Pleasing the Gods

[Sarge]

How in the world do you build favor with the gods!?????

[Blum Entertainment]

Hello, Sarge

To gain the gods' favor, you must first unlock the Altar technology in your Technology Tree. To gain access to the Tech Tree, build the Sophist House.

When you gain the ability to build Altars, build one (or several of them) and then perform one of the rituals available in the panel of this building. Each ritual will provide you with a portion of the gods' favor points.

[Sarge]

Thank you very much!!

[yanosmith]

HI, first of all, idea of rituals is a good , but:
- lack of simple donation at the begining (gold, simple products) - it takes time to have scluptures, silver , etc... at the begining it should be more simple: meat, wheat, animal, olive, depend to God ofcourse. And points of care droping too fast..

[yanosmith]

And when you gain the ability to build altair, you have to serve for all goods, At he same time on the begining is imposible. and with short time the curse of god can stop your development,, to much impact.. And btw - god was created by people and priests.. so maybe upgreading sanctuary by decorations could make them also more happiest... small amount of points of favour but permanently.

[Blum Entertainment]

Hi, yanosmith, and thank you for your opinions on the Gods system. We're still trying to balance and improve it, so feedback like this is always welcome.

Remember that you can build several Altars and assign them to different Gods to slow down the decline in their happiness level. However, you still need to perform rituals to gain their favor.

[DeWell]

Recently started playing the game again, until I got stuck with 0 pop growth and a more or less stagnant production level. The Gods were basically unhappy with me from the start on. Why? Because I did not have the technology yet to please the Gods. That is not necessarily an issue, it makes the player feel an urgency for pleasing the Gods. The main issue I have is, as soon as you have 5 altars. 1 for each God. The rituals to perform are usually not available in the early game. making the player getting stuck with the Gods remaining to be unhappy.

As a suggestion: Add some flavour to the Gods favour. Maybe add missions/tasks to please the Gods. Like building a new winery next to a Lesche to please Dionysos. Build 2 hunting lodges next to eachother to please Artemis, or have your bow men to some tasks. Build something decorative next to some mines to please Hephaestus. Send your army to the arena for a public exercise to honour some gods. Maybe have events that lead to a challange that could please one or the other God. You could even make it kind of tricky for players: Have an event where you need to decide on multiple missions or have only a certain time frame to complete these. Each mission giving favour to another God, while not managing to complete the mission leading to loss of favour to a God.

I am really looking forward to the future of this game. I believe you can make something beautiful out of it,.

[Blum Entertainment]

Hi, DeWell

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on Faith system with us! As we mentioned above, we are still trying to improve and balance it, so your feedback will certainly be very useful to us. Probably soon we will announce a Patch, in which we will address the most pressing issues.

[Coconut]

not sure if it is a bug but I have a temple to Artemis ( who I thought was a female in Greek history) and Hephaestus. I give tribute to both, but Artemis angers a lot faster than Hephaestus. Still has points but I still get punished?

[JupitersGravity]

Some gods seem to lose honor points faster.

To devs:

The entire god system is annoying and doesn't add anything. You should be able to automatically give favor to them. Otherwise it becomes a very annoying frequent chore.

The honor point decline is far too rapid considering the cost they require for the sacrifices and for their related buildings.

Two of the gods provide military bonuses but the military aspect of the game is essentially non-existant. Suggest those gods favor bonuses be reworked or the military aspect becomes much more frequent.

[Blum Entertainment]

We are aware of problems with the balance and operation of the Faith system, and our team is already looking for a suitable solution to these issues. Nevertheless, we thank you for bringing this aspect to our attention and for your suggestions. More info on this topic coming soon!

[Tbonesteak]

I think it's a great feature but comes with 2 problems that I can see. Firstly, if you fall out of favour with the gods, it's almost impossible to regain that and enjoy doing so, because it involves a lot of work without experiencing any growth.

2nd is not something I've experienced yet, but judging by Civ 6, I can see this becoming rather tedious in late game. Civ 6, when you run out of things to build in late game you need to constantly get your cities to invest in 1 of 2 or 3 things (I forget) and that takes up more time than anything else. I can imagine spending so much time appeasing the gods that the game would lack much else to do. Again, I've not reached this stage so I could be quite wrong here.

Please don't get rid of this feature at all, it's not a common feature in games and definitely sets it apart from other very similar games such as the Anno series, in particular my favourite, 1503. Finding a balance and possibly a way to automate certain functions towards late game would be, in my view, of great benefit to the game and the player experience.

