A Guide to Playing “Small” on Deity (feat. Piety)

Culture is late, so we agree on that. Piety after all religious buildings are bought equals Liberty with 20 total pop (which you will likely have going wide) for happiness. Liberty gets this bonus earlier, which is what allows for expansion. Same with Tradition, but even earlier. Tradition is underrated for early expansion. +2 food in capital is almost as much as a hammer, extra gold means faster gold bought settler, etc.

A piety start is not going to do much in terms of helping you with those early cities. Austria is a pretty bad example of how most civs expand. I think I wrote in the guide several times that semi-wide (5-6 cities) is totally doable, but it's harder to get them started than tradition or liberty. You need 1 point of culture for borders to grow. Shrines cost same as monument in hammers. This means that assuming you want a shrine and monument early, tradition > piety. Piety also doesn't get a significant gold bonus until after your cities are set up (unlike tradition which is from the capital), which makes gold-buying monuments difficult. Your city will catch up and surpass tradition in all bonuses minus growth and faith sometime around 50 turns after you set it up. That's a while. And, if you count growth and faith and free aqueducts (which you should, for the most part, since food = hammers), it takes until late game to catch up (assuming mosque) in value. Sad, but true.

Also, I think you are confusing Piety as a tree with a Piety start. You can do whatever you want after the start (in my strategy, I went tall; as Austria, you can go wide), but between the start of the game and mid-game, Piety cripples your expansion and growth.

For tradition, even when going semi-wide, you can't think of growth as meaningless. You have more happiness than anyone else, and you need to grow your cities to 10 pop to receive a very hefty happiness bonus (includes capital for extra bonus). Half of that policy is as good as the Liberty policy by mid-game. And that's not even your main happiness policy. That's why given space, semi-wide tradition > 4 city tradition. Neither Piety nor Liberty manages it as well. That's why they need a ton of per city bonuses to surpass Tradition (and liberty also makes getting the space easier) even for semi-wide.

Edit: The point I'm trying to make is that everything in Piety besides the faith is totally back loaded, and its not per-city. Beliefs can be per city, but those are follower beliefs you can get from other religions (50%+ of AI religions, and almost all early ones, the ones that actually spread, will have a faith building). Faith and gold are civ-wide resource that doesn't help your cities. Culture doesn't come until mid-late game, and your cities need border expansion asap. Nothing in the entire tree helps your actual cities. Piety = bad start in terms of your cities. I think that's hard to argue against. Its because of this guaranteed bad start that you don't need things like happiness as much as other starts. Even toward end game, you're really not getting much from the tree for your actual cities (food and hammers) compared to tradition/liberty. Only in very rare synergetic cases will Piety be better for going wide than Liberty, or semi-wide than Tradition/Liberty. Austria and Venice correct for the need for a quick land grab, Indonesia/Byzantine have synergy with actually having a religion. Other than those civs, you need to sacrifice so much to make religion work for happiness that you'll almost always be better off going Liberty/Tradition if you don't plan on starting small or semi-wide and small.

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Well, I'm not saying Piety is equal to the other two for Happy on expansive starts. It's easy to find one Happy policy, point to it, and say hey, Trad/Liberty gets this and Piety doesn't. What I am saying is that the advantage is not very big. Say compared to Tradition, how is Piety when expanding to 5+ cities? 90%? 95%? What is your total Unhappy burden on 5-cities at Turn 100? 50'ish? If I miss a 5-happy policy in the Capital then, that's 10%. Honestly outside of Monarchy, which is really just an extra luxury sale at most early game for an empire expanding to 5 cities, Trad neither gives you help expanding nor gives you any reason to expand other than spam. Sure, your borders expand quicker and you get a free Monument to boot, but how many tiles do you need to work? If I am going this Wide, I don't want to work very many, and so no, I don't need or even really want an Aqueduct in my 4th city at that point either.

