Pagan Religious Victories

[Si No Hay Paz]

After the US Pagan win I reloaded and switched to Canada for a quick game. This was just settling a couple cities before religion spread to the American cities with pagan temples.

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

I'm back after a long break, and working on the Vedic pagan victory, which is Thailand, Indonesia, Khmer, India, and Tamils. I think the first three are the most viable because the Shwedagon Paya is easily available to conquer and for Thailand, Theocracy is quickly accessible. I've been having a pretty fun Thai game, but there are only 100 turns left and I still need 90 turns of We Love the King days, despite my cities (almost) always remaining happy and healthy. I know version 1.18 is out now, so I'll probably wind down this series on the previous version I've been playing, but I've enjoyed the pagan victories and figuring out ways to win without direct cheating.

Spoiler Thai UHV :

 

[Gahan]

I achieved Vedism Religious Victory before by India.
It is too difficult to have 100 Celebration Days by normal speed, so the most important thing is Marathon Speed.
And I tried to have many cities with high population, happiness and healthiness to hold many Celebration Days.

 

[Dracosolon]

I thought "We Love The King" Day lasted until the city was unhappy/unhealthy again?

 

[Enyavar]

I've tried a couple different times as the aztecs and I can never get more than a couple cities up before conquerors show up in like the 1400s! I would keep getting really early catholicism spreads too?

Hi Si No Hay Paz, are you considering it a legal strategy for you to switch civilizations multiple times in a row?

If so, I think it is possible to sabotage all the Western powers from invading South America due to the late start: Begin as Egypt, found only Alexandria as a coastal city and stunt its growth as much as possible. Flip to Greece, keep Athens small and destroy Egypt. Flip to Rome and destroy Carthage and Greece. Build up Rome just enough to survive the Barbarian onslaught, kill the Gauls and do expeditions on the Persians. Switch to Vikings and stunt their growth right with the first settlement. Switch to the Arabs and finish off Persia. The tricky part is then handling the rapid-fire spawns of Moors+Spanish+French+English+HRE+Russia+Poland, but if you sabotage them each, you have a huge starting advantage as Inka.

Portugal and the Dutch still spawn after you...
Hmm, I'm gonna try this in my next run.

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

I achieved Vedism Religious Victory before by India.
It is too difficult to have 100 Celebration Days by normal speed, so the most important thing is Marathon Speed.
And I tried to have many cities with high population, happiness and healthiness to hold many Celebration Days.
View attachment 660607

Thats amazing, how did you avoid founding Hinduism?

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

I thought "We Love The King" Day lasted until the city was unhappy/unhealthy again?

For me it looks like it only lasts a turn at a time

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Hi Si No Hay Paz, are you considering it a legal strategy for you to switch civilizations multiple times in a row?

If so, I think it is possible to sabotage all the Western powers from invading South America due to the late start: Begin as Egypt, found only Alexandria as a coastal city and stunt its growth as much as possible. Flip to Greece, keep Athens small and destroy Egypt. Flip to Rome and destroy Carthage and Greece. Build up Rome just enough to survive the Barbarian onslaught, kill the Gauls and do expeditions on the Persians. Switch to Vikings and stunt their growth right with the first settlement. Switch to the Arabs and finish off Persia. The tricky part is then handling the rapid-fire spawns of Moors+Spanish+French+English+HRE+Russia+Poland, but if you sabotage them each, you have a huge starting advantage as Inka.

Portugal and the Dutch still spawn after you...
Hmm, I'm gonna try this in my next run.

I try to just not use worldbuilder basically but I've still been using a previous version where you can only switch once. Still, I try to only use the switch as set up

 

[Gahan]

Thats amazing, how did you avoid founding Hinduism?

I couldn't avoid founding of Hinduism, but I adopted Theocracy as soon as possible. Theocracy slowly deletes every religions in your cities if you're religion is paganism.

