventages from it.

[Aeson]

Originally posted by stravaig
This strategy sounds cool, but doesn't it have a drawback, in that the founding cities can't get the various civic bonuses for practicing your state religion?

You can still spread your state religion to the cities.

The main drawback is that in focusing on religious techs so much, you are missing out on the military and economic techs for longer.

[padillah]

Tried this myself: Standard Terra map using Aztec (I'll neveer do that again).

The first three are not that hard and the extra money and insane relations for the first few turns more than makes up for not having the "growth" techs earlier.

BUT, getting all seven... no way. Put simply Code of Laws just takes too darn long. You waste away trying to get to the last four. I mean face it, the techs that lead to the last four religions are not what you need in 2000BC.

One thing that's almost impossible to do is control the spread via trade routes. Now, this especially goes out the window if your city is on fresh water, but if not you have a small possibility to control the spread somewhat. Just keep the roads away from the holy city and use a missionary to spread one to a city near you and then the trade network will do what's left. But face it, you will eventually loose control.

I think the biggest advantage to religion is the good relations of other civs. I've seen +4 and even +8 for having the same religion. It was the sole reason Chinese were still talking to me (and even freindly). They had -2 for stop trading, -4 for close borders, and -1 for dealing with their sworn enemy, but +8 for standing with the faith!!

I think the first three are going to factor into my strat somehow, maybe even a religious rush type strat. But I can't imagine trying to get all 7 first being a good idea. I'm also going to have to figure out when to throw the "growth" techs in the mix. Do I have time between Buddism and Hinduism? Or do I have to wait until the rush is done.

And I've really got to pin down the best circumstances to build the second, third and fourth cities.

And... I thought the "Holy City" was the city you build the shrine in? Once you discover "the shrine building tech" you can build a shrine. That then becomes the holy city for that religion. This is one of the reasons I want to get three cities quickly, put a shrine in each city and I get line of sight to everyone for a little while at least (at least 3/7ths and maybe more if I can get to one of the others quick enough).

Tom P.

[Azuarc]

I finally had my first finished game last night, and I snarfed all the religions and got everyone to follow Hinduism. There were a few times I had to send missionaries, but since I was following a very peaceful M.O., that was only an issue insofar as getting them around, and on Pangaea, that wasn't too bad.

A couple of the problems I faced, and some of these are more new player dilemmas, are:
1) Very stagnant tech early on. Even with the Oracle to lock down either Christianity or Confucianism, it's still very slow early on when you're panicked someone might beat you to just one of the seven.
2) Too much to build. Even for a strictly non-military game, I simply could not get everything in my cities built, when there were so many temples and monasteries to work on. Obviously this is a pick-and-choose issue, but I was intending to win by culture.
3) It doesn't give as much culture as you think. At 1900 when I scored a diplomatic victory, my highest city didn't even have 20k, let alone 50. Clearly, I have much to learn about cultural victories in Civ 4. But since I had so many Great Prophets out of my GPs, that didn't afford the culture Great Artists would have.

On the plus side, I never had any money going into the treasury and I was still gaining, once I had my shrine built and everyone got connected to the trade network.

I'm not sure if it's good or bad that throughout the game I had about 2.5x the score of the highest opponent while playing on Chieftain, but somehow I think if I were playing on a "real" difficulty, some of these issues would become rather pronounced. Playing on Chieftain also scored me one VERY early settler for a second city, so I had an unfair advantage in that game.