Holy Warriors

[zxcvbob]

Looks good on paper, but actually it's pretty weak. Units start out cheap but the prices go up -- to 4x more faith than gold; maybe higher. Also you can't buy obsolete units, which I thought was the whole point (Samurai or Roman Legions, for instance)

I don't think I'll try it again. Just give me pagodas or cathedrals or something useful. Or did I play it wrong?

[Glory2God]

It can be very useful if you're generating enough faith and you have discount faith purchases via Piety Branch. Eg: You only need one city to house military buildings and can faith-purchase all units there, while focusing all city production on other things.

[Twelvefield]

I would not make Holy Warriors the focus of my strategy. You have to want Piety quite a bit and then also have a lot of Faith to burn. But as friend Theopholis points out, if you don't have anything else, you can crank out decent troops and keep your economy running. After all, gold and faith don't mix all that often in the game unless you're pious. So if you have to use 4x faith, then so be it: at least you're not breaking the treasury. On the other hand, if you're spending a lot of gold on troops yet you have 4x the faith you need... why?

[leandrombraz]

I see it as a less random allied militaristic city-state. It's merely a way to get a unit here and there without wasting gold or production time. You shouldn't rely mainly on it to get units, but if you need a unit and you have faith to waste, why not?
Depending on the circunstance it's totally worth, but if you don't need a unit ASAP and could use a pagoda, buy the pagoda...

[Red Bat]

Holy warriors are the entire reason I wasn't wiped out in my one city playthrough as Ethiopia. I concentrated on building culture buildings and used faith and money to get my defensive army. Since I started next to both the Huns and the Mongols, I needed to persuade them that attacking me was a bad idea without slowing down my attempt at a cultural victory.

[Twelvefield]

Ethiopia is one of those exceptions that prove the rule, seeing as if you get the right breaks, the Ethiopians swim in lakes of unused faith. I had a similar although lesser experience with pious Ottomans. My Ottomans weren't particularly faithful, but the rest of the world was even less so. On the other hand, I was losing traction with military, culture and science, so I decided I had to go religious. It's helping me lose the game more slowly.

[Ryika]

It's widely concidered one of the worst believes you can pick. Not only because the units are just too expensive, but also because using faith to buy Great Persons later on (or maybe science buildings, if you invest into religion) is just WAY stronger, so your pre-industrial-faith should be used to push your religion into the world to get as much benefit as you can.

/edit: And of course you can't upgrade your units with faith + they still cost maintenance. It only saves you a bunch of hammers.

[ajhartman65]

Personally I am a big fan of holy warriors (when planning a domination game), especially if i get a desert start and can grab desert folklore at the begining. Just wrapped up a run through with the huns, grabbed holy warriors, used faith to get my army going and had my continent all to myself and city states by the time things rolled into AD (5 civs down, six to go on another continent). Only thing that slowed me down was my cap was landlocked and I had just been puppeting/razing conquered cities, so no naval escorts to protect my troops as they went after Polynesia to get a foothold on the next continent.

It really depends on your start, pantheon choice, and what civ you are playing as to how useful holy warriors can be...

[Crim]

Originally posted by zxcvbob:

Looks good on paper.

Looks TERRIBLE on paper...Using precious Faith that can be used to buy GPs for a few garbage warriors, losing a precious follower belief to do it and early game faith is often difficult to accumulate any decent amount.

[Matthew]

I'll preface this with that I don't use Holy Warriors much, but I was always under the impression it was best used like mercenaries. Where you are going all out on boosting infrastructure, but a surprise DoW means you need military now. Spending faith instead of gold.

[Grumpy]

Originally posted by Theophilus:

It can be very useful if you're generating enough faith and you have discount faith purchases via Piety Branch. Eg: You only need one city to house military buildings and can faith-purchase all units there, while focusing all city production on other things.

It is never useful, ever. If you are generating so much faith you can pay x4 the cost for military units your faith would always, always be better spent picking "to the glory of god" so you can pick whatever great person you want.

It is there so that if everything else better has been taken, you can get 'something' just like how some pathenon & religious beliefs are poor but that makes the race to be 1st in religion to be meaningful.

[Red Bat]

Originally posted by x2Madda:

Originally posted by Theophilus:

It can be very useful if you're generating enough faith and you have discount faith purchases via Piety Branch. Eg: You only need one city to house military buildings and can faith-purchase all units there, while focusing all city production on other things.

