Shrine or settled prophet

[Quillan]

I'd do the same as Pauli. If I was going to capture the holy city in the near future, meaning I was either at war or building up to the war and expecting to be able to take the holy city in the first wave, I'd hold the prophet. Otherwise I'd use it, most likely by settling it unless it could lightbulb a really good tech for me.

[Six Thousand Year Old Man]

I tend to play big maps/many AIs, and consequently the shrine is just irresistible. With 14-16 AIs, any religion founded seems to have a good chance of spreading via a shrine. And the ability to run at 90-100% science (thanks to shrine income) instead of 80% is a big boost, too.



(edited to add illustration)

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by DirtyMartini
Someone alluded to this above, but what about the situation where you generate a prophet very early (say an obelisk fueled prophet with Egypt)? Even if I've founded a religion, it's unlikely to have spread to 5 cities at that point, and you're likely to generate another prophet before too long. In that case, I favor settling the first and waiting on building the shrine. But I guess that seems pretty obvious.

That's the whole point. You don't wait for it to spread to five cities - the shrine will help it to do that. Building the shrine with only 2 or 3 cities converted already will generally be the better deal of the two.

The "likeliness" of generating another prophet soon is a presumably not open to question but it simply takes too long to do this. Taking the example of Egypt, 6 GPP/turn will still take 67 turns for another prophet which means that you will be running one of your cities at a VERY slow rate. With this part of the game one in which you need to be expanding, this is going to severely harm your development.

[Blake]

Whether or not a shrine will help spread religion depends largely on how much empty space there is for it to expand into - if many religions have been founded in the locality it might be hard-pressed to expand much but on the other hand if you're in a religious vacuum it's a no-brainer. Also sometimes in a crowded situation it makes sense to get the Shrine in the hope that it can act as a tiebreaker in swinging some other Civs religion to yours.

I will say that quite often, especially as phi, and when I built the Stonehenge or Oracle, I will settle my first Prophet. There are various things which make this more likely - such as if I've founded multiple religions and none of them are dominating, or if I just lack trade routes to other civs and will for the foreseeable future.

Something which will definitely sway me towards building a Shrine is if I don't want to ever generate a second prophet - you usually want to get a Prophet asap (for your shrine) and a Scientist ASAP (for an Academy), that means that your 2nd prophet will (hopefully) be your 3rd Great Person, which for a non-phi leader can take a long time.

[couerdelion]

I still can’t see why you would want to settle the first GP – it only gives you 5 gold while the shrine will net you more in the medium to long term. The earliest you can be certain for a second prophet as a PHI leader is 40 turns (800 years) by assigning a priest in the Stonehenge/Oracle city – I assume you have not built both. In a period of less than 600 years in one game, I had 5 cities convert to Hinduism on a continent where it had to compete with Buddhism and Judaism. That Judaism was able to nearly match this rate of expansion latter may well have been due “forced” conversion rather than simply having the cities assume the religion.

What’s more, I rather think that with a PHI leader you are also missing the point that I failed to mention about the shrine. It generates 1 GPP/turn which is far more valuable than 3gpt at this stage in the game.

In fact, the GPP is an argument for building the shrine even on a island with only space for two cities.

[sjm]

You also have to ask the question why you would bother founding an early religion, and then not build the shrine. If you wanted to annex someone else's holy city, surely you would have researched mining instead of mysticism from the off (or whatever).

Well, I guess if you popped the tech from a hut...

My experience has always been that the AI is rubbish at generating an early prophet, and only builds the holy shrines much much too late in the game to benefit from the spread of the religion. But if you get your shrine out before anyone else does, it really gives you a head start. You want your religion to be the one that spreads - basically locking out the other religions.

I generally go for Confucianism myself, and even though there's often a few other religions around by then, none of them normally have a shrine yet and thus have not spread like wildfire. If I build the shrine, it doesn't take long until I'm getting 5gpt - and very soon its double figures. Even without spamming missionaries, my religion is generally one of the strongest 2 in the game - and it's normally due to the early shrine for a somewhat later religion.