It's not so much about whether you're able to expand while staying happy, since of course you are, but it's about the costs versus the benefits. If I can't make my city productive to the empire quickly, then I'm just not founding those cities. If my BO is Shrine > Granary and I love the 10-pop Happy policy in Trad, then at most I'm making 3-4 cities and stopping there to build the NC and go tall. Piety at least allows a size 1-2 city to build a 2-Faith Shrine in an essentially immediate time frame while the Worker improves the luxury nearby. I might not even build a Monument second, I may go Archer or something else. I just need 1-2 workable tiles first ring, including a luxury, or worst case buy a tile. I hope it's a good site that I've claimed, of course, but I don't need more than 3 pop there until later. I'm not looking for a second capital. But I love 5-Faith and a future. Especially if it pays for itself with a luxury.

With Trad, I'm just not getting anything except more Growth, Hammers, and long-term builds. There's an advantage to having that bought and paid for slightly earlier due to better terrain worked, but on the other hand, a bonus of 4-6 Happy empire-wide is a very small fraction of what your empire looks like Turn 130. That's why Aristocracy is really not important. It's structured so that it's always meeting far less than 10% of your total Happiness burden. If I have an empire of 5 cities with at least 10 pop each, my total income should be at least 80GPT or so, probably more like 100. In the case of a total budget like that, it is no trouble at all to just look for an AI with a luxury @8GPT. In that case as well, policies like Theocracy that get you more Gold might even be better than Happy. Bottom line, when my Happiness ledger is around 60, it doesn't make any sense at all to be defining my game around a bonus of 4-5. I probably just need to do something far less direction-setting than alter the policy track, such as building Colosseum/Circus first and not Granary/Water Mill.

Because what does define the game is that I certainly can't build a Temple under Trad before all religions are founded, much less pay maintenance for it. So, I'm not sure how to interpret the statement that a city doesn't pay for itself until much later than under Trad. Piety essentially allows you to trade one thing for another right away. If you like trading early Happy/Gold for early Faith, you make that trade. If all you want in your additional cities is Food/Hammers local to that city, then what are you doing in Religion at all?

On that point too, sure, sometimes the nearby AI picks a good religion, and it might seem in that game that you didn't need to found. But, there's not just the selection advantage of founding your own religion with a building. There's also the difference between having 30 FPT before Turn 100 w/ 20% discount and having 20'ish from Turn 130, no discount. Without those first three policies, I could even be in Renaissance by the first convenient time to buy a building. So it's in more ways than one that Piety decides whether you have that Happy/Culture/Faith per city.


Basically, it should be a lot more intuitive than it seems to be. If a player likes the hard inputs of Food/Hammers only or is only able to evaluate those and not others, then policy tracks that give you those local inputs are always, always going to look better. And Happy/Gold is always just going to look like an obstacle in the way of getting more of those. Then maybe people start jumping up and down for 4-5 Happy in an SP like Aristocracy, regardless of whether it requires you to take on a 60+ unhappiness burden to even activate it. But when you take the perspective of softer inputs like Gold/Faith/Happy, you should be picking up on the idea that those inputs are interchangable. So in the end, for example, maybe you have something at the end that doesn't fit very well into that set rubric, such as a Mercantile CS ally, or a Faith building. Those don't show up on your SP page, so people are blowing them off as conditional or available to every track. That's the real issue.

I'm not sure what you're arguing for/about anymore.

My claims in the passage you quoted is that full Piety has a comparative (economic) advantage to going small, versus full liberty/tradition, because of happiness, and that the design of the tree, if used as a starting tree, punishes pre-religion culture, so that's not a disadvantage.

I don't think you're talking about those things at all.

Are you really saying Piety can go wide with 2 pop cities faster than Liberty? Be specific. The guide mentions that 5-6 cities (which I called semi-wide and small) is possible if you have space, at the cost (not worth it imo) of diplo. It's just not as good at doing that as liberty/tradition. If you think Piety can claim that space faster than Liberty/Tradition, then I'm not sure what to say.... besides that its mathematically incorrect, regardless of happy. Or, if you're really talking about wide, and you're saying Piety can found 7+ cities on Deity peacefully with any consistency... then I'd like to see you try. I've never pulled it off. It's so hard to obtain settlers when you have no gold bonus and no production bonus and no growth bonus (to turn into a production bonus). The entire tree is designed so that it really really hard to expand or grow early. The gold bonus is delayed to post-temples, so you can't get settlers that way either. You're strapped for happiness on top of this. You can do it of course, because you can do anything in this game, but you can't say its optimal (e.g. even for shrine + temple as your first two builds, Liberty will outproduce Piety once you factor in settler cost. Not to mention getting a free city.)

