Poland Has Spread Religion to 23 Cities

Please see the screenshot.

How is it possible that Poland has spread religion to 23 cities by turn 188?

I'm playing on Prince, and standard game. No extra civs or CS's.

Also--I want to ask. What is up with Venice and the crappy starts? I had another beautiful start, and found out later I was on a damn lake, and not an ocean. Three games in a row I started on a huge lake, and not a ocean coast. Needless to say, I was pretty ticked off.

Screen shot attached for the 23 city thing. Is this a bug?

Probably built Borobodur which gives it 3 free missionaries.

Also poland likes to build wide, so it probably has a lot of cities exerting pressure and if it managed to get an early set of missionaries the number of cities snowballs quickly

If you study how Poland is played, they'll go for Piety all the way and their UA helps them finish the Piety tree faster. They will always 99.0009% of the time be the first to found a Reformation belief. They're a religious civ, just like the Celts and Byzantium.

Part of the beauty of poland is that they can be anything, not just religious. Of course it will be easier for them to snatch a reformation belief because theyre getting some 6 odd policies for free, which if your talking in end of game culture cost terms thats over 100,000 culture for free. You can truly go anywhere with that. Want a culture victory? Get to exploration and aestehtics before anyone else can. Diplo? Of course youll be the first up that tree. In my game as poland i had literally taken so many policies that i had reached a point where i couldnt find any more useful ones to pick, my civ was so good at doing every activity that there were truly no modifiers i needed from SP's. If anything poland is guaranteed to do well going wide b/c they will have the free policies making up for the higher policy cost. In addition, their stables improvement means that one of the most abundant special resources on the map, cattle/sheep/horses produce an extra production and gold. Ive noticed in BNW the map tends to generate with clusters of resources as well in ways G&K never would. This leaves open the possibility of multiple cities with 3+ pastures being worked and at any point throughout the game but especially earlier that is an amazing bonus which can be funneled towards almost any endeavor. Lastly their mounted units unique ability to drive enemies back is amazing when defending and has plenty of uses in attack situations as long as you back them up with infantry to take cities. Poland is truly the jack of all trades and imo one of the most powerful additions in BNW.

It's now up to 29 cities. This has to be impossible. And Poland only has three or four cities.

And their missionaries keep converting my cities even though I have inquisitors in them.

On standard speed, is it possible to have 29 cities (worldwide) in 200 turns or less? And let's not forget that other civs have a religion as well.

Seriously--he has spread his religion to 29 cities by turn 200???

How is that possible?

docbud said:

It's now up to 29 cities. This has to be impossible. And Poland only has three or four cities.

And their missionaries keep converting my cities even though I have inquisitors in them.

On standard speed, is it possible to have 29 cities (worldwide) in 200 turns or less? And let's not forget that other civs have a religion as well.

Seriously--he has spread his religion to 29 cities by turn 200???

How is that possible?

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I've done it before.

It's not hard, you just dedicate a lot of time to sending missionaries into other cities.

This sounds possible given religious pressure and some missionaries to start the snowball effect. Most cities have fairly small populations at this point, so missionaries can do some serious damage converting cities. Once enough cities have adopted the religion they will start exerting their passive pressure, regardless of their size. It's very easy, once the ball is rolling, for a religion to begin spreading like a virus. This is especially so if it's early and there's no other religions in the way.

Just have to get enough faith coming in early on. The civs i tend to see doing this are boudicca or a desert/jungle bias civ that takes that +1 faith bonus for those respective tiles. But any civ can do that really, if poland starts in the middle of a desert and adopts the pantheon for extra faith from deserts he can be making over +6 faith in each city with these tiles in addition if he builds stonehenge thats just more free faith that no one else can get. In the early game when everyone else has maybe +2 faith total or no religion at all this is huge and swarming the map with prophets is easy. Also build the great mosque for the missionary bonus and then borobudur for 3 super-missionaries. Also is the holy temple a new national wonder or was it in G&K i cant remember and it seems like the religious pressure i can exert in BNW is far superior to G&K once i build it, im wondering if only trade routes are responsible for this.

Religion in CiV spreads in the same way that mycelium colonizes a substrate. It's creepy and awesome.

Unfortunately, my religions always get crushed under the weight of some other civ that has devoted more into it. I've only seriously tried twice now since BNW, but there's just so many other things to do at the start that I can never bring myself to focus on religion. It's fairly easy to ignore, as there aren't any consequences, just the inability to choose the religious traits that you want, since someone is fairly likely to swamp you with their religion. And not their Pantheon belief, of course.

