All Religions Strategy (ARS)

[Hayek]

I've been playing with getting all religions too. Great fun.

Admittedly you may need to tweak the opposition a bit, if you have all the civs that start with mysticism in your game, you're likely to be toast.

Now for the pro's and con's:
- pro: huge shrine income for the larger maps. Larger map = more cities, and that can really add. In one game I have no less than 3 shrines in my capital. Combine that with wall street and you'll be able to sustain very high research rates.
- pro: no-one else gets that income
- pro: the Ai will work for you. Ofcourse you'll have a very hard time spreading 7 religions in enemy cities, but the AI will spread at least one, and quite possibly two themselves.
- con: you don't get to choose what kind of religions your opponents have. The shrine spreads religion by itself, and it's quite possible (even likely) that it spreads judaism to your nothern neighbour and taosim to your western one. Religious wars are possible.
- con: you have to gimp your military for quite a while, especially delaying bronzeworking can be risky if your neighbours are close by. It doesnt go well with early warmongering.

Also bear in mind that you need all those great prophets to actually build those shrines. A philosofical leader will help lots. Actually, I've had one game (admittedly on Noble) which I played Saladin - ideal for this strategy - build the parthenon, 3 shrines in my capital and the oracle there, giving me 77 (!) gpp each turn. In other words: I'm turning out at least a third of all GPs in the game, even past 1000 AD. So it is possible, and potentially very rewarding. But I doubt if you can afford the military weakness you suffer for the first 4 millenia in a game on high difficulty levels.

[marvinkosh]

Of course, if one of your neighbours happens to found two religions on his own, then he's rather a juicy target. In a game I haven't finished yet, Spain founded Hinduism and Islam, and then after a short conquest of Arabia gained the holy cities for Christianity and Buddhism.

One of the great things about this is that, as with any conquest, you get things that make your people happy. This means you don't have to crank the Culture slider much, in fact with all those new and shiny places of worship, your cities will be more cultured then before, assuming you can spare the production to build them.

As with any conquest though, there are expenses. In the game I just described, I can't set the science slider above 70% because I'm saving gold to rush-build Versailles. That may not be an entirely sound way of reducing expenditure, but it's better than being beaten to it by someone else

[eris]

I understand the urge to collect religions. or at least shrines. I keep wanting to make it part of a new victory condition. Owning all the shrines would be one part of it, of courseb but I wanted to come up with something that differentiated the condition from a military victory. I came up with this thought:

A Religion victory consists of owning (through founding or capturing) all 7 shrines and having at least 50% of cities with your state religion be outside your empire.

You can use war to get the shrines, but you have to leave enough people alive to reach the second half of the victory.