The only thing Piety produces more of than Liberty in the first 100 turns is faith. And, the benefits of the faith does not compensate for the opportunity cost (in hammers and gold and culture) until far deeper into mid-game, because you can't use faith on anything else until you have 300+ initial investment. The Piety start analysis is only about the Piety start (which, I think most people interpret to be the first 120 turns or even shorter), and you're not going to find much space to settle after the start on most Deity games.

I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make. It sounds like you're saying "faith is eventually useful, and Piety has more of it". Kind of a tautology. My point in your quoted section is that Piety starts with more of it, has more in midgame, and most likely has more in endgame too (runaway domination civ aside). On the other hand, it sucks at producing every other kind of resource early game, and you can't trade faith for anything until mid-game. You need resources to expand (yes, even to 2 pop cities), or to grow. Piety, because it does not give you those resources early, is bad for expanding / growing. Thus, its comparative advantage is going small. This should not be controversial.


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My point is that how good Trad/Liberty are at expanding relative to Piety is a question of magnitude.

You can't simply say Piety gets no bonus at doing X, so it must utterly suck at X. It's what you can do above baseline. So let's take how a civ can expand with no policies, then add Trad's bonuses relevant to expansion, and consider that 100%. Again my question would be, what percent of that is Piety? 90%? 95%? Because it would really boggle my mind if people say ~1 effective Hammer from Landed Elite first along with Monarchy's delayed Gold amounts to more than a ~10% advantage even in building Settlers, much less an overall empire comparison at 5 or more cities.

Maybe it's different methodology. This is what I consider "baseline" - steal Worker, grow Capital to 4-5 population only, work all production tiles and chop Forests to produce two Settlers. Send one Worker to first satellite, then produce another Worker while growing the Capital maybe one more pop. After that, go Food negative again as you produce 2 more Settlers, chopping all remaining Forests. That's 5 cities, meeting the agreed definition of "semi-wide".

I can't really say Tradition gets any bonus in that rubric. Mathematically, it's true that Trad > Piety there, just as Landed Elite > 0. But on magnitude, it's just not significant. You maybe get to that next pop point after the first 2 Settlers 2-3 turns earlier than without Landed Elite. If you wait until Pop 8 or some absurdly late window, then sure, a Tradition capital becomes better and better at producing Settlers given the tiles to work, just as it becomes better at producing anything. But, that's just not the way to play expansive.

But the point is, and I think you'll agree, it's mostly dependent on map conditions, both your capital dirt in how fast you can produce Settlers and the AI tendencies on the locations you have available to Settle. I was only saying that if you're going to take a Growth approach, then founding more cities is bad in the first place. So the result is that I'd expect a Piety start to have more cities on average than a Trad start, played correctly. The average might not even be a whole city, so maybe on a set of given maps, they have the same number. But if having more cities under optimal play is what's considered "wide", then I'd say Piety is better at wide. Which is what you touched on in the paragraph about debunking the idea that "Piety must go wide". At the end, I think you're more or less correct when you say you get benefits out of Piety regardless of how many cities you found. But I do also think that Piety has more of a reason to found extra cities than Trad, with ability at that phase of the game roughly the same. That's my side.


And I'm not really comparing to Liberty, because honestly, the benefits of that tree are going to be hard to quantify due to the highly volatile nature of the number of city spots available to settle. Even so, Liberty is very much focused on trading Gold/Happy for Hammers anyway, so it's definitely not an economic style to begin with.

I think it's mainly though that I resist the idea that you suck at doing X whenever you get no policies for doing X. You don't need policies to do any one thing. And so on balance, Piety should be somewhere between Trad and Liberty in city count, imo.

