Why Inquisitors?

ChuckDWithFlava

Chieftain
Joined
May 21, 2013
Messages
3
I am new to Civ 5, and have 3 young girls at home, so I don't get much of a chance to play. I preface my question, because I feel that it may be a stupid one, but I can't seem to find the answer anywhere.

What are the negatives of having a rival religion in your cities? I have read a couple of items, but don't feel that I have them all. Certainly not enough to warrant spending my hard earned faith on an inquisitor, when I've got mosques etc. to buy. What is it about a rival religion that poses such a threat? why can I not spread my religion and who cares what the other faiths are doing? What is the difference between the civ 4 and civ 5 mechanic in this regard?

As far as I can tell:
Some bonuses are predicated on the number of followers that you have, having a rival religion in your midst reduced these bonuses. To my eyes this is a valid concern, but highly dependant on the bonuses that you choose for your pantheon and religion​

The natural spread of religions is based on the number of cities with (a majority?) of the religion in a 10 (or 13) hex radius. So if any of your cities is majority of a rival religion, a third city may take the rival, as opposed to your preferred religion. But if there is no harm in having them, why do I care?​
 
It depends on which point of view you take

If you ar ea founder, you lose not onyl your Founder Belief bonus (as you don't have followers/cities with the majority followers), but you also lose the Follower/Enhancer/Pantheon Belief you personally chose.

If you are only a Follower, there's no positive or negative, as you can pick and mix the religion you wanna choose (although, pressure will often mess that up), however, you can choose a religion to follow if you failed.

In majority cases, having a rival religion is the issue, asyou lose control of your orwn religion along with the bonuses, as with pretty much all beliefs, except the Building ones (as they stay in the city), do not have an effect on yoru city if the Religion isn't the majority.
 
It depends on which point of view you take

If you ar ea founder, you lose not onyl your Founder Belief bonus (as you don't have followers/cities with the majority followers), but you also lose the Follower/Enhancer/Pantheon Belief you personally chose.​
As long as you are the majority in your city, this is not an issue, no?


If you are only a Follower, there's no positive or negative, as you can pick and mix the religion you wanna choose (although, pressure will often mess that up), however, you can choose a religion to follow if you failed.​
I'm not sure That I understand. What do you mean "Mix" Do you mean to say that in Paris I can have Budhism and Orelans can have Christianity? or that Christianity and Budhism can somehow be shared in Paris?

In majority cases, having a rival religion is the issue, asyou lose control of your orwn religion along with the bonuses, as with pretty much all beliefs, except the Building ones (as they stay in the city), do not have an effect on yoru city if the Religion isn't the majority.​
What do you mean "Lose control of your own religion"? can an AI choose the bonuses for my religion if I am not careful?
 
You don't seem to know about religion

1. If you are the founder, you are the only one who recieves the bonuses from the Founder Belief, so, if your religion is not he majority you lose A LOT of happiness, or whatever you picked from it.

2. If you are a follower of another religion, you can pick and mix and match what you follow, so say Buddhism is focused on war, and Hinduism on Science, you decide what you need more, but you don't have full control over the beliefs, but you can adjust to the surrounding religion

3. If you have your own religion, then you need to protect it, there can be cases, where, Maya can start spamming Missionairies, causing YOU to lose control of your religion because it isn't strong enough (I had that once, it took me about 100 to gain back control of my religion because he spammed my Holy City before it spread to other cities), which meant I didn't benfit at all from my own religion.

In summary

1. If you are a Founder, you need to protect your religion otherwise you not gonna benefit from it

2. If you are a Follower, because you didn't get your own religion in time, then it doesn't matter as you will simply absorb/become a follower of somebody's elses religion.

Keep in mind that once a religion spreads, you lose Pantheon bonus if you don't have your own religion, and instead gain their Pantheon belief.
 
So then the main benefit is the preservation of control and on your founder belief.

What happens in the case you outlined. Say I am the dutch with Christianity, and Maya drops a Shinto missionary in my capital before I get a chance to spread my religion. If I produce an inquisitor, it will be an shinto inquisitor, no? same if I do a Missionary. What did you do for 100 turns to combat this?

And yes, As I said at the start, I don't have a lot of time to play, so I thought it might be a stupid question.
 
You are right in many aspects Chuck. If you are at a point in a game where are thinking about using Inquisitors on yourself, then you may as well spend faith elsewhere like Great People.

There is no downside to following a religion other than the obvious ones, like no founder bonuses and or having bonuses "useless" to your strategy.

