I've never built Stonehenge.

[Archon_Wing]

Building Holy Sites at your leisure more often than not results in having your cities converted by your neighbors with their first missionary swarm. Stonehedge is pretty pointles because of the need for Holy Sites to actually do something with your religion.

You could always hoard the Great Prophet. When you finally activate it, converts all the cities with a holy site to your new religion and nullifies the inital missionary spam.

 

[Browd]

You could always hoard the Great Prophet. When you finally activate it, converts all the cities with a holy site to your new religion and nullifies the inital missionary spam.

^This. Just because you have gotten an early prophet does not mean you should reflexively burn that prophet on an early religion. The prophet assures you of a religion, whenever you choose to burn him, but you should not adopt your religion until you have sufficient religious infrastructure and resources in place to defend your baby religion (e.g., holy sites in multiple cities so they insta-convert to your religion on founding, plus at least one temple, and a hoard of faith sufficient to burn an early apostle to launch an inquisition, and buy inquisitors if needed). Anything less and you are vulnerable to having your religion wiped early because you founded before you were ready to defend.

 

[Siptah]

But if the best strategy is to found a religion late, then why build stonehenge? Getting the last or second last prophet in the game through normal means is less costly and less risky than competing for stonehenge.

That's exactly why Saladin's ability is so great. You can build some HS and temples after you've done other things and then get a powerful religion without competition. If you don't overdo and get a regular Prophet....

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

You can even send your Great Prophet out as a deathless scout until you decide to bring it home to found a religion.

 

[UWHabs]

The real question is how valuable the early choice of bonuses are. The problem is if you're only the 5th religion founded, if you wait, everyone else will have claimed all the best beliefs. And after the first couple beliefs, the payback from actually founding and spreading a religion doesn't really pay off anymore.

 

[Browd]

But if the best strategy is to found a religion late, then why build stonehenge? Getting the last or second last prophet in the game through normal means is less costly and less risky than competing for stonehenge.

You may be missing my point. It doesn't matter whether you get an early Stonehenge GPr or a natural GPr, if you found your religion when your religious infrastructure is underdeveloped, you run the risk that your too-quickly established religion gets wiped by aggressive AI. How many times have we seen posts where folks bemoan that they got a religion, but all of their cities have been converted to another religion. The point is that you don't have to burn a Great Prophet on the same turn they spawn. If you need X number of turns before you will be ready to both found and defend your religion, park the GPr (or send him off scouting). Yes, as UWHabs notes, you might lose out on a desired belief, but that may be a far better outcome than seeing your religion wiped early because you chose to found your religion at a time when you only had a couple of Holy Sites, with no Shrines or Temples, and anemic faith production.

 

[Scaramanga]

Since warmongering is an effective and encouraged strategy early on, burning an early prophet to grab defender of the faith is worth it. In multiplayer I've observed this by the warmongerers themselves in order to deny defenders the belief.

 

[Browd]

But this *is* a thread about stonehenge, so I assumed you were making a statement about stonehenge being worth building because of the strategy you mentioned.

Yeah, sorry. What I meant was if you were to choose to beeline Stonehenge (a questionable decision most of the time, but let's assume you choose to do so), that does not mean you should insta-found your religion when the SH GPr spawns.

 

[agonistes]

You may be missing my point. It doesn't matter whether you get an early Stonehenge GPr or a natural GPr, if you found your religion when your religious infrastructure is underdeveloped, you run the risk that your too-quickly established religion gets wiped by aggressive AI. How many times have we seen posts where folks bemoan that they got a religion, but all of their cities have been converted to another religion. The point is that you don't have to burn a Great Prophet on the same turn they spawn. If you need X number of turns before you will be ready to both found and defend your religion, park the GPr (or send him off scouting). Yes, as UWHabs notes, you might lose out on a desired belief, but that may be a far better outcome than seeing your religion wiped early because you chose to found your religion at a time when you only had a couple of Holy Sites, with no Shrines or Temples, and anemic faith production.

If you found a religion with the intention of keeping it around for any reason what-so-ever, and you let your cities get converted, you might wanna rethink some of your strategies. You don't need to be earning any faith per turn whatsoever to prevent your cities from being converted. In fact, a military unit is far more efficient against holy units than a holy unit is. Let them come. Invite them in. Saves you some missionary charges.

Also, even if your cities seem converted, you probably can bring your religion back by taking out a few religious units. I've done this.

A good reason to delay that I've read about on here is that by waiting, you get all of your cities with holy sites to insta-convert late in the game, which can give you a huge push towards a religious victory at a time when hopefully the ai has burned up a lot of their faith already. I personally don't think that's necessary, the ai is no better tactically with its holy units than it is with its military units. And I really rely on some of the beliefs. But its a reasonable reason to delay.

 

[Scaramanga]

Keep in mind that wonders and holy cities generate tourism so you could theoretically get a head start on culture victory if you do it sooner.

 

[bcaiko]

Yeah, it's this game's Great Library - don't bother. The one wonder that is universally built early by the AIs.

But you also shouldn't bother because Religion is bad in this game unless you're going for Religious Victory.