That's fair, but I think the costs are closer to 75% by turn 120 than 90%. Piety doesn't just fall behind on the lack of your first 3-4 policies doing much, it'll also fall behind on the faith panetheon on working sub par tiles (instead of god king as minimum), assuming you're comparing with Tradition that doesn't have religion. It also forces you to build temples in late-mid game, when you'd otherwise build anything else (and it costs, 2gpt, which usually neutralizes the policy in terms of actual gold gain in late-early game).

Compare Piety religion with Tradition no religion, and Piety essentially has its first 5 policies do nothing (and reformation belief may not do anything else, depending). That's a LOT of resource bonuses (front-loaded) that Tradition gets. Just add them up per turn. The way you describe playing, Tradition will easily end up with more than 2x total resource output than Piety by turn 100, if you don't count faith as a resource (and at that point it essentially isn't).

Piety's not just a slower start, its a much much slower start. There's a reason people think (correctly) that it sucks.

I am assuming no forests to chop. Forests obviously change the %, but a forest start happens less than half the time.
You should try it out to see what I mean if you don't want to look at the math. Use Mongolia, try to spread to 5 cities as tradition/piety pre-turn 100. Only use gold to buy settlers. For tradition, only build shrine until you get pantheon. 90% is very wishful thinking. Piety is THAT bad for early game.



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Well if the idea holds that low pop = more Gold = City States = catch up, then why would we weight the early local-to-city Hammer/Food bonuses of Tradition so heavily? I mean, maybe I'm the one not understanding the guide correctly. But aren't we staying low pop for a reason, not just for funsies to show we can still win? If so, how are we still measuring whether we are ahead/behind based on "resource output"? I'm assuming that's the same old population, hammer yield, etc.

When I played through as Austria, I was measuring progress depending on essentially two things - my Gold income, and how many CS's I'd allied. I settled the same sites for 5 cities each time, built the NC at the same off-capital location, everything at essentially the same turn time. While it was 2-3 techs behind, my Piety start was better on Gold and CPT by Turn 100. Not only better, it was much better, early, middle and late game.

Speaking of tautology, if you are deliberately keeping yourself small for a specific goal, wouldn't it follow that you'd be smaller? And if we're talking about results going wide, aren't we talking about city count only? How does city size instead come in now and declare Trad the winner? This line of thinking just seems to go in circles.

Keeping small does save gold, but each additional pop can work a trade post by mid game to similar effect. Its a significant savings early game. However, it does that by requiring less happiness, which is immediately negated by the first city without a unique lux in the first ring that you settle. Semi-wide small gains more faith early, but it has costs.

You're keeping small at first so your religion spreads, and after that (turn 100+) you're no longer trying to be small. At that point the guide directs you to grow, because its transitioning to going tall.

Small to start is just a function of the diplo. Going tall so early gives you less gold and hammers. This is all within the framework of Piety itself, all for the faith. The argument you're trying to make is that even aside from the faith, Piety is 90% competitive with Tradition start. That's just not true. I'm guessing you ran food routes with tradition or avoided working gold tiles. Otherwise, your gold output with tradition no religion in the first 100 turns should easily be more than Piety trying to get religion. If you managed both consistently.

Tradition has a growth bonus, doesn't mean you need to go for broke with it if you're not going for a science/culture VC. Just like not all your cities are production cities with Liberty. You can 100% play small with Tradition.

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I ran external routes both games, all for the Beakers, as the guide describes. If there was a Gold tile to work, I worked it. Under Tradition though I took Tithe when I founded at about Turn 80'ish, while under Piety I took Church Property maybe 15-20 turns earlier. Of course, CP wasn't available by the time I founded under Trad, so I thought it was fair to credit that to Piety. But I would've taken Pilgrimage anyway if Ethiopia hadn't beaten me there both games. Point is, I got the second Pantheon versus the Fourth,

