Religious numbers - how does it work?

I usually don't fiddle with religion much, I just store thunders and buy scientists/musicians/merchants at the endgame, but the few times I tried to make it work (and I did), was all sorts of a blur:

1. What determines how much citizens in any city will follow my religion if I use a
a. Missionary
b. Prophet
on it. Their spreading "strength" seems like a rather arbitrary number, and the number of citizens that will be flipped over seems to saturate VERY quickly.

2. Is there any indication when will a citizen and eventually, a city, flip over to my religion passively. I found somewhere that once a city has accumulated 100ish pressure, one citizen will flip over. But since that obviously doesn't work like that, how do you factor in the presence of other religions. Does my +30 and neighbor's +12 result in me edging with a net +18, or the counters are tracked separately?

3. Lastly, the Religious Tolerance policy in Piety is definitely broken. If a city's dominant religion is Desert Folklore and its second most dominant religion is my religion with the DF embedded in it, that city will get doubled DF as a result. As everyone witnessed in the Arabian DCL

http://www.carlsguides.com/strategy/civilization5/religion/convertingandreligiouspressure.php

My opinion of religion on Deity: Given how difficult it is to spread your religion to say, 10 cities, unless you go full Piety or are playing as Arabia on Pangaea, or get some luck with a continents map where the other 4 religions started on the other continent, I can't see the point on Deity. I mean, nothing wrong with getting a Pantheon by luck, and maybe building Shrines if there is nothing more pressing in the BO, and maybe stumbling onto a religion by chance and letting it spread passively, but it's so not worth the effort to found and waste faith on missionaries that could be spent on GP.

An afterthought: since Maddjinn made religion a decent part of his CV in the India LP, it could be worth revisiting the sections where is calculating mathematically when cities will flip.

Thanks but that guide doesn't quite answer my questions.

If you're not going Piety/Evangelism, then the best bet is to have a wide civ act as a buffer and then you use missionaries on the distant ones and prophets on the tainted ones. Either way, you'd want to enhance and get the grand temple up sooner rather than later. And since religion is not really a key part of any consistent strategy (other than small piety ), it's more often a waste of time rather than an investment, especially once the armies of AI prophets swarm in and all of your religion has been for nothing

The guide says that 100 pressure is required to convert 1 citizen in a city with no existing religion. That pressure is negated by the presence of other religions.

So I would imagine that if you have a 10 pop city which has 6 citizens following Buddhism, then using a Missionary of Strength 1000 means that only 4 citizens will be converted to YOUR religion, lets say Sikhism.

Whereas if there was no Buddhism there, they would ALL be following Sikhism.

This dynamic is further altered by Prophets, who act as Inquisitor + Missionary, removing the Buddhism and making all 10 follow Sikhism.

This dynamic is even further altered by stuff like Evangelism, where Missionaries can act as mini-prophets by eroding the Buddhism following.

TLDR: I don't know the exact math, but the exact math can't change the fact that on Deity its not really worth it since the 'Piety patch'. I don't think Maddjinn could be as successful with the same map on the current patch.

EDIT: If you want to keep a religion in your cities, park an Inquisitor in each one, and have Prophets parked in CS that you can flip. In all the games where I've had really strong religion, I always have a ton of prophets - esp. with 100+ FPT.

consentient said:

EDIT: If you want to keep a religion in your cities, park an Inquisitor in each one, and have Prophets parked in CS that you can flip. In all the games where I've had really strong religion, I always have a ton of prophets - esp. with 100+ FPT.

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Expand a bit on this. Rather than each one, you can make it so one inquisitor can protect 2 cities by means of roads (sometimes more depending on the layout). Though of course, checking on this every other turn could get really tiring fast, so it's still up to you whether the extra faith spent for inquisitor is worth it.

Actually, if you park the inquisitor in the city, it means that the enemy unit won't attempt to flip it in the first place, right?

I read that somewhere here and its worked when I tried it.

Yes but his point is that the inquisitor can survey two cities.

Keeping my religion in a typical 4-city Tradition empire is hardly ever a problem for me, and I rarely even open Piety. Even on pangaea I hardly ever bother with inquisitors. I rarely even build a single missionary, as waiting for passive pressure works well enough. Waiting for the 3rd GPr is fine too. One GPr burn on your own cities is almost always enough to convert it. If you get Religious Texts (available like 9 out of 10 games) and your cities are within 10 hexes of each other, the passive pressure will protect your cities from missionaries.

But st412, are you asking about wider play? I have only had success in that situation by bombing three or four cities in short order, so I needed a couple GPr at once. Assuming no-buffs, converting a mid-sized city that is already following one religion will take two GPr spreads. If I want to go wide my religion, I start with GPr bombs on my neighbors and depend on Religious Texts to keep cities stuck.

stormtrooper412 said:

What determines how much citizens in any city will follow my religion if I use a Missionary

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Unenhanced missionaries are really only useful for converting small cities that are not already following a religion. A missionary spread converts up to half the citizens in a city, but only effects citizens not already following a religion.

What determines how much citizens in any city will follow my religion if I use a Missionary Prophet

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GPr spreads work very well, following a religion or not, because they de-convert as well as spread. I think up to about size ten (twelve maybe?) a single GPr spread is enough. After that you need two as the first GPr spread converts half-minus-one of the citizens, and the second spread converts two or three more. There is one enhancement though that makes converting much more difficult.

