Allying every city state on the map via religion

[Zet]

I played a game on Emperor difficulty where I ended up with all city states as allies and kept them with basically no effort.

Here's how to do this:

- Play as Byzantium on a Pangaea map.
- Rush Stonehenge to start accumulating faith.
- Build the Hagia Sofia for the free great prophet.
- Pick Papal Primacy as founder belief for the diplomacy bonus towards city states.
- Pick Itinerant Preachers as extra belief for spreading your religion 30% further (in practice it means that most unconverted cities will be exposed to the pressure from 1-2 more cities than usual. Also, this is the reason why you should pick Byzantium as they can take Itinerant Preachers when founding a religion, everyone else must wait until they're enhancing their religion)
- After founding your religion, "seed" two suitable city states with a missionary. Location is important, it's better to seed towards the center of the continent and it's better to seed an area which contains many cities within 13 tiles of each other.
- Get a second great prophet as soon as possible and pick Religious Texts to make your religion even more pervasive. It will start spreading like a wildfire at this point and give other religions no chance to establish themselves.
- Offer protection to all city states. Always condemn other civs who bully city states to avoid losing reputation.
- Get Aesthetics from the Patronage social policies tab. You'll quickly become friendly with all city states that follow your religion and they'll start giving you bonuses.

Now here's the interesting part: with the culture from friendly cultural city states, I was suddenly able to complete every single "generate culture" quest given from city states, effectively gaining lots of reputation for free. Initially I had to work a bit towards getting more allies, but the more allies you have, the easier many city state quests become and it quickly escalated to the point where I gained allies without every doing anything for them. I had to use one spy to stabilize the last city state that an AI tried to control by constantly rigging elections.

 

[RedRover57]

Interesting. Do you consider this primarily a diplo VC strategy or can you incorporate it into other VC's?

 

[Buccaneer]

Thank you Zet, that is very interesting and well done.

 

[Zet]

Interesting. Do you consider this primarily a diplo VC strategy or can you incorporate it into other VC's?

You can do whatever you want with all city states as allies because you won't be lacking in any area. You'll have good research, culture, faith, happiness, strategic resources and get free military units. I spammed wonders and conquered a weaker neighbor, then went into full domination mode. I even received a Khan at some point.

 

[S.K. Ren]

I would think Siam on a Huge map would benefit the most from this. I'd go with Religious Texts and just invest in a few more missionaries.

 

[pspboy7]

Interesting that people are figuring out so many things to do with religion already, cool!

 

[ZombieBunny]

I did something similar with The Celts. Its fairly easy to get first picks on religion with them due to the +1-2 faith from forests early on. By industrial age my religion was dominating about 80% of the world and I was on friendly terms with pretty much all city states.

That minimum 35 influence from religion+patronage is just awesome! Even if someone rigs elections with spies, youll recover back eventually without having to pay a single gold.

 

[Zet]

I'm doing another game now, same approach and sequence but taking the 1 gold per 4 followers founder belief instead and playing on Immortal on a larger map. Going for domination right away.

Turn 130, I'm earning 61 gold/turn from followers and 40 from my four cities (before expenses). I'm #3 in score. The other religions are barely present on the map. I'm seeing some cities on which I have about 100 religious pressure, so I have definitely established religious dominance. The Dutch are on the opposite corner of the map and they too have adopted my religion, despite me failing to bring a great prophet to their side for some conversions (reason being a wardec from Austria). In only seeded once with a missionary. My military is in decent shape and I'll soon start to hit Austria which is showing signs of becoming a runaway. It looks like I've been able to keep up despite rushing Stonehenge and Hagia Sofia.

 

[kamex]

Sounds really interesting. So what overall benefit do you get from dominating the map with your relgion? The founder bonus for every city on the map, and you chose extra gold? Sounds powerful. Are there any other benefits? Is there a diplo penalty from the other civs who founded their own? How many missionaries do you require to dominate the map?

 

[Peacemongerer]

The other religion diplo penalty only take effect if you directly send a missionary or Great Prophet to their cities and covert followers. Spreading your religion by pressure does nothing negative; only deliberately doing so will incur a penalty; the AI will also whine to you about it and you get either promise not to do it again or tell them to screw-off and incur another penalty... it's like the expanding too quickly or troops on their borders.