Rate the Beliefs - part I: Pantheon beliefs

[PMac67]

That's a simple calculation ? Are you a Professor at MIT ?? It's a BAD Pantheon ! I'm from the UK and I have one 'O' level ! WTH ???

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

This was something I did back in Civ5, and it was pretty valuable for me to get insight in people's thoughts about various beliefs to use for modding and just for general interest. So it goes like this: Rate each belief, starting in this thread with the Pantheon beliefs, on a scale from 0 to 5 by copying list from this post and applying number before each belief:

3 - Dance of the Aurora: Holy Site districts get +1 Faith from adjacent Tundra tiles

Give votes between 0 and 5, where 1 is worst and 5 is best, like this:
5 = Excellent
4 = Very good
3 = Good
2 = Decent
1 = Poor
0 = Bad or Very Bad

When voting, please take into account both the potential strength of the belief, but also how situational it is. By this I mean, if a belief is potentially very strong, but requires a set of very specific and rare) circumstances to line up for it to work, try to balance these two factors in your vote. I know that there will always be an element of subjectivity also, and that's perfectly fine.

The Pantheon beliefs are:
_ - Dance of the Aurora: Holy Site districts get +1 Faith from adjacent Tundra tiles.
_ - Sacred Path: Holy Site districts get +1 Faith from adjacent Rainforest tiles.
_ - Monument of the Gods: +15% Production to Ancient and Classical era Wonders.
_ - Lady of the Reeds and Marshes: +1 Production from Marsh, Oasis, and Floodplains.
_ - God of the Open Sky: +1 Culture from Pastures.
_ - Desert Folklore: Holy Site districts get +1 Faith from adjacent Desert tiles.
_ - River Goddess: +1 Amenity to cities if they have a Holy Site district adjacent to a River.
_ - Divine Spark: +1 Great Person point from Holy Site (Prophet), Campus (Scientist), and Theater Square (Writer) districts.
_ - God of the Sea: +1 Production from Fishing Boats.
_ - Goddess of the Hunt: +1 Food from Camps.
_ - Fertility Rites: City growth rate is 10% higher.
_ - Religious Idols: +1 Faith from Mines over Luxury and Bonus resources.
_ - God of the Craftsmen: +1 Production from Mines over Strategic resources.
_ - Goddess of Festivals: +1 Food from Wine, Incense, Cocoa, Tobacco, Coffee, and Tea Plantations.
_ - Oral Tradition: +1 Culture from Banana, Citrus, Cotton, Dyes, Silk, Spices, and Sugar Plantations.
_ - God of the Forge: +25% Production toward Ancient and Classical military units.
_ - Initiation Rites: +50 Faith for each Barbarian Outpost cleared.
_ - God of Healing: Increases Healing by +30 in your Holy Site district, or any adjacent tiles.
_ - Religious Settlements: Border expansion rate is 15% faster.
_ - Goddess of the Harvest: Harvesting a resource or removing a feature receives Faith equal to the other yield's quantity.
_ - Stone Circles: +2 Faith from Quarries.
_ - God of War: Bonus Faith equal to 50% of the strength of each enemy unit killed within 8 tiles of a Holy Site district you own.

That's a tough one, as so many of these Pantheons are very situational (Sacred Path, Dance of the Aurora, God of the Sea, Goddess of the Hunt & Stone Circles being the most obvious examples). I'd definitely give God of Healing, God of the Forge & Monument of the Gods about a 4-5. Whereas I'd give God of War, Initiation Rites & Divine Spark closer to a 3-4. None of the above I'd rate below 3, unless you ended up taking one that was entirely inappropriate to your circumstances.....but that isn't the fault of the Pantheons themselves.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

The best pantheons are God of the Forge, God of the Open Sky, and Goddess of Festivals. God of the Sea or Lady of the Reeds and Marshes can be amazing on the right maps. All others are garbage.

Wow, you think Faith is a weak currency? I've purchased more Great People with Faith than I ever have with gold, & some of those religious buildings you can get-if you found a religion-are well worth purchasing with faith too. Likewise, if you find yourself with Jesuit Education, then so much the Better.

 

[kaspergm]

Goddess of the Harvest: (Since this bonus applies to marshes, forests and rainforests , too )

I actually didn't realize this also applied to features. That certainly makes this belief much more viable. I always considered it utterly crap.

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

That's a simple calculation ? Are you a Professor at MIT ?? It's a BAD Pantheon ! I'm from the UK and I have one 'O' level ! WTH ???

