Angkor Wat is definitely powerful but I think dedicating culture choices to it is unnecessary. Let me explain. Bold italics for tl;dr

My current understanding of religion is that it:

- Gives you access to some powerful emipre bonuses from tenets.

- Generates greviances on foreign territories so your wars can be more effective.

- In single player it also gives opinion bonuses with nations that have adopted your religion as their state religion (although I suspect this grants them the tenet benefits you chose, if not they can get them via some other mechanic).

This is mostly good and especially valuable early but faith itself is only useful for spreading pressure and really you don't need that much to be dominant. This is to say, late game investing in faith has virtually zero return beyond bonuses such as Angkor Wat.

Food is a much more useful resource but if you want lots of it, pick and agrcultural culture and it will give you more than Angkor Wat in all your cities not just the Angkot Wat city. Pick Polytheism (+5 faith per attached territory) and choose civics for a Tradtition government (+4 per territory) including Divine Mandate (+3 per territory) and Religious Hostility (+5 per territory). Then expand your capital as much as possible, 10-15 territories is readily do-able and even 20+ isn't much of a problem. All your Holy Sites in the city will add another 100. If you picked one of the many cultures with incidental +2, +3, or even +5 faith on their district then you can get Angkor Wat producing around 400 food without really any specialisation into faith.

There are posts on the forum about the diminishing returns of high food overflow which I wont repeat but it's safe to say as long as you aren't neglecting food and farmer's quarter completely, just doing what I've described is going to be more than enough and more food than that is just overkill really. Hence why I think specialising for it is unnecessary. You have to consider the opportunity cost. You lose a lot by choosing the Spanish or Indians over another culture.

I still think it's an excellent Wonder prescisely because you can get so much out of it without much extra investment.

Maybe there are more mechanics to faith than we know about yet (or maybe planned for DLC). It does seem somewhat over-represented in culture abilities for how impactful it is on the game in my opinion.

So strategy is shaping up into something like Celts (food and faith) -> Teutons (faith) -> Spanish (faith per pop) -> Russians (up to 30 faith from unique district) -> Indians (faith per pop). That seems to grow into interesting religious heavy sequence. I think i will try it in fullest in my next game just to see how high i can grow Angkor Wat's food production.

Unfortunately it still has to wait until I finish my current game, through i have Angkor Wat and i'm near last era, i just need to finish Exhibition halls in my newly settled city(i already moved to Indians as soon as i reached 7 stars in order to test how their EQ interacts with Angkor Wat, and it was glorious). So soon i will post screenshot with non optimized sequence of Egyptians - Celts - Norsemen - Venetians - French - Indians.

Iacs wrote:

So strategy is shaping up into something like Celts (food and faith) -> Teutons (faith) -> Spanish (faith per pop) -> Russians (up to 30 faith from unique district) -> Indians (faith per pop). That seems to grow into interesting religious heavy sequence. I think i will try it in fullest in my next game just to see how high i can grow Angkor Wat's food production.

Unfortunately it still has to wait until I finish my current game, through i have Angkor Wat and i'm near last era, i just need to finish Exhibition halls in my newly settled city(i already moved to Indians as soon as i reached 7 stars in order to test how their EQ interacts with Angkor Wat, and it was glorious). So soon i will post screenshot with non optimized sequence of Egyptians - Celts - Norsemen - Venetians - French - Indians.

I think a better sequence is to focus on per population bonuses

Celts (food and faith)..Food bonuses for big city

Khmer (production /pop)... if you have 10 Barrays in a city that's 10 production per pop [Get Angkor Wat]

Spanish (faith=food/pop)

Siam (money/pop)... at this point you can get the inherited land civic you can use the money to fuel attaching more territories onto you mega city.

India (more faith=food/pop to essentially ensure you can put as much pop as you like and you will never hit the max)

for a Giga India Angkor Wat (30 Indian EQ 10 Spanish EQ...70 food per population, in the Contemporary era with Infrastucture, that will support a population of 1000+ (700+ if you don't have enough slots for them)... ignoring all the other sources of faith and food that are not "per pop"

To actually get that many pop in the mega city [since pop growth tops out at ~1/turn] you will need feeder cities that produce cheap units that then disband in your megacity. [a good use for conquered cities, since merging cities is expensive.]

Yes, you can feed lesser city's population to capital, however that seems to be strategy that actually breaks my intention. Goal is to actually grow capital more or less naturally from faith.

Also - final turn screenshot

1804 food from Angkor Wat, 117 pop and 6 territories - unfortunately French are too good at science so i sped up through tech tree causing game to end bit early.

P.S. Next time i will go Babylonian - Celt -Teutons - Spanish - Russians - Indians. Lets see how high Angkor Wat would be.

Last turn of the game. Indians chosen, Ashram built, colony ship sent to Mars. Here is the end

11421 food from 260 pop city with 11 territories. This is Angkor Wat of Babylonians - Celts - Teutons - Spanish - Russian - Indians.

I think this experiment was successfull. Faith can feed you in Humankind.