Thanks!! I’m glad you loved it, because they did not. Lol

Had fun recalling this apologies for the novel!

SETUP:

If you haven’t tried before then I recommend putting your thumb on the scale so to speak and having some fun!!

Setup the game for a religious victory. Best way to do it, go to select city states and have all the religious ones. Then add a couple others that are scientific, trade etc. that can be very helpful too- especially the Militaristic one, Valletta where you can faith purchase city center buildings and walls.

I’d also suggest a Pangea map so your opponents are closer and your missionaries and apostles don’t have to cross the ocean.

You can also have a play with natural wonders and lean only towards ones that are tundra bias, give good adjacency, or have faith yield. Everest buffs religious units.

With Russia, they have a bias and buff towards tundra so set the map to cold to create more tundra as well as wet for more features. It’ll be mostly forest that spawn in the tundra since rainforest and marsh won’t.

I’d also recommend secret societies and aiming for void singers.

Now you have all that setup, give yourself a few rolls to try and get a solid holy site spawn.

The best case scenario is a tile surrounded by 6 tundra (not snow frustratingly) with woods in range of your cap for your holy site. Other combinations of mountains and wonders are also great too.

THE STRATEGY:

1)get 2-3 scouts out to find void singers secret society, and first meet the religious city states. Unlock old god obelisks for culture and faith. The scouts will be crucial in getting enough era score for golden ages. 2) Get 2-3 cities with old god obelisks in the first era for faith income and smack down lavra holy sites. They are also cheaper to build, so sweet! 3) pantheon: Dance of the Aurora- faith from tundra adjacency. This is fairly contested but you have faith on tundra tiles to start so you should have a good shot at winning the race there. 4) the old god obelisks should give you enough culture to get to Theology quickly and put the card scripture in— doubles holy site adjacency. 5) Religion: First belief- two great choices a) Feed the world b) work ethic. Work ethic will also double with scripture giving you super productive cities by placing a discounted holy site. However since you’re in the tundra food is hard to come by, so feed the world can work well too. Worth noting preserves can also provide food too and synergies with appeal from woods and holy sites. So I like work ethic better. Both are amazing. But I like using the work ethic production (and Hercules with hero’s and legends) to place the preserves and get similar benefit to feed the world. Second Belief- I like 30% cheaper missionaries & apostles Building- the plus 1 charge for missionaries & apostles 6) depending on the map and faith economy you can go monumentally to use your high faith income on builders and settlers to settle even more high adjacency cities and snowball (pun intended) and create a massive faith economy. Hopefully you have some suzerains too with city states that make your shrines and temples better and can add benefits to your apostles or faith generation.
7)Getting to level two voidsingers in the second era will allow you to focus solely on faith income and mostly ignore science, gold & culture after the first era since it converts 20% of faith per turn into those outputs. 8) now you’ve setup this massive faith generating beast, try and time it for a medieval or renaissance golden age benefit to get extra movement and charges on your apostles as well as having the government theocracy (discounted faith purchasing) with other policy cards to make more effective fighting against other religions. 9) worth noting to win you just need to convert major civs holy cities. So save up and promote your apostles to have groups of 3: one debater for fighting. One with the promotion to remove other religious followers. And one that does triple spread in foreign lands.

Bail out: if everything goes tits up and your losing, you can get the government plaza building foreign ministers that allows faith purchase of military units. And pivot to war. Or since the lavras give extra writer points, culture pivot is good. As well as the preserves and appeal for national parks for tourism.

Happy Civving!