It depends on what strategies you're doing:
Religious Victory / Faith Purchasing:
- Desert Folklore
- Dance of the Aurora
- Religious Idols
- Sacred Path
- Stone Circles
These are all good if you're trying to spam religious units or buildings, the one you pick will depend on your circumstance.
Culture Victory / Science Victory / Securing Great People:
- Divine Spark: not necessarily great in the early game, but if you build enough campus' and theaters you can get more, or beat other players to, great people. Works well with Russia.
Improving Starting Location / Better Tile Yields:
- Lady of the Reeds and Marshes: if you get a desert start, or only have desert expansions available. Can really help new cities build Petra.
- God of the Sea: if you get a coastal start, can only expand along the coast, or don't have any immediate production tiles. Still not great.
- Goddess of the Hunt: I can really only recommend this one if you're playing Russia, if you're going to be expanding into tundra, +1 food on deer can really help (in addition to Russia's better tundra yields).
- Goddess of Festivals: good if you want some extra early food on tiles you wouldn't normally work.
- God of Craftsmen: the problem with this is that its ability is slow coming, your first bonus is at iron, then nitre, coal, aluminum, and uranium. Then depending on your tech path you could miss some of these bonuses until much later. Okay, but you need to plan around it to get the most out of it.
Faster Civics / Better Tile Yields (similar to above):
- God of the Open Sky: probably one of my favourite pantheons.
- Oral Tradition: depending on your starting location this can be better or worse than the above, the other problem with this is that these tiles don't necessarily get worked as often as pastures (because of little to no production).
When Nothing Else Suits You:
- River Goddess: whilst not terrible, there's two problems with this, river tiles are typically of premium value, and holy sites are of low priority (compared to other districts)
- Fertility Rites: whilst not as immediately impactful as some of the other improved tile yield pantheons, Fertility Rites with its faster growth rate means more citizens to work more tiles.
Terrible (I wouldn't use them):
- Monument to the Gods: though it could help you rush Stonehenge or the Hanging Gardens, the bonus itself is barely impactful, getting one of the production pantheons can generally lead to an early wonder faster.
- God of the Forge: currently bugged, if you take it everyone benefits from it. It could help you kill your neighbour, but its benefits wear off fairly quickly.
- Initiation Rites: could be useful with Sumeria and their UA, but other than that its impact over the course of the game is fairly minor.
- God of Healing: could help in a defensive war, but at this point if you have it and are using it, you're probably not going to win.
- God of War: bugged by the look of it, but in a good way, you seem to get bonus faith within range of any holy site. Better than Initiation Rites, but still not an amazing choice.
- Religious Settlements: you're better off just buying tiles, waiting, planting new cities, or building culture buildings.
- Goddess of the Harvest: despite saying resource and feature, it only seems to work on resources you can "harvest". You won't be doing this as often as you chop down trees.
Well, that's my opinion on them. You're welcome to your own.
