Any way to prevent an opponent from squashing my religion?

Aside from declaring war and just killing another Civ's Missionaries and Great Prophets, is there any way to prevent someone hellbent on spreading their religion from doing so? I'm hoping I missed something, because Egypt is REALLY starting to annoy me with their legion of Great Prophet-led Missionaries storming freely through my territory.

If you don't give a civ open borders, your territory will melt their Missionaries. If you have an Inquisitor in your city, you prevent conversion from other religions. Finally, warring to sieze the civilians is an option. And can be a good one too if you seize a prophet while it still has 4 charges since you can use it to make a Holy Site.

A little trick I use is to keep units around my city they're trying to convert. Enough to keep prophets out, but not so much that they won't stop trying. This can sometimes lead to 2-3 prophets buzzing around. At this point, you only need to declare war once and likely you'll get at least one Holy Site out of it.

Buy an inquisitor and move it around your cities. A city that has an inquisitor can't be converted (except for passive conversion).

And it's that easy. Thanks, guys. The tooltip in-game said nothing of passive defense; it only mentions expending the Inquisitor to remove a foreign religion.

darkace77450 said:

And it's that easy. Thanks, guys. The tooltip in-game said nothing of passive defense; it only mentions expending the Inquisitor to remove a foreign religion.

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That was my thought exactly when I first learned this. Then I found out that they had sneakily included this info in its Civilopedia entry.

Inquisitors and war. That's it.

If you intend to play a peaceful game, just try to be friends with as many civs as possible. The AI will not attempt to convert your cities from your own religion if they like you. I used to take a really combative approach to missionary spamming AIs, but I realized that it's way more effective to deal with it through diplomacy rather than war.

Having the AI convert your cities is a boon. Buy their religious buildings early and often. The biggest difficulty I have is when they keep reconverting a city where I already had their help, but have not yet hit my cap. Inquisitors can help with that. If I have two civs fighting over my cites, I sometimes buy inquisitors from a foreign faith!

Any GPr you get will be of your faith. So recovering your religion in your cities is easy.

Aside from war and inquisitors the other way is going wide. The sheer number of cities you have will overwhelm bozo's religion.

GenuineRisk said:

If you intend to play a peaceful game, just try to be friends with as many civs as possible. The AI will not attempt to convert your cities from your own religion if they like you.

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Having good diplomatic relationships will dissuade missionaries from converting your cities, but for some reason it has no effect on prophets. So your "friends" will often send proselytizing prophets even if you ask them not to. (BTW.... asking another civ to stop sending missionaries/prophets gives you a pretty hefty diplomatic penalty with that civ.)

As others have mentioned, you can counter over-zealous prophets both by stationing inquisitors next to a city and also by using units (either military or civilian to either A)surround your cities, thus protecting them, or B) surround the enemy prophets. If you can maneuver the prophet(s) next to one or more mountain tiles you can use fewer units to trap the enemy prophets.

^^But first you have to get inquisitors. I've had games where a religion-strong civ (I'm looking at you, Ethiopia) is sending missionaries and GPs into my territory, and I'd barely finished picking my second set of beliefs. That usually means having to wait 10 or more turns for a GP or to buy an inquisitor. Sometimes it's a hard decision to make--spread my religions to my other cities with a GP or buy an inquisitor to protect my capital.

A good way to prevent your religion from getting squashed is by placing units all around your shrine city so that way units from other civilizations with religious units won't be able to spread religion to your shrine city once they're next to it. Its kind of cheesy but it works.

docbud said:

^^But first you have to get inquisitors. I've had games where a religion-strong civ (I'm looking at you, Ethiopia) is sending missionaries and GPs into my territory, and I'd barely finished picking my second set of beliefs. That usually means having to wait 10 or more turns for a GP or to buy an inquisitor. Sometimes it's a hard decision to make--spread my religions to my other cities with a GP or buy an inquisitor to protect my capital.

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Byzantium once did this to me before I even had the option to buy an Inquisitor. I've held a grudge ever since

^^I've got the same grudge with Ethiopia and Arabia.

Don't hold a grudge against the AI religious spam. They are helping your game! Just don't panic. Have you tried the strategy I suggested? In the beginning at least, there is no good reason to protect your capital (or your other cities). Sure, you want your religion in your cites, and you want to buy your faith buildings sooner than later. But so long as you don't mind waiting until the Renaissance, none of that should be a problem!

You cannot purchase inquisitors until you enhance, but they are not really a good value anyway. There is no reason to protect your cap.

3rd GPr is just 500 faith. A GPr spread acts like an inquisitor + missionary. So each GPr == 4x inquistors + 2x missionaries.

Build the Grand Temple, your Holy City will convert back soon enough.

Inquisitors on station can be useful -- but only after your core cities are up and following your religion and you still facing waves of foreign GPr.

Buying inquisitors early is not a good use of faith. Unless very early (or buffed by Reformation belief) missionaries are all but useless. Fighting off spammers is losing battle. Buy all the faith buildings you can, but otherwise save faith instead for a GPr.

If things are really crazy, once you get your GPr, sit on it a while until you have an inquisitor on deck too.

^^What you said and your strategy makes sense. But it's still annoying when I'm spammed.

As long as you keep your shrine city and its religion alive, everything is ok. All other cities may purchase religious buildings and uses benefits from other religions if they wanted to.

In fact, you don't even need to keep your religion in holy city, you always revive the religion using a great prophet and you can always buy one if you founded a religion. Holy city can only lose the status with an inquisitor of another religion. Most of the time, holy temple is enough to recover religion in holy city.

phillipwyllie said:

Aside from war and inquisitors the other way is going wide. The sheer number of cities you have will overwhelm bozo's religion.

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Yep. If you can get massive religious pressure on the map, the enemy will spend all its prophets and missionaries re-converting their own cities, or converting the near by city-states which have adopted your religion.

Of course doing so becomes more difficult the higher the difficulty.

beetle said:

Having the AI convert your cities is a boon. Buy their religious buildings early and often. The biggest difficulty I have is when they keep reconverting a city where I already had their help, but have not yet hit my cap. Inquisitors can help with that. If I have two civs fighting over my cites, I sometimes buy inquisitors from a foreign faith!

Any GPr you get will be of your faith. So recovering your religion in your cities is easy.

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That's if the religion coming to your lands have good perks. I've seen AIs trying to shove religions into my land with horrible picks.