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

I know I said I was gonna wind this down, but I want to finish out the games I already had set up. Went back to my previous Roman Pagan setup game to tryout France - really fun militaristic game. France has quick access to Theocracy, just one tech away at the start, so that helped as well from religion spreading too much, though I did get Orthodoxy in Paris and ended up founding Catholicism. Same Celtic URV as England or US, but because France is more surrounded, it requires a lot more aggressive play. Still, almost half of your required 15 cities fit within your core, so its just choosing which direction you want to expand for the extra forest tiles. I probably delayed it a bit more in choosing to go to war against Germany, but I didn't want to win my France game with less territory than my pagan Germany game, so they had to go. This was my second-highest scoring game ever!

Spoiler French Pagan Religious Victory :

Spoiler French Pagan Religious Victory Map :

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Portugal has the Celtic religion as well, so it was a pretty straightforward "Get the tech for Theocracy hoping you don't get religious spread, then settle enough cities". I still finished later than the normal UHV though, but this Portugal seemed weak from the beginning compared to the rest of Europe.

Spoiler Portugal Pagan Win :

Not too different play from the normal UHV, basically you get all the forest and marsh in southern Brazil and then just choose where else to settle - I went in all of Brazil, South Africa, the islands off Africa, and the Trading Co. colonies in Congo, Oman, and Macao.

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Started this game several months ago and it was getting a bit tedious so I left it for awhile. What was so tedious about this particular game? As you'll see in the screenshots, I meticulously planned my city (and fort) placement from the beginning, not just for the Ivory and Gem requirements for the URV, but also trying to create a never before seen wonder of the civilization world - a Great Canal spanning all of Africa from the Swahili Coast to the Gulf of Guinea. Well....see below to find how that turned out

Spoiler RIP the Great African Canal :

So the plan was to prebuild forts alternated with cities to create a continuous canal between the Great Lakes, Lake Chad, and the Gulf of Guinea. I had attempted this previously in an (ongoing) Mali game until I realized that I couldn't build cities on jungles, making Congo my only hope.

Unfortunately, the game mechanics were against me. After getting all my cities and forts perfectly placed, it was time for the maiden voyage AND...failure. Evidently, you can't move a ship from a fort to an inland city next to it. (Even though you evidently can go directly from a coastal fort to a coastal city.) This ambitious engineering wonder has been relegated to the junk heap of history.

Nevertheless, the canal system did help a lot with troop movement in my later Great African War against Mali and Ethiopia, shipping units quickly and avoiding the jungly terrain that blocks most movement.

Spoiler URV Endgame Details :

After failing to build the canal, Queen Nzinga cracked and turned on her African friends (who before she was just trying to destabilize and collapse through espionage rather than direct invasion). After capturing the Ivory and Gem resources around the Gulf of Guinea and Nubia, building one last pagan temple, the gods were finally appeased and Congo emerges as the undisputed leader of a near-united Africa. Yet the war opened up spaces for Europeans to carve their own territories out of the continent. Maybe the fight for a united Africa will continue until the last colonizer is driven out...

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Me 8 months ago: "I think I'll start winding this down"

Well that was a lie. So I've been trying to go back to older games and use them to set up good starting conditions for later civs that would otherwise start with religions, and I think I've found some bugs (probably because these civs were never intended to win with a pagan URV).

Starting from the Maya game, I played until Mexico's spawn (had to capture and destroy the Mexico City that had been captured by the Moors' conquerors stack because they spread Islam). I wondered how a Mexican URV would work since the Aztec and Maya versions of it that they inherit are dependent on civ-unique abilities, in food generation from defeated units for the Maya and sacrificed slaves for the Aztec. But when I switch to Teotl, the URV portion of the victory screen just completely disappears and the rest of it looks glitched out (will provide a screenshot later). For now this looks like its unable to achieve.

Starting from an Ethiopia game (that I started for an Orthodox URV, but was going well for the pagan one too) I founded Islam in Yemen so that Arabia wouldn't start by founding it, then switched over to Arabia and changed to paganism. Arabia's big flip zone really screws you over because you end up with a lot of cities with religion, but after playing around with it for awhile I noticed that even if you flip more cities without religion than with it and don't start with Islam in your capital, the victory conditions still say you failed at "never having more than half your cities with religion". So the Arabian pagan URV looks unable to achieve due to some coding thing too.

Surely this isn't a high priority, but thought it would be interesting to point out.