Another reason why my income was better was Happiness. My religion in Tradition went Asceticism, while Pagodas was my first follower under Piety. In the Piety game I put out a Missionary first, then I was still able to buy the first Pagoda at about the same time I founded under Trad. The second one brought me up to about Monarchy level Happy, after which no more of my cities were religious yet, so I bought I believe 2 more missionaries to convert nearby CS's. There was one Mercantile CS that I was able to ally early on that way, where it was later under the Trad opener that I was able to do so. Obviously under Trad, going Pagodas would've been great, but even if I could've grabbed it they would've been delayed. Even with Shrine Happy as it was, my cities took a while to get 3 followers. And since my BO in satellites was essentially Shrine > Monument > Circus > Temple, on top of that Mercantile ally, I was able to trade ALL my luxuries away under Piety, and I believe I had to keep some under Trad. Trad did save me some Monument maintenance and Unit Maintenance though, so it was probably more even if we are taking Turn 100 as the snapshot.

Regardless though, I don't think 90% is really that big of a stretch, on both income and the ability to found cities. As mentioned, income is mostly having to do with what your build orders, tiles worked, and trade deals look like. Those are the same in concept. Tradition saves basically 4GPT on Monument maintenance, maybe 4-5 GPT earned from Monarchy, one luxury worth of Happy under Monarchy @ 8GPT, then 1GPT unit maintenance once you get Oligarchy, which will probably be late. You might count 4GPT Aqueduct maintenance at that point too, provided you're building those at the same window under Piety. Those values are written right into the tooltip. So, 16 GPT @ Monarchy, maybe 24 after closer?

What's total income like at Turn 100? Because as mentioned, that amount of Gold is one maybe 1.5x a Sea Route, and you should have 4 slots by then, just TR's. So on balance as a whole, there's no way Trad saves more than 10% of your income, even before you consider whatever Gold Piety gives you. On that number, that's not a value you'll see in the tooltip other than Theocracy, but it's there. In that game, it was one Mercantile CS, two Pagodas of Happy, and a bunch of lead time for the Founder belief.

I mean if you want Growth and size, you go Trad. But for economy the difference between Trad and Piety is not that great. And no, growing into worked TP tiles doesn't redeem the costs of an extra citizen @ 1 Happy. At the 8GPT rate you can trade luxuries, that's 2 Gold. That's break-even with a post-Economics TP, with real costs in growing that pop. What you would really be doing that for is Science.

Post economics trade post is 3 gold, at least (you'll have bank and market). Pop will always be valuable mid-late game, and certainly net positive (without a happiness cap, which you won't have). Science or no science. The only question is whether its worth the food cost (which comes earlier in the game, with delayed results).

I was running my analysis specifically to exclude faith, assuming tradition would not go for religion. If you do go for religion, with a faith pantheon and religious buildings, then the difference in resources would not be over 50%, probably more like 75%. After all, science is an immediate resource. Plus, you get the back loaded population bonus to offset your lesser religion bonus for late game.

I am still lost as to what you are trying to show. If we're comparing trees, Piety and Tradition do different things (religion vs growth). But, external comparison can't tell you to pay Piety semi wide small or true small.

If you're talking about comparative diplo victory, tradition's only hope of catching up to Piety's 25% gold bonus in late game plus planted prophets plus wider religion, is by going tall and banking even more resource advantage. That's part of what the theory crafting section deals with. Piety synergizes with small here better than Tradition, but obviously you don't have to play small and religious. A more optimal way to play tradition is the normal science route for forbidden palace, and just ignore religion. You can push WC vote 20 turns faster by triggering via satalites plus better science and then win on second vote as securely as small on first. That's not the strategy I'm talking about in the guide, but that's what Tradition does best. Piety can't do that. That's the point I' highlighting in the theory crafting section. So, it has to go small, and play for different benefits.

If you're talking about what to do after you already pick Piety (semi wide small vs true small) then tradition has nothing to do with anything. You're then weighing faith + late game gold vs. diplo + early game hammers/food. That's a game by game analysis, and something this guide covers briefly.

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Amazing guide. Doesn't deserve to leave the first page. Actually, it should get stickied in the war academy.

Are there any video's we can watch of this strategy in action? With voice commentary? It's so much easier seeing the concept play out than reading through everything. Although the guide is well written, it's a lot of information to digest and it's all non-standard so it takes more time to understand.

