Inconviniences of Founding a Religion

[Saad]

While everyone tries their best to found a religion early on, there are some issues to be aware in higher difficulty settings. I've been playing on Prince and Monarch and noticed these things:

It takes too much resources to spread your religion, and contain your rivals. The only way to contain your rivals is to deny open borders (likely controversial, but I don't see how else to prevent my immediate neighbours from hemming me in). Do that and your religion barely spreads. Plus missionarries aren't exactly cheap, it means a few turns of production at least and you need a lot of them to do any good.
The AI spends a lot of resources on missionaries and its unlikely that you can exceed him.

If you don't spread your religion, everyone is annoyed at you as you and perhaps another civ only adopt your religion. In the end, you might have to just convert to another religion to remain on good terms.



Ofcourse, there seem to be a lot of factors effecting the spread of religion. The games I played, I made a mistake of being a bit too isolated and not actively trading. However, I suspect as we up the difficulty, spreading your religion actively will become more important to exert influence. How much it will detract from a military and economic buildup remains to be seen.

 

[vodkamattvt]

Religion, for me, is too powerful to ignore. It seems to spread almost automatically in my empire, as well as fairly well to civs I have open borders with. The AI isnt cut throat enough to deny land, they usually just build in clumps, not extended to deny land to you.

I just havent found a way to replace the inevitable money you make off religion. You are bound to get at least one great prophet, and if you got a religion, then thats free gold every turn, even if you dont spend any to advance it further. However, I will say, with aggressive AI, one of the only ways to keep them from killing you early is to spend a few turns building a couple missionaries and sending them to one of their cities. They will convert immediatly. Its important to keep them off your back because war early will basically just knock both civs out of the running unless one is able to take the other for a bunch of cities and land. If its a stalemate ... you have both effectively crushed your chances of winning against, for example, a more peaceful continent of builders.