At least I have far more important things to concentrate on in the early game than building missionaries.

[Common Sensei]

Originally posted by Ming
It's nice to see that nobody is recommending using the prophet to get a free science

Pre 2.08 that was a good tactic coupled with avoiding Masonry. Now of course, not so hot.

[Blake]

Originally posted by couerdelion
I still can’t see why you would want to settle the first GP – it only gives you 5 gold while the shrine will net you more in the medium to long term. The earliest you can be certain for a second prophet as a PHI leader is 40 turns (800 years) by assigning a priest in the Stonehenge/Oracle city – I assume you have not built both. In a period of less than 600 years in one game, I had 5 cities convert to Hinduism on a continent where it had to compete with Buddhism and Judaism...

You're missing three things...
1) Game Speed.
2) Map Size.
3) Map Topology.

On faster game speeds religions spread A LOT slower. On smaller map sizes there are a lot less cities - it might not even be possible for the shrine to spread a religion 5 times! Especially if you've founded multiple religions, like on a smaller map you might only have 5 cities, and if you found Buddhism, Conf and Tao, that leaves only 2 cities open, and depending on the map shape (ie not Great Plains) you may well have time to generate 3 Great People before even getting more than one trade connection and it's quite possible that one trade connection will already have a religion of it's own!
(With a Philo slingshot it's possible to have 2 religions and only 2 cities! And by that time having generated 2 Great People and be on the way to the third!)

On a small islands map where you found multiple religions the chance of a Shrine being more useful than settling are slim to none.

I find that on average sized map and normal speed the balance is fairly good, if somewhat biased towards building a shrine on any crowded map.

[khumak]

From what I've seen it seems like shrine #1 is reasonably effective at spreading religion but every additional shrine is less an less effective at it. So generally I aim to found exactly 1 religion and let the AI get the rest. If I succeed in founding 1 then I build a shrine with my first prophet. If not then I settle all of my prophets and just conquer a shrine or 3.

Shrine income is generally totally dwarfed by trade and cottage/town income in my games anyway.

[couerdelion]

The speed shouldn’t be an issue unless it really does spread more slowly – rather than at the same speed but one that seems slower because everything except unit movement (and maybe anarchy) is slower. If you’re overall civilisation output is growing by 0.75% per turn on Marathon and religion spread is 0.25% per turn, then there’s no real difference to a standard speed game where output grows at 2.25% per turn and religion spreads at 0.75% per turn. Obviously there is scope to analyse how MUCH the religion can spread but I dare say, by the time you have the prophet, you’ll have a fair idea of the location of one or two neighbours and will also know if they have a religion. In the example I gave, all three early religions were shared among the three civs on the continent and I can’t see a more competitive scenario than that emerging.

As far as Philo slingshots goes, you’re already on the road to later religions so it’s hard to see that the prophet would considered early anyway. Add to that the fact that you have somewhat polluted the religion pool with Confucianism and Taoism and you could indeed find yourself in a competitive position. But I’d still need a lot of convincing not to build the shrine. Why not stack the odds more in your favour by founding the Taoist shrine, get a little more culture, and add to the existing stream of GPP to get the next Prophet sooner?

Of course, there is always the scenario that you have a single city on a single tile island surrounded by ocean – or some other constrained environment in which you have no trade possibilities and limited space in which to expand. If you are going to max out at two cities with the religion then I think the settled prophet might make sense if it were not for the fact that popping another religion would probably be better.

[Blake]

The speed shouldn’t be an issue unless it really does spread more slowly – rather than at the same speed but one that seems slower because everything except unit movement (and maybe anarchy) is slower. If you’re overall civilisation output is growing by 0.75% per turn on Marathon and religion spread is 0.25% per turn, then there’s no real difference to a standard speed game where output grows at 2.25% per turn and religion spreads at 0.75% per turn.