Hmm... I've never made a LP before. Not sure I'd be good at it, because my turns usually take a bit of time. Might give it a shot when work frees up a bit. What would work better? An edited video showing key turning points in the game, or a full LP type?

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An edited video showing key points is much better. When I watch a LP, I never watch the entire thing, it's too long. I try to find in the video specific steps that give me benchmarks, for example.

adwcta said:

Going hard for science and triggering a faster vote w/ Globalization will of course be faster. But, who cares about all that turn speed nonsense. This is far more stylish, uses skills mostly unrelated to your typical fare 4-city tradition science victory, and ultimately more secure because you will end the game actually still friendly with almost everyone, instead of in a DoW, abusing the AI's inept military game (where they can't even move and attack with ranged units on the same turn! talk about game exploits).

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Funny that tommynt actually took this as a personal insult, hehe

I found it kind of interesting, it will sure be fun to try out a game with this in mind.

Revolutionary! Thank you for explaining these mechanics.

Thanks for posting this! This is one of the most interesting and genuinely original things I can remember seeing on here. I somehow missed it first time round, so thanks to the people who've bumped it recently.

I've just tried a game with this strategy, and it all fell out like clockwork: never built a unit after a couple of archers to hunt barbs, never went to war, peaceful diplo victory at T272 with no AI anywhere near any victory condition. Fascinating to see it play out!

I chose Morocco for the desert start bias and gold boost. Had a nice desert salt start, got desert folklore and was rolling nicely with a decent 2nd city on the coast. My 3rd city was not great, because I'd been hemmed in by the Maya and Denmark and didn't want to expand towards them.

I missed out on pilgrimage, so took tithe instead. Then culture from temples (because I was finding the speed of social policies particularly painful), religious texts, and evangelism for my reformation belief. With hindsight, I think you're probably correct that unity of the prophets is a better option. It's really annoying when a prophet comes along and completely wipes out your work.

I only had one neighbor who didn't found a religion (Sweden), so that made things a bit awkward, but still not too bad. I converted all of Sweden's cities, all of the Dutch cities (other side of the Maya) and most of the surrounding city states. It took a while to pick up momentum, but once I had a couple religious CSs in the bag, those medieval missionaries popped out very regularly. Sully took over England early, who had a religion, so it was hard to get traction with the Ottomans because they were so far away and London was exerting a lot of pressure.

At ideology time, the world split freedom/order, so I took autocracy temporarily for the faster spy stealing. Once I'd finished my stealing, I flipped to freedom. This coincided nicely with the point where the freedom civs were becoming hostile to me. After flipping, the DOFs quickly rolled in - nice!

At WC, first vote I got scholars in residence passed

I king-made William, who had my religion. Second vote, I proposed world's fair and he proposed international games. I voted down the fair but had to suck up the games. Third vote, I proposed the fair and he proposed world religion, which passed.

For the finish I ended up timing things perfectly so that I'd just teched ecology, and on the turn before the world leader vote I finished Oxford and also finished rationalism, to bulb straight through to globalization. I was bottom in almost every demographic - but 3rd in literacy, which was funny given how long I'd languished two eras behind everyone else.



Overall, this is an inspired strategy. It was great fun to try it once, but for regular play I'm not sure I could really get to enjoy playing this passively. Bribing the AIs to make sure every civ is engaged in a permawar with someone or other is undoubtedly entertaining, but it's more satisfying to be competing and going toe to toe with the AI instead of stirring things up behind the scenes - my 2c, anyway.

(Also worth pointing out that Brazil and Denmark both had 5-figure gold stacks, so if the AI wasn't so useless then the position I ended up in wouldn't have been a win. Then again, you could just as well argue that if the AI wasn't useless at combat then most domination wins wouldn't happen...)

jango76 said:

Thanks for posting this! This is one of the most interesting and genuinely original things I can remember seeing on here. I somehow missed it first time round, so thanks to the people who've bumped it recently.

