Piety Opener with The Shoeshone

[evruthon]

Am I the only one doing this? They already have awesome borders so tradition opener is meh and honestly everything sucks up until rationalism anyway.

 

[Memoryjar]

It's not only opener, it's tradition ending wich is important... and monarchy, and land elite and everything in fact.
If you're going into Piety, yes traditon opener can be nice for extending borders. So with Shoshones, it's unuseful.

But Piety sucks.

 

[Acken]

Only Oligarchy is rather poor in Tradition and all works pretty well for the first 100 turns.

In piety half the tree has useless stuff for the best part of these 100turns. It makes the tree poor as an opener by definition.

If I could pick 12 policies before renaissance I would give a lot more love for Piety, it has some useful stuff for later on. Sadly we're limited to 6-8.

 

[Redaxe]

If you're playing a wide civ and want a religion without requiring a faith pantheon then 2 points in Piety is arguably valid. That will give each city 5 faith per turn which means you can pick a pantheon that boosts culture, growth, happiness etc.

 

[consentient]

I've been trying Piety and Honour starts this past week, including Shoshone, but really they quite suck. Honour isn't too bad if you can do lots of CS quests, and have enough barbs that YOU can kill (as opposed to the AI killing them) but Piety is really awful. It doesn't help you get a religion, so on the higher difficulty levels, whether or not you can get a religion and spread it is, as always, totally dependent on very specific map conditions, the CS you meet early, and your neighbours.

I'd argue that on Deity, in order to spread your religion to 10+ cities, you will need to get an early pantheon and/or faith wonder, AND have 2-3 neighbouring AI civs who have no interest in founding their own religion. Even then, those 2-3 can be spammed more heavily by the AI than you can do. Plus you have other stuff to focus on.

Religion is very underpowered in Civ 5 BNW. I hope they sort it out, and the Piety tree, by Civ 6.

 

[Mutineer]

I tryed all combinations of piety openings and found only one works:

3 into liberty until free settler and settler production bonuses, then into piety.

Piety opening needed min 8 cities to work good but with out settler production bonus one simply can not produce that many settlers fast enogth.

 

[NukeAJS]

I often go with liberty with Shoshone. The reasoning should be obvious.

A more fun opener with Shoshone is to get three upgraded pathfinders to composites ASAP and then go take a capital with your composites and additional pathfinders. It's quite difficult to pull off because three individual pathfinders need to get the 1st, 4th, and 7th ruins, but if you manage to do it ... yikes! You can pull it off with just two composites if you get someone that doesn't like spamming military and has a capital NOT on a hill but it's a real stretch.

 

[Lowpro]

I often go with liberty with Shoshone. The reasoning should be obvious.

A more fun opener with Shoshone is to get three upgraded pathfinders to composites ASAP and then go take a capital with your composites and additional pathfinders. It's quite difficult to pull off because three individual pathfinders need to get the 1st, 4th, and 7th ruins, but if you manage to do it ... yikes! You can pull it off with just two composites if you get someone that doesn't like spamming military and has a capital NOT on a hill but it's a real stretch.

Yea I'm a fan of Liberty to get workers and settlers for Shoshone. The best part of Shoshone is getting great workable tiles while still having great starts. Having good expedient workers gets you four cities and faster libraries hard built. The pathfinders can help you get the culture start you need as well as some techs. Shoshone are meant to cheese liberty well. Tradition still works but it's so slow.

 

[reddishrecue]

A piety opener increases your chances of making a religion.

 

[Redaxe]

A piety opener increases your chances of making a religion.

I'm assuming you mean Organized Religion with that for a total of 5 faith per turn per city with Shrine & Temple?
It's something I want to try (ive been scared off Piety by the 4 city Traditionists) but 5 faith per city beats Stonehenge except for the huge cost of 3 gold per city. That to me is the main deterrent esp as Liberty provides no gold and expanding really wide will make your neighbors DoW you so you risk losing your caravans.
But if it negates the need for a faith pantheon then could be really useful in giving you more options for choosing beliefs.

 

[Mutineer]

Gold is a real problem in all king of piety openings.
The ways to moderate it:

1) You never use internal routes with liberty, you limited by happiness, not ability to grow.
So, build ships/caravans early and send them out.

2) beeline to currency or even guild after or even before temples(depends on your gold is situation)
3) Found many cities and meat all civs.
That should give you many duplicate resources to trade.
Condition that you need to be on Pangaea or island connected type of map and for continents may come too late.
4) Adopt Mercantilism and focus capital on gold, by settling prophets or even merchantman.

In big empire you can specialize and capital not necessary best sci city, you are not building NC anyway. You might consider building NC in that Jungle city. You will need gold all game, because at about Feudal-Renaissance age your best use of gold will be research agreements.

Just remember, way to play piety is very different from tradition.

 

[Redaxe]

Honestly when I play wide I find I rarely if ever have gold to spend on RAs. Id rather use it to buy infrastructure like universities, factories etc...