Gifting Inquisitors

My friends and I are playing a team multiplayer game (3v3v3) against AI. My friend founded a religion and spread it to me and nearby CS. We then ran into Isabella who was starting to spread her own religion, so I took her out. Now I have annexed her city (she only had one) and we want to purge her religion. We tried to bring an inquisitor over and gift it, but he could neither gift it to me or purge himself. Are we missing something?
I am also unable to purchase inquisitors and missionaries b/c the only religion I have came from him. Help!

Gift him her Holy City and he can kill it with one of his inquisitors. He can then gift the city back to you, if you like.

You cannot purge a holy city of its religion completely I think. or something like that I don't know. Someone else should.

Holy city will always have religious pressure from that religion. You need to have enough pressure to keep the believers down

MarshalN said:

Holy city will always have religious pressure from that religion. You need to have enough pressure to keep the believers down

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It is possible to annihilate a religion if the Holy City is conquered and swept with Inquisitors. You just have to clear out all cities that have followers of that religion.

An inquisitor of a different faith will destroy the special pressure of the Holy City, like andrew00100 says.

Well that's a bit strange, I actually got rid of all the pressure from a holy city of a different religion, but I quite sure that clearing out the pressure, does not stop the religion. I've already experienced this. If the holy City spawns a missionary its of the original religion and they just bring their old religion back.

R0gue said:

Well that's a bit strange, I actually got rid of all the pressure from a holy city of a different religion, but I quite sure that clearing out the pressure, does not stop the religion. I've already experienced this. If the holy City spawns a missionary its of the original religion and they just bring their old religion back.

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Sweeping out the pressure is not enough
You can sweep out Holy City pressure with GPPs but you have to 1) Conquer the Holy City and 2) Use an inquisitor to remove the existing followers.
If you used an inquisitor to remove the Holy City status, even if it is converted back to the original religion by missionaries or GPPs, it would not grant the Holy City title again nor the Holy City pressure (+30 if I remember it right).

If Isabella ever gets back into the game and manages to create a great prophet, it will still be possible to spread her religion. A religion never truly dies. As mentioned though, the holy city will stop creating extra pressure if you use an inquisitor on it.

Bunch of related, but different, concepts floating around here.

1. To purge Holy City status, conquer the city and zap it with an inquisitor of your religion. Unless the religion has taken the Unity of the Prophets Reformation belief, Holy City status is extinguished, so no more internal Holy City pressure, even if the zapped religion re-spreads to the former holy city.

2. Inquisitor zapping also removes current followers of that religion from the former Holy City (which a Great Prophet also could do), but it does not eliminate that religion from other cities or preclude that religion from re-spreading to the former holy city. Religiion could re-spread either through passive pressure (if there are enough neighboring cities that are still majority that religon to out-pressure your religion) or through manual spread (the AI can send missionaries and Great Prophets to try to reconvert the city).

3. The only way to truly elimiinate a religion from the map is to (1) completely eliminate the founder of that religion (so no more GPs of that religion can spawn) AND (2) make that religion a minority in every city where it appears (so the religion exerts no pressure on other cities) AND (3) find and kill every wandering GP, missionary and inquisitor of that religion (for obvious reasons). Until the founder is dead and gone, he or she can still spawn a Great Prophet of his or her religion and start the re-spread. Similarly, if any civ still has a city with a majority of that religion it can spawn a misisonary and keep spreading the religion. (I've seen this in far too many games--kill the founder and some other nitwit AI keeps spreading the dead founder's religion.)

You can capture inquisitors, so just DoW your friend.