I've just tried a game with this strategy, and it all fell out like clockwork: never built a unit after a couple of archers to hunt barbs, never went to war, peaceful diplo victory at T272 with no AI anywhere near any victory condition. Fascinating to see it play out!

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Glad to see people having fun with this!

You can see what I mean when I say my Greece game is the "worst" game. Most games played with this strategy won't ever be quite as far behind, or for that long. Scholars on first vote especially will make your much more competitive in science. Although, I still prefer the diplomacy benefits of proposing a crowd-pleaser first, since you ultimately don't need all that much science, and scholars helps the 3rd/4th AI hit ideology faster too, so you're not getting much relative benefit from it that early.

Agree that it's way more fun to pull this off the first time than duplicating it, especially if you're a deity player that likes to min/max. There's not a ton of min/maxing to be done with this strategy that ultimately matters. But, how you approach diplo and religion does change each game depending on the geopolitical reality so games feel more different each time compared to peaceful science/culture/gold games and late-game war games (which are almost pure min/max games) at least. Not quite as engaging as an early/mid-game war game, but I think it beats all other types out in terms of replay-ability diversity once you take out the resource micromanagement min/max-ing.

Hello adwcta,

I tried this strategy once so far with Ethiopia on Immortal (I used to play Deity exclusively until I realized it's way too tedious) and I can see what you meant by falling behind. I was making around 55 bpt on turn 100, with 3 cities, of 10 (Capital) 7 and 6 pop. I used my first two trade routes as internal ones for food (I still think this is the best use for them, even early game).

There's one thing I don't quite understand, though. After taking the Piety Opener, Organized religion and Mandate of heaven, I found that taking the rest of the policies early would be a kind of waste, because:

1) About Theocracy: you're not really "ready" to build temples in your cities, because you're busy building key buildings and the NC (granary/library in your 2nd city, shrines, etc.)

2) Religious tolerance: that's so-so. It's a total gamble, because you need to have heavily religious neighbors, with an awesome pantheon to boot.

3) Reformation: that's really good, but you have to go through all the other policies to get it.

Would it be a good idea to open Tradition and at least get the free cultural buildings before continuing with Piety until its policies give you more bonuses? I'd really love to hear your opinion on that. Thanks for taking so much time to write up a strategy!

Hi there. Juste read this guide and no matter what some players think, i like the idea as i don't really care about fast victories anyway (if i want a quick game, i'd rather play an RTS) so thanks for sharing.

JamesCivFan said:

Would it be a good idea to open Tradition and at least get the free cultural buildings before continuing with Piety until its policies give you more bonuses? I'd really love to hear your opinion on that. Thanks for taking so much time to write up a strategy!

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As a rule of thumb, no. It never makes sense to take SPs just to speed up culture because of the way the cost for new SPs increases, you will always get other SPs later if you take an SP just for culture (the only exception might be Honor opener on a raging barb map with lots of room open for a long period of time such as boreal). Taking an SP that gives you free monuments rather than wait to build them is taking an SP for it's culture output and thus bad math.
If on the onther hand, your idea is to take Tradition opener for border growth, and possibly Legalism for the same reason, this is different. I still wouldn't take legalism, but the opener might allow your few cities to grab more land, possibly some useful ressources so it might be an option.
However, even with useless (when you get them) policies, finishing Piety ASAP is not that bad an idea if you decided to open it in the first place, because it will give you the GP to enhance before the "good" beliefs have been taken by AIs (enhancer and second follower belief).

Well, I managed to get the enhancer with Ethiopia on T74. That was on Immortal, but I have played so much Deity in this game to know that even heavy religious civs like the Maya (Who LOVE the Hagia Sophia), also tend to get their enhancer around that turn (on Deity at least. Immortal is a joke on that front). I was planning on actually finishing tradition as my second tree and then open up Rationalism, taking Secularism right after (possibly with the use of a GW).

That's why I asked if it's a good idea. I know. Taking up one policy opener is a terrible idea (like you said, it's simple math), but since I was planning on finishing Tradition anyway, the question was more like: "finish up Piety first, despite the useless policies, or take a break from it, go Trad, then finish Piety and finally finish Trad?"