Sacred Sites policy choice

T

Thunda

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 7, 2013
Messages
38
When going for fastest SS victory, is the best policy choice going straight piety, assuming high faith desert folklore start? Or is it optimal to open piety for quicker shrine then open liberty to settler policy, then go to reformation belief? What is optimal in your opinion?

Thanks
 
Thunda said:
When going for fastest SS victory, is the best policy choice going straight piety, assuming high faith desert folklore start? Or is it optimal to open piety for quicker shrine then open liberty to settler policy, then go to reformation belief? What is optimal in your opinion?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Liberty until free settler---> Piety until Reformation
 
The thing about going Piety with plans on getting SS is that you first need to beat all the AIs to Reformation because it's extremely popular for the AI.
Which means full Piety; while Liberty's free settler might be better if you were still able to select SS, it introduces a high risk of failing to get it at all.

After full Piety is very late to be dipping into other intro trees (unless you are Poland), and so after full Piety it would normally proceed to Aesthetics. Following this open Exploration for the Louve. And you if are forced to take additional policies before Ideology I'd go with Rationalism ones.

Going this approach you want 2 sets of religious buildings (unless you're Byzantine in which case you want 3)
My rank order of these depends on presense or absence of Wine/Incense:

With Wine/Incese:
#1 Monastery
#2 Pagoda
#3 Cathedral
#4 Mosque

But if you don't have Wine or Incense:

#1 Pagoda
#2 Cathedral
#3 Mosque
#4 Monastery

Religious building follower beliefs go really quick and so you need to enhance your religion ASAP going this approach as well (even though it will result in you having already enhanced your religion when you get the free GP from completing Piety)
 
joncnunn said:
The thing about going Piety with plans on getting SS is that you first need to beat all the AIs to Reformation because it's extremely popular for the AI.
Which means full Piety; while Liberty's free settler might be better if you were still able to select SS, it introduces a high risk of failing to get it at all.

After full Piety is very late to be dipping into other intro trees (unless you are Poland), and so after full Piety it would normally proceed to Aesthetics. Following this open Exploration for the Louve. And you if are forced to take additional policies before Ideology I'd go with Rationalism ones.

Going this approach you want 2 sets of religious buildings (unless you're Byzantine in which case you want 3)
My rank order of these depends on presense or absence of Wine/Incense:

With Wine/Incese:
#1 Monastery
#2 Pagoda
#3 Cathedral
#4 Mosque

But if you don't have Wine or Incense:

#1 Pagoda
#2 Cathedral
#3 Mosque
#4 Monastery

Religious building follower beliefs go really quick and so you need to enhance your religion ASAP going this approach as well (even though it will result in you having already enhanced your religion when you get the free GP from completing Piety)
Click to expand...

I'd say if you were going for a Sacred Sites victory, the picks are Monastery and Mosque. Monastery because it is only 150 Faith instead of 200 like the other buildings, and Mosque because it generates 3 Faith so you get more of them quicker. The happiness is a bit more of an afterthought, your cities will not be very big anyway.
 
Calouste said:
I'd say if you were going for a Sacred Sites victory, the picks are Monastery and Mosque. Monastery because it is only 150 Faith instead of 200 like the other buildings, and Mosque because it generates 3 Faith so you get more of them quicker. The happiness is a bit more of an afterthought, your cities will not be very big anyway.
Click to expand...

The difference is too negligible . It should be always Pagodas. Since that over 12 cities are needed it's a no-no for monasteries(you need incense or wine in every cities) and the extra faith from mosque is useless since that your main faith revenue come from shrines and temples.

Pagodas will help you to support more cities...so more tourism.
 
As already said you want liberty settler first, it will help your culture and will cut down a lot of turns for pumping your settler army. Straight piety gives a very late reformation since it takes ages to get the policies. With many cities, faster monument (because of republic) and +1c per city will allow you to reach reformation fast enough.

I also suggest using gold to ally cultural city states (instead of buying granaries as you would normaly do). And if you want a really quick victory, kill other civs.
You will want to grab stonehenge if possible. Shouldn't be hard with chopping and production focus at 4-5 pop.
 
Acken said:
With many cities, faster monument (because of republic) and +1c per city will allow you to reach reformation fast enough.
Click to expand...

This seems counterintuitive to me because SP cost more the more cities you have, and having to get 9 SP (Liberty/Piety) instead of 6 (just Piety) adds to the cost even more -- probably almost doubles it.

I'm not saying that straight Piety is the way to go, but the idea that taking three extra SP will *help* you finish Reformation faster is a little odd, no?
 
No you won't get it faster. But you'll be in better shape when it comes. I really meant fast ENOUGH and not FASTER :)

You are right that getting it straight is faster. But Piety is so bad at culture that you won't get it SO much faster. And getting it fast will probably ends up being useless when it comes. You're just better off making a very strong empire with slower reformation with liberty and then using oracle to grab the reformation quickly than trying to go straight into Piety and having a weak empire when reformation kicks in.
Another very important thing I've been trying for the current gauntlet is that since liberty allow you to hook luxuries faster and sell some of it, you'll end up with more gold than Piety, allowing you to also ally cultural CS.

