How is the AI restoring his own religion?

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King
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Mar 12, 2008
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Persia in my game has 3 cities. Two of them already belong to my religion...i converted his capital and holy city to my religion with a great prophet. The "holy city for zoaroastrism" dissapeared and darius ed about me converting. Since i already converted all of his cities to my religion, i simply promised not to convert anymore of his cities.

I check back a few turns later and darius mysteriously has his holy city back and the diplomacy screen shows that i broke my promise not to convert his cities (which is impossible, as i didnt touch his cities after the promise).

What's going on?
 
wrong. The holy city converts itself back to its religion no matter who control it.
 
He couldn't used and inquisitor because all of his cities have another religion(not zoroastrianism). I think the holy city always converts to its own religion over a period of time.
 
Prophets generated naturally by faith (not purchased in the Industrial Era and later) will always have the religion of the host civ. So even if the religion is wiped out, these prophets can cause a resurgance.

That's probably why.
 
Prophets generated naturally by faith (not purchased in the Industrial Era and later) will always have the religion of the host civ. So even if the religion is wiped out, these prophets can cause a resurgance.

That's probably why.
Probably the reason. I've seen Egypt pop a GP and convert his conquered capital back into Islam even though he has no cities with Islam religion anymore.
 
He couldn't used and inquisitor because all of his cities have another religion(not zoroastrianism). I think the holy city always converts to its own religion over a period of time.

It won't always, if pressure from the other religion is too high, but it typically will revert eventually. However the AI could have had Great Prophets already lurking around, since it seems to hang onto them for a while, and those could have converted it back. Also, any Prophet you spawn naturally (rather than faith-buying) will belong to your religion even if the capital it spawns in has been converted (as happened in one of my recent games).
 
Prophets generated naturally by faith (not purchased in the Industrial Era and later) will always have the religion of the host civ. So even if the religion is wiped out, these prophets can cause a resurgance.

This fact saved my religion. I had foolishly purchased and used an inquisitor in my capital city not realizing that it had converted to another religion. So "my" inquisitor made my capital purely the religion of another civ.

All that saved my religion was the fact that I had 1 more auto-generated GPr to come. He was of my religion and allowed me to get my own faith back in my capital. This was lucky because there were no other cities of my religion in the game, so missionaries of my religion were not possible.
 
What do you mean by auto-generated great prophet, the one that that is automatically bought when you exceed faith points?

I figured out a way to stop a runaway religion. I tried great prophets converting his holy cities and surrounding cities, but the AI just spammed missionaries and slowly took them back.

What i did was use a great prophet to convert all the foreign cities his religion was dominant in and slowly rollback the massive pressure of his religion. And by then i just had to use my own pressure to do the rest.

But pressure works very slowly...seems to take 50+ turns before it does anything.
 
What do you mean by auto-generated great prophet, the one that that is automatically bought when you exceed faith points?

Yes

And on the subject of pressure, how do we judge it? I have a city that has 50% pressure from another religion and 15% from mine. A couple of missionaries of mine have had no effect, so 3x the pressure seems pretty solid. Has anyone worked out the relationship between pressure value and missionary/prophet effect?
 
Not if the founder is eliminated entirely.

Are you sure about that? I think all you have to do it take the holy city (capitol), then hit it with an inquisitor. I did not think you had to actually wipe the entire civ.

I might be wrong, but I just did this in the GOTM. As Atilla, I captured Ethiopa's capitol, then hit it with an inquisitor. Internal pressure from the city stopped. There were some other cities with that religion, but I converted them (mostly) and the (former Ethiopian) capitol pressure was very, very low, below the +30 or whatever holy cities usually get.

Of course, I was more focused on winning the game by killing everyone else, and I eventually did wipe Ethiopia, so I might have overlooked it...
 
Are you sure about that? I think all you have to do it take the holy city (capitol), then hit it with an inquisitor. I did not think you had to actually wipe the entire civ.

I might be wrong, but I just did this in the GOTM. As Atilla, I captured Ethiopa's capitol, then hit it with an inquisitor. Internal pressure from the city stopped. There were some other cities with that religion, but I converted them (mostly) and the (former Ethiopian) capitol pressure was very, very low, below the +30 or whatever holy cities usually get.

Of course, I was more focused on winning the game by killing everyone else, and I eventually did wipe Ethiopia, so I might have overlooked it...
Last time I did something similar I saw abnormally high pressure in the holy city compared to surrounding cities, but I may be mistaken.
 
ok, so I started a Byzantium game just for fun trying to go all religion but I'm failing to convert the whole world to my religion. i learned the following:
while missionaries and GPs both seem to dump 1000 faithstrength into a city, it's not the same amount at all. GPs always seem to completely establish their religion pushing all the others out on their first of four spreadings. Using that on a big city (15+ pop) mean make it about 10 times stronger as a missionary.
It is very frustrating to send about 6 missionaries over to another civ and pump out all their influence to have it all eliminated by a single GP.

Its impossible to spread your religion all over the place because AIs will get mad at you for doing so, which makes open borders impossible so your missionaries just get too weak or die on their way through enemy territory.

Missionaries get severely hindered in their movement by units from other civs.

AI can demand you to stop your missionary activity but you can't. Seeing a GP approaching your own territory can mean the end of your religion unless you declare war and kill the GP.

An of a buglike nature: open borders agreements ending will insta-drain 250 strength of your missionaries at the beginning of that turn.

Even with 3-spreadings missionaires with +25% strength and decreased cost I was/am unable. Churning out a missionary ever other turn isn't enough. It might be possible once the AI gets to industrial era and not popping GPs any more, but then missionaries will be a lot more expensive.

So is it a mission impossible? And what is it good for anyways?
To really do it, either remove attrition and movement impairing restrictions or allow crusades to force your religion on those hostile AIs.
If you want to spread your religion you need to pick religion perks that help you do that and piety, but then you have little benefit from it. Some AIs (those who founded no religion) will like you while most will hate you and it takes a lot of effort and resources. At this point i must say i fare better when i just ignore religion and focus my efforts in other more rewarding areas.
 
There does seem to be something odd going on about eliminated civs and their holy city, however. If you use a GP to convert their city to your religion it will after a certain while start spawning believers and pressure of its own native religion. However, I have gotten the impression from my games that if I instead of using a GP use a normal Inquisitor on the holy city there won't come any of the native believers back. Whether this is permanent, or if it just takes longer time for them to come when you use a normal inquisitor, or if it's just an artifact of the completely intransparent way that pressure and believers work I'm not sure, but that is the tendency I've seemed to experience through my games - without having testing it completely and systematically.
 
There does seem to be something odd going on about eliminated civs and their holy city, however. If you use a GP to convert their city to your religion it will after a certain while start spawning believers and pressure of its own native religion. However, I have gotten the impression from my games that if I instead of using a GP use a normal Inquisitor on the holy city there won't come any of the native believers back. Whether this is permanent, or if it just takes longer time for them to come when you use a normal inquisitor, or if it's just an artifact of the completely intransparent way that pressure and believers work I'm not sure, but that is the tendency I've seemed to experience through my games - without having testing it completely and systematically.

i had completely converted two civs and their 3 cities each with missionaries. some time after that they both managed to get their native religion established again. gets kind of frustrating if you keep moving your missies there all the time until they get mad and deny you open borders
 
Not if the founder is eliminated entirely.

I'm quite certain you're wrong on that, as I recall doing just that in games and not being able to wipe out to Religion entirely.

The Holy City will always generate some influence to convert itself back to its founding religion.
 
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