Rate the Beliefs - part V: Reformation beliefs

In my first BNW game i went full on holy warrior warmoner with the Celts. However, the religious fervor were crap for a number of reasons.

1) I at that point already had an army up to the support limit and buying all the trebuchets and musketmen i want with holy warriors and upgrading them worked just fine.

2) The cost for a unit was too great to be useful. When I backed up and repicked Jesuit education instead I could build 2 remaining universities in low production cities and the turn I discovered scientiffic theory, I could build nine public schools instantly, and they were cheap compared to units.
 
Random note concerning Sacred Sites. If you build the Great Mosque of Djenne, you still gain the +2 Tourism from the free Mosque even though you didn't purchase it with faith.
 
4 - Charitable Missions: Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%.
2 - Evangelism: Missionaries' Spread Religion action erodes existing pressure from other religions.
2 - Heathen Conversion: Missionaries convert adjacent barbarians to this civilization.
5 - Jesuit Education: May build Universities, Public Schools, and Research Labs with Faith.
3 - Religious Fervor: Use Faith to purchase Industrial Era (and later) land units.
5 - Sacred Sites: All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Tourism each.
4 - The Glory of God: Use Faith to purchase any type of Great Person starting in Industrial Era.
2 - Underground Sect: Your spies exert religious pressure on the cities they occupy.
3 - Unity of the Prophets: Inquisitors and Prophets reduce this religion's presence by half (instead of eliminating it).

Too lazy to provide reasons.
 
I think they intended Religious Fervor to be for peacemongers to still have an edge as they waste Gold on buildings, and save their faith for emergency situations. Doesn't work that well since we peacemongers got our day in BNW.
 
_ - Charitable Missions: Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%. - Very nice, This saves 30% of your money if you want to ally many city-states which happens quite often in peaceful games. 4
_ - Evangelism: Missionaries' Spread Religion action erodes existing pressure from other religions.
- Might be useful if fighting Ethiopia or Byzantium for religion and you really really want your religion. Very situational. 2
_ - Heathen Conversion: Missionaries convert adjacent barbarians to this civilization.
- Very situational and unreliable, there are better ways to spend faith. 0
_ - Jesuit Education: May build Universities, Public Schools, and Research Labs with Faith. - These are not that hard to build anyway, maybe gets better with ICS. 4
_ - Religious Fervor: Use Faith to purchase Industrial Era (and later) land units. - Potentially very powerful. 4
_ - Sacred Sites: All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Tourism each. - This gets 5, very nice fos some civs.
_ - The Glory of God: Use Faith to purchase any type of Great Person starting in Industrial Era. - Sweet 4.
_ - Underground Sect: Your spies exert religious pressure on the cities they occupy. - Mostly useless. 0.
_ - Unity of the Prophets: Inquisitors and Prophets reduce this religion's presence by half (instead of eliminating it). - Weak. 1
 
yeah we need more ratings

maybe like another 10 people to give this a good mix
 
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. :cool:

_ - 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.
 
These are only guesses as I've barely explored them yet, but here we go:

4 - Charitable Missions: Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%.
4 - Evangelism: Missionaries' Spread Religion action erodes existing pressure from other religions.
1 - Heathen Conversion: Missionaries convert adjacent barbarians to this civilization.
2 - Jesuit Education: May build Universities, Public Schools, and Research Labs with Faith.
4 - Religious Fervor: Use Faith to purchase Industrial Era (and later) land units.
3 - Sacred Sites: All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Tourism each.
4 - The Glory of God: Use Faith to purchase any type of Great Person starting in Industrial Era.
3 - Underground Sect: Your spies exert religious pressure on the cities they occupy.
2 - Unity of the Prophets: Inquisitors and Prophets reduce this religion's presence by half (instead of eliminating it).
 
I tried out evangelism in a game and it turns out I really like it so I have to raise the score I gave it. It does a good job replacing my religion for the cities that don't have one. If I had good faith per turn I'm guaranteed easy speed into religion free cities and if I'm going tourism I will definitely have the world religion.

If you mix it with Missionary zeal or Holy order you're basically secured to be the worlds main religion.
 
Just tried out Evangelism too. Kinda disappointed in it, but there are a few things I learned.

1) If you're not trying to spread this to other cities (say you chose Interfaith Dialogue) or you stole a good Founder belief, but don't care about managing your spread (Tithe or Church Property), Evangelism works great. With Holy Orders, you can easily remove pressure in your city, and use Inquisitors to ward off Missionaries and Great Prophets. Best defensive religious combo.

2) But also...the best defense is a great offense. I personally think Itinerant Preachers is more powerful as it can snowball a whole continent while Evangelism only removes pressure in your own cities.

