Curse can turn a lot of units (at least 9) from what I have seen into pigs allowing you to win important battles.
Nemean Lions Roar can stun lock multiple units with its Roar and has Roar of Orthus tech that improves the area of effect of its Roar and with the ability in Retold to manually control special abilities someone with multiple Nemean Lions can keep a enemy army stun locked for way too long.
Golden Apples tech improves favor generation rate from praying at temples helping to get out more Nemean Lions or saving up favor for more god power usages.
Divine Blood makes your villagers move faster, carry more resources and construct buildings faster which helps improve your economy and the ability to get up buildings like Towers faster which can help push forward offensively.
I think this age up choice is way too good. It was already a popular choice from the old game from videos I have seen of people playing as Hades or Poseidon and now its even better. This age up choice IMO is way too good after the buff to Nemean Lions Roar ability in Retold.
Not sure. All 3 Heroic Age Minor Gods seem very good in different ways.
Apollo gives you Underworld Passage and Manticores.
Manticores were buffed a lot in AoMR and Underworld Passage can be incredibly powerful in some maps, especially now that it can be casted again.
Dionysus was less buffed.
Bronze now affects Myth units, which is pretty useful.
Hydras can now passively heal but Scylla is now available to everyone so he lost one myth unit.
Apart from the nemean lion buff, Aphrodite hasn’t been tinkered with that much.
Curse works on unit HP. So if, say, there are elephants, there will be less of them turned into pigs as cumulatively, there is more HP. As average infantry has less HP, more of them are turned. This is the same as how it worked in Legacy.
As Skadidesu points out, all Greek Heroics are very good. Arguably, Apollo is now the best, with buffed manticore and reusable Underworld Passage, and his Oracle tech allowing healing and seeing enemy training.
Having watched a fair few beta streams and played beta myself, I’ve seen a wide mix of heroic age gods being used with Aphrodite not being picked that much more than others.