Is this the wealthiest strategy ever?

[coanda]

@maltson: A reasoned critique of my comments if you restrict it to one religion per city, but I think we're talking at cross purposes.

My post was, indeed, addressed towards people proposing founding multiple religions. Founding one religion is a much more reasonable proposition, although I'd probably not aim for an early one personally - I'd rather get a chance to scout the map more and see if I had better options (such as sharing religion with Isabella next door, or conquering a shrine from Gandhi while opening up a lot of land to expand into).

Perhaps I was beating a dead horse. It just seemed to me that there was still a significant number of posters arguing that on low difficulties where you can reasonably rely on founding most or all religions, that was a good strategy. And my point was basically attempting to say "no, regardless of difficulty it's a bad idea." It may work on low difficulties, but other strategies work better.

 

[Gwaja]

After some trying out this "early religion" gamble in multiple games on Emperor, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Getting an early religion does not guarantee that your neighbors will adopt it.

2. Relying on religions auto spreading is being too optimistic, and many times simply does not work.

3. There are better alternatives to using your than to pop a Great Priest for a shrine.

4. Shrine's auto spreading of religions is completely random, and does not spread it like a wildfire in the wind. It is rather a slow process.

5. There are better alternatives than to spend producing missionaries and sending them to rival AI civs.

6. Missionaries have a good failure rate, especially if the city already has another religion or two or more.

7. Successfully spreading your religion to an AI civ's capital does not guarantee that the said AI civ will spread it around for you, especially if they adopted another religion prior to receiving yours. Many times you have to do the work all by yourself, spreading it around to the other cities of the AI civ, which is a complete waste of time and benefits the AI far more than you.

8. Later religions that you found get exponentially more difficult to spread to the AI civs, who are more than content to run their already existing earlier religions. If they have Theocracy running, which happens many times, it is all for naught.

9. Going for an earlier religion means at the beginning of the game, you are making a major game decision with very limited knowledge. You don't know your surroundings, you don't know where or who your rival AI civs are, you don't know what techs you may have to prioritize due to certain resources located at wherever they may be that you do not yet know, and many more.

10. Going for an early religion from Turn 1 means you will be delaying worker techs to improve the land around your capital, which slows your growth, expansion, defensive capability (especially from barbarians early on), and many more.

11. There are far better ways to make in this game.

12. You don't need to be making 100's or 1000's of per turn in this game. By the time it hits to that point, the game should already be in the bag, and you won't even need to worry about getting that much to begin with.

13. is not meant to be horded, as I have learned.

14. The comments made by many players critical of this gambit is talking from experience playing the base BTS game, NOT the Rise of Mankind mod which changes the game significantly.

15. This gambit works quite well in LOWER LEVELS, but gets significantly less reliable and less effective to a point where it is simply not worth it at higher levels.

I think we are beating a dead horse here, because people who are so in love with this religion + shrine gambit simply do not want to accept the criticisms. I understand that getting an early religion and being successful in the game are not mutually exclusive, but that does not make it a solid strategy.

 

[Archon_Wing]

I'm trying this out for fun, but the problem is that it already costs a large amount of hammers to provide gold for 1-2 shrines; much less the other ones. This is assuming I'm next to some pushover who won't attack despite me having nothing. (wait, why am I not just conquering them and probably their shrine then?)

To put things in perspective, you can make 10-15 GPT selling a single resource to someone, and all you need is currency and the appropriate techs to hook up a resource. Is spending 400+ hammers on missionaries really worth the same effect? That's assuming all your missionaries succeed. You could have almost built the pyramids. And that's just one shrine! Or you could have built 4 settlers. You would have probably lost more money by not settling land fast enough and thus having less access to resources and trade routes. If slower expanding has cut off from you 2-3 surplus resources, you're already in a hole.

And that's why new players like us are told to not overbuild wonders without a good reason. The same would go with religions, since the benefit of that is sometimes even less tangible than wonders. The pyramids are extremely powerful early, I can't say the same with some extra shrine gold. Most wonders can be sped up with a resource-- missionaries can't.

If you are industrious with Myst (Hunaya) or have marble; I guess you could pound out the Parthenon and Oracle for more GPs. But you know, what am I gonna do with all this extra money? Ok, I can run the slider to 100%, except since my cities suck due to underdevelopment it's not really that much more. I feel that all these Prophets I popped out, I could have had scientists instead and reached lib already. >.> It's kinda humorous to bulb Civil Service with a prophet I guess.

IMO, Hinduism/Buddhism is a waste of time as it could mean your workers are sitting around doing nothing for an extended period of time. Your expansions will be slower because your cities suck. Trying to find both is a pure gamble. The only real ones to aim for are maybe Judaism, Christianity, Taoism, and Confucianism. You also stand a good chance of losing any of these if you are unfortunate. Getting Divine Right (do you have any useful techs at this point?) just ensures you've created a nation with a bunch of shrines to conquer. And it's sure a pain when they run theocracy on you, right?

Also, why would one run all the way to Sci Meth and not Lib? I don't see how rushing to negate much of the buildings you built would be satisfactory. You'll need lib to catch back up on tech; otherwise the AIs are gonna fly into space at this rate. What you'd really want is a wall street shrine(s) with say the Mining INC corporation, no? State Property's not gonna help that much, since I assume an empire that spent so much time spreading religion's not gonna be that massive anyways.

Well, it'd be a pretty easy way to get culture victory.

It's just simpler to capture a shrine. Open borders and let the religious AIs do your work.

P.S. I'm having trouble even getting one of them sometimes, even as a leader that has Myst. The only times I've been able to capture both Buddhism and Hinduism is by playing as the incans and working a rich river commerce tile or settling on top of dye or something.

TL;DR Bulb Philosophy fast and be happy.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Well he's talking about Prince, where your chances are quite high if you start with mysticism and just suffer with unimproved tiles for a while.

Well as far as I can see even on prince (in SP I'm Prince/Monarch) the strategy won't work unless you're borking the AI. Usually buddhism goes around turn 20 (epic speeds) with hinduism on average about 3-5 turns later, and I've often seen them founded on successive turns. Frankly I wouldn't try this strategy on Warlord, as it's too high risk for not enough gain.

If you want an early religion and use it to power your economy, build the 'henge, Oracle CoL, and work off that.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

When you start talking about prince/epic, you can easily just forgo religion and beat the entire map with horse archers. It might even be "wealthier". It certainly makes you the wealthiest empire alive!

While religion might work on lower difficulties, that doesn't make it good play.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

When you start talking about prince/epic, you can easily just forgo religion and beat the entire map with horse archers. It might even be "wealthier". It certainly makes you the wealthiest empire alive!

While religion might work on lower difficulties, that doesn't make it good play.

Actually I usually wait until rifles, I like the loud noises.

Even on Noble I find going for religion, except Oracling one, to be significantly sub-par.

 

[ywhtptgtfo]

When you start talking about prince/epic, you can easily just forgo religion and beat the entire map with horse archers. It might even be "wealthier". It certainly makes you the wealthiest empire alive!

While religion might work on lower difficulties, that doesn't make it good play.

Depends on map size. On huge maps, it's hard to HA rush the whole map without getting your units on strike.

 

[cabert]

Depends on map size. On huge maps, it's hard to HA rush the whole map without getting your units on strike.

no
just keep razing cities

 

[ManiaMuse]

no
just keep razing cities

+ you get cash from conquering cities which can help you run a deficit at 0% slider