3) Ties well if with Defender of the Faith. No one can remove your religion from your cities, and thus you have a great turtle civ. Ethiopia probably benefits most from this as a peaceful/turtle game works in their favor.

Probably best setup for Evangelism
Pantheon: Situational
Founder: Interfaith Dialogue
Follower1: Personal Pref
Follower2: Personal Pref
Enhancer: Holy Order or Defender of the Faith
Reformation: Evangelism

Great for gaining science while not playing the religion game.
 
Not true!

I am not sure what's going on, but I have tried doing religious conversion warring with and without Evangelism. Big difference. Religious Texts and Itinerant Preachers only work when you're expanding into passive cities with no religion. These will rarely allow you to penetrate into religious strongholds, or an enemy religion with a stranglehold on a continent and strong missionary generation.

Evangelism will do that for you. As far as I can tell, it erodes enemy religious pressure even on foreign cities, so that each Djenne Missionary with Evangelism is very nearly a mini Great Prophet. It's that good of a boost.
 
Not true!

I am not sure what's going on, but I have tried doing religious conversion warring with and without Evangelism. Big difference. Religious Texts and Itinerant Preachers only work when you're expanding into passive cities with no religion. These will rarely allow you to penetrate into religious strongholds, or an enemy religion with a stranglehold on a continent and strong missionary generation.

Evangelism will do that for you. As far as I can tell, it erodes enemy religious pressure even on foreign cities, so that each Djenne Missionary with Evangelism is very nearly a mini Great Prophet. It's that good of a boost.

This is exactly how I experienced it. It was huge for my spread because I could take an offensive against their spread without using extremely expensive great prophets.

it would be a horrible mix with "Interfaith Dialogue" because you want other religions to be strong and it hits them harder. This is good though because if something at the and or piety didn't want you to play the religion game it would be bad.
 
Okay, finally feel like I've got enough noodling done that I can give reasonable ratings.

4 - Charitable Missions: Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%.
This felt like an enormous bonus, although I'm not sure if it really adds up to THAT much gold if you're not dropping gifts on city states on a regular basis.

3 - Evangelism: Missionaries' Spread Religion action erodes existing pressure from other religions.
This definitely makes missionaries work better, but I feel like it's a rare game where I feel like .

2 - Heathen Conversion: Missionaries convert adjacent barbarians to this civilization.
I tried this twice. The first time, it sucked because most of the barbarians that were left by the time I got around to being able to use it were stuck on islands or otherwise in inconvenient spots, and they do not get the ability to embark when you convert them. The second time, I focused it better and ended up with a bunch of free random units. The reason that it's hard for me to rate this higher is that I'm not sure what kind of game you're having where this ability is truly great.

4.5 - Jesuit Education: May build Universities, Public Schools, and Research Labs with Faith.
The faith costs on these buildings are mind-bogglingly low. I would choose this first pretty much regardless unless I was having a pretty unusual game. Makes Oxford University super easy to pick up even if you're wide.

1.5 - Religious Fervor: Use Faith to purchase Industrial Era (and later) land units.
The flipside of Jesuit Education, the faith costs on units are incredibly high. I guess I can sort of see taking this if I was generating a crazy ton of faith but had few good ways to spend it.

2.5 - Sacred Sites: All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Tourism each.
I'm giving this a lowish rating for narrowness, not because it's not good when it works out. The AI really, really likes the faith-building beliefs, so it's hard to live the dream of getting two of those and then this. There is the potential for a pretty sick quantity of tourism pretty early, though.

4 - The Glory of God: Use Faith to purchase any type of Great Person starting in Industrial Era.
So good. Because of how great person costs scale, being able to buy a variety of them is really valuable. I'm rating this a notch below Jesuit Education because I feel like you need a pretty strong faith engine to make this really crazy.

1 - Underground Sect: Your spies exert religious pressure on the cities they occupy.
I couldn't even figure out if this was working. I love the concept here, but unless the mechanics are way stronger than they appeared to be, this seems like a chump prize.

2? - Unity of the Prophets: Inquisitors and Prophets reduce this religion's presence by half (instead of eliminating it).
This is one that not only have I not tried, but that I have very little intuition about.
 
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. :cool:

_ - 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.

