Holy Cities and Cath's

[Daghdha]

I'm going for cult VC and take it that building cathedrals, the special holy buildning for each religion, is crucial. What I don't understand is how do you get to found a religion in one of the three cult-cities? The first one or two will usually be there, but from the third on they are placed in small newly built cities. Is this a random placement or can you control it in some way? The cath's can only be built in these "founding" cities if I'm correct...

As an old C3C'er there is much to be noob about to say the least

 

[wannabewarlord]

The Cathedral is not the special building for the holy city. You got that confused.

You can build a cathedral (or its equivalent for the other religions, i.e. hindu mandir) when you got enough temples of the respective religion (numbers depend on map size, I think it is 3 on standard). So you don't need to found a religion but you need to make sure you have that religion spread in your empire and enough cities to build the temples.

Hence the 9 cities suggestion you often see in cultural victory tips: Your three cultural main cities need 3 temples for every religion to build a Cathedral. So you need 9 cities to build 3x3 Hindu Shrines, for example. This gets you a Hindu Cathedral in each main city. Rinse and repeat for the other religions.

hope that helped.

cheers,
wannabewarlord

 

[wannabewarlord]

on a side note: while cathedrals are very helpful, they don't make or break your cultural victory. I find cultural victories on noble very easy to achieve and manage to do this without 3 cathedrals in each city. You want wonders just as bad as cathedrals. And you want to run artist specialists plus settle great artists in the early game and then culture bomb 'em. you also want to use your culture slider. there's of course more to it and many excellently written guides can give you detailed insight.

cheers,
wannabewarlord

 

[Daghdha]

ok, tnx a bunch
I'll take another look at it. But I do have a point in trying to build those special, "founder", buildings right even if they don't make or breake a cult VC? IIRC they generate a hefty load of culture (is it 50/turn or something?)

 

[wannabewarlord]

yes, of course you should build them (and with a spiritual leader that gets cheap temples, building all those temples is even easier!). I was just trying to say it also works without them (or with not as many). They're +50% CULTURE iirc, but bear in mind that due to the % added and not absolute culture points, they're only as good as your direct output. 50% of 0 is still 0, if you know what I mean.

But in any case they're splendid buildings for this type of victory, and make it so much easier to attain and probably even earlier, so do go build them!

cheers,
wannabewarlord

 

[TheMeInTeam]

yes, of course you should build them (and with a spiritual leader that gets cheap temples, building all those temples is even easier!). I was just trying to say it also works without them (or with not as many). They're +50% CULTURE iirc, but bear in mind that due to the % added and not absolute culture points, they're only as good as your direct output. 50% of 0 is still 0, if you know what I mean.

But in any case they're splendid buildings for this type of victory, and make it so much easier to attain and probably even earlier, so do go build them!

cheers,
wannabewarlord

If you are working cottages and have access to 3 or more of them, you can get ridiculous outputs like 500+ culture per turn in the weakest of the 3 cities though.

I had a game using COTTAGES, 4 cathedrals, and the hermitage and was nearly 1000 culture per turn. That city was 3rd in culture but became legendary first .

One strategy is to rush buy the religious buildings via pyramids for US and slider off, but it only works if you have enough religions, otherwise you want sistine + artists or teching to modern things like hollywood type wonders + brodcast towers mixed with corps and lots of resources.

There's lots of ways to stockpile culture. Wonders work too but it's hard to spam them in more than one city.

Just not that with the cathedrals the cottage city outdid the wonder city by several hundred culture per turn (even the one w/o hermitage). My wonderspam capitol hit legendary last, but not by much!

 

[Clam Spammer]

ok, tnx a bunch
I'll take another look at it. But I do have a point in trying to build those special, "founder", buildings right even if they don't make or breake a cult VC? IIRC they generate a hefty load of culture (is it 50/turn or something?)

Shrines give 4 per turn before multipliers, not 50 .

That's not to say they're not worthwhile. If you have a Holy City, it's definitely worth building the shrine if you get a Prophet, since the gold allows you to run the culture slider higher. You don't have to go out of your way to found a religion in one of your culture cities though. Also don't specifically try to get a Prophet to build the shrine unless it's very early in the game - Great Artists are much more useful here.