Free Religion vs. Organized Religion

[beestar]

When I started I always ran OR for the hammer bonus, but hese days I bulb Philo and run Pacifism + Caste early to pump a lot of GPs out of my GP Farm. This has the great advantage of only needing to spread my religion to my one GP farm to reap 100% of the benefits (and consequently, it's easy to make my chosen religion a diplo-friendly one).

Maybe I've gone too far in this direction and should run OR some more, especially for space races.

I never run Theocracy. Is the extra XP really equivalent to as much as +20% hammers?

 

[Tristan_C]

Typically, aren't buildings a bad habit until late in the game? OR seems so limited, at least until your cities are huge and can actually use multipliers and . You'll get to this late stage sooner if you favor Wealth and units. Often, units can capture you some anyway, or aid your diplomacy.

And then, you don't want to keep building buildings TOO late, because in the final stretch new buildings don't serve any purpose and won't pay for themselves.

 

[budweiser]

Typically, aren't buildings a bad habit until late in the game? OR seems so limited, at least until your cities are huge and can actually use multipliers and . You'll get to this late stage sooner if you favor Wealth and units. Often, units can capture you some anyway, or aid your diplomacy.

And then, you don't want to keep building buildings TOO late, because in the final stretch new buildings don't serve any purpose and won't pay for themselves.

Good points. In the final stage, about the only thing that helps your score is high pop ( I guess more land too ), so any health or happy buildings could serve to increase your score by means of high pop.

 

[mirthadir]

Tristan: In a word, no.

Conquest does give you more resources to play with and more base land for a stronger economy. That being said, it also can reduce your trade options (which can easily mean a 400% to 0% modifier loss), stop you from getting the first past the post prizes, and require you to take a unit heavy tech path. E.g. paper, philo, and edu or calendar, compass, optics, and astroare all excellent trade bait but do nothing for units for a decent bit of time; engineering, guilds, and machinery are all excellent for units but maybe not so good for much of anything else.

Say I'm alone with two non-pyschotic AIs. Most of the time outside of deity I can kill one easy with either axes, pults or trebs. However, once that AI is dead, I can't trade with him, I also can't trade with the other one (who now thinks he is in a zero sum game with me until the other AIs come knocking), and if I strike earlier enough the third AI will likely expand more (as my war distracts AI #2 from reaching his normal amount territory). Once I consolidate my cotinent I get to play catch up and hope that the distant AIs don't get to something evil like laser/robotics before I can win (space/culture/diplo) or get sufficiently close to parity to invade.

Remember as long as you are building units and skull smashing, most of the AI bonuses are working against you, when you are trading and bribing the AIs to immolate on each other they are working for you.