Vinerva has one perfect strategy that works, shadows of forbidden gods 

Beautiful. I really like Vinerva more than the other gods. You quietly spread your gifts around, everybody gets gold (because it's by far the best way to tempt them) and then you create this gigantic Dark Empire, though I don't really like its ending text, but it's such a quick way to win that you kinda have to play around to see the other victory texts.

Golden roses are OP over all the other gifts, and I find it more dependent on the tax cycle than the rulers preference. In fact liking cruelty and a lesser extent gold is actually bad, because they will already have alot of gold, and have spent no gold to reduce unrest, so they wont need the gift. Vinerva synergizes insanely with ravenous dead. When a city becomes manifested, it has no diplomatic ties, but produces death for all the populace that was there. That means you can snowball ravenous dead eating the death in the manifestations without alerting the armies. So what you can do is strategicly gift of gold to everywhere that is the logistical path for ravenous dead, and also plot to steal the gold you give them, and infiltrate a library so you can speed reasearch up to death 3. You can even corrupt knowledge too so you can get a geo 3 wizard on the backburner. That way on a bigger map, when you pop your cities, you have a backup ravenous dead and death of the sun on the backup. I find doing this you even have backup recruitment points to afford an orc warlord forcing starvation.

Ahh, I get it now. I was having trouble figuring this God out.Thank you.

This was funny and informative

Yeah, the gift of gold is just too good. They will almost always take it and it costs just one power. The other gifts have the "fear of the unknown" negative modifiers and cost 2 power. The gift of gold should cost 3 power instead of just one