It is not that difficult as we have only 150 turns to work with make it easy to tell us the value of other partheons. Let say we can pick a partheons from the start and we can work all these resources from the start. If we pick one that give us 1 faith per turn for a few specific resources and we will get at minimum 150 faith per resource and if we pick stone circle we get atleast 300 faith per stone.

But these are very generous numbers because you wont get a partheon at turn one.

The value of harvest increase lineary with your most completed tech tree (science or civic). If you have completed one of the tech trees harvest will give 10 times as much as they would with no tech completed at all.

With a tech tree completed you will get 200 production from forest, 100 food and 100 production from jungle. Bonus resources give a total yield of 250 resources or 500 if it is gold because the game generally consider gold to be worth half as much as other resources.

Godess of Harvest give 1 faith per harvest yield. So a 200 production forest harvest will give 200 faith.

So one forest harvest will give you more faith per resources than a 1 faith per turn per resources pantheon and stone circle is beaten by 2 forest harvest.

 

[Onii-chan]

Dance of the Aurora - Situationally very strong, great synergy with Russia in particular. Quite rare to have a good enough tundra start to want to keep playing otherwise so you rarely find yourself wanting it

Sacred Path - Can kind of synergize nicely with Brazil for some absurd faith adjacency bonuses early on. Other than that I'd never pick it

Monument of the Gods - Sounds cute in theory but I never find myself picking this up. There are just better alternatives in basically any situation

Lady of the Reeds and Marshes - If you get a flood plains start (or in the rare case of one with lots of marshes) then this is super strong. Very situational but can be quite potent

God of the Open Sky - Probably the best resource-based Pantheon in the game. This can more than double your culture output in the early game. Probably the 2nd best in the game to me

Desert Folklore - Similar to Dance of the Aurora in that it requires a somehow good desert-based start. I guess now with Nubia there is at least one civ which can make some sort of extra use out of desert but still not much. Could be strong in theory but it's very unlikely for such a situation to arise

River Goddess - Completely useless; you don't want Holy Sites next to rivers in the first place

Divine Spark - This is like the obvious pick in every single game unless you have a particular resource-based one which seems very potent based on your start. By far the most versatile Pantheon in the game and the most generally strong one, and thus my pick for the best in the game overall

God of the Sea - On an Island Plates map for example this can stack up quite a lot of bonus production for your cities throughout the game. Now with Norway's new Stave Church bonus it could combo even further

Goddess of the Hunt - Pretty sure I've never ever taken this

Fertility Rites - Always useful but it's not a huge bonus. I guess it you're playing in like a 12-player game and your Pantheon is late so most of the stuff you would've wanted is gone already then this is an acceptable last resort pickup

Religious Idols - This is such a tiny boost I don't even know what to say. Absolute garbage

God of the Craftsmen - Same problem as above. I mean really how many mines over strategic/luxury resources respectively do you think you'll have? This gives basically nothing unless you have the most skewed resource distribution in your starting area ever

Goddess of Festivals - If you happen to spawn with an absurd amount of these particular resources it's a solid pickup, though still not a great one

Oral Tradition - Same as above, except this one gives early culture instead of food, which is a much more important yield since it can more than double your culture output early on (same as God of the Open Sky). Probably the third best Pantheon in the game to me

God of the Forge - Okay so if you want to super try-hard and face-rush your neighbour then I guess this is very strong. However, that's also super boring to me and I don't like playing like that. In multiplayer this is probably very powerful I'd reckon but I just don't care about this bonus since it's no fun to me. But in theory it's extremely strong still

Initiation Rites - Even if your farming barb camps with Sumeria, this still doesn't seem worth it. I can't see a situation where you'd ever pick this up

God of Healing - I guess you could use this to hold the line alongside an encampment for a defensive war... but you can't plan for that so early on. Seems way too niche to be a viable pickup; not sure when you'd ever choose this

Religious Settlements - This is honestly better than it sounds given how slow border expansion is in Civ 6. This effectively gives you 15% more gold as that's what you'd otherwise spend to buy these tiles. So it's decent, but kind of like Fertility Rites it's more of a last resort pick

Goddess of the Harvest - Pretty sure I've never picked this because it sounds really stupid and pretty useless. I recall hearing that this was actually OP before because of some bug which made it provide like hundreds of faith per chop or something but I hope that's been fixed by now if so because that clearly can't be intentional

Stone Circles - I wouldn't say this is super strong in theory, but it's quite common to end up with like 3-4 stone in your first city or two (I've even had 6+ a couple times) so for that reason the amount of faith this can give early on is quite extraordinary. Mostly useful thanks to how common stone is a resource rather than the ability itself, but either way it can be quite good

God of War - Maybe with raging barbarians on this could be okay. Otherwise I don't see how this could ever be very useful

 

[KayAU]

Right, I'll give it a go, although I find it somewhat difficult to give a general assessment when so many beliefs are highly situational, and the civs themselves also differ greatly. I'll try to give scores based on how clearly I can imagine a situation where the pantheon is useful, and how useful it would be. My comments are in bold.

