I'm playing only on Noble/Prince so this tactic might have some flaws when more difficult settings are used.
The settings I use are large map for fun, pangea for more tech trade options and otherwise normal options.
This method relies on +50% cultural modifier from multiple cathedrals in each of the culture cities. The key to this victory is in founding as many of the 7 religions possible, even all of them in some cases.
Ideal setup is with 9 cities and 7 religions, but the win can be achieved with less than that if required. The setup will produce a lot of commerce as well, so anyone using this strategy will probably be the tech leader as well. You won't be having a state religion for a long time so you'll have easy time managing the AI warmongers. Most of them won't be having a religion for a long long time
I'll first give a brief outline of the whole game and expand on details right after.
I) Founding the religions
1)Buddhism and Hinduism
Founding these is best done with a civilization starting with mysticism. They'll be the first thing you'll research. Often it can't be helped that an AI will research the other, in which case you'll just have to accept it or retry with another map. The AI probably had an oasis with +3 commerce in their first city and researched the required religion tech in top speed.
2)Judaism
There's chance to learn some early tech or two before going for Monotheism and Judaism. Good options are Wheel & Pottery for early cottages, which you'll be relying on for your tech superiority. Other possibilities are Mining/Bronze Working for chopping the Oracle for instant religion, or fishing&Sailing if your first city will need to use the coast.
3)Confucianism, Christianity
Ideally you'll research the tech needed to make the oracle and research writing, which enables you to oracle slingshot for Christianity. Meanwhile you'll research Code of Laws to get Confucianism. If you've got your cities in good order, you can probably afford to research Alphabet too to trade all of the early techs you skipped. Most of the time I'm afraid the AI might catch up, so I go immediately from writing to Code of Laws, and do Alphabet after.
4)Philosophy
By this time philosophy would take dozens of turns to research unless cottages have developed. With alphabet, you'll trade and get pottery if you don't have it already. Your safest bet to improve research time would be to quickly research monarchy and enable Hereditary rule in your biggest city, and to put at least one or two cottages in some of the good cities you have. Your city size is probably most limited by happiness in cities that have access to fresh water, and hereditary rule easily provides some of that with cheap warriors you'll stuff in your biggest cities. This is by far the fastest method to get happiness.
5)Islam
No-one is probably competing to get islam before you. AI just doesn't do that. You'll have plenty of time to research this one. Meanwhile, you can trade for all the techs you need. You'll be sure to have unique religion techs that you can trade for anything you need. You'll probably still turn out the tech leader even if you spent 50 turns researching this one.
II) Founding the cities
1.First city
The first city will have to take the maximum food & commerce at start to assure getting the first 2 or 3 religions. Once it's size is capped at happiness max for your difficulty setting, you'll put in on avoid growth. This city will need any health and food resources, and preferably cottages on grassland/flood plains/whereever else if neither of those are available.
You'll produce your first worker/settler only after the first city has reached the size when the next population would give it the first unhappy citizen. Watch out that this city never has any unhappy citizens.
The production in this time can be for example warriors for scouting, or scouts, if you have the required tech. Other possibility is a barracks. For a non-creative leader you would probably do well to construct a stonehenge. If you're low on production, make sure that building the stonehenge doesn't prevent you from creating the oracle. Remember, you can put the stonehenge on hold when you need to create your settler/worker, unless you haven't finished it already.
2.Second and third cities
Depending on whether or not you created units in the first city, you'll probably need to do units in your second city. You don't need barracks, you'll be just clearing the way for settlers to found new cities. You'll do better units later. The AI won't fight you as there will almost surely be no religion-inspired wars.
3.Cities 4-9
You'll need 9 cities to create 9 temples for each of the religions, to enable a total of 3 cathedrals for your culture cities, per 3/1 temple to cathedral ratio. 3 Temples are required to build one cathedral of that religion. If you can't quite make 9 cities, don't worry – You'll probably do enough to enable enough cathedrals for your civilization. Also, 6 of your cities don't have to be on good spots. You'll just do them to create temples, primarily.
These cities will have to produce their own buildings for starters, unless you can spare time (or chop) to create pyramids and buy the buildings with gold.
For easiest management, I tend to create one farm in a good spot per city, and a few cottages. If there's enough surplus food I can skip the farm.
When a city isn't needed for producing settlers/warriors, or in more advanced stage of the game axemen, they'll probably do best to create workers and libraries for extra commerce. Library will take long to create so you don't probably have time for that in all of your cities before you'll have to take on the phase III, spreading the religions.
Your top city (or two) is probably doing most of the research anyway.
III) Spreading the religions
1.Missionaries
Some of the first religions will spread to your first cities with no religion in them.
