Voidsinger discussion

[Brutus2]

My initial impression is that the Voidsinger Society is very powerful and in some ways makes Holy Sites almost unnecessary unless you are really going for a Religion Victory and need to make lots of religious units but Faith income is so important for a lot of things outside Religion.

Old God Monument replaces a building that you were likely going to build in nearly every city with any civ anyway and gives +4 Faith and a relic slot. If you are going wide, this gives lots of Faith to buy a Great Prophet and/or buy Settlers, Builders and Traders during a Monumentality Golden Age, then save up again to eventually buy Cultists and maybe Rock Bands, Naturalists or Great People too.

Once you reach Industrial Era and can start buying Cultists you have a quick, reliable and repeatable source of relics and plenty of slots to put them in. This is much easier than trying to get relics from Apostles and needing a wonder or city state to guarantee Martyr promotion because even then, the Apostle has to die in combat to get the relic which means you are depending on the AI to kill your Apostles. The cultist on the other hand gives a relic as soon as they use their last charge with much less effort to get them. If that is not enough already, using those charges helps you to peacefully flip cities to your side.

In a wide empire you can very quickly have tons of relics. Found a religion with Reliquaries and you are getting triple Faith and Tourism from each of those relics. You really don't even need to build Holy Sites aside from maybe one to found a religion (or none if you found with Stonehenge) or maybe to get a couple Apostles to finish your religion. If you have any other Faith income from pantheon, city states, Triangular Trade or improvements you really don't need extra Holy Sites.

Initially I thought Cultist would not be great at flipping cities because any decent size city would quickly return to full loyalty but after trying it, I was wrong. Send three cultists at any city and you can reduce the city by -30 loyalty per turn for several turns. You can move nearly any city to a Free City and then move your units in to capture the city without ever declaring war and no diplomatic consequences. I suppose you could also use a spy to help but honestly, the city likely will flip before the spy even completes his mission.

All of this was without ever using the final Voidsinger promotion that increases the loyalty reduction strength of the cultist even further and just to thrown in another added bonus, the Medieval Era promotion converts some Faith into Science and Culture.

Each of the Secret Societies seem good and I haven't had a chance to test the others yet but Voidsingers seem very powerful. What do you think?

 

[Red Adept]

In theory they sound great. In practice, running Eleanor and the Voidsingers was a bit of a slog.

I had been banking my faith just to spend on cultists when they opened up. I had Dido to my west who was also of the Void and tried to flip a city of hers. I noticed "Loyalty isn't changing" (as opposed to "Full Loyalty" or a "Full Loyalty/revolt in X turns") so I ended up going after Saladin who was south of me. As each Cultist removed 10% loyalty per charge, it took six cultists two turns to flip a city as it gained 11 back per turn. That's not including the soothsayers that were just hanging out around a city limiting my cultist coverage. I was doing this all in peacetime with open borders. I didn't want to get into a war as Saladin had a couple of Vampires running around my border.

I ended up with sooo many relics just from the Cultists... The city flipping wasn't as quick and painless as I'd hoped.

 

[playshogi]

The real power of Voidsingers is the the medieval belief which provides 20% bonus of faith to gold, culture and science. So, you want to build Holy Sites in every city. My Russia game I had 200 faith per turn at the beginning of the medieval, so you do the math to see how powerful that is compared to any other SS's medieval belief. By the industrial, the game should be largely won if you got that far, so cultists are irrelevant for winning, but may be fun to play around with.

 

[Brutus2]

In theory they sound great. In practice, running Eleanor and the Voidsingers was a bit of a slog.

I had been banking my faith just to spend on cultists when they opened up. I had Dido to my west who was also of the Void and tried to flip a city of hers. I noticed "Loyalty isn't changing" (as opposed to "Full Loyalty" or a "Full Loyalty/revolt in X turns") so I ended up going after Saladin who was south of me. As each Cultist removed 10% loyalty per charge, it took six cultists two turns to flip a city as it gained 11 back per turn. That's not including the soothsayers that were just hanging out around a city limiting my cultist coverage. I was doing this all in peacetime with open borders. I didn't want to get into a war as Saladin had a couple of Vampires running around my border.

I ended up with sooo many relics just from the Cultists... The city flipping wasn't as quick and painless as I'd hoped.

