Shrine or settled prophet

[Strollen]

I haven't posted here in ages..

I was playing WOTM 7 as Persia at the other Civ place, and I built Stonehedge. I got a prophet, and had a choice of founding Christianity or settling. I opted for the religion which was valuable trade tech, but pretty useless as religion, since virtually everybody including me was Hindu.

Would anybody make the arguement that a GP should be used to settle giving the need to be a war monger and try to capture the Hindu holy city? By 800 AD Christianity had only spread to 2 cities, by a missionary I built!

[wodan11]

Well, either that, or build more missionaries.

Wodan

[Strollen]

If I had gotten a 2nd prophet to found the holy city, I would have definitely built missionaries. However, I was severely tested in the game and nice to have things like missionaries was a low priority.

[wodan11]

Yeah but... given your earlier decision to found the religion, you could have (and probably should have) prioritized a city to generate a 2nd prophet. e.g., take your Stonehenge city, build a temple (or two), and assign a priest (or two). Wholah.

Wodan

[AAAAAAAAA]

How do you build a Great Prophet?

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by AAAAAAAAA
How do you build a Great Prophet?

A Prophet is a Great Person. Great People appear in cities when the cities GPP (Great People Points) reaches the threshold for the Great Person. At normal speed this is 100 GPP for the first, 200 for the second, 300 for… etc.

GPP points are generated by

a) appointing specialists in the city (produces 3 GPP/turn)
b) wonders contribute GPP/turn)

GPs come in five varieties (ignoring Great Generals)

GS – Great Scientist
GE – Great Engineer
GM – Great Merchant
GA – Great Artist (not to be confused with GA- Golden Age)
Prophet

Each GPP is associated with one of these types of Great People. Scientists produce GS points, Merchants produce GM points, …., Priest produce Prophet points. Also the GPP from wonders are associated with a particular type of Great Person (eg Stonehenge, Oracle, Chichen Itza, Angkor Wat produce Prophet points).

The combination of sources of the GPP will determine the probability that the different Great People will emerge. Where all the GPP come from a particular source (ie only scientists) then there is a 100% chance of the corresponding Great Person arriving. Otherwise there will be a mixed chance based on the different sources of GPP.

So if I build Stonehenge in a city (generates 2 GPP (Prophet) per turn), I can wait 50 turns and a Prophet will be born in that city.

[supremebob]

Hi guys,

Alright so I am late into this so here is the pm I sent to Vaugula on the subject(and on others):

Vaugula,

Sorry for Pming but I don't want to hijack the thread. I completely agree about shrines being worth it sometimes, just not in this particular circumstance. I was never speaking in absolutes.
There were 6 cities in the entire game which shared that religion...

Different circumstances dictate different styles of play.

About lightbulbing, I dont know I never quite got around it. I do know one thing however: as difficulty levels go up, the advantages that the ai gets keeps ramping. You need to counter that advantage somewhat.

Lightbulbing is like a quick fix in that it gives you a temporary advantage for a strategic tech (which you dont really control unless you have a 100% GP emergence type). Is is useful for the early and mid early game where said tech can be discovered entirely.
However your advantage window gets narrower with each difficulty level because the AI's research faster than you do. Even if you get a tech lead for say, 5 or 10 turns, you will not be able to press that advantage if you are teching at 80 or 75%speed of the other ai's .You often trade at a disadvantage too and might help your enemies more than yourself that way.

Moreover, even if you burn a lot of them to maintain it, they get substantially more expensive each time at which point the AI's will catch up to you because your base research does not increase and you find yourself left with no advantage/turn.If you really need to burn a GP to save 3 turn on plastic for the Three Gorges Dam then by all means do it, there are not that many turns left, but by that time the game is pretty much over.

A settled GP says with you for the rest of the game and does increase your research and production so that with each one little by little you will attain tech and production parity with your opponents and eventually perhaps outclass them in both fields. The only GP i would consider burning are G Artists because they are not useful for a gp farm (or settle in a border city during an emergency).

