Charitable Missions: Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%. -
5- Controlling city states is important, and saving money is important. Seems like a no brainer to me. 30% of the gold that would go toward City States (think about how much money that is over the course of a game) now goes to maintenance and building purchasing.
_ - Evangelism: Missionaries' Spread Religion action erodes existing pressure from other religions.
2/5 - Spreading religion is always cool, and it gives the Missionaries a nice buff. If you have the faith to spend, it could be viable in certain situations.
_ - Heathen Conversion: Missionaries convert adjacent barbarians to this civilization.
1/5 - I don't even get how this works in practical terms. By the time you would get this, how many Barbarians would even be left? Plus, it'd only really be good if you got this when you were actively trying to build up a military, which is a limited time frame (one where you could just be building them the good ol fashion way). If this effect happens passively and doesn't eat up the Missionary, then perhaps you could snowball a nice army, but it is very impractical, and there's no guarantee the Barbarians will even have the right unit comp or tech for what you would need. Almost useless if you didn't rush the Piety tree.
_ - Jesuit Education: May build Universities, Public Schools, and Research Labs with Faith. -
5-
If you're going faith heavy, then you'll be able to automatically get science buildings in all of your major cities. That means you'll rush through the era quicker, have stronger units, better production, more access to wonders etc. Being able to rush science is always great, but doing so without spending gold or production - beautiful!
_ - Religious Fervor: Use Faith to purchase Industrial Era (and later) land units. -
0/5- It'd be interesting if the units were not expensive, and why only wait until the Industrial era? Basically means you can't fill out the Piety tree for along time. Could be good for last minute defense, but eh...even the Barbarian one seems like it has higher upside than this.
_ - Sacred Sites: All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Tourism each. -
3/5- How many faith buildings are there anyway? You'll probably want to build one (assuming you rushed your religion quick enough to grab one of them), some people might get 2, if your Byz you could potentially get 3 with your enhanced religions. So assuming you buy at least one faith building in your city, and you're probably building tall, then that's 8 tourism. Notable impact, worth a couple of great works, not gamebreaking though. If you went all out on it, you could generate +20 or so tourism, which is pretty nice.
_ - The Glory of God: Use Faith to purchase any type of Great Person starting in Industrial Era.
5/5 - Only problem with this is it is a little redundant, since the end of every Policy gives you a great person more or less via faith. But with this you'll have access to all of them, which makes your Kingdom extremely versatile. Anything you need at that moment you can just get if you have faith stock piled. Feels good buying engie+scientist and stealing the wonders from that era, then doing the same thing the next turn.
_ - Underground Sect: Your spies exert religious pressure on the cities they occupy. -
0/5 - I have no idea how much pressure is given out, but this ability sounds pretty crappy. By the time you get spies, religious boundaries are already drawn out, and you need some significant religious power in order to change them, which I doubt the Spies would help in those scenarios.
_ - Unity of the Prophets: Inquisitors and Prophets reduce this religion's presence by half (instead of eliminating it).
2/5 - AI loves to spam religion all the time, so this is a cute way to passively defend against it without declaring war or having to make Prophets of your own all day. Hard to justify it with all the other good beliefs though.