What are others thoughts regarding early religion chasing vs. early REX strategy?
I admitted up front in my
GOTM 52 write-up that I believed a Science-based game would beat my date.
However, please do not forget the additional constraints that exist in this game that make a typical Diplo game that much harder:
1. We must have a State Religion
2. Each AI must have a State Religion
The combination of these points means that either we need to try and get many AIs into the same religion as us or else we will be suffering negative Diplo modifiers with many AIs.
Now, some of you seem to believe that there are going to be several Religious Zealots in this game. The best counter to a Religious Zealot is to prevent them from owning a Holy City.
In a "normal" game, we wouldn't need to mess around that much grabbing religions ourselves. A Religious Zealot will hate you a lot for practicing a heathen religion but will like you a lot for sharing the same religion. Thus, even if you declared war on such an AI in order to grab all of their Holy Cities, since you'd be capturing and not razing their cities, you'd only get a permanent -3 Diplo modifier with them. Considering that they'll go from -4 Wrong Religion to +7 Same Religion, you've gone from -4 to "-3 + 7 = +4." That's a BIG difference, even though you declared war on them!
However, the Devil Satin (sic) has thought of this possibility and has decreed that:
3. Eldine will only let us get away with war declarations on 2 AIs
While we can "hope" that we'll only have to use two of them, I'd rather use those 2 war declarations to strategically set up voting allies, rather than just to get the world out of being in 5 differing religions.
Do not forget that Worst Enemy relations are what REALLY screw up a Diplo game. I can win a Diplo game where all of the AIs like each other a lot just by playing around with subtle factors like relative AI Power Levels, getting them to like us more or our voting opponent less. It's the opposite case, where most AIs have a Worst Enemy that gets you into trouble in a Diplo game, especially if they do not all share the SAME Worst Enemy.
Our goal will be to peacefully get most AIs on the "same religious team" while using our limited number of war declaration targets as the world-punching-bags. I predict that not all AIs will be able to hate one particular rival, so I predict that we'll need 2 rival AIs that won't vote for us (because we're mean to them) in order for at least one of them to be an AI that is disliked enough for us to get a Shared War positive Diplo modifier against ONE of them with the other 4 AIs. If we JUST pick one big, bad target, then some AIs will like that target enough not to declare war on them, but with 2 targets, we can probably get at least 3 of the 4 other AIs to give us Shared War positive Diplo points and if we feel we need the votes of the last one, they're probably the more Peaceful type so they are more likely to get less Negative Diplo modifiers with us, since they won't be asking us to declare war on someone else every 10 turns (i.e. we won't have to refuse their demand every 10 turns, so although we won't get the positive Shared War bonus, we won't get the negative bonus of not having Shared a War).
A Religious-beeline Strategy is just a strategy. Others exist.
But, having examined the limiting factors related to THIS PARTICULAR SGOTM, it is the most suitable strategy of any of the strategies that we have discussed.
Let's say that REXing early on will net you 20% more land than another SGOTM team. That's a fair assumption, right? Let's also assume that at Emperor level, without a pure focus on early REXing, each SGOTM team can obtain about the same amount of land as any AI. That's a fair assumption to make, too, right? Even if you disagree with these assumptions, the numbers will only change a little bit.
So, splitting the world 7 ways gives us about 15% of land area. A further assumption is that population levels (those which are used for voting) will be roughly equal to land area. Sure, you can beeline Biology (which delays your United Nations victory, by the way) and farm over all of your cottages, but let's counter by saying that the AIs are good at irrigating their cottages, too--they do so, but I wouldn't really claim doing so is generally in their favour.
In this game, the AIs will get lucky. Plus, they have slightly better Happiness and Health benefits over us, so it's not too hard to believe that given a similar amount of land area, each AI will have roughly the same number of votes as us.
Early REXing gains you 20% more land than other SGOTM teams, meaning 20% of 15% of the world's land area, or 3% more. That's 18%. Even being generous with Biology and other tricks to increase that population amount a bit beyond 18%, you can't get anywhere close to victory with just that amount of votes.
So, you can declare war and take land.
But that leads us to the 4th restriction, which is painful for a war-based land-grab strategy:
4. Each AI must survive until the end of the game
So, each war declaration on an AI will make them hate us. One, maybe two, in a game won't be the end of the world, but we will still have that "thorn of an enemy in our sides" for the rest of all time.
