Religion: a nuisance?

[Plankhead]

Whenever I play, the Spanish are always a Jewish theocracy. That's just freaking weird.

 

[periculum69]

Usually when I play Judaism becomes the most popular, though I've seen budism is a close second and hinduism third. Confusionism has overtaken Judaism for popularity in two of my games, but besides that which ever one gets in first usually stays most popular. The game I'm playing now is kinda funny though as Islam is starting a late game push in the 1900's (all but 2 nations have freedom of religion) and is almost ready to become the most popular, not that it will matter.

 

[TigrisJK]

I've toyed with religion, but I've never liked it much. I typically do an early push towards Taoism, neglecting most other technologies (trading for them with my higher end techs, if needbe) for Pacifism. I like the great people... they do a city good. =) However... spreading them do help a bit/a lot with the AI, as people have said.

Personally I like to stick to strategies that will work against human competition mixed with some difficult AI... religion seems like it could be useful for a very early religious war against the other human player, but at the same time the increased trade benefits from simply having better techs to trade early on and the benefits of having pacifism seem to outweigh religion for me.

However, religion (until you get free religion) is a nice way to boost happiness. Happiness is key. =) Unhappy people are useless people.

I just wish there were a button to systematically execute or reeducate unhappy/dissenting citizens a la Orwell's 1984.

Heh.

 

[hahntsak]

At the lower difficulties, you're usually the first person to grab Buddhism, and so that's usually the first religion to spread.

At higher difficulties, this isn't always the case. I've seen both Confucianism and Christianity become the most popular religion (let alone the first three).

Islam and Taoism still get a bad rap, though. Still, I've seen these become popular national religions, with very little international presence.

If you build missionaries, you can make anything the most popular religion. If you don't build missionaries, usually the first three make the biggest impression. But this isn't always the case.

also isolation from the larger part of the world can have an effect. I played on 3 continents and founded 4 of the world's faiths. only problem was that for a long while, I only had contact with 3 other civs out of 17 total opponents. turned out they were across the ocean and spread 2 of the faiths in my absense to vast populations.
there are ways around that though.