Finally, don't forget that reformation is not the finisher, you only need 8 policies not 9. Getting 8 policies quite fast with liberty, cultural CS, Oracle AND faith building is not hard.

I guess you could factor in competition however so it also kind of depends on which difficulty you play I guess.
 
Indonesia isnt very good for this.
You'll want bonuses to faith generation and/or culture. While the Indonesian candi provides a bonus, it comes too late for this strategy.

Ethiopia for example is a very good candidate for this strategy, the +2 faith on the monument is huge. Mayan also with a +2F shrine. Celts on a forest map. Byzantium has the potential to get 2 faith pantheon with which you can get some good results or taking 3 buildings making you need less cities.

There's basically two priorities for this: get as much faith as possible early to start the faith buying snowball and put out as many cities as possible. So the sooner the faith, the better.
 
Too late? You could start building them turn ~100 if you wanted to, that's not late at all. Sure that's 100 turns you're not getting piety from a stelle, but frankly, the amount of piety you get from the Candi will more than make up for it by turn 200. And the way Great prophets are earned means getting an early start on them won't make so big a difference as the gaps between each widen.

On top of this, you have 25% GP generation in each city, which you can leverage to pump out great merchants to easily befriend every religious CS on the map. Then there is your UA which enables wider expansion for even more shrine/temple/candis, plus more money from the resources to buy city states if you need it, or to trade for more resources to expand even wider meaning even more piety.

I mean, a piety focused Indonesia is going to be pumping out more piety than any other civ on the map come industrial era.

I'm not sure having an early advantage to piety generation really outweighs this.
 
Turn 100 is too late to be considered good for this strategy. I'm not saying its useless, you still will get more benefit than nothing.

But it's way inferior to Ethiopia.

Let's be clear on what we're talking about here, this is a strategy that is aimed at winning before industrial. Having a long term advantage here isn't interesting. You want to pump faith early to get the prophet early to get the buildings early to get even more faith etc. You want a big tourism early because that is where it's easier to catch up to AI culture. The longer you wait the higher both their output and accumulated culture get.

Finally, a stele can be built in every city. Not the Candi, when were talking about 12 to 15 cities that is a massive advantage.
 
The Candi can be built in every city, river is not required. And it will be producing ~3 times more piety than a Stele or pyramid in medieval, well before industrial. Even if there are no nearby religions seeding influence, you can steal missionaries to seed them yourself before the Candis are even built, so I think 3 times is a pretty cautious figure, 4 or 5 times would be more accurate most of the time.

I mean, by the time you've generated your second great prophet to enhance your religion, Indonesia will have its Candi's up and tearing its way toward you. There is no way you're going to generate more piety to buy two religious buildings in 12 to 15 cities before Indonesia will have caught up and passed you by.

I'm not sure how you're even managing 12 to 15 cities before industrial on top of all that, but whatever.
 
Acken said:
No you won't get it faster. But you'll be in better shape when it comes. I really meant fast ENOUGH and not FASTER :)

You are right that getting it straight is faster. But Piety is so bad at culture that you won't get it SO much faster. And getting it fast will probably ends up being useless when it comes. You're just better off making a very strong empire with slower reformation with liberty and then using oracle to grab the reformation quickly than trying to go straight into Piety and having a weak empire when reformation kicks in.
Another very important thing I've been trying for the current gauntlet is that since liberty allow you to hook luxuries faster and sell some of it, you'll end up with more gold than Piety, allowing you to also ally cultural CS.

Finally, don't forget that reformation is not the finisher, you only need 8 policies not 9. Getting 8 policies quite fast with liberty, cultural CS, Oracle AND faith building is not hard.

I guess you could factor in competition however so it also kind of depends on which difficulty you play I guess.
Click to expand...

If this post was about getting best use of generic Piety I'd be more inclined to agree since there are multiple good reformation beliefs out there for plan B, but this post is about one specific Reformation belief that appears to be the AIs top priority; and if the specific plan becomes DOA even 10% of the time with no way to recover other than restart, that's too high a risk for me to advocate.

Oracle itself is on the iffy side at Immortal; it's not in the same boat as GL; but it often requires delaying construction of NC until after Oracle completes to get, which due to snow ball effect puts you behind in tech for a long time. (On Emperor, getting Oracle is much easier)

But come to think of it, I see Sacred Sites on Immortal as more of a self imposed challenge than an actual benefit compared to the two standard opening trees. (Suitable for someone who has mastered Immortal with standard play but doesn't feel like advancing to Deity.)
 
Abraxis said:
The Candi can be built in every city, river is not required. And it will be producing ~3 times more piety than a Stele or pyramid in medieval, well before industrial. Even if there are no nearby religions seeding influence, you can steal missionaries to seed them yourself before the Candis are even built, so I think 3 times is a pretty cautious figure, 4 or 5 times would be more accurate most of the time.

I mean, by the time you've generated your second great prophet to enhance your religion, Indonesia will have its Candi's up and tearing its way toward you. There is no way you're going to generate more piety to buy two religious buildings in 12 to 15 cities before Indonesia will have caught up and passed you by.