One last element is about commerce: it does not help you during war time at least not as much as production and beakers can. Also "even you can buy that tank per turn (in which case you are winning anyway), forget spaceship parts" (obsolete).I challenge you to buy that building or wonder without emptying your treasury...
In fact cottages will help your enemies more(10 turns to grow, 1 turn to pillage). That is NOT to say that they are not useful depending on the situation, just not the universal panacea we were taught them to be. AI spams, fine then more money for me They also take a lot of time (and tech) to become useful.

Other way: give me agriculture and mining (okay, metal casting helps too) and voilà instant good production and healthy growing city that can actually build something, get settlers/workers/wonders/troops out of the door fast, convert hammers to beakers/commerce/culture later on for times when there is nothing else to build and eventually, with enough GP, put the research slider all the way to 0 and still tech decently.

Sorry for the long message, plz continue to bring constructive criticism. What I find nice about this strategy is that I am confident you can still succeed with a haft decent start even on higher levels.

That is to say it all depends on your strategy. If you make your cap. into a GP/Wonder farm, then it is more advantageous to settle your early GP in because gold isn't as important.You get most or your gold in tech selling anyway.

There is also the argument of avoiding founding a religion at all, let the AI found them and fight rel. war among themselves...

Robert

[wodan11]

I didn't see anyone mention that the Shrine itself gives 2 GPP.

Wodan

[Willem]

Originally posted by couerdelion
So it seems that the gold argument is slightly in favour of the shrine on this basis. In fact, I think it highly likely that the early religious expansion will be greater than 0.75% per turn so the gold value of the shrine will be much greater than that from the prophet. Possibly, this would be enough to justify a shrine even if there starting point were only to have one or two cities with the religion.

One thing you're not considering in your analysis is the diplomatic benefits of having other civs adopt your religion. With a Shrine in place, that's going to be much more likely to occur since it speeds up the spread of your religion to other civs as well as your own.

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by wodan11
I didn't see anyone mention that the Shrine itself gives 2 GPP.

Wodan

Post #20 - But I believe it generates on GPP

Willem,

I believe I focussed on the gold benefit arguing that the shrine was almost always stronger on this point. And as the secondary benefit arguing that the civic benefits far exceeds the production bonus from a priest.

Anything else (culture, GPP, diplo, priest slots) is a bonus.

[Common Sensei]

I would consider a second shrine being much more useful if it's in a city that already is a Holy City so that Wall Street can have its effect on any and all shrines in that city.

[darrelljs]

I've actually done three Shrines all in different cities a couple of times in BTS, mostly because of the automated spread change. I'm not arguing that this is optimal play, but after you get a certain size dedicating three cities to full time Missionary duty is not a big deal.

Darrell

[Vaugula]

Originally posted by supremebob
Sorry for Pming but I don't want to hijack the thread.

I don't think I have access to PMs...?

Originally posted by supremebob
I completely agree about shrines being worth it sometimes, just not in this particular circumstance. I was never speaking in absolutes.
There were 6 cities in the entire game which shared that religion...

That's good then. It just sounded from your DAR that it was not even considered. If you considered it then all is good.

I started a new thread about lightbulbing here: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=170443

[Blaupanzer]

First prophet: Shrine on large map, slow games. Second prophet, if early, Golden Age. Enough prophets!

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Common Sensei
I would consider a second shrine being much more useful if it's in a city that already is a Holy City so that Wall Street can have its effect on any and all shrines in that city.

Oh, absolutly.

In my current game, I've actually built 3 shrines; 2 in my main holy city, and a third after I took the islamic holy city in a war. Figured it was worth it since there were 12 islamic cities already.

I tend to think that about the only use of great people then building a shrine, even a secondary shrine, is an acadamy in your 2 or 3 best science cities.