The later religions will come with a missionary. You'll do best to use the missionary in some of your own cities that have enough production to produce new missionarys. Organized religion is needed for this phase.
When the city has 4 or 5 religions you'll start to see the religion spreading attempts by missionarys to fail more. Don't worry about it, you'll probably manage without having all the religions in every cities.
In the missionary phase, most of your cities will be producing missionaries of all the varieties and spreading them to all the other cities. You won't be needing temples for happiness at this phase if you keep your city sizes reasonable. Remember that a warrior costs a fraction of that of a temple and provides +1 happiness under hereditary rule.
Creating temples is a waste of time in the missionary phase. You'll have all the happiness needed when you'll later switch to free religion. You'll get a +happiness in each of your cities per non-state religion, which will top at whopping +7 if you managed to catch them all. Them religions.
2.Diplomacy
If you produce excess missionaries of some religion, you can send them to the enemies. They'll wage war at each other for having different state religion. You won't be having a state religion at all, despite having founded (almost) all the religions in the game. Give all the tribute your enemies require of you – they'll probably ask techs, and being the huge tech leader and all, you can surely spare them – and even the occasional goal. Don't stop trading with any AI unless that AI is running their own religion. In the end, most of the world will be running one of the religions you've chosen. You can then convert to that religion to avoid most of the hate, if you feel it's required.
3.Buildings
After you've spread the religions to all your heart's content, you'll require all the temples you can build. If you've decided by now which 3 will be your culture cities and which will be the support cities (the rest), you can prioritize monasterys over temples in the culture cities to boost up research. 7 monasteries equals +70% research and a lot of culture.
4.Great people
Use all the Great Prophets to build a holy building in some of your holy cities. Those holy structures will give plus to great prophet, which will further help you create more prophets. You'll get money from all the religions buildings in the world, even those that aren't yours, so you'll never have to turn the tax/science slider away from 100% science, until it's time for your final culture phase.
5.Buying versus constructing
If you built pyramids, you can probably buy most of the religious buildings. If you didn't, you have to prioritize which buildings to produce. 3 temples enable 1 cathedral or their equivalent in that religion. 6 temples enables 2 cathedrals and 9 temples enables 3 cathedrals. Spiritual leader will build the temples faster. Also, if you feel the most of the world has settled on some state religion, you can probably afford to take that state religion and enjoy the +25% efficiency in building. One option is to research metal casting and build forges for extra production. The culture cities are most likely to benefit from forges. You don't need to care about the pollution they bring in. Creating culture is independent of the size of the population, and even an unhealthy population will bring tons of culture.
6.Total +%culture modifiers and base culture
It's possible to achieve +70% from 7 missionaries and +350% from 7 cathedrals in each of the culture cities, for a total of +420%. These add up linearily. The base culture comes from temples (+1 each), monasteries (+2 each), libraries (+2) and later universities (+3), and of course the culture slider you'll use at the end of the game. Culture slider converts part of the commerce in each of the cities to culture. Culture slider will easily become the most important source at the end. This is why you'll need cottages: they will provide you the research for your technological superiority (from a slider), money for buying your buildings, after you've gained universal suffrage, and culture, after you've gained drama. You won't probably need to use the culture slider in most of the game though.
Of course, then there's the +100% culture from free speech/liberalism, which really means double culture, not a linear addition to a city culture modifier. If a city would have +420% culture modification without free speech, it will have +840% with free speech. Now, this will be plenty. In any case, I guess it might be possible to win before researching liberalism, too.
7.End phase: bringing up the culture
All your cities (even the support cities) are now culture bombs waiting to explode. AI who sees your culture spreading to their cities, even causing them to revolt will be mad at you. If you've cottage spammed enough you'll have large enough technological advancement that you can hold off the enemy easily by now. If not, you have probably enough political power by now that you can turn most of their enemies against them. If they have a different religion to the target civilization and your trade relations have been good, they'll probably agree to fight for one or two techs, which are essentially free for you to give. You probably shouldn't need to bribe anyone to war with gold.
That's it, happy playing!
My favorite leaders to play this type of game are Incas, for mysticism/finance. Finance really helps with the cottage heavy tile improvement tactic. Aggressive helps to create few warrior-replacing UU's right at the start which I'll send in to scout & survive nicely. I can bring them back to home after they've gathered enough experience from killing barbarians, right before the barbarians have developed axemen.
Another nice leader for this is Gandhi. Spiritual helps to bring the cost of the temples down, so they never need to be rushed. Fast workers make it possible to start cottage spam & land improvement more efficiently. Industrious helps to secure win on the pyramids, which is a really good wonder for this type of game. It also helps to build forges faster to improve creating all the buildings you'll be doing.
