Pantheon Adjustment Brainstorm

This seems to be a common sentiment, but one I don't share. 4:c5culture::c5faith: in all cities and 6:c5culture::c5faith: in the capital is quite good, even ignoring the healing. I pick it up quite often with any civ that has a unique barracks or wall, since I was probably aiming that tech anyways. It's a solid founder.
It is 1:c5culture:2:c5faith: per building, not 2:c5culture::c5faith:.
 
Ok so what if we made the council +1 faith, +2 culture? The council would still be our monument replacement, the build order doesn't change. The founder potential is definately weakened, but probably still intact. You might need to push your expansion a little harder, rush those councils a little quicker, etc, but it would likely work...maybe. It can be surprising how much faith you are giving up with such a small change.
That's why I suggested the removal of the culture instead. the +2 faith while still maintaining +1 science and +1 culture allows for it to be a powerful founding belief. +1 faith would make it kind of pointless as you'd be forced (without natural wonders, religious UC's, or ancient runes) to build shrines first anyways if you wanted to found, nullifying the point of the pantheon in making the council your first-build multi-purpose building.
So how about making the council +2 faith, +1 culture? Now things get tricky. If I go Council -> Shrine -> Monument, I am now behind in culture compared to a monument first opener, by a good bit. That's problematic, culture is king, especially in teh early game. Early culture is so valuable because early policies are very strong and formulative, and also because my production is so low. ... . But culture tends to give me immediate bonuses with no work required, basically giving me "magic hammers" during that key early game. Giving that up is a MAJOR sacrifice.
As you said, culture is king. That's why by removing the single culture from ancestor worship would make it a have a sacrifice in early culture to use, while still being powerful. The issue with ancestor worship is that it provides the best benefits of the monument, shrine, and council for a third of the price of all three combined, in a single building. It also lets you get four culture per city within potentially two buildings which is just ludicrously good, far too good for a pantheon with so much less investment or circumstantial cost compared to so many other pantheons. With my proposed culture nerf it would at least require some form of sacrifice while still being a very powerful, low investment pantheon.

Giving that up is a MAJOR sacrifice. If I go Council -> Monument -> shrine, I can compensate for that loss early culture by pushing some extra culture. However....my faith is now ruined, instead of getting extra faith (which you need to found) I am actually getting less faith than the standard build order. That's not really viable.
In hindsight I think it ought to have +3 faith/+1 culture, I think that would solve your issue here in combination with the scaler. This way you at least get some early culture and science compared to building shrine first, while being able to delay shrine till 3rd so your culture does not fall behind. So in other words, still very useful early yields without such insane amounts of easy early culture.
 
I hope this does not pass, for the DLL modders' sake. Having to retrain worker AIs to build sea improvements on the whim of some players, probably just to revert it again is a bad use of modders' time.
Do Samurai not improve sea resources in BNW?
 
Do Samurai not improve sea resources in BNW?
Not like what they are proposing, no. They want to turn fishing boats into a multi-turn build done by workers like land improvements; something we don’t have art or animations for, aside from the coding. Workers seem to handle non-resource sea improvements okay, but aren’t sea resources are handled differently?
 
I think the pantheons that need adjusting are the poor options. Commerce, Earth Mother, God of the Sun, being prime examples.
I cannot count the number of times I've tried to make Earth Mother work. If you've got mining luxuries it looks like it'd be great. Mines are available quickly and are great improvements, culture is love, it buffs the first building every city is going to build, sounds good to me! And then in practice it's just...fine, at best, I guess?

You know, I hear a lot of people's issues with improvement-based pantheons is the time it takes to get them online. Good yields don't mean much when it takes 6-10 worker turns to get them for each tile. Maybe they should be changed to improve resources that can be improved by those improvements instead? Earth Mother gives it's yields on minable resources, not mines themselves.
Alternatively, if that's too much, maybe take a nod from this Stars & Sky idea and split the yields between the improvement and the resources themselves? Earth Mother gives 1:c5faith: on mining resources and 1:c5culture: on them once they're improved with mines?
 
