Relatively new player -- religion

I am relatively new to this game/franchise and I was hoping to get some clarification. Can someone either explain to me (or point me in the direction of the right thread) how religion works? What does the 'pressure' number mean for each city? Also, what exactly does a missionary do? I did some quick searching about this issue and see that many were confused about it when G+K first game out...so I was hoping someone had it straight by now and could help me out. Thanks.

refer the following thread i used it the other day tons of info in here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=481092

I can answer all.
1. Pressure determines how fast a city converts.
2. A missionary converts population of a city great prophets can do the same thing execpt they can do it more effectivly and more times.
3. Inquisator can prevent enemys from converting your citys just keep the inquisator inside the city to prevent the missionary or great prophet from converting your citizens.
4. A belief can only be chosen once and by only one civ.
5. The name and symbol don't mean anything.
Anything else that I missed others can probably answer. and welcome to civfanatics.

Thanks 20jordo, that answered my questions about how pressure works.

I am still a bit confused about what the missionary does. For example, I had a missionary and placed him next to a foreign city, expecting to convert their Christian citizens to Shinto (my nation's religion). However, it just increased the number of Christians from 7 to 8. Why is this??

did you capture a christian missionary and use it or did you purchase a missionary in predominatly christian city because either way and the only way you could have spread christianty.

See the link in my signature for a guide to all the basics of religion.

Missionaries only exert a certain amount of pressure. That means that a Christian missionary, for example, will not always exert enough influence for Christianity to become the majority religion in a city.

KingKirkpatrick said:

Thanks 20jordo, that answered my questions about how pressure works.

I am still a bit confused about what the missionary does. For example, I had a missionary and placed him next to a foreign city, expecting to convert their Christian citizens to Shinto (my nation's religion). However, it just increased the number of Christians from 7 to 8. Why is this??

Click to expand...

I think you meant it only increased the number of shintoists from 7 to eight (?).

Anyway - I'm quite certain everything regarding religion has been covered in the linked threads, but a few rules of thumb from someone mostly playing quite focused on religion on emperor or immortal without having a real clue about the mechanics (never bothered reading a guide on how it excatly works):

- Missionaries work best on small cities that don't have any religious followers or bigger cities with small numbers of religious followers as they're good for converting non-believers.

- If you want to convert a city that has a high percentage of religious followers of another belief, it's always more efficient to use a Prophet initially, since he also removes all opposing faith

E.g. throwing missionaries at another holy city is a complete waste, however on standard maps, it's entirely possible to completely remove another religion with 2-4 great prophets followed by a couple of missionaries. Timing is key - have open borders, move all your great prohets and missionaries in place and remove their faith in 2-4 cities at a time (starting with their holy city) and (optionally) use missionaries to consolidate your faith and build up pressure.

Their holy city will start to emanate pressure again quite quickly, but leaving one conversion use on a prophet after you're done and converting their holy city once more usually is sufficient to thoroughly nuke a faith for good.

KingKirkpatrick said:

Thanks 20jordo, that answered my questions about how pressure works.

I am still a bit confused about what the missionary does. For example, I had a missionary and placed him next to a foreign city, expecting to convert their Christian citizens to Shinto (my nation's religion). However, it just increased the number of Christians from 7 to 8. Why is this??

Click to expand...

The missionary you used could have been a Christian missionary. If you are Shinto, you could have captured a Christian missionary, not realizing that using it would encourage the wrong religion.

The other idea, that you built it in a Christian majority town? I haven't tested that out, but keep in mind that you can only buy a Shinto missionary from a majority Shinto city... if it was a majority Christian city (and assuming you can buy missionaries for religions you did not found yourself) then you must have bought your missionary in the wrong city, sorry.

Yes. If you buy a missionary from a city that has another religion as the dominant religion, Missionary will spread that religion instead.

Now the nuance here is that even if your holy city is converted to another religion, your great prophet spontaneously generated will still convert your religion (of your holy city). However, if you just spawn a missionary from the holy city but with another religion as the dominant, it would just spread that religion instead (and not your holy city one).

Another thing that's often missed is that the world wonder Djenne does affect great prophet spread usages as well but only on great prophets bought by faith after industrial era. The spontaneous prophets (generated by random after you reach 200, 300, 500 faith and so on) will still have 4 uses.