That's it, I'll be happy to hear your comments, critizism, suggestions etc.
The settings I use are large map for fun, pangea for more tech trade options and otherwise normal options.
This method relies on +50% cultural modifier from multiple cathedrals in each of the culture cities. The key to this victory is in founding as many of the 7 religions possible, even all of them in some cases.
Ideal setup is with 9 cities and 7 religions, but the win can be achieved with less than that if required. The setup will produce a lot of commerce as well, so anyone using this strategy will probably be the tech leader as well. You won't be having a state religion for a long time so you'll have easy time managing the AI warmongers. Most of them won't be having a religion for a long long time
I'll first give a brief outline of the whole game and expand on details right after.
I) Founding the religions
1)Buddhism and Hinduism
Founding these is best done with a civilization starting with mysticism. They'll be the first thing you'll research. Often it can't be helped that an AI will research the other, in which case you'll just have to accept it or retry with another map. The AI probably had an oasis with +3 commerce in their first city and researched the required religion tech in top speed.
2)Judaism
There's chance to learn some early tech or two before going for Monotheism and Judaism. Good options are Wheel & Pottery for early cottages, which you'll be relying on for your tech superiority. Other possibilities are Mining/Bronze Working for chopping the Oracle for instant religion, or fishing&Sailing if your first city will need to use the coast.
3)Confucianism, Christianity
Ideally you'll research the tech needed to make the oracle and research writing, which enables you to oracle slingshot for Christianity. Meanwhile you'll research Code of Laws to get Confucianism. If you've got your cities in good order, you can probably afford to research Alphabet too to trade all of the early techs you skipped. Most of the time I'm afraid the AI might catch up, so I go immediately from writing to Code of Laws, and do Alphabet after.
4)Philosophy
By this time philosophy would take dozens of turns to research unless cottages have developed. With alphabet, you'll trade and get pottery if you don't have it already. Your safest bet to improve research time would be to quickly research monarchy and enable Hereditary rule in your biggest city, and to put at least one or two cottages in some of the good cities you have. Your city size is probably most limited by happiness in cities that have access to fresh water, and hereditary rule easily provides some of that with cheap warriors you'll stuff in your biggest cities. This is by far the fastest method to get happiness.
5)Islam
No-one is probably competing to get islam before you. AI just doesn't do that. You'll have plenty of time to research this one. Meanwhile, you can trade for all the techs you need. You'll be sure to have unique religion techs that you can trade for anything you need. You'll probably still turn out the tech leader even if you spent 50 turns researching this one.
II) Founding the cities
1.First city
The first city will have to take the maximum food & commerce at start to assure getting the first 2 or 3 religions. Once it's size is capped at happiness max for your difficulty setting, you'll put in on avoid growth. This city will need any health and food resources, and preferably cottages on grassland/flood plains/whereever else if neither of those are available.
You'll produce your first worker/settler only after the first city has reached the size when the next population would give it the first unhappy citizen. Watch out that this city never has any unhappy citizens.
The production in this time can be for example warriors for scouting, or scouts, if you have the required tech. Other possibility is a barracks. For a non-creative leader you would probably do well to construct a stonehenge. If you're low on production, make sure that building the stonehenge doesn't prevent you from creating the oracle. Remember, you can put the stonehenge on hold when you need to create your settler/worker, unless you haven't finished it already.
2.Second and third cities
Depending on whether or not you created units in the first city, you'll probably need to do units in your second city. You don't need barracks, you'll be just clearing the way for settlers to found new cities. You'll do better units later. The AI won't fight you as there will almost surely be no religion-inspired wars.
3.Cities 4-9
You'll need 9 cities to create 9 temples for each of the religions, to enable a total of 3 cathedrals for your culture cities, per 3/1 temple to cathedral ratio. 3 Temples are required to build one cathedral of that religion. If you can't quite make 9 cities, don't worry – You'll probably do enough to enable enough cathedrals for your civilization. Also, 6 of your cities don't have to be on good spots. You'll just do them to create temples, primarily.
These cities will have to produce their own buildings for starters, unless you can spare time (or chop) to create pyramids and buy the buildings with gold.
For easiest management, I tend to create one farm in a good spot per city, and a few cottages. If there's enough surplus food I can skip the farm.
When a city isn't needed for producing settlers/warriors, or in more advanced stage of the game axemen, they'll probably do best to create workers and libraries for extra commerce. Library will take long to create so you don't probably have time for that in all of your cities before you'll have to take on the phase III, spreading the religions.
Your top city (or two) is probably doing most of the research anyway.
III) Spreading the religions
1.Missionaries
Some of the first religions will spread to your first cities with no religion in them.