Dido has a special ability that locks some cities at 100% Loyalty so you can't flip those cities. I've been able to flip most cities with 3-4 Cultists but again, I think the Relics are the best part and the city flip is a very nice bonus when you pull it off.

 

[Solver]

It's a toss-up between Owls and Voidsingers as the best society in my experience.

The Voidsingers aren't powerful because of Relics. Cultist Relics take too long to get, and Relics aren't that great without additional tools like Reliquaries or being Khmer/Poland. But the Old God Monuments can hold any great work type, which makes normal cultural victories much easier. It becomes easier to have enough slots for all the works before you get Art Museums, and you can even use Great Musicians before having those Broadcast Centers! For Russia, this is crazy. But the most powerful Voidsinger ability, and the reason you definitely want Holy Sites, is the medieval tier that converts faith to other yields. Civs with a strong faith economy, like Russia, Japan, Mali or Ethiopia reap enormous benefits there.

The Cultists aren't that good. Yeah, fun, but you need too many to flip cities, and I'd rather spend the faith on something else. It's not like flipping one city puts you much closer to victory. Spend that faith on Apostles or Rock Bands instead for the corresponding victory types.

The Owls of Minerva are likewise awesome, they have a very early extra Economic policy slot. Possibly by the time you discover your first civic, certainly sometime in the Ancient. The Industrial-era Wildcard slot is also very helpful, so is the Atomic free gold, but the ability to have +1 economic slot for basically the entire game is amazing.

 

[monikernemo]

as pointed out the medieval era bonuses for void singers are really strong. If playing as ethiopia you get 35% of your faith turned into science and culture. Essentially the whole game just revolves spaming rock hewn churches and colossal heads (if la venta is present in yoru game)

 

[Equilin]

a bit off-topic but

The Owls of Minerva are likewise awesome, they have a very early extra Economic policy slot. Possibly by the time you discover your first civic, certainly sometime in the Ancient. The Industrial-era Wildcard slot is also very helpful, so is the Atomic free gold, but the ability to have +1 economic slot for basically the entire game is amazing.

I'd also add that the envoy on trade route is also very powerful, it allows for very early suzerainty (=diplo favor, on top of suz trait, levy opportunity, and envoy bonus)

 

[Vilvatiktan]

Eleanor + cultists = world domination

 

[JesseS]

Voidslingers are amazing with Ethiopia. Just a lot of synergy all around. The rock hewn churches and old god monuments provide a ton of faith, 35% of which turns into culture and science from faith to get to flight and rock bands. I was getting 500 science by turn 150 with just 2 campuses. The extra slot of the old god monument means you don’t need any art museums, and can just faith buy archaeological museums.

I think the cultists are basically irrelevant because you should have unlocked rock bands by then. The faith to tourism conversion is much better with rock bands than cultists, though I can see how spamming cultists towards the end of a relic game would be fun.

 

[Pfeffersack]

I have two issues with the Voidsingers (or more precisely with the Cultist unit):

1. The AI is not using them really effectively. I haven't seen them doing loyalty attacks with them at all, not to talk of actucally taking cities. Also they quite mindlessly send them to death during war times, when all relics are long distributed.

2. The decision to have them exist on the military unit layer. This means they can block tiles for units of other civs, e.g. here Alexanders cultists preventing my MP from railroding my own land:

Sure I can DoW on that civ and maybe the new iron rule will be "just never ally or befriend voidsinger civs", but is that really the intended gamepaly?

 

[MrRadar]

1. The AI is not using them really effectively. I haven't seen them doing loyalty attacks with them at all, not to talk of actucally taking cities.

The AI seems not using them at all, it has no idea what to do with them, apart from carpeting the map and being an a**hole with all that getting in the way business.

But even for human player they do add so much additional fuss with moving that carpet around. Perhaps it would be worth to make them ten times more expensive, increse loyalty reduction power to 40%, and attach massive grievance penalties for using them?
For there should be some repercussions for using them. Now you can just make your neighbours into allies, use them for wisselbanking while slowly eating them alive with some concerted spy and cultist effort, never letting them off the alliance leash.

 

[Uberfrog]

Loyalty currently doesn’t have an effect on relationships does it? Beyond “you settled too close!”

There should be increasingly severe negative relationship modifiers for a) causing negative loyalty pressure and then b) occupying a city that was flipped through a revolution.

If they get upset that you convert their cities, they should be fuming at you fomenting unrest.

