Question about generating a great prophet

johanna

Chieftain
Joined
Jan 9, 2010
Messages
2
Hi everyone,
I started playing Civilization 4 recently. Usually I manage to found a religion in the beginnen. Now I know, that wenn you get a Great Prophet and build a shrine, you can get a lot of income. But the game I'm playing now, is almost finished and all this time no prophet was born. Is there a way to increase the chance a Great Prophet is born, instead of a Great Merchant/Artist for example?
Thank you :)
 
From what I can tell, the type of great person you spawn is dependent on the wonders you have. I'm not sure if using priest specialist will increase but it seems likely.
 
What Great Person you get, depends on what GP points are produced in a city.
GP points are produced by specialists and wonders, and how much of what type, and what's the chance for what GP you can see in the yellow bar in the city screen.
 
Priest Specialists will increase the likelihood of generating a Great Prophet, and from my experience will, over time, begin to overpower the GPP (Great Peron Points) generated by Wonders, giving you vaster control over which GP spawns.
 
Specialists (free or otherwise) provide 3GPP
Great Wonders provide 2GPP
National Wonders provide 1GPP

Thus, running one additional temple priests changes the percentages from 60/40 to approximate 70/30 in favor of the prophet.

Keep in mind that the average game maybe see 10-15 great people which is a very small sample size and thus quite possible that you will not see these percentages.

Adding the National Epic gets you more Great People but makes it possible to pop an artist in addition to whatever else you are trying to get.
 
Specialists and Wonders give you the "GPP" that fills up the yellow bar until you pop a great person.

The type of Great Person who appears when that bar fills is random, with the chances depending on the types of specialists and wonders in the city. Some wonders (ex. The Oracle) make Great Prophets more likely, as do Priest specialists.

If the city happens to have only religious specialists and wonders, a Great Prophet is the only possibility. A more likely scenario is that the city has a variety of wonders, but you "load the dice" making the type of Great Person you want more likely by using as many of that kind of specialist as you can. For example, if I really want a scientist to build an academy in my science city, I could use my Great Person city (surrounded by farms to support many specialists) and the Caste System civic to stack six Scientist specialists there, making my chances of a Great Scientist very high.
 
Best way to get that prophet is to get it early. Each great person you generate increases the points required for the next, and its hard to get enough priest slots later on. Scientists are better anyway though.
 
Hi everyone,
I started playing Civilization 4 recently. Usually I manage to found a religion in the beginnen. Now I know, that wenn you get a Great Prophet and build a shrine, you can get a lot of income. But the game I'm playing now, is almost finished and all this time no prophet was born. Is there a way to increase the chance a Great Prophet is born, instead of a Great Merchant/Artist for example?
Thank you :)

You need to keep your holy city focused on religion -- NOT art, science, commerce. Once you have enough population to begin running specialists, run ONLY priests there. For example, build Stonehenge and activate 2 priests. Leaving them running, and you will definitely soon get your first prophet. If you settle him in the city or use him to build your shrine, that further increases your chances to getting prophets. So does Oracle and (later) wonders like Angor Wat and Spiral Mineret. If you are playing a Spiritualist leader (such as I do with Ramesses), you want to be cranking out prophets on a regular basis until you reach Divine Right. After that, they are of less value. Just settle any extras in your commerce cities to boost their financial output.

Watch that yellow Great Person progress bar. It will tell you in how many turns your next prophet will be born. By correlating that information with your technology research, you can often time it so that your next prophet founds a new religion. That will give you lots of benefits, especially if you are playing for a Cultural Victory.:)
 
Thank you very much for your help!
Now I've got a much better understanding, also from the GP-principle in general.
 
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