I've just played a very successful India game with Chandragupta on King. Now, it can be argued that the reason for this was because I used a leader with a non-sucky ability. Granted. Ghandhi's Leader Ability feels rather questionable at the moment, but India gave me more than I expected. Certainly, I got more than what I myself expected. How?
I stopped trying to grow the cities.
It turns out I misunderstood the point and function of the Dharma civ ability. This is what it is as written:
Dharma:
Receives Follower Belief bonuses in a city from each religion that has at least one follower.
Note the wording. This ability therefore has two related, but different effects.
1. It allows you to poach the Follower Beliefs of other Civs, primarily on your continent, but possibly from other continents later on. That's the obvious one.
2. It allows you to reliably use your own Follower Belief in all your cities with a token Missionary investment, and even when other religions invade. The city doesn't need any majority religion at all. You will benefit from your Follower Belief as long as one citizen is a follower. This is much less obvious.
Therefore, you can save your Faith and use only the barest minimum to defend your Holy City and spread your founded religion to maintain at least one citizen in each city. That's it. One citizen. You don't need to spend oodles of faith to convert your cities, and you most certainly do not need to defend the majority religion in every city. Let the religions come in. Welcome the missionaries, for they bring gifts.
For my game, I chose Choral Music for Chandragupta, and the reason for this is obvious. I need Military Training ASAP and I need lots and lots and lots of culture to do that. Instead of Theater Squares, Choral Music in Holy Sites - +6 Culture per turn once you build Temples. It feels almost like Gorgo-ish. You get key war Civics quickly, and your key unit is the Varu, relevant to the Renaissance and can be acquired with a minimum of Science.
In addition, I was fortunate enough to get Feed the World from a nearby Civ, and that fueld my war machine. Why? Well, I DIDN'T use it to grow big cities. It doesn't make sense that way because you don't need food just to get more food. You need food to fuel production, whether to make Wonders or to make units.
Stepwells function exceedingly well when paired with Feed the World. The solution here is counter-intuitive. Gun for Apprenticeship to boost your mines. Then DON'T make many farms. Make a couple here and there to boost your Stepwells. The Stepwells are there to build Housing. They're incidentally as good as a Feudalism Farm, except in the Ancient Era. So use Feed the World and one Stepwell to get +10 food and +2 Housing essentially out of one citizen and two Builder charges. So in an 8-pop city, one citizen is doing food. The rest are on 4-production mines (or whatever you have, 7 hills is a bit much). 28 Cogs from tiles alone. With a single Envoy in a Military City State, that's 30 production for units. Plus Maneuver, this is 45 production for Varu - you make Varu in 3 turns each!
Now, it is undoubtedly fortunate that I got Feed the World, but I did pick Choral Music as a base, and the AI avoids that Belief, so it's easy to get so long as you get the Religion. Dharma functions best from King to Immortal. On Deity, the rush to Religion is a bit much, and on Prince and lower the AI is too sluggish to mine for Beliefs without a lot of active participation on your part.
So Dharma basically means you can treat the Holy Site as a Super Theater and maybe secondarily get a bunch of other useful bonuses. So let's track down the worst ones first.
Work Ethic - this belief is trash for India unless you take it yourself so you have lots of followers in all your cities. But then you're expending Faith and ignoring the Faith-saving benefit of Dharma. Probably best to just risk one religion being trash in the world for you. Hope it's not the only one on your continent. Could still make good use of it if the AI is aggressive in turning your cities.
Reliquaries - hard for India to really leverage, but plausible if you target the Wonders giving you Martyrs. It helps that you don't mind sacrificing religious units to make Relics. It can be hard to remove the last follower in a city without Inquisitor use.
Warrior Monks - depends on how early you get it. You are saving a lot of Faith relative to other Civs, and you're building Holy Sites everywhere, so you can actually afford to field these as Swordsmen-replacements for an invasion. You may want a Governor Saint to promote these quickly. Progressively useless as the game wears on. Even Monk Corps are only 45 Strength.
And that's it. The worst ones are still somewhat useful.
There are better possibilities:
Zen Meditation is not the best because you don't know exactly how useful +1 Amenity will be. For what it's worth, it's easier to get because the Holy Site is a cheaper District with cheap buildings, so you'll almost always have 2 Districts in every City.
Religious Communities are relatively less useful for you because Housing is not a problem for India. It just needs a Builder Charge to add +1 to nearly any City anywhere. Still, Housing is Housing. Better than Warrior Monks in the Renaissance, at least. The extra Housing can allow size 13 cities early for 5-District cities relatively early.
Jesuit Education is actually fairly useful because you will be able to jump in Science and GS points very quickly if you can acquire it in all your cities. The main limitation is that you'll need to fit in Campuses in all of them, so it requires some doing to leverage.
And of course the best ones are Choral Music, Feed the World, and Divine Inspiration.
Saving Faith from not having to defend your cities that much from religious incursion also means you will have a fair amount of Faith for buying Settlers and Builders during a Monumentality Golden Age. In turn, this means you're a lot freer with not running Serfdom very much. A single round of Builders plus Faith-bought ones means you really only need to be in it for one turn in an Era, freeing up the card slot for more useful things.
For my part, I used Feed the World to build a lot of Varu and Ranged units, then built the Grand Master's Chapel and faith-bought a bunch more. The resulting ROLFSTOMP of Egypt and Indonesia (on King, it must be admitted), is at least as OP as anything I've ever played, including Rome's Legions.
I still think Ghandhi's Leader Ability is trash. His War Weariness doesn't help you win or defend from a strong attack, and the Faith Generation is completely laughable. Tripling the output would go some way into making Ghandhi a civ leader with a palpably useful ability.