The later religions will come with a missionary. You'll do best to use the missionary in some of your own cities that have enough production to produce new missionarys. Organized religion is needed for this phase.
When the city has 4 or 5 religions you'll start to see the religion spreading attempts by missionarys to fail more. Don't worry about it, you'll probably manage without having all the religions in every cities.
In the missionary phase, most of your cities will be producing missionaries of all the varieties and spreading them to all the other cities. You won't be needing temples for happiness at this phase if you keep your city sizes reasonable. Remember that a warrior costs a fraction of that of a temple and provides +1 happiness under hereditary rule.
Creating temples is a waste of time in the missionary phase. You'll have all the happiness needed when you'll later switch to free religion. You'll get a +happiness in each of your cities per non-state religion, which will top at whopping +7 if you managed to catch them all. Them religions.
2.Diplomacy
If you produce excess missionaries of some religion, you can send them to the enemies. They'll wage war at each other for having different state religion. You won't be having a state religion at all, despite having founded (almost) all the religions in the game. Give all the tribute your enemies require of you – they'll probably ask techs, and being the huge tech leader and all, you can surely spare them – and even the occasional goal. Don't stop trading with any AI unless that AI is running their own religion. In the end, most of the world will be running one of the religions you've chosen. You can then convert to that religion to avoid most of the hate, if you feel it's required.
3.Buildings
After you've spread the religions to all your heart's content, you'll require all the temples you can build. If you've decided by now which 3 will be your culture cities and which will be the support cities (the rest), you can prioritize monasterys over temples in the culture cities to boost up research. 7 monasteries equals +70% research and a lot of culture.
4.Great people
Use all the Great Prophets to build a holy building in some of your holy cities. Those holy structures will give plus to great prophet, which will further help you create more prophets. You'll get money from all the religions buildings in the world, even those that aren't yours, so you'll never have to turn the tax/science slider away from 100% science, until it's time for your final culture phase.
5.Buying versus constructing
If you built pyramids, you can probably buy most of the religious buildings. If you didn't, you have to prioritize which buildings to produce. 3 temples enable 1 cathedral or their equivalent in that religion. 6 temples enables 2 cathedrals and 9 temples enables 3 cathedrals. Spiritual leader will build the temples faster. Also, if you feel the most of the world has settled on some state religion, you can probably afford to take that state religion and enjoy the +25% efficiency in building. One option is to research metal casting and build forges for extra production. The culture cities are most likely to benefit from forges. You don't need to care about the pollution they bring in. Creating culture is independent of the size of the population, and even an unhealthy population will bring tons of culture.
6.Total +%culture modifiers and base culture
It's possible to achieve +70% from 7 missionaries and +350% from 7 cathedrals in each of the culture cities, for a total of +420%. These add up linearily. The base culture comes from temples (+1 each), monasteries (+2 each), libraries (+2) and later universities (+3), and of course the culture slider you'll use at the end of the game. Culture slider converts part of the commerce in each of the cities to culture. Culture slider will easily become the most important source at the end. This is why you'll need cottages: they will provide you the research for your technological superiority (from a slider), money for buying your buildings, after you've gained universal suffrage, and culture, after you've gained drama. You won't probably need to use the culture slider in most of the game though.
Of course, then there's the +100% culture from free speech/liberalism, which really means double culture, not a linear addition to a city culture modifier. If a city would have +420% culture modification without free speech, it will have +840% with free speech. Now, this will be plenty. In any case, I guess it might be possible to win before researching liberalism, too.
7.End phase: bringing up the culture
All your cities (even the support cities) are now culture bombs waiting to explode. AI who sees your culture spreading to their cities, even causing them to revolt will be mad at you. If you've cottage spammed enough you'll have large enough technological advancement that you can hold off the enemy easily by now. If not, you have probably enough political power by now that you can turn most of their enemies against them. If they have a different religion to the target civilization and your trade relations have been good, they'll probably agree to fight for one or two techs, which are essentially free for you to give. You probably shouldn't need to bribe anyone to war with gold.
That's it, happy playing!
My favorite leaders to play this type of game are Incas, for mysticism/finance. Finance really helps with the cottage heavy tile improvement tactic. Aggressive helps to create few warrior-replacing UU's right at the start which I'll send in to scout & survive nicely. I can bring them back to home after they've gathered enough experience from killing barbarians, right before the barbarians have developed axemen.
Another nice leader for this is Gandhi. Spiritual helps to bring the cost of the temples down, so they never need to be rushed. Fast workers make it possible to start cottage spam & land improvement more efficiently. Industrious helps to secure win on the pyramids, which is a really good wonder for this type of game. It also helps to build forges faster to improve creating all the buildings you'll be doing.
That's it, I'll be happy to hear your comments, critizism, suggestions etc.