Passive vs. Active Spread

How strong should passive spread be relative to missionary spread

  • Stronger. Most followers to any religion should come from passively spreading

    Votes: 7 38.9%
  • Weaker. Most followers should come from missionary conversions.

    Votes: 11 61.1%

  • Total voters
    18

pineappledan

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@Stalker0 and I are at loggerheads over India's inability to convert its own cities in the current version.

The central issue at hand is that I think this is a general problem with how passive spread has been decreased over many consecutive patches and reworks, such that no civilization can effectively spread its own religion through passive means.

It is my opinion that passive spread through cities and trade routes should constitute the majority of conversions to your religion, both in your own cities and in other cities, enough even that the last to found in a standard game should feel their own religion's somewhat imperiled by the 20-30 turn lag. Missionaries should mainly be there to direct your religious spread in targeted ways, and create new centres for passive pressure to be generated from.

Stalker's viewpoint is that:
Missionaries are the standard way to spread religion[...]
Passive pressure augments and reinforces pressure, it’s not the primary vehicle for conversion, and never has been in any version of the mod. Only after the initial city conversions does passive start to turn into a dominant way to deliver pressure.
Thus, if I am understanding his viewpoint, Stalker thinks that missionaries should be the primary vehicle for all spreading, and that passive pressure should only be sufficient to consolidate and maintain the converted state of cities you have already spread to.


As this relates to India, The current India mechanics only slightly increase the % pressure for followers in your own cities. In the current patch, this is equivalent to 1-2 % modifiers from faith buildings depending on the size; more of a nudge, which relies on passive pressure already being a core driver of conversion. If Stalker's viewpoint is to prevail, India would need to have far more dramatic modifiers in order to make passive pressure viable. The current proposal is to increase the passive pressure per follower from 2 to 10%, 5x the previous amount.

So what are people's views on the role of passive spread in the game?
 
Missionaries you pay for and control. Passive spread is hard to control, and also extremely snowbally by nature. When the AI surrounds you with passive pressure you can't beat it with passive pressure, because they already have more and you have less; if it's too strong relative to missionaries, you just lose your religion. I don't really understand the view that the mechanic which naturally snowballs and is costless should be more powerful than the one that you need to invest in and can focus in specific directions.
@DeAnno, it used to be that removing an unwanted religion only cost an inquisitor action, which had a fairly minimal effect except that maintaining your religion in this way also cost you :c5faith:faith. Thus, strong, costless passive spread mainly amounted to bleeding neighbours of their faith generation.

Perhaps the resistance turn was a bad move, because passive spread turned from a way to drain enemy faith economy into a way to completely paralyze another civ, if they were committed to keeping their religion?
 
As long as inquisitor uses cause anarchy, passive spread should be weaker than missionary spread. There are very few things in this game more frustrating than watching your cities be converted through no action by the AI, and the only recourses you have are to cripple your cities or attempt to conquer them. At least if missionary spread is the dominant method, you can ask the AI not to spread or declare a defensive war to kill their missionaries.
 
The only thing I’ll modify from PADs description of my viewpoint, I think missionaries are the vehicle for INITIAL spreads, aka getting your cities converted to your religion.

from there passive pressure increases and can be used to convert foreign cities without missionaries.

Put more simply, missionaries are the initial spread mechanic, passive pressure the later spread
 
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I'd like to see a detailed explanation of how pressure is (currently) calculated before making a choice.
 
I'd like to see a detailed explanation of how pressure is (currently) calculated before making a choice.
Having recently looked at the code, I'm not sure that would be very helpful. I can say that it scales off the number of followers in the city creating pressure. It's probably more useful to look at the total resultant pressure (shown in the city religion tooltip) against the missionaries 1000 pressure.

Missionaries should generate a lot more pressure than passive pressure as it's a one-off (two actually I suppose) effect, whereas passive pressure is per turn. Maybe we should be thinking about how many turns of passive pressure a missionary is equivalent to. In the early game, it will be very many turns and the number will steadily fall throughout the game.

Regarding India, perhaps you should keep your non-capital cities small until religion has spread there. The bigger the city, the longer it will take to overcome the accumulated pantheon pressure added each time the city grows.

Pressure from a religion actually reduces the accumulated pantheon pressure. Perhaps India could get a bonus to this reduction so passive pressure will convert their cities to the religion faster than for other civs.
 
I am not well versed in the exact mechanics of religion spread but from a laymans point of view i feel that missionaries should be much more immediately impactful than passive spreading and be your main way to actively spread your religion while passive spreading should primarily be about reinforcing that religion.

Obviously if a city is surrounded by a religion then things start to muddy as it will be recieving a lot of pressure from other religion(s) which can build up significantly and passive spreading can be very powerful which i feel can't reallly be avoided and is generally an acceptable outcome when surrounded by a religion but in a more equal relgion 'battle' missionaries should have a significant impact to tip the battle in that religions favor.

I see three things really affecting the effectiveness of missionaries and that is that they stay static in strength throughout the game which means past the initial phase of spreading you often need multiple missionaries just to convert 1 citizen so they seem quite poor in the cost/benefit calculation especially as the cost of missionaries rises as the game progresses so the cost of a missionary increases but their effectiveness is static so in real terms they become less effective as the game progresses. In short cost goes up, effectiveness goes down.

A big game changer was the change to passive spread over water. Coastal cities can be very hard to stop from flipping constantly both from the immense amount of pressure that can be exerted on them from 'abroad' as well as simply further away on your own continent and as this pressure can be coming from 'abroad' it can be difficult to actively counter either by converting other civs or invading them.
As an example of the disparity in the pressure applied to coastal cities i have just conquered a small continent and converted it in my current game. The continent has 10 cites, 1 inland and 9 coastal all converted to my religion with me already having converted my own continent fully.
The inland city was getting around 20 pressure while the coastal cities were getting 150-200 pressure once all were converted.