General comment: I always play with the option ANY_PANTHEON enabled because I hate it when I don't get a pantheon because of 1 or 2 turns.
  • Ancestor Worship: I don't use it because I find it uninteresting. In any case I would agree that +5 on a single early-game building is too strong when the baseline is +2 and I prefer options that aren't universally good. What wasn't mentioned is that AW doubles the maximum culture and faith per city in the early game. Normally once you've built monument and shrine the utility of additional buildings decreases but AW lets you squeeze a lot more value out of your early cities.
  • God of Commerce: Would still be bad with +3 Great Merchant points.
  • God of Craftsmen: The issue as I see it has more to do with the general pace of the game. You need two tier 1 techs and one tier 2 tech to build quarries and this may conflict with other priorities. For my games I reduced the tier 1 ancient era tech costs from 60 to 40 and in turn increased the cost of the tier 1 classical era techs by the same amount. The point about some other civ picking the pantheon you want applies universally I think.
  • God of the Expanse: I don't think this change would be that meaningful and I don't even agree that it would be better in the early game; the obvious synergy would be with Authority and its initial culture upon settling a city and I think a percentage reduction is at least as good in that context since it means you'll have more culture left over after the initial border expansion.
  • God of the Sun: I think the main issue is that +3 food from farms on improved resources is just bad. Especially in the early game food is the easiest yield to get and also the yield that is the worst unless you have a lot of tiles that are worth working.
  • God of War: It could give me +100 supply and I still wouldn't pick it. More ranged combat strength for cities is useless and +10% production towards units is almost always worse than just +1 production. Yields from kills are more reliable now but at standard speed they still seem suboptimal and GoW gives nothing but faith. I don't currently play with these changes but I used to give GoW faith for conquering cities; that gives you a clear objective for founding. Of course Hero Worship basically does the same thing but faith after founding is way less useful anyways so I used to change the yield from Hero Worship to culture.
  • Goddess of Protection: I don't agree that the healing bonus is that good, at least for early-mid game warmongering. More broadly I don't see a need to change this pantheon.
  • Goddess of Springtime: I don't think this change would be particularly impactful. See God of Craftsmen.
 
Its interesting that people view God of War and Commerce so negatively because those use to be solid, popular choices. I think what has changed is pantheons went from being primarily a source of :c5faith:, where if you got a religion you were happy, anything else was just a cherry on top. Now pantheons are primarily a source of other yields, especially :c5culture:.

There are 13 pantheons that give culture, I'm going to go through them.

Spoiler Top Dogs (4) :

Extremely good choices, you want one of these every game, they make the game easier.

Ancestor Worship:
A lot has been said, I'll just add that the pantheon is boring and doesn't interact with your start or civilization in any meaningful way.

God of the Open Sky:
There are a lot of starts where other pantheons make sense (like on plains olives, Springtime looks good, and there is plenty of wheat and corn so Sun makes sense), but even without pastures this guy kills the other options. Its messed up by hills and desert, which is the only reason its not as ubiquitous as ancestor worship.
1:c5culture::c5faith: per 2 plains/grassland alone would be a worthy pantheon, the pasture thing alone is minor and secondary. This can provide like 1/4th of your culture in medieval era, the scaling is better than God-King. There's actually some anti-synergy here, because sheep on hills won't work towards the plains/grassland bonus.

Goddess of Renewal:
You can reach like 3:c5faith::c5culture: and 5:c5science: from this pantheon. Its just ridiculous, who cares if jungle is somewhat weak in food or hammers, while the other guy spends hundreds of hammers on libraries you just enjoy already having the science. Way too much science and it gives culture too. I think the design is off too, the market bonus makes little sense here. It also contributes a lot to the whole 'never chop/improve bananas' thing. It requires a lot of micromanaging as 1 forest 1 jungle won't give the bonus.

God of Stars and Sky:
I'm putting him here because others like him, but I haven't used it in a while. I can obviously see how OP having like +7 culture in your capital from the pantheon would be but I haven't actually encountered it ever. This could be a map script thing.


