Inquisitors Poll

[pineappledan]

Inquisitors are in a weird place right now. They are far more punishing and less “fun” to use than they were in vanilla.

Vanilla Inquisitor:
Costs 200
Blocks all missionary spread when stationed in a city
No effect on passive spread
Remove heresy action

Expends Inquisitor
Removes all followers of other religions
Converts some of the citizens to your religion
Removes holy city status
​

Current VP Inquisitor
Costs 200
50% resistance to missionary spread when stationed in a city
No effect on passive spread (at one point it was supposed to)
Remove heresy action

Expends Inquisitor
1 turn of Resistance in city
Removes all followers of other religions
Converts some of the citizens to your religion
Removes holy city status​

Some criticism of the inquisitor system right now:

• The original inquisitor can wipe out foreign religions too easily and for little cost.
• Unless you had the ability that cut enemy inquisitor actions to 50% effectiveness, this makes it very hard to justify spreading to other civs with their own religions, because their inquisition actions are cheaper and more effective than your missionaries. Combined with their 100% spread blocking, inquisitors made eroding a civ’s own religion impossible, even with infinite investment into your own religion’s spread.
• On the other hand, the VP’s inquisitor is very weak. 1 turn of resistance is a heavy cost, potentially paralyzing to your economy. Combined with the lesser effectiveness, it just doesn’t feel worth it to use inquisitors at all without the inquisition enhancer.
• The VP inquisitor is not worth the maintenance cost to keep in cities. They don’t block passive spread, and they don’t do a good job of blocking missionaries, so their ability to station them in cities goes unused in my games. I only buy inquisitors to remove heresy action
• In both BNW and VP, the way inquisitors remove and convert followers is opaque. Inquisitors have a spread strength attribute, but they don’t use it to convert citizens.

Some ideas on how to change the inquisitor:

New VP Inquisitor:
Costs 300
50% resistance to missionary spread when stationed in a city
25% resistance to passive spread when stationed in a city
Remove heresy action

Expends Inquisitor
Deconverts 10 followers of other religions in the city to no religion
After that, Performs a 1000 strength missionary spread action
Removes Holy city status​

So get rid of the resistance turn and increase the faith cost, this makes the main “cost” of using inquisitors is that they are clearly less efficient than missionaries. This makes bleeding faith from religious defensive civs a little easier, but doesn’t allow you to just completely paralyze another civ’s cities.

I also propose that remove heresy be changed to remove Some foreign religious followers, but not all if the city is big enough. This wouldn’t usually affect anything, but if you are conquering cities it makes it more costly to flip larger conquered cities, and stamp out foreign religion in larger cities of 20citizens or more.

lastly, tying the inquisitor conversion to spread strength, like a missionary makes it more consistent with the rest of the religion spread game, making their conversion use the same numbers as both active and passive spread. This also lets VP augment inquisitor strength via wonders and abilities like hagia Sophia. This would make inquisitor conversions both more transparent and more dynamic.

 

[psparky]

The game doesn't manipulate followers directly but rather works on accumulated pressure. Religious units and passive spread add or subtract from the accumulated pressure. Pressure is also added when a city grows. The number of followers is calculated based on the relative accumulated pressure for each religion including pantheons (and also atheists).

I believe you need to phrase your suggestion in terms of accumulated pressure. For example, removes half of the accumulated pressure of other religions, minimum 1000 reduction.

 

[Sardauker]

I've played so many hours, but the religion mechanic still remains a mystery to me.

 

[Stalker0]

I am not sure the block active spread for inquisitors is working either, in my spread experiences foreign inquisitors don’t seem to slow my down when I’m doing bulk spreads

 

[rsc2a]

How about you keep turns of resistance and total conversion but the length of resistance is based on the number (or percentage) of the population that was converted?

 

[InkAxis]

Yeah seems a bit early for a poll.

But it really depends on how you want the religion game to be played.
If inquisitors are made too weak, then you will just use missionaries to reconvert your cities. If they are too strong converting civs is difficult and they almost become a complete block to conversion.
It might be too radical but an idea is to have inquisitors unique to the inquisition belief. After all if a religion doesn't have an inquisition why would it have inquisitors? And I'm sure not all religions had inquisitions. It provides a much more unique bonus as well.
Otherwise for any option you'd need to justify their niche.

 

[looorg]

I'm starting to agree with Stalker0 here, is everything a poll now? It's nice to be asked but perhaps it's starting to be a little bit to much. After all it's not like we are getting hundreds upon hundreds of votes or opinions here. Anyhow. I foresee nothing but trouble here, or many many questions on my part.