By the way, as the value of the pantheons also might vary depending on game settings: I normally play on Epic speed, Small or Tiny maps, always single player, usually King difficulty. I tend to go for Science or Cultural victory.

2 - Dance of the Aurora: Holy Site districts get +1 Faith from adjacent Tundra tiles. Great as Russia, maybe okay if you are settling on the edge of the tundra.
1 - Sacred Path: Holy Site districts get +1 Faith from adjacent Rainforest tiles. Unlike tundra, the jungle will usually get chopped down. Perhaps Brazil or Kongo can make use of it.
0 - Monument of the Gods: +15% Production to Ancient and Classical era Wonders. Too tiny a bonus (saves 13% production time), too limited applicability.
3 - Lady of the Reeds and Marshes: +1 Production from Marsh, Oasis, and Floodplains. Good on terrain with loads of floodplains, where you will probably sorely need the production.
4 - God of the Open Sky: +1 Culture from Pastures. Early game culture is very important, and you will probably have quite a few pastures early on.
1 - Desert Folklore: Holy Site districts get +1 Faith from adjacent Desert tiles. Deserts are arguably worse than tundra, and less frequent. No synergy with Russia.
1 - River Goddess: +1 Amenity to cities if they have a Holy Site district adjacent to a River. Amenities are important, but the requirement of a Holy Site on a river breaks this one.
5 - Divine Spark: +1 Great Person point from Holy Site (Prophet), Campus (Scientist), and Theater Square (Writer) districts. I love GP, and this is a nice boost, especially in the beginning, but throughout the game as well.
2 - God of the Sea: +1 Production from Fishing Boats. On the right map, with a coastal civ, this is not bad, but the bonus will rarely be that great. Good synergy with Norway now, perhaps.
1 - Goddess of the Hunt: +1 Food from Camps. A tiny amount of food in most situations. Better than nothing.
2 - Fertility Rites: City growth rate is 10% higher. It's nice to grow faster, but this won't amount to much. Perhaps a bit better now that walls give more housing, or if you are Kongo or Australia.
0 - Religious Idols: +1 Faith from Mines over Luxury and Bonus resources. Too small a bonus for too few tiles.
0 - God of the Craftsmen: +1 Production from Mines over Strategic resources. Small bonus for even fewer tiles. Mineable strategic resources appear too late.
1 - Goddess of Festivals: +1 Food from Wine, Incense, Cocoa, Tobacco, Coffee, and Tea Plantations. Useful in some situations, but not a major bonus.
3 - Oral Tradition: +1 Culture from Banana, Citrus, Cotton, Dyes, Silk, Spices, and Sugar Plantations. Potential source for early culture. Plantations not as good as pastures.
1 - God of the Forge: +25% Production toward Ancient and Classical military units. Not a significant enough saving (20% off production time), and limited to the early game.
0 - Initiation Rites: +50 Faith for each Barbarian Outpost cleared. This will rarely amount to much faith.
0 - God of Healing: Increases Healing by +30 in your Holy Site district, or any adjacent tiles. I can see a specific strategy where you make use of this, but it is not a very good one.
0 - Religious Settlements: Border expansion rate is 15% faster. For the instances when you need to get tiles quicker, buy with gold.
1 - Goddess of the Harvest: Harvesting a resource or removing a feature receives Faith equal to the other yield's quantity. Too little faith to be worthwhile, at least on longer game speeds.
1 - Stone Circles: +2 Faith from Quarries. Even if you have bunch of quarries, this will not amount to that much.
0 - God of War: Bonus Faith equal to 50% of the strength of each enemy unit killed within 8 tiles of a Holy Site district you own. Small amounts of faith in a specific sitation.

 

[PMac67]

You can just do a simple calculation, you start a map, count (forest+rainforest+marsh)*200+ bonus resource*250+ crab and copper*500(Since they yield double when being harvested). This is the amount of extra faith God of Harvest gives you.