Spoiler Strong But Fair (7) :

Pantheons I wouldn't change, or only make minor changes to. The main reason not to use them is the top dogs exist. Note that these typically cap at like 1 culture per city on average. The two that can go beyond (protection and god-king) need a big investment to get there.

Protection:
High payoff but high investment. This lets you get strong culture but I think the price is adequately high. Really the only issue with this pantheon is that its very similar to ancestor worship, and requires a much higher investment for an only slightly higher payoff.

Goddess of Nature:
This gets very powerful on starts with the right mountain conditions, but you really need that AND a natural wonder for it be impressive. A fun choice, it causes you to change where you settle your cities dramatically. It competes with the top dogs, but only when the stars align, which is okay. Good design.

Festivals:
Fun pantheon to use. A little light on faith but there are ways to compensate, lots of hidden synergies with civs like Indonesia or Netherlands. It works with luxuries imported from city-states. If you rush for an early scrivener's office this can be crazy strong, but the required investment is high enough that its fair.

God-King:
God King is fun but pretty bad. That's not a need to change it, its just a funky design.

Craftsmen:
Only 1 culture in the capital isn't much but it makes a big difference. This option is niche but it works well in that niche, which is basically Stonehenge into fast construction to connect either Jade or Lapis. Then you have a high production capital that can spam wonders, military, or settlers.

All Creation:
Just 1 culture in the capital is a nice bonus, but not game changing. A well designed pantheon IMO.

Goddess of Beauty:
This doesn't directly give culture, but it gives great artist points which ends up being similar. Its a fun pantheon and important for one-city challenges. I'll just note that as much as I've used and love this pantheon, in terms of power its really far behind the top dogs.


Spoiler Weak Choices (2) :

Even though they give culture I almost never take these options.

Earth Mother:
Its a decent payoff but hard to use. This should provide 2 or 3 food to each city instead of the monument bonus, that way you could work your strong mining tiles and still grow.

Goddess of the Hunt:
This looks so good on paper, but in practice the time to connect all those camps really slows it down. According to the wiki it still has the +1 food to tundra, which should go (we already have a tundra pantheon), and it should be replaced by a boost to the newly added lodge.


TLDR;
I think a small number of pantheons should be nerfed because they are too strong, and eclipse many options, which are often far more interesting. I think nerfing a few of the options would be easier than buffing weaker options.
 
Its interesting that people view God of War and Commerce so negatively because those use to be solid, popular choices. I think what has changed is pantheons went from being primarily a source of :c5faith:, where if you got a religion you were happy, anything else was just a cherry on top. Now pantheons are primarily a source of other yields, especially :c5culture:.
I think there are several reasons for this:
  1. If I remember correctly founding used to be more difficult against the AI. In that context strong pantheon faith is much more useful since without it you likely won't be able to found at all.
  2. Beliefs used to be more unbalanced. Getting to pick your beliefs before the AI used to be more valuable because some beliefs were simply much better than others but nowadays I think the difference in strength is lower.
  3. The current pantheons almost all have benefits that are most prominent in the early game so there is less risk of losing a valuable bonus (like the old +1/3 production per population from Earth Mother) if you don't get to found. Consequently the value of faith has decreased and the value of the other yields has increased.
 
Its interesting that people view God of War and Commerce so negatively because those use to be solid, popular choices. I think what has changed is pantheons went from being primarily a source of :c5faith:, where if you got a religion you were happy, anything else was just a cherry on top. Now pantheons are primarily a source of other yields, especially :c5culture:.
If I remember correctly founding used to be more difficult against the AI. In that context strong pantheon faith is much more useful since without it you likely won't be able to found at all.
This one in particular. It used to be that the maximum number of religions in a standard map size, 8-civ game, was four (Byzantium aside). Now that it is at 5, a human player can go for a less faith intensive pantheon and still found comfortably. This should be even easier now that the handicap procs no longer grant production to the AI; their shrines should take longer to set up.

I'm curious now if reducing the number of religions back to 4 would bring back the pantheons that don't grant culture as solid options.

