Cultists - the most annoying feature?

[Robo]

Is there any way how to fight cultists besides starting a war and clearing them out?

This sounds very silly to me - If I want to play peaceful game and my neighbor(s) go for these - I am basically unable to play?

That does not happen always, but in my last 2 games - they just surround my cities and do nothing. They are from my ally so I cannot even easily declare war to get rid of them. I could not care less about them if you could at least ignore them and walk through them like religious unit - but you cant, they occupy the tiles and you cannot even move builders to such tiles.

I had wait for the alliance to end and trigger emergency towards me because I could not play at all ...

This is a huge oversight on 2K side if you ask me and should be patched somehow.

[-1 Stability Hit]

no the launcher is the most annoying feature

[Loviatar]

It can be pretty annoying. I made a half-joke post just a day ago about it. At one point I had 35 Ethiopian cultists shuffling about one of my new colonies. My guess is that the AI sees them as similar to missionaries, since they cost faith and you send them to other civs. But then since it doesn't do any religious pressure on use, they just end up not knowing what to do with them once they get them there.

One solution might be, if you have a religion, to ensure your cities all follow it. At least in my games, the AI is rarely aggressive with conversion, other than with city states and cities not already following a civ's religion (hence why they kept swarming my colonies).

Otherwise, hopefully the devs will look to updating the mode in the near future. I mean, the AI can use rock bands well enough, which are faith buys as well.

[Cryten]

you can happily ignore cultists as long as you have positive loyalty growth. Even at 0 loyalty a city will not flip if when the turn starts it gains loyalty. Effectively since the change to cultists they became useless except as a way to speed up a already rebelling city.

[Pokepug]

Originally posted by -1 Stability Hit:

no the launcher is the most annoying feature

Damn, you beat me to it.

[Stormwinds]

Originally posted by Cryten:

you can happily ignore cultists as long as you have positive loyalty growth. Even at 0 loyalty a city will not flip if when the turn starts it gains loyalty. Effectively since the change to cultists they became useless except as a way to speed up a already rebelling city.

You're not wrong, but they do provide a useful way of turning faith into tourism especially since the Reliquaries belief triples the tourism output they provide.

[Cryten]

Aye

[Lemurian1972]

The real problem isn't Cultists specifically, but why they're being sent to huddle around your city. What you're seeing is a symptom of one of the biggest AI flaws in the game. It shows the AI makes decisions about 'going to war' independent of your friendship/alliance state, and isn't capable of adjusting. This is the same reason the AI decides to flip and go to war if an alliance lapses.

AI makes a decision about which enemy to focus on and it can last dozens of turns. It moves all its forces into their territory (if it can) even if it can't do anything. Eventually if you keep up your alliance, they will change their mind and go away, but the turn counter cycle for this decisionmaking is a lot longer than the 30 turns agreements last, so the end result is the AI wastes huge amounts of time.

This has been this way since launch, and while I've reported it in detail, I have no idea why it is this way and what can be done to avoid it, short of the devs fixing it.

[Robo]

Originally posted by Cryten:

you can happily ignore cultists as long as you have positive loyalty growth. Even at 0 loyalty a city will not flip if when the turn starts it gains loyalty. Effectively since the change to cultists they became useless except as a way to speed up a already rebelling city.

Loyalty is not the problem - they do not even try to flip my cities. They just stand there surrounding my cities and preventing my units to step on the occupied tiles to make improvement with builders for example.