Except it doesn't work like this. A great many things don't scale with game speed - revolt timers, treaty durations, jungle spread - and religion spread is one of those things.
(Even missionary spread doesn't scale properly because the unit limit is far more restrictive with the Cost/Move Speed ratio)

As for why you shouldn't stack the odds in favor of getting a second prophet sooner? BECAUSE SCIENTISTS ARE FAR MORE USEFUL , if it's not a good idea to build the first shrine then it'll be a fair bet that the second shrine will be even less useful. An early prophet means you built the Stonehenge or Oracle and that means there'll be a trickle of prophets popping up throughout the game - part of the trick is MINIMIZING the chance you generate the bastards, there's few things worse than FAILING to generate an early scientist. Granted often you can get a pure scientist pool but it doesn't always work like that and sometimes your capital will be the only city blessed with absurd food, or the religion decided to found in your "pure" scientist pool city while the capital has henge/oracle.

Note that Prophets are of course far less useful in Warlords 2.08 than earlier versions of CIV, since they can't be used for CoL/CS.

[couerdelion]

But I thought one of the points of the Philo slingshot is that it allows you to assign lots of scientists in one food rich city thus forcing out a stream of scientists. Four scientists will easily outstrip the GPP from Oracle, Stonehenge and the shrine so the Academy is a given at some stage.

As it is, I’m tending to drift away from settling GPs ever since I started looking at typical growth rates in a civ. While I will still contrast this option, I find that the value of settling seems to be worse than simply popping techs with special abilities tending to be stronger options - except in the case of academies where one is usually as much as I will build.

[Blake]

Again that's something which does depend on game speed, especially skewed on Marathon where Settlers are cheaper (meaning you can expand to larger faster). And it depends greatly on map size, while things are fairly balanced for smaller maps, the largest maps greatly disfavor settling.

The main use for settling is on smaller maps when the GP in question wont lightbulb something useful. Another factor is that the settled GP income can be directed towards any end, like you can use a settled Scientist or Prophet to help research Currency and Construction.
Settling is something I do mainly as Philo leaders since for others you're right that usually you can plan better uses for GP's.

Also I almost never settle GP's generated by Specialists (again unless Philo), if I'm running specialists to get GP's then I have some very specific purpose for the GP (the exception of course being dud GP's like a prophet when I need a GS or a GS when I need a prophet).
Settling specialists are best when the GPP points are "free" and can't be turned off, you can't choose what you get and it's difficult to plan optimal tech light bulbing.

[joncnunn]

I've never bothered with offically doing the math; but it's agreement with my intution that in the long run Shrine is much better than Great Prophet.

A more interesting issue for me is assuming you haven't built all the Shrines to the holy cities you have yet but the free tech adviable would found a new religion [that otherwise you wouldn't found], which choice is better?

On the one hand, building the Shrine would give you money now from one of your religions while forsaking ever getting money from an additional religion.
On the other hand, using it for a religious tech will evenually allow you to get money from that as well and possibly in the more imedate run build a Great Wonder or two.

[couerdelion]

Much depends on the ease with which you will be generating Prophet. Don’t forget also that, if you have CoL, a great scientist can lightbulb Philosophy for Taoism so you don’t always need Prophets for religions, just for shrines.

In general, I would go Religion/Shrine/Religion/Shrine from prophets. Second religions can still be big money spinners and, particularly at a time when costs might be an issue, missionaries are a tidy way of paying for them when you have one or two shrines.

The third religion is likely to be a luxury. I suspect I would only try to lightbulb this if it were Divine Right, and this more because I like Spiral Minaret. If it occurs earlier then the spreading of a third religion actively will be a drain on resources so probably only wants to be done if you have already acquired local and/or regional dominance.

At least, that’s my gut-feel. Often, local dominance also comes with one or two holy cities and, unless shrines are already built, you’ll have plenty more shrines to build first.