Realisation

[Redaxe]

I completely agree, Piety should be weaker if taken as starting tree, my gripe is with Tradition. I actually don't mind Piety opening in Ancient era, I regularly open Piety after the first couple of policies in Tradition/Liberty to get the production bonus to Shrines at the time I actually start building Shrines. Rather, one could argue that the AI should be programmed to not max out Piety straight away.

But then again, that's one of the dilemmas of which role the AI should play: Should it always play optimally, and should it sometimes play sub-optimally in order to challenge the player in a specific area? For instance, the fact that 1-2 AI players almost always max out Piety directly puts some pressure on the player if you want to target specific beliefs - for instance, getting Jesuit Education is rather rare because the AI will almost always get to it before you while you're busy filling out Tradition/Liberty, and I think that's fine. So basically those AIs sacrifice themselves to spice up gameplay for the human player, and I guess that's fine (as long as some of the other AI players play optimally).

Mmmm the other annoying seeing a civ get Jesuit Education and Cathedrals at 2000 BC. Hence the other reason why I favor Piety being delayed.

Usually I tend to ignore early Piety - if I get it it's usually to get Temples more quickly. Shrines can manage by themselves and on higher difficulties you generally need more than Shrines for a religion anyway

 

[Sclb]

Sometimes you can get piety to work if you get it immediately after liberty's free settler, but sometimes deity AI will still be able to choose all of the good stuff even then. You really need a faith generating NW or good pantheon dirt to get good stuff on deity. I prefer the AI before the patch, also a lot more aggressive.

 

[Redaxe]

Sometimes you can get piety to work if you get it immediately after liberty's free settler, but sometimes deity AI will still be able to choose all of the good stuff even then. You really need a faith generating NW or good pantheon dirt to get good stuff on deity. I prefer the AI before the patch, also a lot more aggressive.

I think to make a Piety game work (on Diety at least) you need the settler bonus. The strength of Piety and Religion is in playing wide (lots of cities cramped closely together). You really need a settler bonus to make this happen (unless you role a heavy production start)...

Well if you're on a Pangaea map you get a bonus in that you'll see all the civs quite early and you'll be able to view their social policies by looking in one of the Diplomatic Screens.

If 3 civs have gone full Piety - forget it - all the good reformations will be taken

If 2 civs have gone full Piety - Its dicey at best, usually Jesuit Education will be taken and either Sacred Sites or to the Glory of God. There are exceptions though... Sometimes they'll take something useless like Heathen Conversion

If only 1 civ has gone Piety then it can certainly be worthwhile

 

[kaspergm]

On difficulties up to and including Emperor, the AI seemed to never take To The Glory Of God before the last patch, after last patch they do occasionally take it, but still I can fairly reliably get it. TTGOG is extremely powerful coupled with Liberty and Piety, because you can get huge Faith output with many cities, and this will allow you to bypass Tradition and Rationalism and still get to buy Great Engineers and Great Scientists with faith. The fact that you can also buy Great Writers to rush a couple of the very tasty Order tennets (Worker's Faculties, Five Year Plan) is just icing on the cake. But I assume this strategy is hard to pull off at Diety.

 

[Redaxe]

Absolutely, the other thing you should mention is that as TTGOG doesn't kick until the Industrial era, there's generally no hurry to fill out Piety, so you can invest in better policy trees in the meantime.