Is founding multiple religions an advantage?

[joncnunn]

First, unless you only have one city, it will indeed never found in the capital.

Next, all cities with no religion whatsoever are highly prefered over those with religions.

After that, it's weighted by population.

[realpolitic]

Playing a military strategy, I find that 2 religious wonder lets me build less, while keeping my GNP high enough and science around 70% this buys me a bit more time, conquering a few more cities before I need to worry about finance.

[ben_vii]

Joncunn, are these the only rules? I heard this also so I thought that I could manipulate where the religion would land.

I had 3 cities including the capital and my third city had a couple of gold mines next to it, so I wanted to make this my holy city. So right before I discovered the tech I whipped whatever I was building in the second city to lower its population. To my annoyance the religion was still founded in the second city with the lower pop.

Could there be another condition?

[Yosho]

Well, founding more religions means more money if you're willing to build multiple shrines and build lots of missionaries.

Also, it can be useful for diplomatic reasons. Each religion tends to form a hostile power block, and you usually can't get other people to adopt your state religion if they've got their own religion. If you found, say, Hinduism or Buddhism, and you want to spread it far and wide to make a powerful Hindu alliance block, it can be useful to found another religion or two just so the AI's don't get them. It's kind of a crapshoot, but one game I managed to grab enough religions that out of the 5 people on my continent, 4 of them were Hindu and the other was Bhuddist; we all crushed him easily, and then I never had another war all game and easily cruised to a peaceful late-game space race win. If I hadn't founded Judiasm, Confusinism, and Christianity odds are fairly high one of my allias would have, making them my enemies. Of course, I was lucky the other religions were founded on other continents.

[Dis]

I find it's very difficult to found more than 2. Though I suppose if I place more importance on islam and christianity tech I could get those. Too many other important techs to get.

[Blake]

Originally posted by ben_vii
Joncunn, are these the only rules? I heard this also so I thought that I could manipulate where the religion would land.

I had 3 cities including the capital and my third city had a couple of gold mines next to it, so I wanted to make this my holy city. So right before I discovered the tech I whipped whatever I was building in the second city to lower its population. To my annoyance the religion was still founded in the second city with the lower pop.

Could there be another condition?

It's not a rigid rule, it's a preference.

Religion massively prefers to not go in the capital.
It greatly prefers cities with fewer religions.
It slightly prefers cities with high population.

[wodan11]

Generally I find that if I aggressively spread religions to my cities such that my "shrine" city always has fewer religions than all my other cities, then my shrine city almost always gets the new-founded religion.

It's a pain in the butt and takes a lot of management, and really works best if you are planning on running Free Religion later. But, the payoff is huge once you get Wall Street.

Wodan

[Willem]

Originally posted by joncnunn
After that, it's weighted by population.

That's not true. I've had religions found in cities that were much smaller than others, even though all the other conditions were the same.

[KMadeleine]

there's a random factor too, just to make it more exciting i guess.

i don't read code myself, but reliable sources have told me that the formula is:

[(City Population) + 10 + (Random10)] / [(Number of Religions in City) + 1]

age is a tie-breaker, older city wins. the capital's score gets divided by 8, so it's basically disqualified.

the city that scores the highest founds the religion.

i haven't heard any rumors that it's been changed in BtS.

twice recently i've had a very old, very high population city with a religion end up holy even though i also had a teensy tiny new city with no religion. the most recent case was this weekend, islam was founded in a size 17 city with one religion already rather than a size 1 city i'd settled 3 turns earlier. i didn't have time to wait until i finished DR because genghis was about to settle and block my spot, what a brat.