Religion victory and Inquisitors

[Aleddra]

I'm a bit new at this. I'm playing on settler, trying to finish this game. The guy launched an inquisition like ages ago. It's still on and i can't quite make any progress in his territory because of it.

This should be easy, it's the easiest difficulty setting. I'm missing something here.

[Lemurian1972]

When you see the "so and so declared an Inquisition" message, all that means is he burned an Apostle to unlock Inquisitors. It doesn't add any special status to his other units or his home territory.

An Apostle with the Debater promotion should be stronger than an Inquisitor. If you ever get that kind of Apostle, don't use up all his charges, send him around with a Guru or two as support and have him beat the crap out of opposing units.

Winning Theological combat in enemy territory is actually a far more efficient way to convert their territory than sending unit after unit and burning charges anyway.

You could also just fight a regular war against them and use your military to Condemn them, killing them quickly and easily.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Send your apostles as a mob, 6-8 at a time, and kill every religious unit they find by overwhelming them. If a particular civ is hard to convert, convert every other civ first and let religious pressure work for you. Their inquisitors will be worthless outside their own territory - weaker than missionaries - and so of no help in stopping you from converting other civs. Once they are all that is left you can start the slow work of slogging your way against their inquisitors' resistance. Note that each one they buy will increase the cost of the next one, so as you take them out you will be driving the price of the next one higher. Eventually they won't be able to afford a new inquisitor long enough that you can convert their cities without fear of them being flipped back. Just make sure you fall back to your holy sites and heal your religious units, because not losing them in combat is key.

[NecessaryWeevil]

Additionally, remember that while Missionaries can't attack, they can defend and impose Zones of Control. Use the cheaper Missionaries to build your line of battle / dragnet, work your way slowly across enemy territory, and then use your Apostles to pounce on injured enemy apostles / inquisitors.
If you can move your battleline past an enemy city, isolating it from all others, then you can bomb it with missionaries without fear of enemy Inquisitors undoing your work.
But, yeah, remember the gurus. Realizing that I could use them to heal my apostles was the key to my first religous victory (on Chieftain).

[Aleddra]

i was going for a cultural victory but there was one other civ close to a religion victory. Started going for a religious one, just to put up a fight. In the end, i swapped 2 or 3 policies and it boosted my tourism enough for a victory.

But it's all good, it's going to come in handy.

[gimmethegepgun]

The only way they can get a religious victory is if they convert half of your cities as well. Inquisitors, as you noted, make this extremely difficult, especially since the AI is a lot worse at combat than you and virtually never attempts to conventionally heal its religious units (it will use Gurus though).

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Scheneighnay:

the best way I found for religious victories is a slow and steady route of sending teams of apostles, missionaries and gurus (preferably gurus, but you can improvise) to sit on all of the enemy holy sites so they can't spawn any more religious units, while the rest of yours can start picking off stragglers and gradually converting their cities.

They can still buy religious units if there aren't any in the city center (but they often just park one inside doing nothing anyway).
Pillaging the Holy Site will prevent purchase entirely.

the AI is really bad at religious warfare, they'll prioritize converting cities over attacking your units

Yeah a lot of the time the best way to deal with an enemy Debater is to let the AI destroy it by using all of its charges on conversion rather than keeping it around to fight you.