spiritual is lame!

BlizzardGR

BlizzardGR

Prince
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Is there any real advatage for selecting a civ with spiritual trait? It seems pretty useless to me.

So there is no anarchy right? How can a single turn of anarchy when i change civics even bother me? It doesn't set me back or anything. Is there another use for spiritual that i'm not aware of?

Do you guys ever choose spiritual leaders and why?
 
spiritual is good if you're playing online and need to change civics often baised on wars. Humans tend to declare war much more frequently than the AI, and being able to switch over to theocracy at the drop of a hat when you need more troops is a great bonus. Also it can help you get some early wonders and techs before others in mp.

Granted, it is a little underpowered compared to finacial or industrious, but given the right circumstances, it can prove quite useful

Myself, I always leave my leader random, so if I get it I make very good use in switching my civics as often as I need. (build military, expand city infastructure, build more military, expand city infastructure... ect.)
 
BlizzardGR said:
Is there any real advatage for selecting a civ with spiritual trait? It seems pretty useless to me.

So there is no anarchy right? How can a single turn of anarchy when i change civics even bother me? It doesn't set me back or anything. Is there another use for spiritual that i'm not aware of?

Do you guys ever choose spiritual leaders and why?
Click to expand...

Spiritual Leaders save 5-50 turns of anarchy per game, depending on how many changes of gov you make. It allows much more freedom with your changes as well.
 
Spritiual is a wonderful thing when you utilize it properly. Working on infrastructure go bureacracy, serfdom, organized religion. Planning for war? go vassalage, caste system (for expanding conquered cities culture) and theocracy. War going on too long... switch into Police State. Like the science bonus from Representation, but have tons of cash sitting around, switch into Universal Suffrage and spend it up. Suddenly attacked by the AI? switch into Statehood and start conscripting your people. Neighbour wants you to accept their favourite civic/religion... you can accept, no real loss to you, it's only 5 turns of a something you hadn't wanted. And it's all without anarchy. The faster temples is a nice little bonus if you're having happiness problems.

If i'd wanted to do that in the last game I played (monarch, standard highlands, won a domination victory). i would've had to endure 3 turns of anarchy for an early shift, and it was 7 turns near the end. That's for one civic switch.
 
I don't change civics very often but even if i did i don't see a reason to choose a spiritual leader. When i'm in a hurry to change civics, the fact that i'll have one turn of anarchy doesn't keep me from doing so.

If there were more turns of anarchy (3-4), then i would have a motive to go with spiritual. But only 1 turn? Common, that's nothing! So what if you change your civis a few times in the course of a game? Still doesn't make a defference.

Other traits are much more important than this. Plus i don't play online so...
 
BlizzardGR said:
I don't change civics very often but even if i did i don't see a reason to choose a spiritual leader. When i'm in a hurry to change civics, the fact that i'll have one turn of anarchy doesn't keep me from doing so.

If there were more turns of anarchy (3-4), then i would have a motive to go with spiritual. But only 1 turn? Common, that's nothing! So what if you change your civis a few times in the course of a game? Still doesn't make a defference.

Other traits are much more important than this. Plus i don't play online so...
Click to expand...

You save a minimum of ten turns in the game. If you play 'spiritually' you can save 100 turns in the gmae.
 
Spiritual and Organized seem to be the most underrated traits in the game.
Spiritual allows for many special tactics, i give you some examples.
Say you have several religions and no Stonehenge. In this case you often want to switch frequently between religions so that all your cities (with different religions) can expand their borders.
In the later game it is often a good idea to buy things, sometimes you want to run Republic instead of Universal Suffarage. Now with Spiritual this is easy if you have gathered some money switch to Universal Suffarage buy the buildings and switch back.
Sometimes you want to build a crucial wonder as fast as possible, so organized religion would be nice, well here you go change to organized religion while you are building the wonder and switch back after that with Spiritual trait without loosing any turns.
Lets say some AI civ is pissed of you because you believe in the wrong gods - with spiritual you might change it to the AIs favour before negotating and after that switch back.
I think Spiritual trait is well balanced.
 
Anarchy is not always one turn. I'm not sure exactly what determines it but if you have a lot of cities (going for domination) it can easily be three turns just for one change. When it would take you six turns just to change to vassalage/theocracy to get +4xp for your troop when you're planning for a war... it's no slouch anymore. Then the war weariness strikes bad and you have to change to police state... three more turns of anarchy. That's a whole lot of wasted turns. This basically means that you don't change civics unless you absolutely must.

But yes, in some games it doesn't benefit you much. If you don't care about religions (starting with mysticism pretty much guarantees you at least one of the early three, perhaps even all of them if you play it right and get a bit lucky. And the cheap temples...) and only have a small number of cities then it's a sort of wasted trait. However, if these things are important to you then it's a great trait indeed.
 
