Did we really get much of an improvement? Still missing a equivalent to the citadel of faith, reanimated is pretty cool but a separate civic, spiritualism still on the whole kinda sucks.
Maybe i missed something in the intervening months between June and today when you raised this thread from the dead. But it still seems that many of the outstanding issues still remain.
I didn't play it before, but my understanding is that the rebalance focused along the value of the sacrifice edicts. Instead of 'value for # of pops sacrificed', it is not a 'value for % of pops sacrificed,' which gives it a substantial early-game buff as a starting civic since instead of getting fewer gains for not sacrificing 40 pops of a 40 pop empire, you're getting value for sacrificing a large % of your empire. This should put you far closer at the upper ends of your economy boosts from early game sacrifices.
I'm not familiar with what the wiki describes as 'each sacrifice is +5 growth speed'- I assume 5%, but whether it's empire-wide or planet-specific is unclear. But- even if it is planet-specific- the buff offers a potentail early-game economy strategy.
-Take Expansion like a plebe
-Settle your initial colony worlds
-Build the death temples on them in the guaranteed slot
-Immediately conduct an empire-wide sacrifice on all three planets, choosing your mineral/energy output boost
-Sacrificing 3 pops out of about 40 will be the highest % of empire sacrificed you can get in the game
-Leave your death priest in place to reap more unity than 2 administrators of a size 10 colony.
-Close the Colonist/Sacrifice jobs. Pops 2-through-8-ish of your colony can work directly as district workers.
-Coast on the pop growth to replace the sacrifices in the early game.
-Rely on the empire-wide economic boost to your capital
The empire % bonus to energy/minerals is the biggest such boost you can get for these on your homeworld, which can't benefit from Planet Designations but is still your primary mineral/energy source for the early game. The shift to a more (if not absolute) sacrifice % calculation should give bigger values early. Depending on how big, these could easily outweigh the lost pop and offer a far stronger early-game economic base to support science/industrial districts than most empires can get, because most empires can only make either very limited or often ineffective tradeoffs to boost homeworld economic productivity.