For me, usually I think this is about 100,000, consider 150 is a typical number of turns for a game, this pathenon gives me a little more than 500 extra faith/turn. (Which is about a dozen times as other pathenons.) Even the Kongo relic bug (fixed now) which gives 1,452 faith/turn do not produce that much unless you get 5 relics before T75.

Apologies for my earlier response Lily ! Rather rude of me ... It's not your fault I'm poor at Mathematics

Just had a big bowl of humble pie for breakfast cos this Pantheon is actually quite useful early game ! 4 harvests to get a GP is pretty awesome ! Not sure how well it scales? but Pantheons are primarily for early game advantages they all fizzle out over time... Yes, Much more powerful than I first thought and you don't need to pursue a religious game... Harvesting is as natural as breathing... in my last game I had only 14 Pastures in 20 cities, While I still maintain that early culture boost from pastures is extremely critical, maybe harvesting a few cultural GPs would maybe be even more optimal than acquiring pastures over a long period of time !

 

[Amrunril]

You can just do a simple calculation, you start a map, count (forest+rainforest+marsh)*200+ bonus resource*250+ crab and copper*500(Since they yield double when being harvested). This is the amount of extra faith God of Harvest gives you.

For me, usually I think this is about 100,000, consider 150 is a typical number of turns for a game, this pathenon gives me a little more than 500 extra faith/turn. (Which is about a dozen times as other pathenons.) Even the Kongo relic bug (fixed now) which gives 1,452 faith/turn do not produce that much unless you get 5 relics before T75.

If it applies to forests, rainforests and marshes instead of just resources (as the description says), that makes it significantly better than I thought. I'm still skeptical, though, that it's quite as good as you say. 100,000 faith would mean harvesting 200-500 tiles at the rates you listed, and that seems like quite a stretch. And early in the game, when faith can have the biggest snowball effect, you don't get nearly as much per resource.

I'll also add that your reasoning seems to be more or less exclusively based on trying to win deity as quickly as possible. That's certainly one valid metric for evaluating things, but it's not the only one, and things can be quite a bit different outside those specific, somewhat idiosyncratic, circumstances (I strongly doubt, for instance,that it's possible to win the game in anything like 150 turns without taking the deity AI's free/improved cities and settlers and using them to win faster).

 

[Vahnstad]

In the beginning (and civ 5) i often took Fertility Rites or Religious Settlements, when I didn't understand them. The last three times I played I took: Dance of the Aurora, Goddess of Festivals (or Oral Tradition) and now probably Goddess of the Hunt or God of the Open Sky. I just tend to look to what tile/resource I have a lot of, and don't try to think a lot about it, since they're not that important.

Now, it's quite helpful to read more about it. Next time, i will deliberate my choice more.

 

[DizzKneeLand33]

One point that is getting lost a bit is that it also matters *when* you get the faith -- sometimes frontloaded faith is worth more than having a bunch on the back end. So, it's not just that Stone Circles (for example) gives 2 faith per stone -- that's not a lot. But, if you have 3-4 sets of stone in the early game that is immediately workable, it sometimes matters more than a whole bunch of faith further down the road.

That's one of the things I like about God of War vs an aggressive AI (apparently pre-patch lol). The faith scales throughout the eras.

But, as many above have said, it is truly situational, which is why it would be impossible to fill out a list. No one answer is correct, other than counting out the bad ones.

 

[UWHabs]

If it applies to forests, rainforests and marshes instead of just resources (as the description says), that makes it significantly better than I thought. I'm still skeptical, though, that it's quite as good as you say. 100,000 faith would mean harvesting 200-500 tiles at the rates you listed, and that seems like quite a stretch. And early in the game, when faith can have the biggest snowball effect, you don't get nearly as much per resource.

I'll also add that your reasoning seems to be more or less exclusively based on trying to win deity as quickly as possible. That's certainly one valid metric for evaluating things, but it's not the only one, and things can be quite a bit different outside those specific, somewhat idiosyncratic, circumstances (I strongly doubt, for instance,that it's possible to win the game in anything like 150 turns without taking the deity AI's free/improved cities and settlers and using them to win faster).

It definitely applies to features like marsh, rainforest, or regular forests, and yeah, the once or twice I've gotten a pantheon early enough, it can really give you a lot.