While I'm not super thrilled about the current version where it causes a turn of resistance I have learned to live with it and play with it. It's just that a turn of resistance causes, or can cause, a turn of massive unhappiness. While it will bounce back in a turn it during that turn can cause massive problems so you have to sort of spread out the inquisitions. Unhappiness of that kind causes combat problems, can trigger negative events etc. Some fairly drastic drawbacks. It's not that you lose a turn of production, it's all the other things that come with it, mostly happiness related on the empire scale.

Why as an example are the once that believe upset or angry about the inquisition? Are they sad that they got rid of the heretics? At the same time they get angry or mad (happiness-wise) when there are not enough followers of the own religion in the city. Weirdness.

I would prefer if the passive resistance came from say the buildings instead of the units. The shrine, the temple etc. Most of the buildings increase the pressure now but do they give any actual resistance (if the pressure isn't also resistance)? The buildings are in some regard the physical manifestations of devotion and that is probably what should add the resistance, the community of believers. (edit) Some of your selected faith buildings if you picked any for your religion do offer resistance as I recall it now -- usually in the 25% range? I don't have the game running at the moment so I can't look it up exactly.

I think I would prefer it if we just removed the one turn of resistance. That has a lot of negative consequences on an empire wide scale compared to just a city-scale.

In some regard perhaps I would almost prefer it if part of the people to be "converted" actually died (or was deported) instead, as in the pop shrinking in the city. You could convert those lost into gold or faith (gold from taking their stuff as they went to be with their God or was deported, and faith for the believers that we got rid of some heretics). That could justify some of the suggested cost increase for the unit and offset it if used right. But if you just want to use it as a passive then you won't get anything back.

As it stands now, and have for some time there is no negative consequence really for putting a city to the inquisition, besides a very temporary one turn effect. In some regards and buildings you even want the diversity (pagodas etc). You just don't to much of it.

Inquisitors also cost money (or unit maintenance if you will) so while it might be fine to have a few around having an army of them around just sitting in cities to stop active and passive influences is not advisable, at least not in the early parts of the game. In the later parts it usually doesn't matter since money is less of an issue then for the most parts.

Will the influence of multiple inquisitors be additive (or cumulative)? As in one 25%, two of them 50% (or 25*1,25) or whatever? Or is the influence of one inquisitor the maximum? What if you have two inquisitors that follow different religions (in the same city)? Who will he passively stop the pressure from? The majority religion or the religion of the inquisitor?

That said I do like the idea of their strength increasing by things that also increase the strength of missionaries and prophets. Perhaps even allowing them to have multiple charges.

Deconverts 10 followers of other religions in the city to no religion

That makes no sense from an inquisition point of view does it? They don't want to create non-religious people. They want to purge heretics. Non-believers of any kind are in that regard heretics. Some possibly worse then others but heretics non the less.

From a game perspective all this would do then is that first you inquisition and then you follow up with a missionary to convert the newly unconverted to the one true faith, whatever that might be. Sure it would require even more faith being spent on units to do it but it is what it is. But it would require more, cause it's not like you want to "un-faith" people and then just leave it be for them to eventually once again fall back to whatever heathen ways they had before.

 

[chicorbeef]

I wouldn't mind the turn of resistance being removed, I see why it exists from a thematic standpoint but not really from a gameplay.

Tying Inquisitors to spread strength is a solid idea. I think inquisitors should work like prophets where they convert citizens ignoring existing pressure, so an Inquisitor would be like a Prophet for your own cities with one spread. It doesn't make thematic or gameplay sense for inquisitors to just purge religions and turn them into non-believers.

A passive spread reduction would be nice, it's kind of balanced out by the fact that it costs more, I'm pretty much indifferent to these two changes.

 

[frktest]

I often choose Inquisition Belief that give 25 Gold per converted Citizen; then I do exploit the normal attitude of AI to hail Missionaries, earninig thus al lot of gold with Inquisitors reconverting my Citizens; I think the Inquisition Belief is the single most effective choose playing VP and maybe a bit overpowered. For that reason (and because the Inquisitor action should have a cost anyway) my advise is to maintain the 1 turn of Resistance in city and also to keep that in the Inquisition Belief (now removing Heresy no longer cause resistance with that belief).

 

[pineappledan]

We could move this to General, there's a lot of inquisitor discussion that has already happened, and just necro it. It seemed like people were liking the polls; it lets some people just vote instead of writing out a complicated thesis.