[Mr. Spock]

So far the gods mechanic is the area of the game that needs the most attention. It's brutal. I took it nice and slow and built as raging economy as I could before meeting the milestones to advance in the scenario but once the gods become active, you barely have enough time to research the tech to unlock the altars - which seemingly do very little to stem the hemorrhaging of favor that just drops like a stone. Often times you won't even have access to the resources needed to perform the basic festival in time. Basic festivals should require basic resources that are readily available. Perhaps even allow the player to choose what to sacrifice and in what quantities, to scale with favor earned.

Honestly, having to juggle the gods like this seems to be a needless thing to manage that doesn't bring joy in its current form. Make appeasing the gods more rewards based instead of punishment based - unlocking special things for sinking in the sacrificed resources or for a victory condition instead of just - doing it just to survive for another 5 minutes. Maybe some kind of less interactive and more passive based ways to generate favor, the more places of worship you build, the more satiated the gods are. Maybe make other things that you're already doing feed into the favor, like if you're city is already doing a lot of mining and bronze forging, make that a small bonus for Hephaestus for each operation up and running. Just anything that doesn't require me to send resources constantly down the drain every 3 minutes of real world time. It's just too much. Maybe I haven't played too far into it enough? It is really hard to see how much impact altars have. Is it based on population? Do the gods need 1 each or 4? And how do I afford to staff and build that many if I do?

Other areas of note: notifications need to be more - pronounced, like finishing a tech for example. Map overlays for resources, prices per unit for resources being bought/sold.

This game reminds me a lot more of Tropico than the ancient city builder games of the past. That's not a criticism. I love those games. Managing the gods should be like in Tropico how your little totalitarian island has to manage the "great powers". But right now we're facing lots of gods to appease all at once like in the old Pharaoh and Caesar games but with out a lot of ways to just stay out of their way, let alone make them happy. As I said earlier, once you've built altars, temples, and great temples, just those buildings existing in my city should be enough to stave off my destruction - getting more interesting incentives and rewards that we can see and build by doing the work of earning the gods favor would make the game more fun.

[Blum Entertainment]

Thank you for your input, everyone! We carefully examine each of your entries, which will certainly result in introducing specific changes and balance corrections to the Gods system. Making a long story short - we are working on an update in this regard 😉

[pjohn51]

The religious system is a joke. First of all, even after getting the tech tree, the hints guy never even says to go with the religion stuff (or the medical stuff) first so you get wiped out because, by the time you can get them, the Gods are attacking or the disease kills everyone. These techs should be, at the least, IMPORTANT in hints. Second, on the third run through ,I put up an altar for each God, but you don't even have access to the techs needed for 3 of the gods until you get to the point where you have the library. In the meantime, the Gods are attacking you. Then after the library, it still takes a lot of time to get to many of the mats because, you never had time to even finish the prerequisites in the first tech tier and you have to do those first. Even working fast, by the time I got to all the techs needed, and the significant amounts of mats for appeasement, the Gods shut down my businesses and stopped my population growth, so I couldn't get any more civilians. And, I could never feed them enough mats, with the time period between feedings, that I ever went beyond neutral with them so they still kept attacking me. This is not either fun or challenging; this system is seriously flawed!

[M0D_Chris]

My entire play-though has been rough with this god system as it is. This was the first time I have played since getting the game and I have gotten sick of barely being able to be at the level to unlock the tech tree and immediately having the gods loose all favor and smite me on everything I was trying to do before I had even unlocked the alters. Also I feel that there needs to be some kind of innate benefit to having the alters apart from slowing the loss of favor which as it is feels like it is way too fast. The other thing the two main ones that continually kill me are Aphrodite (for pop reproduction) and Hestia (Houses continually going to ruin) absolutely make every attempt after to even recover anything more than a true neutral point a impossible task. The game is fun and I love being able to have this mechanic but it is so aggressive that it makes the game close to unplayable if you end up at 0 favor and don't have any of the tech unlocked to be able to even attempt and recover from the two I have mentioned. If we have some kind of slider to adjust this feature for personal play-through or just a drastic reduction on how aggressive the penalties are for having 0 favor on gods you can't do anything for until later game. These are just my thoughts as in additon to playing with extra hints as it was my first full experience the lack of info on how the god system works and how to react and keep them happy needs a serious rework on the explanation page.