Piety/Rationalism combo for Science Victory

In BNW, none of the policy trees are mutually exclusive. In G&K, Piety was better for cultural victory and Rationalism was better for science victory. With the changes to social policies in BNW, a combination of Piety and Rationalism might get the fastest science finishes.

The reformation belief Jesuit Education allows you to build science buildings with . This is a massive benefit because you no longer have to stockpile to rush buy Public Schools and Research Labs. Because of the Piety policies, buildings also cost less . In my recent game, I was able to rush buy buildings in my four core cities immediately upon reaching the required tech and also have enough to buy 4 GS for the late game tech rush.

I also find this combination works well because Rationalism isn't available when I finish my initial policy tree (usually either Tradition or Liberty depending on the game). I can open Piety in the late Classical to early Medieval era and still open Rationalism when it becomes available in the Renaissance.

What do other people think? What are some of the social policy combination you find work well in BNW?

I've found that liberty/commerce/patronage (in that order) works wonders for a tall empire, as liberty allows you to expand earlier without sacrificing wonder production, commerce gets you money and happiness, and then patronage allows you to get all the city states with that money and control the world congress (and works well with commerce's +2 happiness per lux resource). With the world congress and militaristic city states to back up your authority, you can do whatever you want, and your city states/wonders will work well together to give you a nice empire full of everything. When you're done with patronage you can usually start filling out your ideology.

This works on emperor difficulty extremely well, I'm having a bit of trouble on immortal though (but I got tradition instead of liberty in this game).

To the OP - have you run into any games where you were going down the piety tree, but the AI took jesuit education before you got there? What would you take as a fallback for reformation?

Also, what about neighbors with strong religion - overwhelming some of your cities. Spending faith to convert them back so that you can buy the university adds to the faith cost of the university.