Religion Approach

[cybrgamr]

Last night I started a game with the Spanish. I tried cornering the market on religion, and I quickly was able to get four religions founded in my cities - Hindu, Buddism, Judaism and Christianity. By 0 BC, I had six cities in place (and had also founded Taoism). A couple of questions:

1. Once I found these, should I make it a priority to get a temple and monastery built for each?
2. Should I also be producing a steady stream of Missionaries to convert all of my cities to each religion?
3. To take advantage of the GP benefit will i need to set the research slider to less that 100%, or should I still see gold income with research set to 100%?
4. Is there a good order of builds to support this approach?

Is there a good article/post/guide available for this type of strategy? Thanks in advance for your comments...

[rjmatsleepers]

Re: Religion Approach

Originally posted by cybrgamr
Last night I started a game with the Spanish. I tried cornering the market on religion, and I quickly was able to get four religions founded in my cities - Hindu, Buddism, Judaism and Christianity. By 0 BC, I had six cities in place (and had also founded Taoism). A couple of questions:

1. Once I found these, should I make it a priority to get a temple and monastery built for each?
2. Should I also be producing a steady stream of Missionaries to convert all of my cities to each religion?
3. To take advantage of the GP benefit will i need to set the research slider to less that 100%, or should I still see gold income with research set to 100%?
4. Is there a good order of builds to support this approach?

Is there a good article/post/guide available for this type of strategy? Thanks in advance for your comments...

1. The temple gives you hapiness. The monastery lets you build missionaries and gives you some extra beakers. Whether this should be a priority depends on your circumstances.

2. Converting cities to your state religion gives a hapiness benefit. Non state religions allow you to build a temple. The major benefit from spreading a religion comes after you've built the special building. With enough temples you can build academies which give additional culture and hapiness in the case of the state religion.

3. The gold from a special building does not depend on the position of the research slider.

4. The best build order depends on the circumstances for each city and your overall strategy. I'm not sure what you mean by "this approach".

RJM

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Re: Re: Religion Approach

Originally posted by rjmatsleepers
The major benefit from spreading a religion comes after you've built the special building. With enough temples you can build academies

Cathedrals, not academies.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Re: Religion Approach

Originally posted by cybrgamr
1. Once I found these, should I make it a priority to get a temple and monastery built for each?

Temples, yes. Extra happy is always useful.

Monasteries, not so much. OrgRel is just as good for building missionaries, and only your cities with high research benefit much from the science boost.

Originally posted by cybrgamr
2. Should I also be producing a steady stream of Missionaries to convert all of my cities to each religion?

Victory condition is a significant factor here. If you are angling for a cultural victory (a common goal when there's a lot of religion at hand), getting Cathedrals built in your three cultural cities is a big boost. To build cathedrals, you need to have extra temples built. More religions in each city -> more temples for each religion -> more available cathedrals.

If you aren't playing for a cultural win, then spreading the extra religions around is only a big deal for the opportunity to build temples, and the shrine income you gather. Missionaries are more likely to fail as the number of religions in a city increases, so you start losing on the cost benefit curve.

I'll prioritize my state religion, and religions in my gold city, and not worry about the rest so much. That also reduces the number of Shrines I feel obliged to construct, allowing me to generate some other flavor of GP instead of another prophet.

Originally posted by cybrgamr
3. To take advantage of the GP benefit will i need to set the research slider to less that 100%, or should I still see gold income with research set to 100%?

Gold is gold; you'll see that income regardless of where the slider is set.

Originally posted by cybrgamr Is there a good article/post/guide available for this type of strategy? Thanks in advance for your comments...

Look around for a guide to cultural victories. If there aren't any here, I know there are some elsewhere.

[AshenPlanet]

.

You can really do some whacky stuff with religions, especially on lower difficulties like prince.

On a prince game recently (earth map), I had my starting city with two religions founded, and my second city with the next 5 founded religions.

It's better to have many foundings in the same city than to have them spread out so that all the money bonus gets multiplied by wall street, bank, etc.

When it comes to which city gets the founding, a certain order is used.
If you have any other cities, it won't go to your capitol.
City is chosen from cities with the lowest number of current religions.
You can use that to insure that all the foundings go to one city.
As you are about to trigger a new founding, make sure all your other cities have at least 1 more religion than your economic city, and you can insure that the founding will take place there.
You don't have to use any missionaries on your capitol, because it's not eligible for a founding anyway, once you have other cities, so it doesn't matter if it has fewer religions than your religion city.

With multiple prophet buildings, you should be able to stay at 100% for most of the game, and not bother with banks, etc. in any other city - just your religion city needs to have all the economic buildings.

In general, monastaries are not such a big deal, and you lose them when you hit scientific method (except for +2 culture per turn, which is meaningless)
You do want at least 1 monestary of each religion though (idealy built in cities other than your founding city).
It's sometimes useful to go to non-organized religion setups.
Pacifism, especially, is extremely powerful in this type of strategy, because you will have lots of priests specialists running to get those 7 prophet buildings.

Temples, on the other hand, are all good.
1 happy, 1 priest specialist, and 1 culture per temple makes it worth it to build temples to every religion you have in a city in every city where you spread your religions.
Extra mandirs, cathedrals, etc. above your 3 main culture cities are never a bad thing, especially on a border city to help push back those cultural borders.
Your 3 main culture cities should have all 7 mandirs/cathedrals.

Good wonders to shoot for here are parthenon, angkor wat, and pyramids, as well as the other priest wonders to a lesser degree.
A good civic line to go after is pacifism asap, representation if you can get pyramids, and mercantalism.
It's actually better to have the religious wonders built in a city other than your religion city with good food bonus resouces.
You can generate prophets in that city, and send them to your religion city to make your prophet buildings like temple of solomon, daio maio, etc.

