Hoarding religion

This seems a bit of a daft thing you are able to do. Admittedly you have a certain amount of "stuff" in order to do it, but most of this can be obtained relatively cheaply. As I understand it, and i may be wrong, but when you set the religion auto purchase thing to "remind me later", when you accumulate enough faith, you auto purchase a great prophet. You dont just accumulate faith indefinitely. If you park a great person/missionary/inquisitor (or oven a worker/settler, although this is untested) in every city you own, then you just go on accumulating faith indefinitely because there is no city for them to spawn in (because they spawn with their turn ended, then move the following turn). This throws up some interesting strategies that you can employ. I only discovered this as a result of sticking an inquisitor in every city to defend against enemy GP's then setting my faith to auto purchase GS's (which never happened, resulting in about 10,000 faith points after a significant while).

One is to save enough faith to purchase multiple great people in one go. You could also do this with prophets and completely remove an opponents faith for a looooong time, even if they have gobs of cities. You can also save a load of faith, then purchase a load of units if you have the correct belief enabled (never used this, so dont really know how it works). I personally got to within about 12 techs from researching all spaceship parts, then used all of my faith along with every other scientist I had got, and researched the remaining techs in one fell swoops. I ended up winning an emperor game via space in about 1916, and I could have got the victory a lot sooner too had I known about this rather broken feature.

Is this a design flaw, or am i not understanding something?

When you hit the industrial age Great Prophets can be bought and are no longer randomly earned. There is no need to park a citizen in every city to save up faith points.

Gamewizard said:

When you hit the industrial age Great Prophets can be bought and are no longer randomly earned. There is no need to park a citizen in every city to save up faith points.

Click to expand...

The point is this is possible BEFORE the Industrial Age. Sometimes I get like 70 faith per turn and would rather save it up than get a 1,000 point great prophet in the Renaissance Era. I'll have to test it out myself.

I don't think it is possible before Industrial. I tried parking a GE I wasn't ready to use yet in my capital, my only city at the time, with religion purchase set to 'remind me later'. I still had the unwanted GP spawn at the capital once I crossed the 800 faith mark.

I once managed to get to Industrial before the 500-faith GP spawn, so there's that.

I don't think this tactic works. As others have said, you were probably in the industrial age already.

By your logic, even great scientists couldn't spawn which is obviously not the case.

You cannot buy units with a unit stationed in the city, but they can still anturally spawn and tend to be spawned OVER a unit or eject the previous unit. So even if you are pre-Industrial, you cannot save those Faith points to avoid earning another Great Prophet, he will still spawn, simply over your Civilian Unit, or next to the city.