On a note, one patch in 2018 reduced the faith output of God of War from 300% of the killed unit's CS to 200%. As a compensation, the pantheon gained the +10% unit :c5production: production modifier.
 
I'm putting him here because others like him, but I haven't used it in a while. I can obviously see how OP having like +7 culture in your capital from the pantheon would be but I haven't actually encountered it ever. This could be a map script thing.
I do think map script is a big factor. For example, my communitas_79 maps love to make beautiful klondikes, so stars is just a godly pantheon.

Meanwhile I rarely find open sky as powerful as others claim, I think my maps are hillier than some others (I never see the kind of flatland I see in some screen shots for example). Likewise, earth mother I don't generally consider too bad, I often have lots of good mining resources at my fingertips to get the bonus off of.

So probably the best assessment of a bad pantheon is....does this pantheon really have a niche, would I actually want this over another pantheon even in reasonably optimzed conditions?

That's where I come back to Expanse as an example. The only time I want expanse is border blobs with Russia. Otherwise I think there are better pantheons for production that are a lot easier to found with. The reason for my change here is that it would push borders to the front of the pantheon, you would get your first initial coups of border expands significantly quicker, at the price of slower border growth later in the game. I think that solidies the niche of the pantheon back to real border growing rather than just "hammers and faith through a roundabout method"

Craftsman: There is a point to be made that perhaps this is "stonehenge only pantheon". My issue with it otherwise is you have to commit a LOT to getting it going, and if you get there and craftsman has been taken, well you are just screwed. But if you take it off of stonehenge, you have that comfort ahead of time. But then again, if I'm going stonehenge, would I really take craftsman over something else...there are a lot of solid pantheons if you have stonehenge to boost it.
 
I'm curious now if reducing the number of religions back to 4 would bring back the pantheons that don't grant culture as solid options.

On a note, one patch in 2018 reduced the faith output of God of War from 300% of the killed unit's CS to 200%. As a compensation, the pantheon gained the +10% unit :c5production: production modifier.
I'd support reverting God of War to 300%.

The culture pantheons aren't bad at faith. This could be an interesting trade off, but I don't think its really there. I'm consistently getting the 1st or 2nd religion on Deity with Ancestor Worship, building council-monument-shrine. So if founding was harder, I'd just swap shrine and monument in that order. The only pantheons that I think are high reward, low faith are Renewal, All Creation, and God-King. Of the 3, Renewal has by far the most early game faith.

That's where I come back to Expanse as an example. The only time I want expanse is border blobs with Russia. Otherwise I think there are better pantheons for production that are a lot easier to found with. The reason for my change here is that it would push borders to the front of the pantheon, you would get your first initial coups of border expands significantly quicker, at the price of slower border growth later in the game. I think that solidies the niche of the pantheon back to real border growing rather than just "hammers and faith through a roundabout method"
I think there's room for pantheons to be a 'plan B', and expanse can do that fairly well. I've used it a lot with tradition, you get a lot more yields with the cheaper border growth. Its viable with progress or authority too, its a decent at generating faith without much commitment, especially if you have culture from somewhere (like a UI). Of course its much worse than 2 culture to all councils though.
 
Its viable with progress or authority too, its a decent at generating faith without much commitment, especially if you have culture from somewhere (like a UI).
this is just not my experience. I tried it with Authority recently where I even had the big culture NW in my 2nd city, so in theory should have had great border growth. Still couldn't found with it (all founding by Turn 106). Not saying its unfoundable, but I do feel like it needs solid commitment to make it work, like the faith UW, or shrine first play, kind of thing. With tradition, sure its easy to found with the faster borders and the +3 faith (most pantheons are a lot easier to found with on tradition because of that), but I still question why go for it over other better pantheons.
 
With tradition, sure its easy to found with the faster borders and the +3 faith (most pantheons are a lot easier to found with on tradition because of that), but I still question why go for it over other better pantheons.
With tradition it gives like double the yields if not more. It isn't working just because of the 3 faith, you could remove that and still get there. Sovereignty's border reduction is crazy. Later on a tradition capital will grow borders every single turn, this is just a flat 20 faith per turn.