Have Mali, Ethiopia, and Netherlands games in the works, and since this is now my hyperobsession I'm gonna see if there is any reasonable way to set up for Moors, Byzantium, Italy, Turks, Brazil and Argentina later and then will also get back to the Vedic ones, but those are gonna have to be on Marathon as noted before.

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Also sorry, I've realized a lot of my screenshots are weird and I didn't know how to properly include the spoilers tab, so I'll be cleaning up previous posts with better screenshots and formatting over break.

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Me 8 months ago: "I think I'll start winding this down"

Well that was a lie. So I've been trying to go back to older games and use them to set up good starting conditions for later civs that would otherwise start with religions, and I think I've found some bugs (probably because these civs were never intended to win with a pagan URV).

Starting from the Maya game, I played until Mexico's spawn (had to capture and destroy the Mexico City that had been captured by the Moors' conquerors stack because they spread Islam). I wondered how a Mexican URV would work since the Aztec and Maya versions of it that they inherit are dependent on civ-unique abilities, in food generation from defeated units for the Maya and sacrificed slaves for the Aztec. But when I switch to Teotl, the URV portion of the victory screen just completely disappears and the rest of it looks glitched out (will provide a screenshot later). For now this looks like its unable to achieve.

Starting from an Ethiopia game (that I started for an Orthodox URV, but was going well for the pagan one too) I founded Islam in Yemen so that Arabia wouldn't start by founding it, then switched over to Arabia and changed to paganism. Arabia's big flip zone really screws you over because you end up with a lot of cities with religion, but after playing around with it for awhile I noticed that even if you flip more cities without religion than with it and don't start with Islam in your capital, the victory conditions still say you failed at "never having more than half your cities with religion". So the Arabian pagan URV looks unable to achieve due to some coding thing too.

Surely this isn't a high priority, but thought it would be interesting to point out.

Have Mali, Ethiopia, and Netherlands games in the works, and since this is now my hyperobsession I'm gonna see if there is any reasonable way to set up for Moors, Byzantium, Italy, Turks, Brazil and Argentina later and then will also get back to the Vedic ones, but those are gonna have to be on Marathon as noted before.

There seems to be the opposite problem with the Turks, at least on the 1700 start. I loaded it up just to get a quick look at what the Turk pagan religion is (Tengri, like the Mongols, that's a fun one). Despite there being present a religion in every city, the "don't allow more than half of your cities to have a religion" goal is marked as accomplished. Interestingly, the Turkish UHV goal that shouldn't trigger until 1800 is already listed as failed as well, but thats not important here. So because of this glitch, the Turkish pagan URV is completely feasible from the 1700 start, all you would have to do is purge religion from all your cities and build your pagan temples and get some more horses somewhere. It would feel illegal, but this would probably be one of the easiest pagan wins.

Spoiler Turk 1700 Pagan URV Conditions :

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Just finished the Mali game that I started months ago even before the Congo game (I also had quit this one in despair after realizing that my canal wouldn't work.) However after jumping back into it, I think this was my favorite game ever!

Reminder, this is on version 1.6, so there are lots of things that will just be different from the latest updates. Sorry, I'll update eventually.

I actually don't like Timbuktu as a capital because you found on a critically important flood plains that could otherwise be used for an improvement.

Spoiler Starting :

So instead I founded my capital in Wagadugu, therefore I renamed the civ to the Mossi people of present day Burkina Faso and the leader to Yennenga, a pre-Islamic semi-mythical warrior queen and founder of the Mossi kingdoms. I got really lucky by flipping a Farari at the beginning, which stayed with me to the end of the game and dealt the death blow to the final Dutch resistors in southern Africa that gave me the win. I don't know if I would have been able to fend off the hoards of Camel Archers and Impi without it. I then used my other two starting settlers to found Gao and Djenne on the corners of the Niger River in order to have the maximum river space possible for development, and to also make use of the otherwise useless desert tiles. (2/1/1 city yield instead of nothing) These would be my only cities until I entered the Renaissance in order to get the free buildings and population.

My goal for this game originally was to highlight wise civic choices to overcome Mali's not ideal terrain.

