I should lead with a caveat that I might be speaking from some profound in experience here but... polytheism seems much stronger than shamanism.
I wonder if I am misunderstanding what "attached Territory" for calculating the faith of polytheistic Faith generation because it seemed like it was being generated by all outposts not all attached Territories.
Is this correct? Is polytheism just much stronger?
It all depends on how quickly you want your religion to spread. If you have a city with 3 attached territories when it pops up that is 15 faith from polytheism which is great to get you going. However, shamanism later once you have several cities is better and your religion will get better as the game goes forward. Admittedly as you gain new cities and territories polytheism also grows, it just depends on how big in population you think your cities will be and how quickly.
What I'm a bit disappointed with are the tenets... still just 1 or 2 per tier that are must have, and the rest are not attractive.
I won't agree here. They are situational and I almost picked all of them in different games. Sure, as a pacifist you won't pick the warmongering tenets, but that doesn't mean they aren't useful.
It all depends on how quickly you want your religion to spread. If you have a city with 3 attached territories when it pops up that is 15 faith from polytheism which is great to get you going. However, shamanism later once you have several cities is better and your religion will get better as the game goes forward. Admittedly as you gain new cities and territories polytheism also grows, it just depends on how big in population you think your cities will be and how quickly.
Shamanism seems fine if you can get a chance to get the population up, but I have found it very hard on a Normal sized map to get breathing room to do so.
It seems Shamanism just dies on the vine for me. No chance to get it going even if you rush out a stone circle. I was way behind from having done that, and the neighbors' Polytheism still just overran me like I hadn't even picked a faith. When I pick Polytheism, the reverse seems to happen, even on the hardest difficulty level if any AIs picked Shamanism I get a big faith boost when my Polytheism runs over it like a truck.
The issue is that early faith is monumentally more important than long-term faith. In the long term, you will get more out of faith per population than faith per territories, but the time you need faith the most is early on when you want to out-perform your neighbors and get early tenant picks. The faith-per-pop can be nice for those edge cases where you get some other bonus per faith, but it takes a lot of planning and luck to get that far.
Shamanism is still fun for roleplay flavor. I pick it sometimes. I don't believe there's a point in trying to re-balance this choice, because faith in general needs to be reworked and number changes will not make for more meaningful choices within the current system.
Updated 3 years ago.
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It depends on the map. If extremely crowded by neighbors, I may take Polytheism to keep my religion from getting overrun.
However, I have had my religion disappear during late-game with Polytheism, but I have never lost a late game religion battle with Shamanism.
*shrug*
I tend to burn my early neighbor civs to the ground, so I almost always take Shamanism now.
IMHO, I've lost more late game religious confrontations than early ones, but this is undoubtedly a function of my map settings (Huge, 8 players, 600 turns).
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