I'm not sure how you're even managing 12 to 15 cities before industrial on top of all that, but whatever.
Click to expand...

True river is not required missed that. However it costs 120Hammer, a long time for a pop 1, 2 or 3 city. I know the candi can give some really high faith in medieval/renaissance I'm not arguing against that. But that is relevant in a normal game, not an ICS strategy around SS. Again it's purpose is to win early, a late bonus there isn't as interesting as an early game one.

At this point I don't really have more to add, if you're convinced that a 120hammer building coming online at turn 100+ will beat a +2faith monument on this strategy then I guess we will just agree to disagree and either show some game proof or leave it at that :)

There is a snowball effect with this strategy. Once you start getting a few buildings you have more faith for more buildings etc. I was able to achieve 100faith per turn at turn 120 in one of my latest tries for the hall of fame. Equipping 12 cities with religious building becomes trivial at that point. As for making 15 cities I don't see how you'd consider it hard. With liberty, it takes 5turns for a capital to make a settler and usually my second city can make one in 10ish turns.
 
joncnunn said:
If this post was about getting best use of generic Piety I'd be more inclined to agree since there are multiple good reformation beliefs out there for plan B, but this post is about one specific Reformation belief that appears to be the AIs top priority; and if the specific plan becomes DOA even 10% of the time with no way to recover other than restart, that's too high a risk for me to advocate.

Oracle itself is on the iffy side at Immortal; it's not in the same boat as GL; but it often requires delaying construction of NC until after Oracle completes to get, which due to snow ball effect puts you behind in tech for a long time. (On Emperor, getting Oracle is much easier)
Click to expand...

I don't really understand your point. This isn't a safe strategy to begin with. If you play at immortal or deity and want something that never fails, just play regularly.

What I described was just what I consider the fastest way of achieving it, not the safest. High-risk high-reward if you want.

Finally like I said at the end, you also have to consider competition so your choices may be influenced by difficulty level. I can see someone in Immortal being worried to not get the reformation belief. But if you're playing at King or Prince... And Oracle is usually easy to get before T80 on Immortal, you're not supposed to make the NC and libraries here so I don't really understand your concern aout delaying NC to get Oracle.
 
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding joncnunn's point, but if you are pursuing a SS city spam strategy, why would you ever plan on building NC in the first place, much less plan on building NC before Oracle? As a hedge if you lose Sacred Sites? If that happens, you might as well trash that game -- whether you play the game out to a true loss or just retire from the game, you gambled on a strategy and lost. Hence, the high risk/high reward point.
 
Browd said:
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding joncnunn's point, but if you are pursuing a SS city spam strategy, why would you ever plan on building NC in the first place, much less plan on building NC before Oracle? As a hedge if you lose Sacred Sites? If that happens, you might as well trash that game -- whether you play the game out to a true loss or just retire from the game, you gambled on a strategy and lost. Hence, the high risk/high reward point.
Click to expand...

Joncnunn is quite stuck in 4-city-tradition-NC-first-max-science ways, so he sometimes misses the finer details of other strategies.
 
Browd said:
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding joncnunn's point, but if you are pursuing a SS city spam strategy, why would you ever plan on building NC in the first place, much less plan on building NC before Oracle? As a hedge if you lose Sacred Sites? If that happens, you might as well trash that game -- whether you play the game out to a true loss or just retire from the game, you gambled on a strategy and lost. Hence, the high risk/high reward point.
Click to expand...

The title of the thread was SS strategy; not SS city-spam strategy. These are different; it's quite possible to use SS with only 4 cities. (It's not as good as standard Tradition policy on Immortal though; but I think this says more about how over powered tradition is.)

Tall version of SS is dependent upon science as there isn't enough tourism from only 8 total religious buildings and so you need to add science to get to standard Hotel / Airport / National Visitor Center / Internet.
 
Fair enough, I suppose, but I would question the utility of Sacred Sites in that case, as compared to the potential ROI from other social policy investments (whether on Immortal or any other difficulty level). To burn that many policies in Piety to get 8 base Tourism seems like a poor decision, since you could have maxed out Tradition much more quickly, taken Aesthetics that much sooner, dipped deeper into Rationalism, etc. etc. And in the end probably culturally vanquished your opponents more quickly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

adan_eslavo
  • Locked
  • Poll
[Vote] (6-25) Sacred Sites - Rework (based on @Stalker0 version)
Replies
17
Views
2K
azum4roll
A
Legen
  • Locked
  • Poll
[Vote] (4-15) Proposal: Sacred Sites boosting Holy Sites
Replies
5
Views
1K
pineappledan
pineappledan
S
(2-18) Proposal: Weaken Inspired Works Reformation Belief
Replies
8
Views
799
Recursive
Recursive
Recursive
  • Locked
  • Poll
[Vote] (2-18) Weaken Inspired Works Reformation Belief Proposals
Replies
7
Views
897
Stalker0
S
T
Suggestions for tweaking religion
Replies
0
Views
623
The Pixie
T
Top Bottom