Don't spread any religion (including your state religion) to your religion city until you get all 7 religions founded.
The 25% organized rel bonus isn't worth having to make the missionaries required to put an additional religion in all your other cities to make sure that 1 city gets all the foundings.
Once you get all the religions founded, make sure your 3 culture cities get all 7 religions, and your other cities however many they need for happy points.

You can do a similar strategy in higher difficulties as well, but any higher than prince, and it's pretty near impossible to get both the first 2 religions hinduism and buddhism even if you started with mysticism although you can sometimes get 1 of those 2.

.

[rjmatsleepers]

Re: Re: Re: Religion Approach

Originally posted by VoiceOfUnreason


Cathedrals, not academies.

Ah - I'm giving away my play style - I normaly found Confucianism, so I think of them as Academies

RJM

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Originally posted by AshenPlanet
When it comes to which city gets the founding, a certain order is used.
If you have any other cities, it won't go to your capitol.
City is chosen from cities with the lowest number of current religions.
You can use that to insure that all the foundings go to one city.
As you are about to trigger a new founding, make sure all your other cities have at least 1 more religion than your economic city, and you can insure that the founding will take place there.

I'm pretty confident that the above paragraph is only approximate. All of your cities are eligible to become the holy city. The dice are loaded against the cities with religions, and against the capital, but my recollection is that the scaling factors don't actually force the holy cities to be selected as described above - its only very likely to work.

[couerdelion]

Re: Re: Re: Religion Approach

Originally posted by VoiceOfUnreason


Cathedrals, not academies.

Stupas not Cathedrals

[couerdelion]

Re: Religion Approach

Originally posted by cybrgamr
Last night I started a game with the Spanish. I tried cornering the market on religion, and I quickly was able to get four religions founded in my cities...


Is there a good article/post/guide available for this type of strategy? Thanks in advance for your comments...

My guide for this type of strategy is to NOT adopt it. It seems to me to be a terrible waste of effort.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Religion Approach

Originally posted by couerdelion


Stupas not Cathedrals

I think you will find, after a careful perusal of Civ4GameText_Objects.xml, that a Stupa is a BUILDING_BUDDHIST_CATHEDRAL.

Nice try, though.

[couerdelion]

But does that make it a cathedral any more than make it a mosque or a synagogue?

[AshenPlanet]

.

I'm pretty confident that the above paragraph is only approximate. All of your cities are eligible to become the holy city.

I'm pretty confident that if you actually tested this hypothesis of yours, you'd find that you're very much mistaken.
It does work as advertised, not all your cities are equally eligible to be a founding city.

You can force all foundings to one city (besides the ones you get in your capitol).

.

[popejubal]

Originally posted by AshenPlanet
In general, monastaries are not such a big deal, and you lose them when you hit scientific method (except for +2 culture per turn, which is meaningless)
You do want at least 1 monestary of each religion though (idealy built in cities other than your founding city).

You want a couple of monestaries for each religion that you want to continue to spread after the discovery of scientific method.

You also want to build Monestaries in your border cities if you think that you might feel cultural pressure there at some point. Monestaries give +2 culture each. Wtih 3 religions, that's +6 culture. With a Cathedral and Free Speech, that's 15 culture per turn.

If you have that, you have no worries on the border. If your opponent has that and you don't, you can expect to lose city tiles to your opponent at the least and you may see your city flip if you don't bother to build libraries, etc.

[couerdelion]

Which really states that monasteries are things that are built selectively where needed rather than generally across the empire. Check for each option

1) Is this city under a lot of cultural pressure (or is it able to apply a lot to neighbouring cities)?
2) Do I have a high science output in this city?
3) Do I want to be able to build a lot of those missionaries from this city yet will not be Organised Religion for much of this time?
4) Have I built, or will I be building, the Spiral Minaret or Sankore? (State Religion Monastery only)

If the answer to any of the above a yes then you should built the monastery. But you shouldn’t go overboard. Culture and Wonder bonuses aside, Monasteries give a pretty poor return on their investment in most cities.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Originally posted by AshenPlanet
I'm pretty confident that if you actually tested this hypothesis of yours, you'd find that you're very much mistaken.
It does work as advertised, not all your cities are equally eligible to be a founding city.

You can force all foundings to one city (besides the ones you get in your capitol).

OK, two seperate points here, one of which is not under dispute, although I would spell it differently: "not all your cities are equally likely to be a founding city." And in fact some of your cities, under normal conditions, will have no probability of landing the religion at all.

But because I familiarized myself with the the SDK (CvPlayer::foundReligion, for those of you keeping score at home) before formulating my hypothesis, I've got really good odds of being able to produce experiments that refute contrary hypotheses.

In the experiments below, I've saved games with a Prophet conveniently placed to pop a religion, and the new random seed bit turned on so that you can repeat the scenario until you've got a large enough sample to satisfy you. I recommend a minimum of 10 trials each, if you want to get a sense for the actual probabilities (which can be calculated, if you understand what is actually happening under the covers).

Claim: If you have any other cities, it won't go to your capitol.

Refutation:Here's an experiment. The population in the capital has been boosted to the point that it can win the die roll. When I ran this test, the capital got the religion about half the time.

Claim: City is chosen from cities with the lowest number of current religions.

Refutation: Here's an experiment Three times out of ten, this rule was broken. I set this test up with the expectation that it would be 50-50 in a significant sample, but didn't have the interest to run it that many times.

If you happen to be aware of the game mechanics, there are steps to can take to stack the deck in your favor - steps that do not deviate so far from normal play as to be impractical. There are common situations where you can game the system so that your target outcome is not subject to the fickleness of the dice.

But the absolutes stated in the post I initially responded to are demonstrably false.