That makes no sense from an inquisition point of view does it? They don't want to create non-religious people. They want to purge heretics. Non-believers of any kind are in that regard heretics. Some possibly worse then others but heretics non the less.

That's already what happens -- the inquisitor removes religion from all the followers and then converts some of them to your own religion. The main difference is changing that from deconverting ALL other religion followers to just deconverting up to 10, before the inquisitor moves to the conversion step.

In some regard perhaps I would almost prefer it if part of the people to be "converted" actually died (or was deported) instead, as in the pop shrinking in the city. You could convert those lost into gold or faith (gold from taking their stuff as they went to be with their God or was deported, and faith for the believers that we got rid of some heretics).

This was implemented many versions back, but was deemed tooo harsh by the community.

The buildings are in some regard the physical manifestations of devotion and that is probably what should add the resistance, the community of believers. (edit) Some of your selected faith buildings if you picked any for your religion do offer resistance as I recall it now -- usually in the 25% range? I don't have the game running at the moment so I can't look it up exactly.

All faith purchased buildings give 10% spread resistance. I believe it works on both passive and active spread.

Will the influence of multiple inquisitors be additive (or cumulative)? As in one 25%, two of them 50% (or 25*1,25) or whatever?

I wouldn't make them stack, no.

As it stands now, and have for some time there is no negative consequence really for putting a city to the inquisition, besides a very temporary one turn effect.

Depending on the relative size and strength of the city, 1 turn of resistance is actually quite costly. It can meant hundreds of yields lost.

The game doesn't manipulate followers directly but rather works on accumulated pressure. Religious units and passive spread add or subtract from the accumulated pressure. Pressure is also added when a city grows. The number of followers is calculated based on the relative accumulated pressure for each religion including pantheons (and also atheists).

I believe you need to phrase your suggestion in terms of accumulated pressure. For example, removes half of the accumulated pressure of other religions, minimum 1000 reduction.

In the current implementation of inquisitors they manipulate followers, not accumulated pressure. That's what makes them so weird. As I said, Inquisitors have a Spread power value, but they don't use it. Part of my original proposal to Spain was to increase the power of their inquisitors, but doubling their spread power had no in-game impact.

 

[azum4roll]

The only change I want regarding Inquisitors is to let non-founders buy them again.

 

[Recursive]

Moderator Action: Please remain on the thread topic when posting. Poll etiquette can be discussed in a separate thread.

 

[pineappledan]

I wouldn't mind the turn of resistance being removed, I see why it exists from a thematic standpoint but not really from a gameplay.

I dont like the 1 turn of resistance either

• The punishment isn't mainly focused on Faith: Before, the main punishment for having 1 of your cities converted was the opportunity cost. If you are spending faith on inquisitors instead, you aren't spending it on other things (missionaries, faith buildings, GPs, etc.). This meant your punishment for losing a converted city was mainly that it made your faith economy slower.
  
• The costs are dispersed and harder to quantify: Now, the punishment is dispersed to all the other yields in the city as well: , and can hurt you empire-wide for a bit with the unhappiness spike.
• The Punishment is too variable: Inquisitioning a large city hurts a lot more than inquisitioning a small city. The yields lost are much greater on a core city, but also the unhappiness spike is extremely variable on overall city population

The faith cost of the inquisitor is still part of the punishment for using them, but now it's a smaller consideration than the resistance. If you had to pay more for inquisitors, and maybe if they also didn't work as well, so you had to buy more of them, the faith cost of inquisitors would be a bigger consideration again. Removing only up to a max of converts or built-up pressure, then you would have to use more of them to flip a larger city. It would also slow down the faith game, which I know a few people would be a fan of, since there were criticisms of there being too much easy faith in the game overall.

The only change I want regarding Inquisitors is to let non-founders buy them again.

I agree. It seems like a double-punish to non-founders.

In addition to not getting founder/enhancer beliefs bonuses, non-founders are also afflicted by religious tension unhappiness, all game long, and with no tool to address it. This might be the root of those calls to give non-founders the pagoda as a special non-founder ability, but it would be much better just to give them back the inquisitors.

 

[Bruhmoment]

I don't care all that much, to be honest. The A.I REALLY rarely buys Inquisitors, and so do I. Missionaries are the way to go, let's go boys
I usually overpower the A.I in religion anyway, so this would be more an advantage for them.
Maybe add a new event to reconvert all of your cities to your own religion (1 time only and triggers when none of your cities are converted to your religion)? But I think generally the event system itself should be fixed first