Is Ceremonial Burial / Djenne / Holy Order broken?

[Wodan]

Ceremonial Burial: +1 for each city following your religion
Djenne: Missionaries can spread 3 times
Holy Order: Missionaries are 30% cheaper

The main limiting factor in expansion is happiness. Cities can easily pay for themselves in terms of and they provide your empire. Thus, unless you're going for a culture victory, happiness has to be a major focus.

There are some countervailing strategies, if you deliberately choose not to expand. In particular, can be turned into or . So the question there is whether that return (from religion) is more beneficial than the effort and benefit from expansion. Or, perhaps, ignoring religion altogether (because there is a cost to having shrines, temples, and other sources of ).

Just thinking aloud a bit... comments are welcome.

Moderator Action: Moved to G&K.

 

[Gort]

Tithe is also a fantastic belief to go with. Ceremonial Burial I think is a close second while everything else is a lot further down the chain.

 

[AriochIV]

+1 per city isn't too extreme... even with the benefits you mention, religion still takes significant effort to spread to and maintain in a large number of foreign cities, especially in the later game when missionaries become almost useless.

I do find that the right combination of Happiness-boosting beliefs can make Unhappiness from war expansion much less of a problem than it was pre-G&K, though. Ceremonial Burial together with Asceticism (+1 in Cities with 3 followers) and Religious Center (Temples provide +2 in cities with 5 followers) is pretty significant in a large empire. Cathedrals/Pagodas/Mosques are nice, but can't be built in puppeted cities.

I do agree that I usually go for Tithe is it's available.

 

[Halcyan2]

No, it's not broken.

Missionaries are great early on and also for converting civs/CS' that do not have a religion.

However, once a religion is already established it is extremely difficult to convert all their cities with missionaries. It's not uncommon for me to see that using a Missionary will result in just 1 or 0 converts. Great Prophets are the best for this since they completely remove the opposing religion; if you own the city you can use Inquisitors.

If you are going with cheap Missionaries and Great Mosque of Djenne, I think you might have more mileage out of Interfaith Dialogue (if it's a high difficulty or there are lots of religious civs out there).

 

[Question]

Ive found it impossible to reverse the religion tide if an AI founds a religion early and spreads it fast. The pressure from multiple cities is just too great.

Vice-versa, ive found it very easy if i can spread a religion ASAP (Especially via city states, AI doesnt seem to like missionaries that much). The only problem is dealing with AI great prophets...i find it strange that attacking a great prophet usually makes everyone hate you (and theres no way to tell the AI to stop sending in great prophets).

Tithe (+1 gold per 4 followers) is pretty significant if you can spread a religion fast.

On the other hand, ive found most of the beliefs to be rather gimmicky. The + science one for spreading religion to another religion's cities in particular, is very strange...your missionaries lose strength if they are in hostile territory, so this is only useful if you have open borders (which you will quickly lose as the AI doesnt like you spreading it) or am friends with a CS who has another religion (so you can spam missionaries for science). But the science bonus doesnt seem big in the first place, and the faith cost isnt that cheap for a small science boost.

Pantheon beliefs as well...some of them are REALLY powerful (arabia + desert folklore is insane), most are crap (+1 culture per shrine is very unimpressive). Even on legendary start, the resource specific bonuses are unimpressive as well, +3 culture from 3 plantations for example, doesnt add up to much.

 

[Wodan]

Misc responses:

Wow, that's the opposite of my experience. Late game is when I find Ceremonial Burial the most powerful. It seems quite easy to be able to spread to 60+ foreign cities. The trick is to send in a half dozen or more and convert each AI all on the same turn (which also helps prevent the "stop proselytizing" demand if that AI has its own religion). After that, there seems to be a bonus for the pressure when most of the cities in the AI's empire are of your religion which makes it a self-sustaining reaction... the AI doesn't seem to be able to cope with that.

Arioch, when talking about spreading to enemy cities, I am not fond of Asceticism or Religious Center (or any of a number of others) because they seem to give the enemy the happiness benefit. Why spread to the enemy when he'll just reap the rewards? It seems to me you have to decide early whether you're going to keep your religion internal or external, and choose benefits that compliment each other.

Halcyan, I've tried Interfaith Dialogue... it's interesting because you don't want to convert the city, you just want to zap it with your missionary once, and you shouldn't care if you convert it the whole way. (After the city no longer has a majority religion, you don't get the Interfaith benefit any more.) So it's an "external" strategy but kind of different from Ceremonial Burial (where you definitely want to convert it).

