La Venta

Strategy guide

Colossal Heads pull Faith from adjacent Woods and Rainforest, and after Flight that faith also generates Tourism. Keep the jungle standing instead of chopping it, ring your cities with heads, and a green empire turns into both a faith engine now and a tourism engine later.

Best civs & plans

Brazil's rainforest adjacencies stack beautifully; also great for any culture plan that already preserves woods for appeal and national parks.

Envoy plan

La Venta belongs to players whose starts are wrapped in jungle and forest, and the envoy plan is simple: three envoys by the time your second or third builder is out, because every Colossal Head placed before Humanism has a long runway to pay off. The religious envoy tiers help the same plan, adding faith in the capital and Shrines at one envoy and Temples at three. Religious AI leaders will contest it, though less fiercely than Jerusalem or Yerevan, so four envoys is usually a safe margin through the medieval era. If your land is grassland and plains with little tree cover, one envoy for the Shrine faith is all it deserves, no matter how good the improvement looks on paper.

Value by era

The Colossal Head has a slow build-up with two distinct upgrades. In the ancient and classical eras each head is a steady faith tile that helps land a religion and pay for the first missionaries, and heads ringed by three or four woods or rainforest tiles outperform most early improvements. Humanism, a renaissance civic, raises the adjacency yield and is the first real spike, arriving just as Theater Squares make the civic reachable. The second and larger spike is Flight, when the faith from every head is mirrored as Tourism, converting a decade of religious investment into a cultural endgame. The bonus never fades, but heads built after Flight have less time to matter, so the improvement rewards early commitment more than most.

Pitfalls and how to protect it

The improvement fights your own builders. Chopping rainforest for a quick production burst destroys the adjacency every neighboring head relies on, and later placing Campuses and Holy Sites removes more trees. Decide early which tiles stay green and mark them, or the empire ends up with heads surrounded by farms. Snow tiles are off limits, and heads on tundra or desert with no tree neighbors are barely worth the builder charge. Do not overbuild them at the expense of mines and farms; a city still needs production and growth. Losing suzerainty keeps existing heads but stops new ones, so finish the planned set early. La Venta is seldom attacked, and its units are not worth levying; if it is captured, liberation is a low priority unless Flight is near.

Envoy bonuses

• 1 envoy+1 Faith in your capital and in each Shrine you own.
• 3 envoys+2 Faith in each Temple and each Consulate you own.
• 6 envoys+3 Faith in each worship building and each Chancery you own.

Envoy bonuses are shared by every city-state of the same type.

Other Religious city-states

• Armagh
• Chinguetti
• Jerusalem
• Kandy
• Nazca
• Vatican City
• Yerevan

Related guides

• City-States and Envoys: Where Your Influence Should GoWhere envoys come from, how to spend the first handful, which city-state types match each victory plan, how to win and keep suzerainty against the AI, and when conquering a city-state is the right call.Last reviewed: 2026-10-03
• Diplomatic Victory: Earning and Spending FavorA working plan for the Gathering Storm diplomatic victory: where Diplomatic Favor actually comes from, how World Congress sessions and votes turn into victory points, which emergencies, competitions and wonders matter, how to keep alliances alive, and when to spend favor versus hold it against a rival's lead.Last reviewed: 2026-10-03
• Early District Planning: The First 100 TurnsHow to read city sites for future adjacency, decide between settling for yields now or reserving tile clusters, and know when a planned layout should be abandoned.Last reviewed: 2026-10-03