It is never useful, ever. If you are generating so much faith you can pay x4 the cost for military units your faith would always, always be better spent picking "to the glory of god" so you can pick whatever great person you want.

It is there so that if everything else better has been taken, you can get 'something' just like how some pathenon & religious beliefs are poor but that makes the race to be 1st in religion to be meaningful.

In a one city cultural playthrough you can often get great persons with relative ease. But getting enough soldiers to avoid getting wiped out can be tricky, and that is where holy warriors comes in handy. A lot of the religious and pantheon beliefs aren't widely useful, but are incredibly powerful in the few situations they are useful.

[Twelvefield]

That's how I see it. If I'm building an army of Holy Warriors, I'm not worried about GP's way off in the future (although that's a fairly drastic decision), I'm wanting to steamroll my neighbours. There are other ways to gain GP's. You need angry army guys if you're going to go military.

But as the anti-Holy Warrior brigade very rightly points out, you shouldn't be making that kind of decision in the first place. To which I say, you know, sometimes it happens no matter your best intentions. When he got out of bed that fateful morning, Lieutenant Gorman didn't once consider he was going to get to hold the luscious PFC Vasquez in his arms, caressing her hands in his, but at the end of the day that's exactly how things worked out for him.

[Ryika]

Well, if you play efficiently and on a difficulty that fits your level of skill, then holy warriors shouldn't really do anything for you in a "standard"-secnario. You would have the army you need anyway and in the early ages, when units are still reasonable cheap to buy with faith you can't really start going nuts yet (diplomacy would backfire on you and your infrastructure still needs to be improved, also you just don't have the happiness to afford taking city after city) and Chances are that the game is not going to be over before those great persons are available, so you WILL benefit from them (Great Engineers + Great Scientists are huge for warmongering), one way or the other. And then again, it's not only about the GPs, it's also about the beliefs you could have taken instead of Holy Warriors - many of them are just so much more useful.

That does of course not mean that you "shouldn't" go for that belief if you have that special strategy that works really good with it, but overall, in a standardised scenario, the belief is just bad, even as a warmonger.

[Glory2God]

I trying out a few things in a standard prince pangae game. Settled 6 cities (+ cap = 7 cities) and only made one neighbor a little angry for expanding. Built shrines and temples in all and later purchased mosques in all.

Went a few policies into Piety and then to the Liberty production boost for buildings. Purchased several troops with faith and fulfilled City State quests. Sitting first in army, but I prefer playing nice and my happiness isn't great so gifted a few to City States that requesting units.

With the beliefs I choose, I can purchase units and cheaper missionaries to get science when spread to other religions (and go mosque of djenne for 3 spreads). Seems pretty useful. Can buy a unit on command whenever needed or field a decent army quickly and use my gold for citystates and use production bonus in cities to focus on buidings.

The science boost from missionary spread would be much more useful at a higher difficulty, as the AI are better at spreading their religion around. I'm getting varying amounts of science with each spread. Anyone know how the amount of science through missionary spread is calculated?

Another consideration is if you're invaded and tiles and happiness pillaged and your production and economy suffers, your faith purchasing abilities are unaffected.

http://cloud-3.steampowered.com/ugc/3298070082291565279/6FB05AC1376E85921BC19E9DBAA361A905B3D5B4/

[Grumpy]

Originally posted by Azazel:

In a one city cultural playthrough you can often get great persons with relative ease. But getting enough soldiers to avoid getting wiped out can be tricky, and that is where holy warriors comes in handy. A lot of the religious and pantheon beliefs aren't widely useful, but are incredibly powerful in the few situations they are useful.

In a 1 city cultural playthough you only have, as the title says, 1 city. So you should have the workshop + ironworks national wonder which is more than enough hammers to get a military unit every 3 turns. You can also take commerce and pick mercenaries if you really need a fast army. The x3 faith cost is always a rip off no matter what unit you are buying and the whole point of a cultural victory is to keep generating culture till you win so once again generating GP is still the better option.

If you are picking and using holy warriors in games, I would love to play against you online and see how it works out for you because I assure you, 1 city is not going to generate enough faith to reliably get out an army on a dime if you are in trouble and need it.

Not saying "you are wrong" but it is certainly not the most efficient use of faith.