For some reason I can't stand to be in anarchy, so I find that if I'm playing with a non-religious civ, I avoid switching when often I desperately need to (almost like "the old ways are best" variant I read about a while back). I only go with random leaders, but next time I get a spiritual one I will definitely be using it to the max with some of the ideas Orca et al. gave.
 
Spiritual is for players who micromanage. Basically by properly milking the civic system, you "simulate" other traits:

- want quick land grab like creative? go for Caste system/free speech for a few turns
- switch to vassalage/police state/theocracy, you're like aggressive leader for a while
- want to be a peaceful builder getting GP like a philosophical leader? Quickly switch to representative/merchantilism/pacifisim
- you want a quick wonder but like representative? Don't worry, switch to organized religion to build faster, serfdom to cut forest faster, universal suffrage to get a few more hammers and allow rushing, 5-10 turns later you go back to your representative/free religion mode.
- if you have multireligion, you can switch state religion to 1) scout different sets of AI cities; 2) make friends with somebody who threaten you most that you don't want to fight, or a leader who have most techs to trade 3) as somebody mentioned, somewhat control the culture spread.

Really try it and play with it, and you'll regret what you've said. Start from Gandi, probably the best wonder builder.
 
Spiritual is for players who micromanage. Basically by properly milking the civic system, you "simulate" other traits:
Click to expand...

Now that makes more sense to me. That may be it after all! :goodjob:

Having no anarchy in itself is no big bonus when i generally play with specific civics. I only change them when something more suitable for my stategy comes up and stick with those. But when someone micromanages things a lot, as you said, it makes more sense to constantly switch civics and therefore have a spiritual trait.

That cleared things up for me! I may even give this trait a chance, go figure!
 
BlizzardGR said:
Having no anarchy in itself is no big bonus when i generally play with specific civics. I only change them when something more suitable for my stategy comes up and stick with those. But when someone micromanages things a lot, as you said, it makes more sense to constantly switch civics and therefore have a spiritual trait.
Click to expand...
But even then, when you don't MM civics, you will probably have more than 10 turns of anarchy with p1.52, at least above noble. It may not seem like much because it's only 1-2 turns each time, but have you counted how much production and commerce you would otherwise get during those 10 turns? That's certainly no small amount.
 
spiritual is very usefull for people who optimize every turn and change civics on the fly to counter and produce anything to the max. You can turn yourself from the most free lovig country to the most zealous military state cranking out weapons of war in a heartbeat. reccomended for people who are very impulsive.
 
I think anarchy gets watered down on epic speeds as well. 1 turn during epic, and one during normal are quite different as far as lost productivity.

I've only seen anarchy take 1 turn for a change, but I haven't controlled a huge number of cities just yet. I believe it would help in that regard.

My problem with the micromanagement is that you still have to wait 5 turns between each change. So you're lack of anarchy is overshadowed by your inability to change civics more frequently.
 
_alphaBeta_ said:
I think anarchy gets watered down on epic speeds as well. 1 turn during epic, and one during normal are quite different as far as lost productivity.

I've only seen anarchy take 1 turn for a change, but I haven't controlled a huge number of cities just yet. I believe it would help in that regard.

My problem with the micromanagement is that you still have to wait 5 turns between each change. So you're lack of anarchy is overshadowed by your inability to change civics more frequently.
Click to expand...

most empires i control end up with 30-40 cities under it, and when you get that big, changing one civic is 2 turns, and all 5 civics is 5-6 turns of anarchy.

and to improve the spiritual trait, maybe the cooldown between revolts should be reduced? halved?
 
Spritual is the second strongest trat after financial IMHO. It's just so extremely abusable. In quick multiplayer games I would even say it's the strongest. (cottages get pillaged too often, and game lasts really short...)
 
What difficulty and game speed are you playing at BlizzardGR? I regularly get 3-5 turns of anarchy.
 
What difficulty and game speed are you playing at BlizzardGR? I regularly get 3-5 turns of anarchy.
Click to expand...

Well, i play on noble at the moment usually on normal speed(sometimes on epic, never on marathon). I've never experienced anarchy more than 1 turn and that might explain it.

Is it really worth having a spiritual trait on noble when you hardly ever change civics? I reckon it can be useful in higher difficulties or when you change civics all the time, but what about those who play on lower difficulties like myself? Also on slower speeds i think that even 3-5 turns of anarchy isn't that big a deal right?
 
lossing 3-5 turns or even one is always a big deal to me, it stops you dead in your tracks.Havinig spi trait means you never ever have to slow down unless you choose to. IMHO SPI is the best trait in the game.
 
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