How to play the Piety tree?

I've been recently interested in China, and I've read they work well with the Piety tree. What does Piety give that synergies with China so well? In my current game I held off on founding a religion early and instead let the nearby civ convert my cities since I could use faith to purchase monastery and cathedrals under his religion. Afterward I took his capital and converted all my cities and surrounding ones to my founded religion. It worked out well. For SPs though I only dipped into the first 3 in piety, getting temples +10% gold and 20% less faith purchases. Is there anything I am missing?

China, being definitely a miltaristic civ, makes me aim for a Domination victory, in which case I'll always go Honor. Considering your UA makes generals even better, it is one more reason to go that route.

But I can see why someone would go Piety here. They are probably aiming at buying units with Faith. The gold from temples is also good... well, gold is always good for any Civ I guess.

I think Piety is definitely viable, but, particulary if I'm aiming Domination in a non-island map, I'll go Honor and then Commerce. You could go 1 point into Trad to get Wonder building and rush GL, and then switch to Piety... Full Liberty can also work great depending on the map... Really, China can be played in many ways, but I don't see an obvious synergy with Piety, I actually think Honor has more synergy.

Yeah, probably the military. Faith has a lot of benefits for warlike cultures and if you conquer a few other holy cities you ensure pretty easy world dominance with your religion as in my experience conquering and using a great prophet removes the spreading effect of the other religion entirely. Plus if you choose the right modifiers like: "holy warriors", "faith from killing" etc...you can really get a tank rolling where you buy military with gold, production, and faith. You can rush an army with a snap of the fingers.

It doesn't. In my experience you get your faith from your pantheon, from ruins, from Wonders or maybe if you have a Natural Wonder close by that gives you faith. +1 from temples and shrines is really the only decent policy in that tree but it just doesn't give you enough faith to warrant going in there.


If I don't get a start with any of those things I just ignore faith. The AI will beat you to all the buildings and probably the faith warriors too if you don't get a good start. At that point spreading your religion will be tough and it won't get you very much. Temples and shrines get expensive too.

Beaver79 said:

It doesn't. In my experience you get your faith from your pantheon, from ruins, from Wonders or maybe if you have a Natural Wonder close by that gives you faith. +1 from temples and shrines is really the only decent policy in that tree but it just doesn't give you enough faith to warrant going in there.

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Yeah, the +1 to temples/shrines is my favorite too. If I'm gonna go there that's the most valuable one. And it does tend to garner me a _lot_ of extra faith points bc I usually have a sizeable empire of at least 12 cities by the time I settle down. You can do the math...that's easily a quick +24 faith/turn which if gotten early adds up drastically. I played a game where I maxed out all my great ppl purchases: Prophet, merchant, and scientist in pretty much every tree I researched. I also got rapid-spreading characteristic so I got so many prophets that the entire large world was pretty much my religion. Even native religions couldn't seem to overcome the pressure--they tried but the cities converted right back without me even having to send anyone over. I really like the extra building purchases too--the pagoda is awesome as it gives +2 to faith, culture, and happiness. Easy way to start your border cities expanding rapidly, add more to faith, and boost your happiness as an extra building. And if your don't emphasize faith you miss out on all the bonuses I've mentioned as it is a religion-only building.

Above King, it doesn't have any synergy. Piety is only worth two things: Getting sacred sites and rushing to a culture win, or going Jesuit education and rushing to space. China has no bonuses to either.

Skip piety unless you're role-playing, or are Ethiopia/Maya, or Spain with Mt. Sinai.

If you're China and you want to get piety, get heathen conversion. That way if your unhappiness falls below -10, put a missionary in the capital and rack up 2-3 free units every 5 turns. Also enables you to build an army rather quickly early in the game. Although unhappiness will reduce combat effectiveness by as much as 20%, the GG will neutralise it.

I've played as Mayans with piety and although I missed sacred sites, I got religious fervour and it was not worth it at all. For example, it costs 2200 faith to buy an infantry unit. With that faith, you could buy 2 great people.

China's benefits are very important early gold (gain gold when you build Paper Mill in addition to science instead of losing gold) + a very powerful UU that keeps on giving long after you upgrade them.
There's nothing about it that has extra benefits from Piety; but of course can be played that way and can be treated as standard civ for Piety:

Which is first insure your pantheon is not a faith-only one, but instead produces culture. Culture only even better. It's a race to complete the Piety tree before you would naturally generate a second great Prophet. So first build is likely to be a Monument. Standard pick Pottery first; moment that you open Piety, interrupt what you are building for a Shrine. Chances are you will have this policy by the time you found your second city and so that city's first build will be a shrine.
This will get you right on track for the golden have already founded a religion but not already enhanced it when you finish the tree. Doing anything else that adds more faith early such as a faith producing world wonder would cause you to already enhance the religion before completing the tree unless your pantheon doesn't have extra faith associated at all.