Holy Warriors - Civilization 5 (BNW) Succession Game

[Wyatan]

A question that may warrant being raised is whether you actually want to spread your religion at all...
With two out of three beliefs (if you get to Reformation) taken up by the "buy units" options, your religion will basically suck.

Pros:
- Ability to raise units closer to the battlefield
- Ability to raise more than one unit per turn in a pinch
- Paltry amount of faith gained through foreign spread

Cons:
- Will you ever get enough faith to raise more than one unit / turn anyway ?
- Religion spread is pretty faith-intensive, especially if one AI goes all zealot mode, with an endless missionary spam
- With no unit upgrade, you won't be able to leverage the human advantage through highly promoted units, so you'll need to spam units --> faith is at a premium
- Diplo hit with all civs that have their own religion
- As mentionned, your religion sucks.

[T-hawk]

Good points. Yes, spreading this religion doesn't do a whole lot. It's pure numbers on whether the repayment from Pilgrimage will outweigh the investment. But that can indeed work.

The key principle of religious spread is getting it to work *without* being faith-intensive. This means passive pressure and letting that snowball as more cities beget more pressure. Invest a limited amount in spreading early, at very high leverage with a Prophet squelching newborn religions in the cradle. I've done this a bunch in single player games. You guys give me one Prophet and the missionaries from the wonder, and I'll have half the world pilgrimaging to us by 1000 AD making 50 faith per turn.

[Ichabod]

A good target for T-Hawks strategy is Morroco, since they have the Stonehenge and will likely spawn the first competing religion. They are friendly, so will likely sign open borders to ensure the doom of their own religion.

Besides, Morroco has a central position on the map, so it'll help to make our religion reach the Iroquois and a lot of city states.

Ah, one of the minus from this strategy is giving everyone the ability to buy units with faith, making our job harder.

[T-hawk]

Looked over the save, will play Thursday. Yes there are tile assignments to fix, notably the not-yet-improved but still 3F 1H wheat between Faith and Divinity.

Hiawatha has silver available, will trade it for 1 horse + 9 gpt. I'm inclined to do it. I don't think we have any high priority spending target for the gold. And I want to veto the circus at the capital in favor of the watermill, since that's a way of shifting current production into future wonders. Devotion will do a circus next.

Will slowbuild rather than buy library at Piety, since capital is going to be busy with at least Oracle before NC.

[timmy827]

Looked over the save, will play Thursday. Yes there are tile assignments to fix, notably the not-yet-improved but still 3F 1H wheat between Faith and Divinity.

Not saying I'm proof, but wheat is being worked by the cap....suppose divinity can take it back now that granary was finished.

Looking further: I had forgotten that the game Thawk linked to was no-desert-foklore, so perhaps wide spread is possible without huge spending. Although since we are not OCC'ing there is some faith overhead (or wait gazillion turns) to spread to our own cities as well; although it does little for us now.
Perhaps we use the 300 faith prophet and the HS prophet for squelch spread, save the Piety finisher prophet for enhancing. For enhancement, we could take a passive spread enhancer belief. The other one might be +1 food shrines/temples, or +2 happy from temples since we plan to build a lot? Those are nice but not crucial. Not sure if a prophet for passive spread enhancer is better than a squelcher prophet.

with the no upgrade restriction, I wouldn't think we really want to go offensive until fairly late, at least musket/cannon era? So perhaps some missionary buys make sense also.

"Religion improvement" is the GP tile improvement. It's +6 faith, also +3 gold and +3 culture with all the piety policies. If we think we can get mileage out of Pilgramage we probably use prophets for squelching instead.

So I do think wide spread is worth trying, which means theology next religion.

Back closer in:
OK with silver buy. We might want to extend Ragusa alliance but still have 14 turns. Can anyone confirm Icha's claim that buying portugese embassy fulfills that quest?

[Ichabod]

I agree with the silver buy. Perhaps we can start using our extra luxuries to trade for other luxuries from now on. Does the AI usually accept a straight lux for lux trade?

By the way, since we want to build Wonders and we are going for the Piety opener soon, I seem to remember reading somewhere that the overflow from buildings built with production bonuses doesn't get divided in Civ 5. Not sure if it applies to all cases, but the example I remember reading about was Piety-boosted Shrines. So, we can get more hammers added to a wonder by overflowing a significant amount of hammers from a shrine, using the production bonus from it (which doubles the hammers, if I remember correctly, also doubling the overflow). I'm not sure if that was patched, though. And perhaps we deem this a bug and we refrain from using it, but then we should probably stop playing Civ 5 altogether, because the game is a whole bunch of situations like this.

EDIT: I'll do some tests later today to see how exactly this shrine thing works.

[yuris125]

If you have good relations with an AI, they will accept a lux for lux trade. Also agree with buying silver. T-hawk is the expert on overflow I think, I remember him setting up overflow for building spaceship parts as fast as possible

[T-hawk]

timmy: yes I meant Divinity should get the 3F tile, the city lower on the growth curve.

Yuris: we don't have a spare lux to trade for silver. Divinity has unimproved ivory and unacquired truffles, but both will take several turns until we have workers there.

