Getting AI to spread/not spread to you?

So I wasn't paying attention and one civ spammed my city with his prophet while I had world religion passed of my religion. Of course this is extremely dumb and would never happen playing with people who aren't insane, but the A.I. does this constantly. ( This is why autosave is mandatory for this game IMO, too much stupid stuff like this ).

So now I found a prophet from the other civ that has the religion I want. I sent 10 units to circle him to herd him to my city, but he's just sitting there now, not moving.

Just awful. It seems that prophets are coded to target a city and never stop until they reach it. So this one was targetting another city when I blocked his path, now he will basically idle forever.

Same thing when I set up blocker units. Whatever prophet was targetting my city will linger around that city until the end of the game waiting for me to move a unit. If you move a unit and open a hole, you instantly see that prophet start moving towards the hole.

So is there some kind of way to get the AI to spread their religion to you with their missionaries? I'm friends and have open borders with the civ I want, but he's just not spreading to me.

As I recall, unit blocking doesn't cause the AI to change it's target. This is even for Missionaries with closed borders which causes the AI missionary to die.

What does cause a new target is an Inquisitor present in the target city / one tile away, but most of the time, the new target is another city within your empire.

Another 'solution' is to go heavy on the barbarians mods, if Bozo cannot get a GProphet TO you, no problem .

Learned a similar lesson. Now I place Inquisitors if religion is going to be an important part of my strategy. They're cheap insurance and a Faith powerhouse can put them up fairly early without crippling anything else.

binhthuy71 said:

Learned a similar lesson. Now I place Inquisitors if religion is going to be an important part of my strategy. They're cheap insurance and a Faith powerhouse can put them up fairly early without crippling anything else.

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That's interesting. Inquisitors are otherwise completely useless haha

poxpower said:

That's interesting. Inquisitors are otherwise completely useless haha

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They're a deterrent. That's good enough for me. I'm not sure of the consensus regarding religion's importance to the game at higher levels so I only work it at all if my random leader/civ has advantages in generating Faith. Otherwise I usually just accept whatever conversions come along and take advantage of what they may offer.

Inquisitors are great if you are conquesting because it's the only way to completely wipe out a holy city. If you conquor jerusalem and convert the city to 100% Pastafarianism, the city will nevertheless eventually grow some more Christians and will flip back to being Christian.

With an inquisitor they actually completely wipe out the "holy city"ness of a city.

Also often inquisitors aren't enough to convert holy cities you conquer if they're far enough from your religion bases. You might need to follow up with GP or missionaries to actually convert the city.