Does Religion break the Culture System?

historix69

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In my last game I started in a region with african climate. I chose Oral Tradition (+1 Culture per Plantation) as Pantheon, Pagodas (+2 Culture) and Choral Music (+2 Culture per Temple). I went wide so Faith was no problem.
A neighbouring civ (which I conquered) had Cathedrals (+1 Culture) and Sacred Path (+1 Culture per Jungle) as Pantheon, which was also active in most of my cities as 2nd Pantheon, so some cities had up to 20 tiles with +1 Culture from either jungle or plantations + 4-5 Culture from religious buildings. With the global +25% Culture Bonus from Sistine Chapel, normal culture buildings, Great Works etc. my cities produced an enormous amount of culture allowing a lot more Social Policies than usual. (On huge maps SP costs are increased by only 5% per City.)

I remember from an earlier game that combining Japan (+1 Culture per Fishing Boat) with Oral Tradition (+1 Culture per Plantation) and Pagodas was also producing a lot of culture. France would probably also be good when combining Oral Tradition (+1 Culture per Plantation) with Chateaus. Or Brazil ...

Since most of the default culture buildings and most wonders only give +1 culture and the Great Works are rather rare until you discover archaeology, a wide empire with good cultural pantheons/beliefs seems to be just culturally overpowered since more culture leads to more social policies leads to more happiness, gold, science, production, etc ... Loosing the religious race in the beginning of the game has a major impact on your civs culture production. I think the balance between normal culture and culture from religion is broken.
 
It doesn't matter in higher difficulties, the chance of founding and keeping a religion without faith pantheon is next to none unless you happen to get good faith NW. Also to even benefit from the jungle culture pantheon, your start has to be in jungle which is already a slow start that will slow you down significantly anyways. On low difficulty, anything can happen anyway.
 
Also to even benefit from the jungle culture pantheon, your start has to be in jungle which is already a slow start that will slow you down significantly anyways.

Actually I had a flood plains start with wheat, sugar and cotton and some hills not to far away and I could settle 2nd city next to Mt. Sinai. Other cities were in mediterranean coastal climate. I conquered the neigbouring jungle region with jungle pantheon cities later with comp bow / cross bow ...

It doesn't matter in higher difficulties, the chance of founding and keeping a religion without faith pantheon is next to none unless you happen to get good faith NW.
On low difficulty, anything can happen anyway.
That is probably true ... it was not deity ... and keeping your religion often means to conquer some of the other religions holy cities ...

However the op was not about Religion at higher difficulty, it was about the effect of pantheon/religion on the culture system in general and if it was unbalanced, since early game normal culture production is weak compared to culture from unique improvements of certain civs combined with culture from combined pantheons/beliefs/religious buildings. The AI seems to choose pantheons/beliefs randomly, so there is probably only a small chance for a super-culture-religion-AI-civ in a game.
I miss a non-religious alternative to culture production for civs who do not get a religion. (On Giant Earth Map there are 43 civs but only 7 religions.) Aesthetics buffs tourism, but the effect on culture for a wide empire seems to be rather small compared with a cultural religion until you discover archaeology. (If you can construct wonders in all your cities, Flourishing of Arts is fine.)
 
It is unbalanced but only if you get a lot of the cultural beliefs, which, as Sclb said is really only possible on lower levels of difficulty where the player can get everything they go for. On a huge world with decent difficulty, you are talking 6 other competing religions. It's very unlikely you can build up perfect religious builds like this, and usually you're picking up the leftovers because so many AI pick piety and expand so fast. It's not true that the AI picks beliefs randomly. There's some randomness but they definitely prefer certain ones. Among the first to go are religious buildings and cultural beliefs. The AI on Deity likes culture a lot and multiple civs pick the piety tree and get a strong religion. I see them founding 4 religions in the 25-55 range and enhancing in the next 20 turns and you are dead last or have no religion at all if you don't do as Sclb says: get lucky with a powerful natural wonder, or pick a faith pantheon. You cannot expand fast enough to do it with shrines very often and if that does work you'll have very little good left as the AI takes the cultural stuff first or 2nd choice. Even the civs that start with faith advantages will get beat often without a faith pantheon. Even with a good faith pantheon the best I can usually manage reliably is 3rd or 4th, which means the AI took most of the cultural picks. Usually ALL the religious buildings are gone. +2 culture from temples is sometimes there but is usually a weaker pick.

So on Deity the "balance" gets reversed. There are multiple AI that pick powerful cultural religions before you can and produce WAY more culture then you can for most of the game as a result. So yeah, it can create overpowering culture for sure, but this is less of a balance problem when the AI take these advantages for themselves which is the most likely result if you play difficulties that favor them. There is ONE way to get your pick of religion on Deity fairly reliably and that is the combo of playing Celts/Ethiopia/Maya AND picking a suitable faith pantheon quickly. But you still won't get everything you want, just have a better first selection. This might work 60% of the time or so when you get a start set up for a particular pantheon and actually get that pantheon before the AI.
 
