Pantheons in Civ 7

[Noble Zarkon]

How are you folks treating pantheons in Civ 7? I find them much less useful than in Civ 6 due to the altar requirement and often end up with it only in my capital. I have however seen some YouTubers going as far as putting the culture card in first to get to the pantheon so I wondered what the thoughts were here.

 

[Leyrann]

Depends.

The influence one is good if you're going diplomacy/city state heavy, but of course it's often gone if you don't rush for it (and sometimes even if you do).

I also find the 1 of each yield card pretty nice. You do need to build an altar everywhere, yes, but you get 8 total yields from it. That's hard to match for other Antiquity buildings, even though a sprinkling of everything feels less impressive than +6 for a single yield, and it actually makes it worth to build them in towns imo - something which I otherwise only do for food buildings, as production is devalued because it gets turned to gold at a 1-to-1 ratio despite gold only having about half the value of production. (I might make an exception for a town that has like 6+ tiles boosted by a single warehouse building I guess)

Other than that, they're a bit meh imo. Guess Goddess of the Harvest (+1 food on farms, pastures and plantations) could be worth it, but one time for example I took God of the Forest (gold on camps, woodcutters) and realized that I don't prioritize those tiles in the first place, let alone wanting to invest into altars for that.

Also, the altar can be useful in the happiness crisis or to get an extra settlement over your cap, which indirectly makes the pantheon more useful.

 

[Taefin]

I’d like to see the warehouse bonus pantheons not require the altar, based on everything said above. Then there are powerful pantheons for building altars, and powerful ones for not. Also, it’s hard to feel like they are balanced when something in the AI code picks the same ones first each time.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

I also find the 1 of each yield card pretty nice.

Yes that's a good one, and the influence one (but I can never get that even on lower difficulties).

 

[Zaarin]

Most of them feel sufficiently underwhelming that I have yet to choose anything but God of the Sun (+1 to all yields on Altar). It makes the Altar a nice general purpose building, but it's not exactly a make-or-break strategy.

 

[Navelgazer]

Honestly, I rush the pantheon every game in hopes of getting City Patron Goddess (the influence one), because that makes it worth putting an altar everywhere you can afford to. If I miss that, I go for God of the Sun (the +1 grab-bag one), but then spamming Altars becomes less of a priority. If you can manage to get City Patron Goddess, though, that can be huge.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Most of them feel sufficiently underwhelming that I have yet to choose anything but God of the Sun (+1 to all yields on Altar). It makes the Altar a nice general purpose building, but it's not exactly a make-or-break strategy.

Especially compared to previous renditions of the game, Pantheons and religion in general is a yawner. The Pantheons are (to me, at least) utterly unimportant except as incremental yields equivalent to slapping down another structure or Social Policy, and religion in the next Age is a micro-management game of Whack-a-Missionary almost as bad as the Carpet of Digital Religious Vermin from Civ VI. I have gone through the entire Exploration Age paying absolutely no attention to Religion, and while I'm sure I was supposed to have missed something important doing that, I didn't notice any major lack: still got my Treasure Fleets floating, my Galleon fleets smashing opposing cities in places that I wanted, and reached end of the Age pretty much as I had hoped to.

 

[Uberfrog]

I think they are much weaker than in Civ 6 because of the need to build an Altar.

Aside from the strong ones (City Patron and God of the Sun) they mostly seem like straightforward copies of Civ 6’s where you play into your capital’s terrain type… except now you need to build something to access the bonus, the immediacy of the terrain-related bonuses is gone.

 

[chazzycat]

Am I mistaken or do pantheon beliefs also not carry over to the next age? I couldn't find any indication that they did.

