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other ways are city spamming, as each spreads its majority religion to all the citys in a certain radius. However, if the target city is already affected by that radius an additional trade route won't gain you anything here (from the city that affects it already)
for example: City A is close to City B and affects it with the religion, then a trade route from A to B wont spread additional religion. However, a City C further away will still spread to B via trade route.
A faith costly way is to spam missionaries to the citys around, for example cities from civs you dont care that they get angered or they wont get angered as they dont spread an own religion...or city states. But converting from one religion to another is much harder than converting heathens, so you will need several missionaries (or a great prophet) to convert a single city. Also, many civs tend to spam their own missionaries, making this even harder.
another costly way that only works under certain circumstances is to buy the target city, spread the good word and then sell it again. This is more useful when the target city already has another faith, which would make it really hard to convert, but that way you can simply send an inquisitor
also keep in mind that inquisitors have a passive ability. Stationed in one of your cities they give a certain resistance against enemy missionaries. Inquisitors can also "clean" cities from the status of "holy city", crippling that religion quite a lot.
ofc...the long term solution for everything is conquest.
On the other hand, they only get angered if your missionnaries flip their cities, so you can start convert them, even let their cities with no major religion (without actualy converting them to your religion), they will not care about it.
Ultimately, you may even give them gift, and convert them nevertheless ; the diplomatic boost you get from the gift should compensate.
PS : civs do NOT care when you convert them if they don't have found a religion themselves.
I am not playing for so long - in my last game I used missionaries and angered the other civs. To be precise I totally converted them. ^^ Guess I was too greedy then.
Proximity is the most passive way to go about this as cities will spread their influence to nearby neighboring cities without much action on your part. If you found a city nearby one of your already converted cities you can go about converting your new city without having to spend any faith on a missionary. And the more cities you have, the stronger the pressure. Population size has no influence on this. Tightly packed wide cities are great at this strategy.
Someone else also mentioned trade routes. You can actively send multiple caravans from different cities in order to amass large amounts of religious pressure on neighbors. Sea routes (like with everything) grant double influence. You can convert rival cities by using this strategy. But using this method brings over rival pressure as well. This is best used on trading oriented civilizations and your ideal targets are tall cities. Also works great with tithe as it counteracts gold loss by prioritizing cities to amplify religious spread over initial trade payoffs.
You can also indirectly influence other rival cities by spreading your religion to city states which neighbor them. This strategy steps on the least amount of toes but must be carried out in a mass wave as opposed to one at a time. I like to spread it to city states at opposing sides of a rival civilization. Like if I am to the south of a rival civilization my main priority with missionaries is to spread my religion to any place to the east or west of my northern neighbor. Once I do that then I get the city state to his north. I encircle them and if I can do that he will be spending all his faith trying to convert his own cities and making futile attempts to convert his neighboring city states to his religion while my passive pressure overwhelms him.
And lastly is the direct missionary/great prophet holy rush strategy. While the effects are felt immediately, it can rub other civilizations the wrong way if they have their own religion they want to spread around and you are forcing your own religion upon them.
Ultimately you will want to combine all four methods to get the full effect of your religious pressure. So build many cities close together (making your cities harder to convert, as well as indirectly influencing people not to settle near you), use trade routes to spread religion as opposed to gaining the most gold possible, make use of city states as metaphorical "religion surrogates" and buy and use missionaries in a "holy rush" style as opposed to the "one by one" method.
As a side note, Religion tends to favor diplomatic style civilizations the most and science civilizations the least. Diplomatic civilizations tend to build wide, play relatively peacefully, use lots of trade routes and actively seek out city states, all of which positively foster religious growth. Science civilizations build tall, meaning less cities, and rush through the eras quickly. And the further you progress in the eras the more costly it becomes to faith purchase things, meaning religion progresses more slowly.
Here is what i would do: Get the max amount of trade routes you can get. Put a single caravan in each city as opposed to all caravans coming out of one city. Now send all caravans to one rival city. He will gain gold but you will convert his one city very quickly. Then move onto the next city next to that. Keep doing this until he is spending all his faith just to convert his own cities back to his own faith. This will reduce his pressure while increasing your own.
You can also use the "insincere friend" strategy which zxcvbob is very fond of where you pay a neighbor of your next door neighbor to attack your next door neighbor. Then watch from the sidelines to calculate your next move.
If the guy who you paid to attack your next door neighbor is winning then you invade your next door neighbor and burn down some of his cities to eliminate some of the pressure. Just don't eliminate him from the game as that is very bad diplomatically speaking.
But if your next door neighbor ends up winning the fight then you just call war upon the guy who you paid to attack your next door neighbor to get some of your money back and get on your next door neighbors good side for fighting a common enemy.
You can ultimately keep doing this until someone (or someones if your bank roll is high enough) kicks his ass and you swoop in for the land grab or you can use the diplomacy buff to offset the inevitable missionaries you intend to send into his borders and actively convert his cities.
In my current situation it will take some time though until I can try it though, but I definitely will.
(I guess I need to get rid of any loyality feelings in this game.)
Currently I have 5 trade routes but no idea how many turns the caravans still last. It seems to me as if it would be best to wait and send the caravans all at once in the future.
edit:
Why is it important not to buy religious buildings before? Wouldn't I just start cumulating faith?
That perk really only benefits England who gets one additional spy. The pressure the spy exerts is hardly worth mentioning and in multiplayer games it is a major tip off on where your spies are. In all cases you are better off taking iterant preachers or religious texts.
You want to forego buying faith buildings and get missionaries so that you establish a strong early foothold with your religion. Your religion will spread farther the earlier you establish it as there will be less competition in establishing your faith in foreign cities.
Also you can acquire great prophets by either completing the liberty tree (choose your great person) or by building the Hagia Sophia so you can reform your religion without spending that early (and hard to come by) 300 faith points.
And if you need faith generation just build temples, pantheons or settle near faith wonders. Buying early faith buildings may increase your late game faith output but if you do this too often you will find yourself using missionaries to remove other religions rather than establishing your own. And that's an uphill battle.
When I started my current game I had the problem that other civs already started a religion while I hardly had faith to do so. That's why I started building all those religious buildings.
From my point of view I need those buildings to gathe enough faith so i can found a religion. The note not to build those buildings is confusing me now.
By the way: I suffer from the uphill battle you have mentioned. ^^ In my next game I'll try to avoid this by doing it right.
And out of the ones I mentioned above it is a wide consensus who agrees that most often the Celts are the first civilization to acquire a pantheon belief, Ethiopia is the first to acquire a religion and Indonesia has the highest faith generation output of any other civilization.
Try building your temples and other faith buildings earlier (research pottery first). And build double scouts in order to find those religious city states and faith wonders before anyone else.
When a quest for a religious city state becomes available try to actively complete it. And possibly station a unit nearby to kill any invading barbarians as well as rescue any of their workers. If you can free a worker by killing a barbarian while in their borders you become instant allies. Try focusing the faith city state quests sooner. And actively protecting city states by stationing one or two of your soldiers near their borders.
Building one of the theology wonders really helps your religion take off but is not mandatory.
And the note about not building faith buildings only pertains to using faith to buy buildings. In other words cathedrals, pagodas, mosques, etc. He wants you spending your faith on missionaries as soon as you are able to.