Is there any indication when will a citizen and eventually, a city, flip over to my religion passively?

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As I understand the mechanic, citizens don’t flip much. It is more about new citizens being born into your religion as the city pop increases. RNG is a significant factor. So if you are counting on passive pressure, be sure yours is significantly stronger than any other.

Lastly, the Religious Tolerance policy in Piety is definitely broken. If a city's dominant religion is Desert Folklore and its second most dominant religion is my religion with the DF embedded in it, that city will get doubled DF as a result.

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Since only one civ gets to pick DF as pantheon, how would DF get doubled? There are some follower benefits that duplicate pantheon benefits, but AFAIK faith from desert is not one of those. If your religion has DF embedded in it, how could the second most dominant religion be the DF pantheon? What do you mean by a city's dominant religion being Desert Folklore when DF is not a religion?

I want to know how the religious numbers work. So far, nobody seems to know how to answer. Perhaps it would be too much to ask for ain info popup saying "if the current trend continues, a citizen will convert to religion A in B turns" or something

stormtrooper412 said:

I want to know how the religious numbers work. So far, nobody seems to know how to answer. Perhaps it would be too much to ask for ain info popup saying "if the current trend continues, a citizen will convert to religion A in B turns" or something

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My best advice is to send a PM to Cromagnus and suggest he adds it to his mod. Sounds like a great idea. Each city would have it's own counter so you could plan religion a bit more. However, that would be a bit strange, lore-wise.

"Hello? Is that Billy Graham? Yeah, can you head on down to Houston and do your thang? The Muslims are getting a bit too strong there and we need you to negate them."

Well, there are already such IRL estimations, allegedly by 2050 (turn 500 on standard speed, right?), everyone in Paris will be Muslim, so I don't see why not

stormtrooper412 said:

I want to know how the religious numbers work. So far, nobody seems to know how to answer.

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This is pretty close: As a new citizen is born, passive pressure gives the relative weighted chance of the new citizen following any particular religion.

The pressure tool-tip at any give time shows the odds, except that it does not display the pressure for religions that currently have 0 citizens. (But that pressure is probably not relevant unless the city is currently a Holy City with 0 followers.)

Perhaps it would be too much to ask for ain info popup saying "if the current trend continues, a citizen will convert to religion A in B turns" or something

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It is too much to ask because the process is not deterministic, but based on probability.

Really? I was pretty sure there are exact numbers in the works and the only thing that's really up to chance is when will that damn prophet appear, I lost track of how many religions I lost because the game was like "I know but nope, not yet, eff you"

I understand why people play fixed using the fixed prophet mod. That is a quite frustrating way to loose out on founding! There is plenty of RNG in the works, I am not sure why you would expect exact numbers. (Well, there are exact numbers, but just exact numbers on the probability.)

I am not clear on the citizen flipping mechanic, but I have read (and experienced) enough about how the religious pressure effect works on new citizens as cities grow.

I think I have read on this forum before that religious pressures works like this: every city accumulate all the pressures coming to it, and the composition of how much influence accumulated between different faiths dictates how many followers each religion have.

So it's not individual population being pressured/converted, but the accumulated pressure is controlling the population demographic. I'm also not sure about the exact mechanic of it though.

They're pretty valuable. I wouldn't normally advocate piety but you can get religion w/o that in some cases and the AI won't consistently take great stuff like sun god or sometimes you get those starts with 4-6 trapping resources etc. If you can get pagodas or mosques and set up good faith generation you can get pretty impressive chunk of great people in the late game with a respectable bonus to the early game also. Stuff like 1% production/follower in a tradition game is a potentially impressive advantage too (say you're at 60+ hammers and getting 15% production...basically the religion is adding 9 hammers/turn...probably more...to all builds on top of what it gave you early).

It's just a matter of how much you have to invest to secure those things, how much pressure AIs will put on you, and what bonuses are taken very fast.

The religion sub-game seems very straight forward to me:

1. Build a shrine very early in your cap. Not before scouts, but maybe before monument.
2. Wait ~30 turns.
3. Pick a patheon that best matches your dirt. God King is okay as backup, and the AI never seems to take it.

A faith oriented pantheon gives you about a 50-50 chance of founding, so that is what I go for. Worse case is a bunch of faith accrued come the Industrial era.

Without founding, for less than 10 turns to build shrine you get 50-100 turns of the pantheon benefit for each city. Yes, those early turns are precious, but how is this not good payback?

The only games where I regret the shrine are: (1) when I get lucky with scouts and hit CS and/or early faith ruin that was enough to unlock a pantheon; and (2) some AI enhances before I have unlocked a pantheon. But (1) you can’t plan for, and is not an option until turn 20 -- so I have started my shrine by then. (2) is terribly bad luck, but at least is pretty rare.

Of course, you could go the other way, and conquer 4-5 capitals by the Industrial Era and have 100 FPT without founding even a pantheon

I've had 3 good faith games :

1. Arabia DCL where I went DF, Mosques, Pagodas and then reformed into Jesuit Education. It was still a crappy science game compared to Tradition and I pulled a miraculous early diplo win

2. Mongolia DCL where I went romping and stomping and ended up capturing ND, Stonehenge and whatevers

3. Byzantium DCL where I went DF

so yeah

still nobody knows the answer to my questions