What is the viability of using this strategy in MP?
Also, adwcta, I've seen some of your other posts on these forums and have noticed you talking a bit about wide play in general; I was wondering if you had any intention of making a wide guide in the future?
Also (again), regarding Reformation beliefs and staying in the Medieval era:
-Would stacking the Charitable Missions reformation belief along with the Philanthropy social policy be a good idea, or would you suggest going for only one?
-We stay in the Medieval era so that Missionary spam is easier, right?
ETA: Would also like to know what beliefs you recommend for founder/follower. Papal Primacy?
I have never seriously played MP, only screwed around with it with friends (co-op). I imagine it won't work at all for competitive play (not even a little), because at least a third of the guide is about how the AI will react. You will likely be invaded because you have zero army. I really don't know what people do in multiplayer, but I imagine "peaceful" play does not exist.
I may make a peaceful (or semi-peaceful) wide guide. It would be much shorter than this, because it still generally requires the same skillset that playing tall does, only it adds more stuff on top of it. It's less easy to see the value of peaceful wide, as compared to "small". The value of this style is obviously that you can fall behind, and in cases where it would be difficult not to fall behind, "small" becomes a very viable alternative in terms of game security. You also have to do less work than tall/wide in terms of the basics (the work you do is religion/diplo work, which is very different than squeezing out resources each turn).
For Reformation Beliefs, I don't find myself using gold that much (your spies level up very quickly, and you're generally only worried about science from leaving Medieval to hitting Industrialization, so you'll have two high leveled spies to pay around with, and you can always train replacement spies in 10-15 turns because you're behind in tech). I coup-blitz as much as possible, and wait for the "lost" CSes to recover. Charitable Missions is most useful early on in the game (go left side Patronage, ignore Consulates) for gold savings. So, if you aren't expecting any religious competition, then sure. I have yet to find it better than Unity of Prophets though, because the AI WILL convert civs that don't found their own religion, so you would need to counter-prophet spam them to keep up (usually takes two prophets at once), once they start, unless you have Unity of the Prophets (and that has opportunity costs in gold and culture). I might do it if the key civ I need to hold as my religion is non-expansive (4-city tradition) and I get there first, and I pick the Prophet savings/conversion strength Enhancer. Unity of the Prophets relies on pressure, and 4 cities won't generate enough natural pressure to automatically convert cities back. So, a Prophet/missionary combo might be necessary anyway.
Think of it this way, Unity/Evangelism saves you faith (a LOT of faith, significantly more than 30% is a contested area). Charitable Missions saves you gold, 30% on whatever you dump into the CSs. You'll have enough gold/spies to get all the CSs by endgame anyway (remember, our endgame is very very late), so saving gold will only benefit your final delegate count to the extent that it is the difference-maker between being about to king-make your ally, or being about to buy a CS from being eating up by war. My preference is always to go for Evangelism/Unity (and they're almost always there) depending on which one is applicable for my purposes, with Charitable Missions as a backup.
And yes, the only benefit to staying in Medieval over Renaissance is faith costs (and research costs, but you're so far behind that you can safely enter Renaissance without raising RA costs for 95% of civs). Now, the only benefit to getting Renaissance earlier is to be able to open up Rationalism (which is fine, but not very important in the big picture timing of things), and gold from Banking (which is very nice). Again, the tradeoff here is really faith vs. gold. As you can see from my reasoning, I almost always prefer faith to gold. It's the more scarce resource, and the bump is +50% faith costs vs +20%gold (trade route plus banks, on an existing +50% city-gold modifier). This is why I recommend only hitting Banking after you won't be making faith purchases anymore.