So on Deity the "balance" gets reversed. There are multiple AI that pick powerful cultural religions before you can and produce WAY more culture then you can for most of the game as a result. So yeah, it can create overpowering culture for sure, but this is less of a balance problem when the AI take these advantages for themselves which is the most likely result if you play difficulties that favor them.

So if you play deity on a huge map (maybe continents) and loose the race for a good culture pantheon/religion, how do you continue with culture production for Social Policies before archaeology besides the 3 cultural guilds? Or do you just concentrate on Tradition/Rationalism/Ideology for growth/science/... ?
 
You just have to learn to play with less culture tbh if you are used to getting a lot early from religion. It was annoying to me in the beginning but not so bad anymore. You just get it where you can

I usually play wide/liberty games so sometimes foreign religions spread in with some useful buildings to buy but this is all based on luck.

Friending cultural city states becomes a pretty effective way of getting early culture

Yes, focus on getting and running your writer and artist guilds quite early if you want to push through your first tree in a timely manner, but I actually often skip the musician guild. They come late and writers and artists are more valuable.

Great works do give culture but actually it can be better if you aren't trying to win culturally to save the great writers since they give culture. You can spend them during your peak. If you played wide enough to get the hammers, One thing you can do is propose and win world's fair, save your great writers, maximize your culture and burn the 2-3 writers for 2-3 more quick policies right around ideologies. I demonstrated this in the Shoshone Empires game I'm currently playing and it quickly got me all the critical policies in rationalism and commerce I wanted right before ideologies. The AI may beat you if you played tradition though as sometimes they really like the fair and put a lot of cities on it. You can tell if you are going to win by monitoring the changing percentages during between-turns.

Be first to ideologies and you'll get 2 free policies. There are also a lot of wonders with free policies and world's fair gives a free policy.

So you have more then enough to get what you need usually. If you really want to get overwhelming amounts of policies you can still play Poland or someone with a cultural building or improvement. And religion still sometimes works out, you just have to see how each game goes. I often get religions on Deity, they just are 4th or 5th and the culture options left are not as valuable as other choices.
 
... save the great writers since they give culture. You can spend them during your peak. If you played wide enough to get the hammers, One thing you can do is propose and win world's fair, save your great writers, maximize your culture and burn the 2-3 writers for 2-3 more quick policies right around ideologies. ...

Be first to ideologies and you'll get 2 free policies. There are also a lot of wonders with free policies and world's fair gives a free policy.

I know this strategy and use it. The game I played was a modded game on marathon. (The mod adds +25% culture in capital + allows writers guild in all cities for all civs.) So besides the effect of religion my culture rate was already higher than normal and cannot be compared to unmodded games ... I finished aesthetics with the free policy from world fair, started a Golden Age and bought 3 Great Writers with Faith while having 2 more stockpiled ... one turn before the culture bonus of world fair victory vanished, I used the Great Writers to get 5 x 50k = 250k Culture which was insane ... (please note that prices on marathon are 300%). If I had delayed world fair until the next world congress (100 turns later), the effect would have been even bigger ...

Allowing writers guild in all cities in my mod is one way to allow all civs to generate culture, even when they fail in religion and do not have a cultural terrain improvement. (I think of writers guild as kind of a city hall like in colonization where social policies are produced.) AI and puppet cities build them. I think a small cultural terrain improvement for all civs would balance things even more and reduce the strong effect of early religion against weak culture buildings. (Maybe with no2adjacent to prevent AI spamming it everywhere.)

In the unmodded game you have culture from buildings, wonders, guilds, Great Works and artifacts, civs' unique improvements, pantheons and religions. The normal culture buildings and most wonders are just too weak compared with the additional effect of civ UAs and religion ...
 
The main way to get culture on Deity is cultured city-states and then winning world's fair.
Once you do that, you pop a great artist, buy all the cultured city-states you can and hopefully you have a lot of great writers.

It's not uncommon to be generating 300-400 culture during the world's fair golden age boost. So 8 turns into that ( I believe great writers pop is based on your culture output for last 8 turns?) you use up your great writers and they will generate thousands upon thousands of points of culture, much much more than what they'd have generated with great works unless you were planning to play for 1000 turns on standard speed.

The second way is if you plan to do a culture victory. You should still win world's fair, but your great works / culture buildings will generate a lot of extra culture for you, same for theming bonuses and hopefully some kind of culture tile improvement from your civ ( like brazilwood camps )

The last way is to just conquer all the good AI cities with wonders. Not rare on Deity to have one AI spam 10-12 wonders in the same city. If you're lucky enough for him to be close you can just steal that and get the 10-15 culture.

But at the end of the day, cultured city-states are far and away the biggest way to generate culture while at the same time preventing the AI from getting it. Almost cheating to get allied with them honestly :p
It's almost mandatory in a deity game IMO, you should do everything you can to get allied with them as early as possible.

edit: Religion is generally not worth that much culture. If you play 4-5 cities and get all pagodas, that's 8-10 culture, which is like.. one cultured city-state ally. Culture religions are usually bad, slow to start and in the end generate under 10 culture per turn anyway unless you have some kind of monstrously wide empire. The only exception is culture from jungle. If you have a jungle start, that can get out of hand, but the problem is that jungle tiles are crap and need to be improved to be good, which removes the jungle lol.
 