Question, I have found that you can boggle an AI Great Prophet by putting an Inquisitor in the city he seems to be headed for. The AI sees it there, and more often than not turns around and goes somewhere else. Which is fine... convert somebody else's heathen religion all you want.

And for being in hostile territory... well, if your strategy is going to be "external" and sending your missionaries out, then you will get the most synergy by using a diplomatic strategy which gives you lots of open borders. or vice versa. That's just common sense, seems to me.

As for the pantheon benefits... yes, I agree. At first I thought most of them were worthless, but the more I played especially with different civs, and the more I figured out the religious combos, I saw where some of them could be useful. They seem extremely specific though, regardless... you can't just pick them out of the blue and expect them to do well.

One comment I have though about your "doesn't add up to much" note... I think some of the benefits are best in the early game, some midgame, and some late game. I'd be surprised if they weren't designed that way. And so, something like a + or + most certainly can be a huge benefit if you have it early. It'll give you some civics or accelerate your religion 50 or 100 turns earlier than you would have those benefits, which can be huge.

For example, think of it this way: if it instead said "your capital gets +3 all game" wouldn't you think that is strong? Think about around turn 50 or 75... your whole empire is probably getting about 8 a turn and that's if you spent the hammers to make monoliths in 4 cities, so this is a 40-50% increase with no additional cost in hammers or gold. Pretty strong.

 

[superfeds]

Broken as in over powered? Doubtful for the great mosque and holy order.

However ceremonial burial, stacked with the right beliefs, is over powered/broken in my opinion.

I usually play on immortal, huge maps.

By taking CB-Aesthetics-Pagodas-Interient Preachers(30% increase to range of pressure) and playing with a civ that can get a religion first or 2nd...you can easily ignore happiness for the rest of the game.

I usually play as the Celts, but this also works great with the mayans.

As the Celts, since you start generating faith immediately if next to a forest. Its easy to ignore shrines, go liberty, and throw up 5-6 inital cities. This will get you 6-12 faith pt no problem. After that, you should be a lock for one of the first religions. Picking the above mentioned beliefs, will give you a religion that spreads on its own, and give you more happiness as you spread it. Since you are one of the first, you should be able to push it into one or more other civs and all nearby city states. Couple this with the celts unique building that comes with +3 happiness, and you should never have to build any other happiness buildings. All this extra happiness as the Celts, allows you conquer enemy cities early, and have the happiness to absorb them. You can also stay peaceful and just grow your cities almost like a tradition star, since you have all that extra happiness to spend.

Also, since your only giving the other civs near you more happiness...which they have tons of already...it really doesnt hurt to spread this religion as much as possible.

IMO spreading religion via missionary should only be a last resort if one of the two natural religion spread enhancers arent available.

 

[Wodan]

IMO spreading religion via missionary should only be a last resort if one of the two natural religion spread enhancers arent available.

Why do you say that?

 

[Halcyan2]

Why do you say that?

That's just his way of saying that Religious Texts and Itinerant Preachers are probably the two strongest (or at least most popular) Enhancement Beliefs.

 

[Wodan]

That's just his way of saying that Religious Texts and Itinerant Preachers are probably the two strongest (or at least most popular) Enhancement Beliefs.

Hmm, I'm not sure I buy that. Reasons:

• you're spreading, for the most part, to your own empire (unless you put your holy city on the edge, in which case you can put pressure on one or at most two of your neighbors, I suppose); spreading to yourself is for the most part not an issue unless you have an AI neighbor aggressively spreading to you, in which case these are defensive strategies. Defensive is inherently a weak strategy because it relies on your opponent attacking you so it's not always useful
• depends on map and your position on the map... if you're on small continents or on a peninsula of pangaea or a large continent, then you're wasting most of your "spread radius" on the ocean
• you're spending two of your religion benefits on this. That's a pretty hefy opportunity cost. The whole point of religion is to get those benefits; without benefits your religion is basically an exercise in doing nothing; i.e., if your religion benefit is used simply to spread the religion then it's a self-serving waste of time... you're getting little to nothing out of it, so why bother? It's like logistics... when the majority of your cargo space is spent on fuel for the transportation then the value of your cargo is greatly diminished. That was a huge problem 500 years ago before roads and wagons... in a mule train, 5 or 6 out of every 10 mules had to carry food for the mules themselves.