Well, I gotta say, he sure sent out a lot of missionaries. I counted ten at one point and those were just the ones loitering by my territory.

It's the first time I've seen religion spread like that so early in the game.

What religious benefits have they chosen and at what proximity are they from the others?

I have done 35 cities in 130something turns with Byzantium using no missionaries in G&Ks (IP and RT in a continent that I was in the middle)

I'll have to check to see on his benefits. I know I have religious texts for mine.

And it's on a Pangea map, so there are alot of civs around.

I've occasionally spread my religion to over half the world, but never that much and that early.

I'm glad to know it is possible.

Like Alphabeta said, once the cities' pressure starts to build up, particularly if they are close together to each other, religion spreads like wildfire.

What is worth noting is that in one game I'd spread my religion all over N. Europe on the Hyper Europe map, but then a religion from outside Europe began spreading even faster than mine. The civ behind it had spread missionaries like bacteria and they were going from city to city building up pressure to neutralize my own. It was clever in a mathematical kind of way, the way the AI went about stifling my religion in favor of its own. By the end of the game I was left with a few key cities close to my Holy City, which affected my income since 1/3 of it came from religious sources.

Well, I'm still playing the game, and since I was making decent faith per turn, I am able to keep generating/buying GPs to keep my two cities safe.

However, the AI is very smart when it comes to me preparing to spread my religion in other countries. Here's a screenshot of my GP going to Austria. Now--before I sent my GP across the ocean, Poland immediately sent several great prophets. As you can see--they are following my GP.

A turn later I converted Graz to my religion. The closest Polish missionary then landed next to Graz and tried to turn it back to his religion. And the other missionaries are hot on my tail.

So it appears to be fruitless to try to convert other nations to my religion as Poland will always be a step behind me to convert them back.

Or should I just accept the fact that eventually I will lose my religion? I'd hate for that to happen.

I've got
1) Tithe
2) Extra faith Great Wonders (Divine Inspiration)
3) Swords into Plowshares (extra food)
4) Religious text.

I figure the only real important things are tithe and the extra food. I think I've got enough faith to generate GPs throughout the game, but don't know. It's only 1710 AD (standard speed).

In any event, I was very surprised that Poland sent the missionaries after my GP and *knew* what I was planning.

{edited and deleted question about annexing Vatican City: I realized after posting that Venice cannot annex}

EDIT, EDIT: It seems the Polish missionaries are dying from attrition on the way to re-convert the Austrian cities

It seems like the only way to deal with Poland is to be Poland.

I am heartened to see a civ be aggressive in this area - hopefully it can lead to a victory otherwise it would have been a waste of faith points for them.

Religion is best spread if you are going into non-religious cities. I have found that once an enemy religion has been established, it's very difficult and costly to try and convert without capturing. It doesn't take much to convert a city with a GP but it won't stay converted for very long. You just keep your cities safe and hope they chose beliefs that are minor.

Buccaneer said:

I am heartened to see a civ be aggressive in this area - hopefully it can lead to a victory otherwise it would have been a waste of faith points for them.
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If anything the AI finally can spread its religion cohesively. So far I have seen even Cathrine been competitive on that department.

Buccaneer said:

I am heartened to see a civ be aggressive in this area - hopefully it can lead to a victory otherwise it would have been a waste of faith points for them.

Religion is best spread if you are going into non-religious cities. I have found that once an enemy religion has been established, it's very difficult and costly to try and convert without capturing. It doesn't take much to convert a city with a GP but it won't stay converted for very long. You just keep your cities safe and hope they chose beliefs that are minor.

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I know. But Poland spread his religion so quickly that there were no non-religious cities.

As an update--my plan didn't work. Poland simply sent GPs instead of missionaries. He had dozens of them and for every city I converted to my religion, he simply converted back the turn or two after.

yeah when civs start spreading religion like that I find the only solution is to kill it with fire. In my first play as portugal boudicca was all by herself on a continent but was beyond dedicated to spamming her missionaries all over mine and everyone elses. It got to the point where she had a steady train of missionaries so that I could line up 2-3 Naus (with logistics upgrade!) in a narrow strait between her continent and one of mine and wipe out at least 1 missionary/GP per turn. I remained at war with her for several hundred turns and faced few consequences.

pilot00 said:

Quoting myself as a bump

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I think that's a key question. If they are getting 100g per city, that would be huge (assuming they actually do something constructive with all of that gold). Apart from that, there is no religious victory and if I knew I could spread like that, I would simply get faith to buy Great Persons. But knowing the AI, they're probably just spamming more prophets and missionaries, which are not cost effective.