 

[walkerjks]

The Voidsingers aren't powerful because of Relics. Cultist Relics take too long to get, and Relics aren't that great without additional tools like Reliquaries or being Khmer/Poland. But the Old God Monuments can hold any great work type, which makes normal cultural victories much easier. It becomes easier to have enough slots for all the works before you get Art Museums, and you can even use Great Musicians before having those Broadcast Centers! For Russia, this is crazy. But the most powerful Voidsinger ability, and the reason you definitely want Holy Sites, is the medieval tier that converts faith to other yields. Civs with a strong faith economy, like Russia, Japan, Mali or Ethiopia reap enormous benefits there.

This is my impression as well. Industrial-era benefits are rarely important in cultural games as you should be pretty much winning before that. Occasionally a high difficulty random opponents game will go long enough to take advantage of void singer relics. But the extra early slots are huge, huge, huge. And the 20% faith into science/culture isn't trivial (given the +4 faith/turn from monuments). Haven't done religion + void singers yet. Will eventually get around to a Mansa (desert) or Peter (tundra) or Pedro (jungle) religion + work ethic + scripture + void singers game. My earlier tests, religion + scripture + work ethic were fun (produciton galore!), but weren't as fast to cultural wins while avoiding religion. Void singers might change that a bit. You certainly don't need any campuses if you are generating huge faith in a few cities with void singers.

 

[kaspergm]

1. The AI is not using them really effectively. I haven't seen them doing loyalty attacks with them at all, not to talk of actucally taking cities. Also they quite mindlessly send them to death during war times, when all relics are long distributed.

The AI seems not using them at all, it has no idea what to do with them, apart from carpeting the map and being an a**hole with all that getting in the way business.

Now there's a big surprise.

Anyway, on a serious topic, the fact that they work in the military layer is both extremely annoying and quite illogical. Is it something that can be modded?

 

[Kwami]

Now there's a big surprise.

Anyway, on a serious topic, the fact that they work in the military layer is both extremely annoying and quite illogical. Is it something that can be modded?

Which layer would be better?

 

[Equilin]

Which layer would be better?

support layer (same as soothsayers etc.) sounds better imo

 

[Pfeffersack]

Which layer would be better?

Religious units? This would allow civil and military units to occupy the same tiles (and during war the military ones could destroy the same way like they can do it with enemy religious units). Of course that would move the problem to religious units getting blocked and it would allow a strategy of turtling cities behind a wall of cultists to avoid them getting converted. Best solution would be perhaps integrating the cultists somehow into the theological combat - or allow Inquisitors or Apostles with a certain promotion (maybe Convert Heathen, Debater, Chaplain or anew one?) to expend one of their loadings to remove cultists around them.

 

[UWHabs]

Religious units? This would allow civil and military units to occupy the same tiles (and during war the military ones could destroy the same way like they can do it with enemy religious units). Of course that would move the problem to religious units getting blocked and it would allow a strategy of turtling cities behind a wall of cultists to avoid them getting converted. Best solution would be perhaps integrating the cultists somehow into the theological combat - or allow Inquisitors or Apostles with a certain promotion (maybe Convert Heathen, Debater, Chaplain or anew one?) to expend one of their loadings to remove cultists around them.

Yeah, I think building them into the religious system would have made more sense. You'd probably have to tag them to a neutral religion somehow, but letting your inquisitors or apostles defeat invading cultists would also make some thematic sense too.

 

[iammaxhailme]

My problem with the voidsingers is that I"ve done multiple games and have never gotten an invite to them, even though I got to the other 3

 

[steveg700]

Religious units? This would allow civil and military units to occupy the same tiles (and during war the military ones could destroy the same way like they can do it with enemy religious units). Of course that would move the problem to religious units getting blocked and it would allow a strategy of turtling cities behind a wall of cultists to avoid them getting converted. Best solution would be perhaps integrating the cultists somehow into the theological combat - or allow Inquisitors or Apostles with a certain promotion (maybe Convert Heathen, Debater, Chaplain or anew one?) to expend one of their loadings to remove cultists around them.

Well, cultists on the religious layer could also be subject to theological combat. But then the AI would have to behave suitably when being attacked (i.e. retreating).

Honestly, all told, without some serious future rebalancing, I can't see secret societies being much more than a gag game mode. It's a faff, something to just indulge the brokenness for a bit before returning to the real game.