Spoiler Civics :

I started off by switching to Elective for the commerce boost on unimproved tiles and camps in order to take advantage of difficulty in maintaining infrastructure from barb raids as well as the many ivory resources. This was a very small opportunity cost in the longer URV, as slow growth rates made it so there's not much use for Despotism rushing, while in the UHV your low production pretty much requires you to rush key buildings. With Mali's UP, this gave some very nice commerce yields right off the bat (like 3 food, 3 commerce flood plains with no improvements).

Obviously, for a pagan URV belining to Theocracy is the most important first task to prevent religion spread.

A huge boon to the economy came when I started building watermills on all possible river tiles, after which I adopted Meritocracy (!) to further boost their commerce output. (I had stayed with Citizenship a bit too long to really benefit from Vassalage, and forts were just taking too long to build in the desert, even though it may have been better to do Vassalage over Meritocracy for the food, I just really wanted to see some super watermills). Finally, when I built my new Renaissance cities on the coast to get the free harbors and enough infrastructure so that there weren't really any blank tiles, I switched to Republic, allowing my crowded cities to grow a bit more and focus on a specialist economy. In the switch to Republic, I also adopted Regulated Trade and Isolationism, with the idea of using the bonus to build Customs Houses and grow from the free specialist, but at the end of the day, I don't know if the hit to trade was worth it, as research really slowed down and I didn't unlock Nationalism until right before the end of the game - I continued a bit after winning to switch to Free Trade and Nationalism and those trade yields were soooo nice tho.

This ended up being a long game with a fun combination of peaceful economic development and trade along with a military challenge, first against barbs and natives and then Europeans and Congo to go for the win. Like Congo, the Yoruba URV requires 8 ivory and 6 gems, plus your 15 pagan cities with temples, basically you have to control most of subsaharan Africa in order to achieve it. Until the Renaissance, I only focused on developing my core; then used the Renaissance boost to build more cities in the historical area and attacked the weaker Portuguese colonies in East Africa; finally, waited until the Industrial Era's greater expansion stability and riflemen to clean up the German, Dutch, and collapsed English colonies in southern Africa and get the Congolese ivory and gems, vassalizing them in the process. I ended up near the top of the scoreboard, beaten only by France and Arabia which had been the leaders the whole game (I even surpassed Arabia for a second at the end. We had been friends but we ended up at war because of their defensive pact with Dutch and Germans). My only complaint would be inflation which by the end was absolutely wrecking my economy (I hope that is something that has been addressed in the updates because it completely destroys my Marathon games). This was overall probably my favorite game ever.

Spoiler Screenshots :

LOOK AT THOSE WATERMILL YIELDS (Especially in Djenne that built a Levee)

 

[Dracosolon]

Did you trade with Asia to get enough Ivory? I don't think there's enough of it in Africa.

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Did you trade with Asia to get enough Ivory? I don't think there's enough of it in Africa.

There is enough just in Africa, I quit before starting at first because I miscounted in worldbuilder and thought it would required getting them from India too

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Went back to try new strats to keep Russia pagan, but no matter what I do - avoid having any trade connections, build pagan temples, declare war on neighbors - Orthodoxy ends up spreading to my cities. May have to do a Japan fix for this requiring World Builder, will try as the Poles and see if they have the same issue

Spoiler Russia Pagan Woes :

 

[Si No Hay Paz]

Irregular update:

Finished - Poland, Russia
In course - Netherlands, Ottomans (stay tuned, I'm building the greatest of great canals)
Broken (starts with "no more than half of your cities with religion" already lost regardless if you actually do) - Persia

Spoiler Russia Win :

A fun game that lets you finish wayyyy earlier than UHV Russia, with some flexibility on how you play because you can fulfill the fur requirement taking a couple of different paths. Just declare war on any Orthodox civs to keep it from spreading early game and once you get Theocracy you're free to do whatever

Spoiler Poland Win :

You have the same second URV condition as Russia, but you're way more boxed in, so conflict with your neighbors is inevitable. I had to get creative with how to get the other furs, so I actually have two Canadian Colonies as back-ups in case I lost one of the Siberian ones to barb shenanigans. I think I finished with more than I needed though.