The third factor is the inquisitor change, both from the aspect that none founders can't use them and from the aspect that they now send a city into resistance.
It is nice that you can now convert other (none founding) civs but it can be extremely hard and expensive to convert/keep them converted as you are relying on spamming your own missionaries which as pointed out earlier become increasingly more expensive while increasingly less effective.
Keeping the religion in your own cities can be hard enough sometimes with inquisitors without the unrest addition.

Before it was essentially a race to convert a civ and then they would keep that religion for you by liberal use of inquisitors which conversly made it virtually impossible to convert cities after the inital part of the game without conquering them. It was therefore good if you got there first, bad if you didn't and very quickly religious balance became static for the rest of the game and the only chance you had to get your religion wonder if surrounded by other religons was by converting city states for long enough to build it and then probably lose those city state afterwards or as would often happen you would have to have multiple goes at building it as you battled to keep the follower count high enough.

The change to inquisitors now makes religion potentially more fluid and interesting throughout the game but at the same time as missionaries become increasingly expensive and increasingly less effective, unless you have a lot of cities with orders and doing a lot of fighting it is not really reasonable to convert cities past the start of the game still as you can need 10+ missionaries to convert a city and if that city is not getting huge pressure from your religion already it (and therefore will likely passively convert anyway) has little hope of staying that religion as you then need another 10+ missionaries to convert a nearby city to apply more pressure and realistically you will need to convert multiple cities to create a block which pressure each other and you can only really afford that amount of faith with large warring and orders and if your doing that you are likely just taking cities and coverting them anyway so missionaries aren't really needed.

I feel missionaries really need to scale better (at all) in some way. As their power stays static maybe the easiest option would be to keep their cost static or if their cost is going to scale still then their power needs to scale in some way also to keep them relevant.

Regarding India as a special case specifically i have never played them in their current iteration so i don't have direct experience of their nuances but if missionaries being strong breaks their UA then obviously their UA needs a tweak to make it work but i don't feel missionaries should be inherantly weak just to accomodate one civs UA.
UA's should be balanced to the game not the game balanced to UA's.
 
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I like the idea of passive spread but currently it is just miserable. Cities end up half flipped without any religion. You just can't rely on it to spread at all and it is far too easy to end up in this rubbish middle ground without a religion at all in half your cities.

I think the issue is passive spread is way too much of a snowball, once it gets going it is unstoppable but before that it does almost nothing. Maybe it can be adjusted so this isn't the case but it does seem a rather fundamental part of how it works.
 
One thing I will also note is that more aggressive passive spread would mean non-founders would get religions in their cities sooner. The current missionary-focused paradigm relies on non-founders being targeted by missionaries from other civs in order to benefit from the religion game at all. Hence, other civs need to invest their own :c5faith:faith into converting a nonfounder.
 
Missionaries should be the best early on to spread on religion-less cities, possibly good later if invested in (Borobudur + beliefs that empower missionaries). passive spread should be the deciding factor once religions have been set in every city.
I feel like trade routes could be more relevant in pressure, too.
 
Thinking of it as passive vs active spread is flawed in my opinion. Missionary spreading boosts pressure, a lot. As an example in game, I got my religion only 6 turns after Siam got his, and he's put a missionary on 4 of his cities.

When I can buy my first missionary (6 turns after founding), that results in enough passive pressure to already flipped 1 citizen in most of my cities. If passive pressure was too much larger I'd have lost before I began, and this is only a small gap in turns between Great Prophets.
 
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So here's how I generally see spread work in my games. There are various "phases"

  • Found -> Initial Spread: From founding your religion to getting it running in your cities, this generally requires missionary work. If you are waiting for passive (such as trying to focusing on the fastest possible enhancer), then it will take a long time for your cities to gain followers, and are easy for foreign missionaries to convert. I consider passive pressure functionally non-existent at this stage, but I also think that is working as intended.
  • Conversion of Foreign Non-Founder / CS: After you have spread to your initial cities, you start gaining nearby CS and hopefully have a non-founder to spread into. At this point passive pressure is starting to rise. If I have 8 or more cities, I start to notice my passive pressure being strong enough to convert new cities I just make (and if I'm really large like 10+ than its nigh instantaneous....I know this from a recent mass expand morocco game I played). Foreign pressure is noticeable but not yet a real threat, it will eat some of my followers but little risk of a passive conversion.
  • Passive Snowball: As a secondary civ (either a non-founder or one you used GP + missionary to convert) takes on your religion, passive pressure jumps up noticeably. I will frequently see that if a foreign AI has done this, their passive pressure in my cities is often greater than my own (and that's before fealty and the like). Ultimately if I don't respond with more conversion of my own, than I usually will have to do some amount of missionary and/or inquisitor maintenance in my cities to maintain the main religion. This is when the passive pressure starts to snowball, for its high enough to convert some followers on its own....which increases passive pressure....which converts more followers....etc.

For me that's working pretty well. Passive pressure serves as a force that eates a bit at your followers, and does well letting a religion that has started to snowball really takes off across the land if left unchecked. It also serves when I do GP + missionary conversions to maintain my religion and continue to reinforce it unless the enemy takes steps to drive me out. I think its in a reasonable position at the moment.
 
I think that missionary conversion strength should scale much better in later part of game, because starting Medieval their influence drops harshly.
 
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