For example, if we take this 150 turn "typical" game, and say you have 4 quarries from turn 1 with stone circles. That will yield 4 x 2 x 150 = 1200 faith. But when you complete the tech tree, every chop yields 200 faith, so you only need to chop 6 forests at the end of the game to get the same amount of faith. Even early game, by the time you actually need to use the faith, a chop is probably worth around 60. So, if you compare harvest to stone circles, for every early game 60 faith chop, that's working a stone tile for 30 turns.

And in my current game, for example, I chose stone circles because I have 3-4 stone resources near my cities, so I figured it would give a decent faith boost early to build off of. But even working them, I'm only getting a little bit of faith that it's probably going to take me forever to actually generate enough to use it. And since I'm not really going to end up with a lot of other faith sources when all is said and done, honestly, it's going to be virtually worthless for me overall. Yeah, more valuable than 50 per barb camp cleared, but probably would have been better even to just grab one of the ones that would give me +1 culture per banana and then hope that I later found a spot to get a few extra from that. The best would have been +1 from fishing boats since I discovered some island spots to settle, but yeah, the more I look, the less and less I like just the small faith boost per tile.

 

[PMac67]

OK... So I have misunderstood the faith yield thinking it's a flat 200 faith for a chop or a harvest... I take it all back... This is not that great now...

 

[EpicWestern]

For me, usually I think this is about 100,000, consider 150 is a typical number of turns for a game, this pathenon gives me a little more than 500 extra faith/turn.

I'm sorry but your numbers are completely bogus.

 

[UWHabs]

I'm sorry but you're numbers are completely bogus.

Yeah, those numbers are definitely not right, unless if you essentially don't chop anything until you finish the tech tree, and then use your army of 300 workers to plow the entire world.

The pantheon is especially good when you have cities whose borders have expanded to crab tiles which you can't even use. You can still harvest those for 400+ gold, and then gain 400+ faith at the same time.

 

[EpicWestern]

Yeah, those numbers are definitely not right, unless if you essentially don't chop anything until you finish the tech tree, and then use your army of 300 workers to plow the entire world.

Right, in which case you aren't winning in anywhere near 150 turns (not that that would be typical anyway).

 

[Abraxis]

I just want to mention for a moment the value of God of Healing, since it seems as though no one here values it at all because they can't imagine how to make it work for their military.
It's not for your military.
The religious combat game, unlike martial combat, is not very dynamic at all. You have two or three units and that's it, they are a more active way to exert religious pressure. There's really only two things you can do to increase their effectiveness, get more piety (more), and get more out of your piety (better). God of healing is kind of like cheating this system.

It makes them almost immortal on defense, giving you safe places to stick them (kind of like the religious equivalent of forts) where they can out-heal any assault. Most importantly it means less downtime between religious attacks on others as you can heal your religious army in just one or two turns instead of having to wait four or five turns like everyone else. This increases the frequency of your assaults, easily doubling their up-time, allowing a relatively small religious force to exert pressure of someone with twice as much faith production for units to throw around.

 

[Lily_Lancer]

I'm sorry but your numbers are completely bogus.

A little explanation.
1:As for my Gotm experience, the turn numbers are 155,175,133,163,118,average= 149, so 150 is a good approximation for a typical game. (In fact, since god of harvest is the most popular pathenon, I never had chance to choose it. With this pathenon I can finish more than 10 turns earlier, so the actual number is ~140, 150 is a very conservative approximation.)
2: Considering you may not researched all techs when harvesting, you actually get ~75,000 faith instead of 100,000. In fact, this number varies by map. On a wet map you certainly can get more than 100,000, while on a dry map you may be only getting 50,000.

3: So this pathenon gives a little more than 500 extra faith/turn in average.

 

[Karmah]

A little explanation.
1:As for my Gotm experience, the turn numbers are 155,175,133,163,118,average= 149, so 150 is a good approximation for a typical game. (In fact, since god of harvest is the most popular pathenon, I never had chance to choose it. With this pathenon I can finish more than 10 turns earlier, so the actual number is ~140, 150 is a very conservative approximation.)
2: Considering you may not researched all techs when harvesting, you actually get ~75,000 faith instead of 100,000. In fact, this number varies by map. On a wet map you certainly can get more than 100,000, while on a dry map you may be only getting 50,000.

3: So this pathenon gives a little more than 500 extra faith/turn in average.

I Still don't understand how you get so many workers to spare. Gare to enlighten me and I may be sold.

 

[stinkubus]

The likelihood that the AI snatches the pantheon before you get the chance should be factored in, imo, and in my experience the harvest pantheon is always one of the first taken. Also God of the Forge and the faith adjacency pantheons. The others the AI doesn't seem to have much interest in.