Gotta disagree on your analysis of sacred sites. I think culture games may actuallybe easier wide now aand if you have about 10 cities and two religiousbbuildings in your religion you can have + 40 tourism easily. Then if you plug artists into cathedrals you get an even further boost and for byzantium you can have + 60 for religious buildings which is ridiculous pre industrial era
 
The Results

There have been 17 votes so far, but one vote didn't rate all the beliefs, so they have been calculated using 16 votes. This should still give a good flavour of what people believe to be the best reformation beliefs (having read the whole topic, the ratings heavily reflect the opinions expressed)

3.53 - Charitable Missions: Influence boosts from Gold gifts to City-States are increased by 30%.
2.25 - Evangelism: Missionaries' Spread Religion action erodes existing pressure from other religions.
1.97 - Heathen Conversion: Missionaries convert adjacent barbarians to this civilization.
4.38 - Jesuit Education: May build Universities, Public Schools, and Research Labs with Faith.
1.78 - Religious Fervor: Use Faith to purchase Industrial Era (and later) land units.
3.62 - Sacred Sites: All buildings purchased with Faith provide 2 Tourism each.
4.28 - The Glory of God: Use Faith to purchase any type of Great Person starting in Industrial Era.
1.09 - Underground Sect: Your spies exert religious pressure on the cities they occupy.
1.93 - Unity of the Prophets: Inquisitors and Prophets reduce this religion's presence by half (instead of eliminating it).
 
3 - Charitable missions. Not bad, but influence is much easier to gain via Freedom tenets anyway, so I'd rather use my money on something else later on.

2 - Evangelism. It's very hard to persistently spam someone who already has a religion anyway, but still somewhat less hopeless with this belief. I've felt this one the hard way.

2 - Heathen Conversion. Gimmicky, possibly useful for barb farming but as barbarians become rarer late in the game, not very useful in the long run.

4 - Jesuit Education. Haven't tried myself but the ratio of cost and effectiveness is reputedly great. However, competes for faith with Great People, lowering my total appreciation of this belief.

1 - Religious Fervor. The weakest one - by industrial era, one should already have an army and far better uses for faith.

5 - Sacred Sites. The amount of tourism with many buildings is awesome. Very good, although requires the player to invest their beliefs in religious buildings.

3 - Glory of God. I usually take Tradition and Rationalism, so I already can get GS and GE with faith. When playing culturally, I take aesthetics as well - so I don't really need this for anything, do I?

1 - Underground sect. Haven't tried it, but a single source of pressure is just an abysmally poor bonus compared to everything else.

2 - Unity of the Prophets. Make nasty religious push against your foes without a chance of immediate pruning? Nice, but only if you really want your reformation belief to be about spreading your religion, not enhancing it.
 
The point of Evangelism isn't to attack the cities of a Civ that already has a strong, native, entrenched religion. That is entirely the wrong use for this belief. It really won't be good for that. The effect of a few missionaries, even with Evangelism could be wiped out with just one Inquisitor.

I've found it quite useful when you're battling just one or two AI spreading their religion through a third party Civ or City States. No-religion CSs and Civ cities can be easily penetrated by Religious Texts or Itenerant Preachers. If they've been converted already, Evangelism becomes necessary to make inroads, especially if the religious AI is aggressive about pushing their faith.

Generally, you pair this with a strong Founder belief and a strong faith-generating belief or condition (Sinai and Uluru as Spain?).

Without a strong founder belief, it is not necessary to convert foreign cities. Without strong faith generation, it won't be practicable anyway. Within this use-case, it is very strong, even necessary.

Jesuit Education is a very strong belief for the purpose of rush-buying Unis and Schools, but it can overlap with money-slashing beliefs and tenets. If faith generation is not strong, it might be better to save it for rushing Wonders, since you can't use money for those.
 
I tried Sacred Sites - the problem with it is that even playing as Byzantium and getting 6 tourism per city as a result, any nation you spread your religion to will be able to build the same buildings and get the same amount of tourism, so it's not just you getting the bonus.

Also, early tourism's fine, but there will be plenty of civs you only meet after astronomy is discovered, unless you're playing on a land-only map or a pangaea or something.
 
I tried Sacred Sites - the problem with it is that even playing as Byzantium and getting 6 tourism per city as a result, any nation you spread your religion to will be able to build the same buildings and get the same amount of tourism, so it's not just you getting the bonus.

Reformation beliefs work like follower beliefs? I assumed they would work as another founder belief.

Thats kind of a bummer.
 
I tried Sacred Sites - the problem with it is that even playing as Byzantium and getting 6 tourism per city as a result, any nation you spread your religion to will be able to build the same buildings and get the same amount of tourism, so it's not just you getting the bonus.

Also, early tourism's fine, but there will be plenty of civs you only meet after astronomy is discovered, unless you're playing on a land-only map or a pangaea or something.

It works well if you plan on hoarding your religion to yourself and not worrying about the spread of it or be very selective with who you spread it too.

So it doesn't work well on pangea where spread is harder to control
 
Top Bottom