Of course, the worst is when you don't get a religion, and no one else in your continent gets one, either. That would be really, really bad for India.
I stopped trying to grow the cities.
It turns out I misunderstood the point and function of the Dharma civ ability. This is what it is as written:
Dharma:
Receives Follower Belief bonuses in a city from each religion that has at least one follower.
Note the wording. This ability therefore has two related, but different effects.
1. It allows you to poach the Follower Beliefs of other Civs, primarily on your continent, but possibly from other continents later on. That's the obvious one.
2. It allows you to reliably use your own Follower Belief in all your cities with a token Missionary investment, and even when other religions invade. The city doesn't need any majority religion at all. You will benefit from your Follower Belief as long as one citizen is a follower. This is much less obvious.
Therefore, you can save your Faith and use only the barest minimum to defend your Holy City and spread your founded religion to maintain at least one citizen in each city. That's it. One citizen. You don't need to spend oodles of faith to convert your cities, and you most certainly do not need to defend the majority religion in every city. Let the religions come in. Welcome the missionaries, for they bring gifts.
For my game, I chose Choral Music for Chandragupta, and the reason for this is obvious. I need Military Training ASAP and I need lots and lots and lots of culture to do that. Instead of Theater Squares, Choral Music in Holy Sites - +6 Culture per turn once you build Temples. It feels almost like Gorgo-ish. You get key war Civics quickly, and your key unit is the Varu, relevant to the Renaissance and can be acquired with a minimum of Science.
In addition, I was fortunate enough to get Feed the World from a nearby Civ, and that fueld my war machine. Why? Well, I DIDN'T use it to grow big cities. It doesn't make sense that way because you don't need food just to get more food. You need food to fuel production, whether to make Wonders or to make units.
Stepwells function exceedingly well when paired with Feed the World. The solution here is counter-intuitive. Gun for Apprenticeship to boost your mines. Then DON'T make many farms. Make a couple here and there to boost your Stepwells. The Stepwells are there to build Housing. They're incidentally as good as a Feudalism Farm, except in the Ancient Era. So use Feed the World and one Stepwell to get +10 food and +2 Housing essentially out of one citizen and two Builder charges. So in an 8-pop city, one citizen is doing food. The rest are on 4-production mines (or whatever you have, 7 hills is a bit much). 28 Cogs from tiles alone. With a single Envoy in a Military City State, that's 30 production for units. Plus Maneuver, this is 45 production for Varu - you make Varu in 3 turns each!
Now, it is undoubtedly fortunate that I got Feed the World, but I did pick Choral Music as a base, and the AI avoids that Belief, so it's easy to get so long as you get the Religion. Dharma functions best from King to Immortal. On Deity, the rush to Religion is a bit much, and on Prince and lower the AI is too sluggish to mine for Beliefs without a lot of active participation on your part.
So Dharma basically means you can treat the Holy Site as a Super Theater and maybe secondarily get a bunch of other useful bonuses. So let's track down the worst ones first.
Work Ethic - this belief is trash for India unless you take it yourself so you have lots of followers in all your cities. But then you're expending Faith and ignoring the Faith-saving benefit of Dharma. Probably best to just risk one religion being trash in the world for you. Hope it's not the only one on your continent. Could still make good use of it if the AI is aggressive in turning your cities.
Reliquaries - hard for India to really leverage, but plausible if you target the Wonders giving you Martyrs. It helps that you don't mind sacrificing religious units to make Relics. It can be hard to remove the last follower in a city without Inquisitor use.
Warrior Monks - depends on how early you get it. You are saving a lot of Faith relative to other Civs, and you're building Holy Sites everywhere, so you can actually afford to field these as Swordsmen-replacements for an invasion. You may want a Governor Saint to promote these quickly. Progressively useless as the game wears on. Even Monk Corps are only 45 Strength.
And that's it. The worst ones are still somewhat useful.
There are better possibilities:
Zen Meditation is not the best because you don't know exactly how useful +1 Amenity will be. For what it's worth, it's easier to get because the Holy Site is a cheaper District with cheap buildings, so you'll almost always have 2 Districts in every City.
Religious Communities are relatively less useful for you because Housing is not a problem for India. It just needs a Builder Charge to add +1 to nearly any City anywhere. Still, Housing is Housing. Better than Warrior Monks in the Renaissance, at least. The extra Housing can allow size 13 cities early for 5-District cities relatively early.
Jesuit Education is actually fairly useful because you will be able to jump in Science and GS points very quickly if you can acquire it in all your cities. The main limitation is that you'll need to fit in Campuses in all of them, so it requires some doing to leverage.
And of course the best ones are Choral Music, Feed the World, and Divine Inspiration.
Saving Faith from not having to defend your cities that much from religious incursion also means you will have a fair amount of Faith for buying Settlers and Builders during a Monumentality Golden Age. In turn, this means you're a lot freer with not running Serfdom very much. A single round of Builders plus Faith-bought ones means you really only need to be in it for one turn in an Era, freeing up the card slot for more useful things.
For my part, I used Feed the World to build a lot of Varu and Ranged units, then built the Grand Master's Chapel and faith-bought a bunch more. The resulting ROLFSTOMP of Egypt and Indonesia (on King, it must be admitted), is at least as OP as anything I've ever played, including Rome's Legions.
I still think Ghandhi's Leader Ability is trash. His War Weariness doesn't help you win or defend from a strong attack, and the Faith Generation is completely laughable. Tripling the output would go some way into making Ghandhi a civ leader with a palpably useful ability.
Of course, the worst is when you don't get a religion, and no one else in your continent gets one, either. That would be really, really bad for India.