Why take it over the better pantheons? No reason at all, that's why I want them nerfed. I'm going to sound like a broken record, there's hardly ever a reason to take anything not named 'Ancestor Worship', except of course the AI beat you it.
 
God of the Open Sky:

[...]

God of Stars and Sky:
I'm putting him here because others like him, but I haven't used it in a while. I can obviously see how OP having like +7 culture in your capital from the pantheon would be but I haven't actually encountered it ever. This could be a map script thing.
yes I think some of these are very influenced by map script, as in my games Open Sky is extremely niche. Rarely ever looks like a good pick. While Stars and Sky is almost always top tier for tundra starts.

edit: whoops, Stalker0 said exactly this already
 
Ok so it feels like the short list for change is:

  • Ancestor Worship - Nerf
  • Commerce - Buff
  • Stars and Skies - Nerf
  • Sun - Buff
That seems to be the most consistent feedback for adjustment. Everything else seems to have its advocates and its detractors.
 
rather than just "hammers and faith through a roundabout method"
It's funny, I actually like this as the primary way of evaluating pantheons. I think it's somewhat consistent that a pantheon affects you most (and feels the most meaningful) when it alters your build order. Going Something Else first over Monument, or Something Else second over Shrine. So when you evaluate any of the yields of a particular pantheon, you can value it based on the building-equivalent it gives you for free. For terrain that still works out, it's just a building you don't need to build that gives you yields: hammers and faith.
 

This group game had multiple people taking stars and skys. It probably is a bit of a map thing but big tundra areas do seem to be utterly filled with deer a lot of the time. Crazyg was even in this game :)
 
I still find it inconsistent that farms on resources don't give any faith at all unlike the other improvement pantheons. I'd change God of the Sun to give 2 :c5food: 1 :c5culture: 1 :c5faith: on farms on resources and 2 :c5faith: 2 :c5gold: on granary.
 
Here is a rough draft of what could be pantheon changes. The general logic is the pantheon should help address weaknesses (like giving food to a low food start) while making sure the gameplan makes sense.

Spoiler Ideas :

Earth Mother:
2:c5food:1:c5faith: to monuments, 1:c5culture::c5faith: to mines on improved resources.
Logic: Most mines don't give food, which makes working several in a city really difficult. This is good in a capital with 3 mines, but its awkward when after a settler is built you need to work food tiles instead of those mines. Food everywhere helps.

Goddess of the Hunt:
1:c5food::c5culture::c5faith: to camps. 1:c5food::c5faith: to lodges.
Logic: If you have a lot of camps you want to build the lodge, this is a simple change to accomodate the newly added building.

Ancestor Worship:
1:c5culture:2:c5faith: to councils. 1:c5faith: per 4 :c5citizen: in a city.
Logic: Less culture but slightly more faith. This is high faith and really easy to use, it's a good backup option.

Sun God:
1:c5production:2:c5faith: to wheat, rice, and corn. 2:c5gold::c5faith: to granaries.
Logic: The only version of this was bad. It gave food to land that already had really high food.
Here, it gives what those cities often lack, hammers and gold. The bonus is applied to resources themselves, not a farm, because workers need to be improving luxuries at this stage. The yields are high because there is no farm luxury, so you usually get fewer of these than you do camps/whatever.
This is very high faith which means it could be worth considering even with no culture.
 
Goddess of the Hunt:
1:c5food::c5culture::c5faith: to camps. 1:c5food::c5faith: to lodges.
Logic: If you have a lot of camps you want to build the lodge, this is a simple change to accomodate the newly added building.
This has already been done, except it's 2:c5food: to lodges, not 1:c5food::c5faith: to lodges.

Otherwise these seems like good, uncontroversial changes

I would also like something to be done about God of the Open Sky. Maybe something like this:

God of the Open Sky
+1 :c5gold: for every 2 featureless flat tiles worked. +1:c5faith::c5gold::c5culture: to Pastures
 
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