 

[Navelgazer]

Especially compared to previous renditions of the game, Pantheons and religion in general is a yawner. The Pantheons are (to me, at least) utterly unimportant except as incremental yields equivalent to slapping down another structure or Social Policy, and religion in the next Age is a micro-management game of Whack-a-Missionary almost as bad as the Carpet of Digital Religious Vermin from Civ VI. I have gone through the entire Exploration Age paying absolutely no attention to Religion, and while I'm sure I as supposed to have missed something important doing that, I didn't notice any major lack: still got my Treasure Fleets floating, my Galleon fleets smashing opposing cities in places that I wanted, and reached end of the Age pretty much as I had hoped to.

Yeah, I've been dutifully playing the religion game in Exploration, but it's not my favorite. I do it anyway because it's how you reach the cultural and military golden ages (it's very possible to ace Non Sufficit Orbis without ever getting into a war!) I've been rushing Piety and Theology there to lock down the +2 relics for first conversion of a City State bonus (in my experience the AI never tries to convert them, at least at the lower difficulties), Tithe, and the one that automatically converts your new distant lands settlements (this one will usually time out to fire after I've settled my first distant lands town, and usually right before my second one.)

It's wild to me that there's no Relationship penalty to spamming missionaries at your neighbors, but that's where we are right now. Also, is it just me, or can you not convert a rival's holy city? (Not that it matters, since your missionaries will always be of your own religion regardless of the prevailing religion of the town in which you spawn them.)

 

[Menocchio]

It's surprising (in a sad way) that Pantheons don't carry over into the following ages. With all of the rest of the game's systems affording more room than ever for customisation, this feels like a step back.

 

[Zaarin]

Am I mistaken or do pantheon beliefs also not carry over to the next age? I couldn't find any indication that they did.

They do not.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Yeah, I've been dutifully playing the religion game in Exploration, but it's not my favorite. I do it anyway because it's how you reach the cultural and military golden ages (it's very possible to ace Non Sufficit Orbis without ever getting into a war!) I've been rushing Piety and Theology there to lock down the +2 relics for first conversion of a City State bonus (in my experience the AI never tries to convert them, at least at the lower difficulties), Tithe, and the one that automatically converts your new distant lands settlements (this one will usually time out to fire after I've settled my first distant lands town, and usually right before my second one.)

It's wild to me that there's no Relationship penalty to spamming missionaries at your neighbors, but that's where we are right now. Also, is it just me, or can you not convert a rival's holy city? (Not that it matters, since your missionaries will always be of your own religion regardless of the prevailing religion of the town in which you spawn them.)

You cannot convert Anybody's Holy City, as far as I know. AND there is no penalty for reconverting a rival/ally city repeatedly AND Missionaries seem to exist in a Holy Bubble of Immunity to any and all in-game events, including Volcanic Eruptions, Plague, Riot, or enemy military action up to and including bombardment by Galleons.

It is, in short, a scrubbed squeaky clean, sanitized, fantasy version of a religious conflict/game without any of the messiness actually associated with Conversion and religious conflict (cue the Thirty Year's War, St Barthomew's Day Massacre, and posthumous testimony from innumerable Christian and other faith martyrs and Hypatia). That they could bork it up at least as badly as they did the Civ VI version is simply amazing: as if they put the entire set of religious events and mechanics in the hands of the most junior apprentice coder who had flunked every history course they ever took and was given no guidance except "Religion - we gotta have some."

Well, okay, maybe it's not That Bad, but Holy Monty Python and the Grail, it ain't Good.

 

[chazzycat]

They do not.

yeah I was pretty sure, but needed a sanity check, thanks lol. It's a noticeable departure from every previous iteration, and another reason not to care much about religion.

 

[Leyrann]

almost as bad

You mean "worse", right?

At least in VI you could eradicate a religion, kill the opposing religious units, etc.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

You mean "worse", right?

At least in VI you could eradicate a religion, kill the opposing religious units, etc.

"almost as bad" only in the sense that I have never seen a literal carpet of missionaries swarming the map the way I regularly did in Civ VI.

Almost everything else about religion in Civ VII, as posted later, is worse than Civ VI: not least because they removed a bunch of options while providing nothing to make up for their removal.

 

[Nikolai II]

I often forget they exist.