Want 16 religions per map instead of 7? Introducing Religion Expanded - a mod that adds 41 new beliefs, including 7 new fully-rendered buildings.

Okay, so point by point here:

For some reason I'm really put off by beliefs/pantheons/buildings that reference gods/demons by name

Okay, to each his own. I like them quite a bit.

Also, these are some damn OP beliefs. There are a lot of beliefs in the game already that are really, really bad. With these, the contrast would be much, much worse.

I'm happy to revisit any beliefs that are considered OP, but I disagree that just because the game includes lousy beliefs that any new beliefs should also suck.

I think the poseidonium and sarapeum are a little overpowered. Given how many sarapeums a player could build, it would quickly make you absolutely dominant with envoys. I could easily build 6-7 of them before the industrial era and that's a ton of envoy points.

I actually just added a little catch - the Serapeum now requires at least one other district in the city for the points to start accruing. I disagree that it is overpowered in concept though - a 3rd tier religious building requires a substantial investment of time and production to get. Holy Sites are weak districts, and these buildings demand you build them and fully develop them before you can use them. In exchange for this 1 Envoy point per turn, you have also given up more immediate benefits of other religious buildings, like food, gold, culture, science, etc.

Then compare the poseidonium to the minervium: minervium is base yield of 3 faith and extra gold for adjacency bonus of the tile. Unless you have natural wonders, that's at MOST 6, and thats when its locked in by mountains. Poseidonium only requires 3 sea resources to equal the gold output with the adition of 3 extra faith. Poseidonium is way better than minervium. Each is situational but poseidonium's upper bound is way too high.

So my description was wrong and has been corrected: the Poseidonium adds +1 faith and +1 food to boats, not +2 gold. But I know your point will then shift to it being stronger than the other food building. To that, I say that building yields require no citizen to 'work' the building. They are automatic and happen every turn. The Poseidonium offers better potential yields than some other religious buildings, yes, but it is HIGHLY situational AND requires the investment of a builder to improve the boats, and citizens to work the boats. It's not as black-and-white as you are making it out to be, I think.

I think some of your pantheons are also kind of powerful. You have a lot that give bonuses to features or land types rather than resources, the dryads and nerieds ones are a little too powerful imo.

Gold is the weakest resource in the game. Choosing the Forest pantheon requires you to make a choice to keep forests around instead of cutting them for extra production or developing the tiles as districts. The Coastal pantheon (Nereids) is highly situational, so I think the yield is appropriate.

sacred ships seems to interfere with Indonesia's UA as well, since they overlap. I don't see any problem with this. Plenty of leader and civ UA's overlap with base game abilities. The vanilla religious belief Burial Grounds (culture bomb from Holy Sites) directly overlaps with Jayavarman's UA.

All world wonders provide +8 gold also seems a little crazy. "Seems?" Again, it requires a gamble and an investment in wonder building (of which only so many are worth your time in any given scenario).

"Witch Trials" ...this one is actually just horrific and I wouldn't want to take it just by the name. Uh, ok.

All in all, I know you haven't explored the mod in game, but that has caused you to make hasty judgments on what you're reading in descriptions. I think you fail to consider that every belief has an opportunity cost of another belief, many are situational, and that developing religion to the point of being able to have many copies of your 3rd building is an enormous investment on the player's part. Every Holy Site built represents another more useful district you gave up.

/r/civ Thread Parent Link - steamcommunity.com