Missionaria Protectiva

Just played my first game as Bene Gesserit in 1.96 and am wondering what exactly the strategy Text of the Missionaria Protective tries to hint at:

This Bene Gesserit unique building provides some espionage income and negatives the unhappiness penalty from having multiple religions.
Building this... will help if you are planning [/b]to spread and utilize multiple religions[/b]

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I get it that you gain 2 espionage points/turn and 1 Happyness... but how do I spread multiple religions in 1 city ?
As soon as I spread a second one (Holy city, missionaries) , all other religions vanish from that city.

So could any veteran help ?
(or perhaps the strategy entry is a reminiscence of an earlier version?)

when you found a new religion it spreads like the wind to (most of) your cities wiping out all other religions. You then have to start sending misionaries (of those other religions) to spread them again

You have to remember that Imperial religion gets removed if another religion is spread in the city which imperial is present and that quizarate when it spreads, removes all other religions

So logicaly, you should try to establish quizarate as the 1st religion in a city, then move on to shai hulud/choam/thinking machines (in any order) and then spread Imperial as the last religion

I had a game once when i had choam/imperial in a 12 city empire and cause of a miscalculation I ended up inventing first Thinking machines and had all other religions being wiped out except from their founding cities. Trying to spread them again to all 12 was a pain, epsecialy with Imperial which has just 1 misionary allowed

The part of the text in bold has to be in reference to something in an older version that no longer applies, I'll clean that up for the next patch. I've noticed it before, but never got around to changing it.

The rest of it is like christodoulos said. The religions are all a little different. It's all in the Civopedia, but I'll give a quick summary of the spread differences:

- Imperial has a quick natural spread, but is lost once another religion moves in
- Shai'halud is the closest to vanilla BTS religions in terms of spread
- Choam is also similar to vanilla religions, but has a lower natural spread rate
- Qizarate will remove all other religions when it is spread to a city, but only spreads by missionary (no wildfire or natural spread)

Then you have those that use the wildfire spread mechanic which only occurs upon founding the religion and removes all other religions (except holy cities) in cities it affects. JThese don't remove other religions when spread by missionary, Qizarate is the only that does that:

- Mahdi has no missionaries but is spread by conquest. If it's your state religion and you own it's holy city, it can also spread to you're own cities even if they already have a religion now (to make up for lack of other ways to create internal spread, e.i. no missionaries)
- Thinking Machines is pretty standard in terms of spread other than the wildfire spread on founding it.

And then there's the Tleilaxu, and, well, they kind of do their own thing of course...

The system is really intended to make 'religion spam' as it occurs in Vanilla BTS much less likely - which I think is a good thing. It doesn't mean you can't spread a bunch of religions to all your cities if you really really want to, but it's supposed to be hard(er) to do so. Really avoids the whole vanilla "collect 'em all" approach.

The part of the text in bold has to be in reference to something in an older version that no longer applies,

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Actually no, just the opposite. The text is in reference to a design intention that was never implemented.

The design goal of the Missionaria Protectiva was to give a bit of espionage income while also playing up the flavor of the Bene Gesserit as manipulators of religions and political systems. The idea was to try to encourage the BG to have and spread lots of different religions, rather than just adopt one and push it.

So the design intention was to give +1 happiness per non-state religion present in the city (which would cancel out the +1 unhappy you normally get from multiple religions present), but we didn't have the code to implement that, so we gave it +1 happy as a placeholder.

I would definitely like to return to the design goal of having the Missionaria Protectiva give you more benefits the more religions you have present.
Whether through happiness or something else (+EPs for each religion present would be cool) I'm not sure; it depends on what is happy codewise.

So please, change the effect, not the flavor.

The system is really intended to make 'religion spam' as it occurs in Vanilla BTS much less likely - which I think is a good thing. It doesn't mean you can't spread a bunch of religions to all your cities if you really really want to, but it's supposed to be hard(er) to do so. Really avoids the whole vanilla "collect 'em all" approach.

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Agree in general for most factions, that was a definite decision behind the religion design, but my design intention was to have BG to have more of the collect'em all approach than the other factions, because that fits nicely with their flavor. The BG don't really "believe" any of the religions and they don't really support any of the political factions, but they can use any of them and lots of them at once to support their own goals.

Possibly it is worth increasing the unhappiness from non-state religions to +2 unhappy per religion (from +1) and then have the Missionaria Protectiva as countering this effect.