A land-grabbing strategy works best if you grab the land early on both peacefully and from war. Yet, an early war will likely mean that you'll need a later war against the same opponent, once they build a couple of more cities later on, as you can only declare war on 2 AIs. Not only do you risk getting more negative Diplo modifiers with those 2 AIs' friends from "You declared war on our friend" modifiers, but you're cementing an enemy who will do whatever they can to thwart you in votes, in trades, in getting other AIs to declare war on you, or declaring war on you at inopportune times (such as to pillage your seafood Resources near the end of the game when you are trying to increase your population) etc.
By not allowing us to eliminate our enemies, we're better off not courting "major enemies," and the best way to do that is to declare war once and then drag in another AI or two to also be at war with them, so that said AI will have many AIs to hate.
Further, consider the possibility that if we want to make an AI like Shaka our enemy. He's easy to control in terms of sicking him into wars against other AIs that might normally avoid war. So, we might get him to declare war on Hatshepsut, Mehmed II, and Justinian all at the same time. Then we simply go to war with Shaka. We'll get more positive Diplo modifiers than negative Diplo modifiers this way, because:
- the AIs that liked Shaka will now hate him for either being declared upon by Shaka or having their friends declared upon by Shaka, so we won't gain the "You declared war on our friend" modifier that we would have gotten otherwise from a few AIs by way of us declaring war on Shaka when they liked Shaka
- we will hope to get more positive Diplo modifiers from shared war than we got for "You sicked Shaka on us" negative Diplo modifiers
- even if these peaceful AIs want to end the war early and thus give us only 1 or 2 "shared war" positive Diplo modifiers, by having Shaka be the one to declare war on them, they will no longer have Resource trades and Open Borders with Shaka (removing their positive Diplo modifiers towards Shaka) and will hate Shaka for having declared war on them "-3 Shaka, you jerk, you declared war on us," so even those AIs that generally avoid war will likely now hate Shaka enough to be bribed into war with Shaka when originally they couldn't be
Insert the name of your favourite Warmongeror in place of Shaka's name. Now you see how the intricacies of a Diplo game can be manipulated.
Your best bet in war declarations is to keep the amount of them that you have to make either very minimal (one, maybe two max per AI) or else eliminate those AIs that you declare on a lot. But we are prevented from destroying any AIs, so our best bet will be well-timed mid-game wars that are done more to shift the Diplomatic situation in our favour than they are sheerly for a land-grab strategy.
Besides, we can't make both of our AI "punching bags" become too small, as they'll become vassals of someone else. You can't gift a city to a vassal, thus you can't gift them the United Nations.
So, rather than purely going for a land grab strategy, we will be (if we go the Diplo route) going for more of a manipulate-the-AIs-into-doing-our-bidding type of strategy, that is actually a lot easier to control than is a game where you simply declare war on a neighbour without first considering the overall diplomatic consequences, only finding out too late that you either declared on an AI that liked you a lot extra due to random number generation or that you declared on an AI that everyone liked and thus made all of the other AIs hate you that much more early on, making it harder for you to get Open Borders and trades with them, thus making it harder for you to get them to like you more down the road.
If we go for a cultural game, the more religions that we can found, the better. The alternative is to play a pangea game and found ZERO religions. Any strategy in between those two will mean that very few religions will spread to us, as our own domestic religions will spread to us first in many cases, limiting our potential for Cathedral bonuses and making a Cultural game that is based on Cottages and Wonders really suck--only a Great-Artist based Cultural game would then be able to get a good date with few Cathedrals, but we would have to sacrifice 4 Great People and since we played peacefullly, we wouldn't even be able to use Great Generals as part of those 4 Great People, as you need to fight wars and win many battles in order to get Great Generals.
So, no matter how you look at it, founding a lot of religious will give us the most flexibility and freedom possible in either a Diplo or a Cultural game.
I'd take a 50% chance at founding one more religion (Hinduism) over not even trying, especially since we at least get SOMETHING more (a faster research rate) out of the tradeoff of a later-irrigated Corn Resource. But that's a risk that we as a team will have to choose whether or not we are comfortable taking. At least, as I said, our Worker will only be temporarily delayed, then can work, then have a shorter late-"early-game" time period where he is idle, compared to an early Worker who will get a few things done faster but then will have to sit around and wait until a further date in the future where he can become productive again.
