Dhoom, I see your strategy is well designed.
But how do we handle the following scenario:
There are two land-blocks (i.e. patches of land that can be connected pre-Astronomy).
One has 4 civs (we are in this group),
and the other have 3 which are Budha.
Our block will surely pick a religion, probably confus since that one already spread outside, will spread at Zara and then off to his other friend...
When Astronomy will come in we will have 4 confused and 3 budhist. Trouble.
Okay, I see that you are bound and determined to try and find a worst-case scenario and see how badly you can mess up our strategy. Okay, I'll try and come up with an answer...
The situation that you describe is actually not too bad. If Confucianism spreads via Zara, at least then it will be a single, uniting religion.
Then, we'll just have to pick sides.
In the situation that you describe, since we have so many AIs that are Confucianist, we may try and convert the other parts of the world to this religion.
Since an AI is far less likely to spread a religion via Missionaries to its neighbours if it doesn't own the Holy City, we will simply spread Confucianism to the non-Holy-City owner and beg like crazy for them to switch to Confucianism. We'll need to maximize their Confucian population, which might even mean building them an off-continent City, putting Confucianism in it, and gifting them the City, if they will take it. That City wouldn't get the Buddhist Holy City's owner spreading Buddhism to it, so our target Civ would have "more Confucian influence than Buddhist influence," even if all of its on-continent Cities have both religions. Plus, with more of the world in the Confucian Relgion, he'll be more likely to switch over.
At that point, we'd just need to decide if the largest population AI (who will likely be Confucian in a worst-case scenario) is well-liked enough to be voted for by some of our Confucian buddies. If he is, then we'll either have to do our best to convert this AI to a different religion or else we'll have to pick someone other than Zara to gift the United Nations to, someone who is not well-liked and preferably is a smaller-sized AI. Without a war declaration, gifting The United Nations to someone else would require TWO Great Engineers, not just 1, as the size of the City that we gift would be Size 1.
However, more realistically, in this worst-case situation that you have devised for us, we'll get some nearby AIs grabbing different religions and not all uniting under the Confucian banner.
So, we'll simply stick to our original plan of grabbing Buddhism. 3 Buddhist AIs are alreeady a lot... if we convert even 1 more AI to Buddhism and then gift The United Nations to Zara, we are done.
In fact, probably instead of messing around with Confucianism in the above scenario, we should just stick to the plan and go for Buddhism as soon as we possibly can get it. The worst case scenario would be that we can't obtain Buddhism at all without a war, so we'll have to grab it via a war, angering all of the Buddhist AIs.
If we do go to war, then we could aim to grab the Buddhist Holy City and then convert as many of those AIs as possible to Confucianism. Or we could even trade a couple of high-priced techs, like Philosophy, only to our war target (probably the dude or lady who founded Buddhism). Then, after declaring war, we might have 2 other AIs bribed into war against us. Free war declarations for us!
We'll just need to switch into Police State and Theocracy, mobilize the troops, and start capturing (or heck, even razing) Cities on the Buddhist continent. As long as each of the Buddhists have a COUPLE of Cities each, they won't die. Even if the other AIs come in and fill some of those locations with Galleon-based Settlers, we'll be fine with that, since they'll be AIs without a Holy City and thus we'll eventually get them all under the same Religious banner (which will likely not be Buddhism anymore, since we started razing Buddhist Cities, but instead we would pick a Religion that many others already share).
We'll still have to figure out when and where to gift the UN, but with 3 AIs at war with us, we can probably pick one of their larger Cities and build it there, giving it back to them once those 3 AIs have been sufficiently weakened.
Probably, in such a war against 3 AIs, our best strategy will be to raze as many of their Coastal Cities as we can, land-locking them. None of those AIs will vote for us anymore, so the more land that we can "free up" for other AIs to come and settle, the better.
Another alternative would be to hope that one of those Buddhist AIs is a warmongeror and then refuse their demands and try and convince that one AI to declare war on us. We'll be nice to the other two, but if we can get one of them to declare war on us, then we'll be able to capture Buddhism and execute our spread-Buddhism-to-the-world (except for Zara) strategy.
Basically, there are always ways to handle any situation that is thrown our way. However, our medium term goal should be to get our economy intact (via Cottages) and then send out a Settler + Galley party or two in search of Buddhism.
If we can't find Buddhism, then maybe we'll be able to sneak a City onto one of the nearby landmasses, to help ensure that we become the #1 Civ in terms of Population. We currently see a landmass to the north and one to the east of Zara. Land can also snake down south-east of Zara and towards the east. So there are currently lots of directions that could offer us a connection to Buddhism.