Due to the mechanics of pressure it's hard to "pick" what religion you want. Not sure what you mean there.

The actual use of Inquisitors, in my opinion, is deleting other Holy Cities without razing. If you capture an enemy capitol, using your Inquisitor on your newly captured city (technically don't have to capture but enemy AI does ACTIVELY KILL Inquisitors since they are classified as a war unit to them) will spell extermination for the religion in time.
 
So then the main benefit is the preservation of control and on your founder belief.

What happens in the case you outlined. Say I am the dutch with Christianity, and Maya drops a Shinto missionary in my capital before I get a chance to spread my religion. If I produce an inquisitor, it will be an shinto inquisitor, no? same if I do a Missionary. What did you do for 100 turns to combat this?

And yes, As I said at the start, I don't have a lot of time to play, so I thought it might be a stupid question.

Your great prophets will always be associated with the religion you founded. So you can recover your religion by spending faith on a great prophet then using it to spread your religion.

You can also combat it by surounding your city with a circle of 6 units. that prevents their missionarys/prophets from being able to convert your city.
 
So then the main benefit is the preservation of control and on your founder belief.

What happens in the case you outlined. Say I am the dutch with Christianity, and Maya drops a Shinto missionary in my capital before I get a chance to spread my religion. If I produce an inquisitor, it will be an shinto inquisitor, no? same if I do a Missionary. What did you do for 100 turns to combat this?

Yea when you build a Missionary it is of the dominant religion of when it was produced.

Holy Cities, however, always will be majority Founder religion in time. Always. Your Christianity will eventually come back as the majority after some turns.
 
Not stupid at all. On your question about how to restore your holy city after it has been converted, each holy city will continue to exert internal holy city pressure (30 pressure at Standard), which helps reconvert convert your city over time. But, if every surrounding city has the "wrong" religion, the external pressure may outweigh your internal holy city pressure. In that case, your only hope is to spawn a Great prophet--any Great Prophet you spawn will have your original religion, allowing you to reconvert your capital.

On your broader religion questions, you might review the various religion articles in the War Academy. That aside, a few thoughts:

Religion is just another tool in the game, and sometimes it may make sense to ditch that tool in favor of another tool (or, in this case, another religion). You may have spent some time and effort getting to the point where you can found your religion, but what do you get from having your religion in the first place?

As Oz noted, the first benefit of a religion is the Founder belief; only the religion's founder gets the benefit of that religion's founder belief. If you let your religion get supplanted, your founder belief (whether providing extra happiness, gold, culture or faith) goes bye-bye. To make matters worse, you are now providing founder beliefs to your religious rival, which may sufficiently strengthen him to make him an even more bothersome rival.

The second benefit of a religion is found in its pantheon and follower beliefs. Again, whatever beliefs you picked presumably were intended to give you help in areas you needed, whether happiness, culture, faith, military units, whatever. If another religion supplants your religion, you don't get the benefits of your chosen pantheon and follower beliefs. However, not all is lost, since you do get the benefit of your new religion's pantheon and follower beliefs. If those beliefs are sufficiently attractive, you might rationally choose to let that religion remain in place and abandon efforts to restore your religion.

The third benefit of religion is enhancer beliefs. As with the others, your enhancer beliefs are supplanted by the new religion's enhancer beliefs. Depending on context you can also use those beliefs, but they may be less than useful (e.g., cheap missionaries is small comfort when the missionaries are of the "wrong" religion), while others operate on their own (e.g., the passive spread enhancers, like itinerant preachers).

Whether to fight back against other encroaching religions requires assessment of costs and benefits, as well as feasibility (no point spending scarce resources to fight a battle you can't win).
 
Yea when you build a Missionary it is of the dominant religion of when it was produced.

Holy Cities, however, always will be majority Founder religion in time. Always. Your Christianity will eventually come back as the majority after some turns.

What happens if you buy an inquisitor in a city with a forign religion, then use it on your own holy city?
 
The main use of the Inquisitor isn't the AI's missionaries; just keep closed borders and those will be ineffective.
It's instead their Great Prophets which don't suffer from closed borders.

I normally build the Inquisitor immediately after enhancing my religion and leave him parked right next to my capital. (Sometimes I build the Missionary before the Inquisitor, but I'm always going to build the Inquisitor before 2 Missionaries.)

I like my choices of follower & pantheon beliefs much better than the AIs. In addition, when picking Tithe, I want all my cities tithing to me. (And if I instead picked the happiness founder belief, I'm relaying even more upon having it in all my cities)
 
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