I found your game and mine particularly interesting in comparison. Some things very similar: Angkor Wat was key. Some things totally different: you missionary spammed to the AIs, I didn't. Our finish dates are pretty similar. The difference could well be the little things ... Cathy getting the pony city west in your game was a bummer I didn't have to deal with, the barb gift of the gold/iron/flood plain city to the south of the capital in mine (before i even knew IW!) was a huge bonus you didn't get. Compromise is interested in how the "monk economy" played out. I get the sense you are too, from your report and your response in Sulla's thread. I'm in the mood to sort of ramble about it, so I will, but if you're not interested I won't be offended if you skip it
. It got long, most of my posts do.
Summary: My focus was priests, not missionaries. Angkor Wat was huge for me (sound familiar?). I ran merc and used priests from my temples for my freebie specs. I did
not spread my faith to the AIs for shrine income (due to political reasons). I deeply felt the lack of courthouses, I felt very very poor, but I did manage. I actually forgot that Versailles was buildable, I never did make it *giggle*. I would not have made it through the tech tree at anywhere near the pace I did without the religious focus and how I used it to run my economy.
Longer blah blah blah part you can skip:
I ran merc as soon as I got banking. I like merc a lot at lower leverls, particularly when I have rep, which I did from nappyâs pyramids. I didnât need the âone-turn wonderâ effect from Ges, so getting a GP was better for me than getting a GE because of the 5g or insta-shrine. I ended up getting more GAs, but that was fine too. Added bonus: priests depend on temples, which are cheap for spiritual leaders. I did do a lot of civic swaps, but I was usually running merc and slavery at the same time, since my specialists were using the temples not depending on caste. you used serfdom ... that didn't cross my mind *giggle*.
Angkor Wat was very key. I got one GE and that is what I used him on. Because it lets you run additional priests, where you make it matters, and I suddenly had a chance to put it in a city that could take advantage of those free priest slots but wouldn't be able to hand-build the wonder in any reasonable length of time. 100% perfect timing, thank you Archimedes!
I built Spiral Minaret, that helped until the last 10 or so turns when I was in FR for happiness/culture-boosts during my âbig brave warmongerâ impersonation. The very few times I've bulit that wonder it's been for the GS points, but here the actual effect did help Iâm sure, because every little bit of gold helped, and I had the time and hammers to build it.
I loaded my save of the final turn to look the economy over, and set science to 100%. Keep in mind at that point i decided science did not matter, I was actually running only culture/gold and had no need to hire scientists; it had not always been that way. Turns out that in every city that wasnât in revolt, except three that had no temples, I was running a priest as the free merc specialist. Four cities were running four priests, and one city was running 3 priests! They did not come anywhere close to making up for the maintenance cost of the city of course, they werenât as good as merchants would have been, or as good as if the cities had market/grocer/bank multipliers, but they were what I could do to ease the crunch.
I used missionaries only in my own cities, and in the farthest of Cathy's (who was already my state religion) to keep an eye on her. I made sure all my cities got my state religion (Buddhism). in food heavy cities where I wanted more temples to run more priests, and in border cities where I wanted more religions to have more culture building options, I preferentially spread the other faiths I had the shrines for: Christianity (it had spread the most at the time I got the prophet) and Hinduism (nappy made that one for me).
So my economy definitely depended on religion in a huge way to carry me through. Just not in the âspread one faith for more shrine incomeâ sense. My biggest shrine, Buddhism in Wall Street city, made 28g; i think christian was 20 and hindu was 9 or so. none were over 30g. My GNP does show one big crash, and I think itâs my recovery from the nappy war. Maintenance went up as cities came out of revolt, they had no infrastructure so they got whipped and provided 0 commerce for a while there.
Political reasons were why I went without the shrine income from their cities. I didnât want my enemy-of-the-moment to have brothers/sisters of the faith getting mad at me and jumping in. Iâm terrible at fighting wars in the first place, so having the entire world one big happy Buddhist family would be bad for me and my style. I would have spread my state religion to nappy during war prep, to be able to spy on his city defenses, but he never gave me OB. I would have spread my state religion to Cathy once I decided not to attack her first, but luckily it spread to her right away and was her faith from the beginning. I donât trust her at all, even when she says she loves me. I worried at the civics swap to rep because even with the shared faith, the +wise civics I was getting with her using HR mattered, since Iâd denied her help more than once. I hate how sheâs always asking for stuff! But it ended up fine, she didnât ever come at me. Nobody declared on anybody. Everyone was a different religion, except me and Cathy sharing one. That helped my economy because they didn't trade much, so I could tech slow enough to save gold but still be teching faster than they were. I can't tell how big your tech lead was, mine was so ridiculous that i even chose silly paths on the tech tree for giggles.
ps: I typed this here, pasted it into a real word processor, did an auto-correct to add uppercase to sentences, and skimmed it over. But I'm not actually awake enough yet to really see if it did bizarre things. I hope it makes it easier to read, if it added any bonus weirdness I apologize.