Inherited turn: As mentioned, I buy Hiawatha's silver. Actually he wanted 9gpt either with or without the horses. That means he has enough horses and puts no value on them. Morocco is the same way, and nobody else has gpt for the horses, so didn't sell yet.



By the way, notice this situation. The wheat is worked by a governor-controlled citizen, and will not change to a manually locked citizen even if you unclick and reclick it. This annoys me to no end in Civ 5's interface. This happens because Faith thinks it has some other tile locked, except that some other city took possession of the tile that Faith thinks it has locked. The fix is to manually take each disputed tile into Faith's possession and manually unlock it, until you find the one that Faith thinks it has rights to. BUT, this causes the same problem in the city you pull the tile from, unless you manually unlock it first there. In our case here, the culprit was the deer towards Divinity. Short version: Before changing city possession of a tile, always unclick it in the old city first.

I also sent that worker on the wheat over towards Divinity's ivory, since uncrunching the happy cap is a higher priority and there's another worker (W of Piety) following one turn behind.

IBT, Catherine enters the Medieval Era. If I'm reading the tech costs right, it's by Civil Service.

Turn 82: Sweden has Salt for trade. I swap him our only Truffles for it, since we have another truffles coming online eventually. And because it triggers WLTKD in Devotion!

Turn 83: Philosophy in, Drama started.

Turn 84: Iroquois found a religion, Protestantism. They took Initiation Rites (100g for converting a city) and Pagodas. Faith finishes water mill and starts the Oracle.

Turn 85: Russia gets a pantheon, Fertility Rites.

Turn 86: Piety finishes granary, starts library.

Turn 88: Morocco founds a religion, Islam. They took Peace Loving (+1 happy per 8 global followers) and Monasteries. Someone (Catherine) finally has 2gpt to pay us for the horse.

Turn 89: Tradition finisher acquired.




Micro notes: Devotion is favoring ownership of food tiles over Faith because WLTKD. Devotion has nothing good to build, I put it on a barracks for lack of any better ideas, we will want one for buying units and Devotion is in the best location for most of the buys.

Divinity acquires the truffles in 6 turns, make sure you have a worker in position. I alertly already cleared the marsh on that tile which was needed to improve its priority for the tile picker.

I fixed the uncompleted mine at Faith. I did start chopping the iron forest at Divinity, it will be worth more for the hammers and iron sales than for the Celt bonus. Also I chopped the forest adjacent to Faith, stupidly not realizing that would lose the Celt bonus because Faith's other forest (deer) is improved. Not a great loss, it's going to get subsumed by much bigger faith numbers soon anyway, and we do need the improved tile.

Scout got free from that barb-infested area. I don't know where Portugal or the last missing civ are. Best guess is back east of Russia. Scout is heading that direction, defogging along the way.

After saving, I tested the question we keep asking, does buying embassy with Portugal satisfy Ragusa's quest to find them. I carefully looked away so as not to see where Portugal actually is. The result: yes it does satisfy the quest, so we should definitely do this, for both the dyes and maritime food.

Drama done, but I actually set research to Construction not Theology. Reason is we need lumbermills. We're running short of tiles that can even take improvements as our cities grow rapidly, so need lumbermills to fill in in those forests. Also because the following sequence works well.

This is the building plan: Capital should go Oracle - Shrine - National College. Oracle will claim the Piety opener right before that shrine. The fourth library will be done on the same turn as the shrine, to plow that overflow right into the NC. The time to build the NC will be just about the same time as to research Construction - Theology, and then the capital can start on those wonders, probably Borobudur first.

[Ichabod]

By the way, notice this situation. The wheat is worked by a governor-controlled citizen, and will not change to a manually locked citizen even if you unclick and reclick it. This annoys me to no end in Civ 5's interface. This happens because Faith thinks it has some other tile locked, except that some other city took possession of the tile that Faith thinks it has locked. The fix is to manually take each disputed tile into Faith's possession and manually unlock it, until you find the one that Faith thinks it has rights to. BUT, this causes the same problem in the city you pull the tile from, unless you manually unlock it first there. In our case here, the culprit was the deer towards Divinity. Short version: Before changing city possession of a tile, always unclick it in the old city first.

There's another way to fix this, perhaps more simple. Just click on the city tile, to reset all tiles to what the governor wants. After that, you can reassign them without the bug.

This almost made me go mad when playing PBEM 2, by the way.

[Ichabod]

Nice turns, T-Hawk. Yuris is up!

Good move by clearing the marsh of Divinity truffles, I didn't know you could do it outside borders.

No problem on the lost forests. The Celtic bonus purpose was to get the religion eaily and before everyone else, which we accomplished already. +1, +2 faith per turn will hardly matter.

I told you guys about buying the embassy! I did it in one of the PBEM games. And we should wait to do it until we actually need it to keep Ragusa's allied status - maybe some other CS will ask the same thing in the turns before that.

Romans are settling all around us! Well, more faith from our Religion, I guess.

What's the ETA on our next GPro? I think we should use it to end Islam in Marrakesh, as per T-Hawk's strategy. Looking at the screenshots, is about time we start building some shrines (of course, piety opener first), our faith generation is really low right now!

I agree about the Capital's build order.

*Do we get the XP from the barracks on bought units?