Thanks for the strategies ...

Religion is generally not worth that much culture. If you play 4-5 cities and get all pagodas, that's 8-10 culture, which is like.. one cultured city-state ally.

I used the Religion in a wide game (20-50 cities) so all this extra culture from plantations, jungle, pagodas, cathedrals, temples is adding up, especially with +25% culture bonus from sistine chapel and +33% from CN-Tower. Some of the jungle cities without a world wonder gave up to 40 culture per turn in late game, (over 50 with my modded writers guild with 2 specialists).

There were no cultural CS in my game who survived due to Venice and Austria taking most of them. They left only a few maritime ones ...

While the 4-5 core cities usually generate some culture, the smaller cities in a wide empire often lack the more expensive culture buildings and therefore benefit more from the religious effects since jungle and plantations are "free" and Pagodas are purchased with Faith ... If you have a few picks in piety, you can build shrines and temples fast even in newly founded cities and they provide a lot of faith per city and give +25% gold. A religion helps when going wide ... and that was one of my points about balance that there seems to be no alternative to religion when you want to go wide with strong culture before archaeology ...
 
damn, 20+ cities is a lot! The bigger problem with these large empires is the base penalties to happiness in my opinion, not culture, though that is a problem too. 1.8 per city adds up fast when stuff like pagodas can only apply to population unhappiness, though it does help those little cities grow to useful size. How did you overcome the base penalties? Did you have something like sacred waters or ceremonial burial as well? These in combination with the meritocracy happiness can be enough to ICS like this but I'd love to hear what your strategy was.

I also see religion as indispensable for really big empires, but more because of the happiness it brings in. Culture is a side effect if you are using religious buildings and is welcome as well. I used to run similar games on emperor and immortal but the jump up to Deity really makes religious strategies unreliable without some great advantages to start with. It's a shame, but expected I guess.
 
damn, 20+ cities is a lot! The bigger problem with these large empires is the base penalties to happiness in my opinion, not culture, though that is a problem too. 1.8 per city adds up fast when stuff like pagodas can only apply to population unhappiness, though it does help those little cities grow to useful size. How did you overcome the base penalties? Did you have something like sacred waters or ceremonial burial as well? These in combination with the meritocracy happiness can be enough to ICS like this but I'd love to hear what your strategy was.

For the 1.8 global unhappiness per city I used Aristocracy, Meritocracy and Forbidden Palace ... If a city has size 10 and a road connection, it gets already +2 global happiness from Aristocracy and Meritocracy and so balances the -1.8 for the city.

I played egypt, so there were +2 happiness per temple (Burial Tomb) and + 2 happiness per pagoda.

Did you have something like sacred waters or ceremonial burial as well?
No, I took +1 Culture from Plantations, Pagodas, +2 Culture for Temples and I got +1 Culture from jungle and cathedrals from my neighbour ... (If you found a new city and it is first infected by your neighbours religion, you can buy cathedrals and later switch to your own religion and buy pagodas, if you produce enough faith ...)

I first went full Liberty with few picks in Tradition and Piety + Patronage Opener. In Industrial Age I went Autocracy and took all happiness-tenets ... Due to massive culture production I could also take aesthetics, commerce, exploration (leads to even more culture when exploring hidden sites and finding "Great Writers"-artifacts), rationalism ... Social Policies added a lot of local happiness from standard buildings ...

Happiness was not a problem, I ended up with +500 happiness (from wonders, luxuries, policies, ...) since Aristocracy and Forbidden Palace increase global happiness when your cities are satisfied with local happiness. However the game became instable when crossing the 2GB Memory limit and I went for a cultural win instead of continuing to grow ... I used mods and the Giant Earth Map is a special map, so it cannot be compared to a usual unmodded game but happiness was not modded ... so the happiness strategy should work in unmodded games on huge maps ... Aristocracy, Meritocracy and Forbidden Palace are the key to global happiness ...

see also here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=568530
 
Religion doesn't really break the culture system. It's a big investment. That said, some pantheons are awesome for a boost, such as the one for +1 culture from jungle. Good for brazil, for example.
 
Oral Tradition and Cathedrals are both rather weak in my opinion. Often times Cathedrals might not even be worth building to be honest, you might be better off saving the fpt for more Great People. I haven't done the maths for how long it takes for them to pay off, but I would reckon that after T150 buying them will end up costing you more GP than the additional faith will gain.

Sacred Path is only really good if you have a lot of bonus resources on Jungle. Jungle will often spawn Gems from my experience, in which case the gems Pantheon would probably be superior. Jungle often spawns citrus, in which case Sun God would probably be superior.

The only really strong culture Pantheon is culture from Pastures in my opinion.
 
culture pantheons like sacred path are good if you plan on going down piety. if not then there are others i'd rather go for either faith or production

and like the above user, i rarely pick sacred path anyway because if i get a jungle start i'm more often than not getting some other pantheon that gives me more of a bonus
 
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