Conversion Ritual SUCKS

[Majorita]

So you can only do it like every 20 days and it has a really high chance of just being terrible and wasting your time AND it puts your moral guide's abilities on cooldown too???

Why the heck is it this punishing to use??? I have 20-ish believers surrounding the guy in an extremely impressive beautiful temple and there's still like a what, 15-20% chance it actually makes trying to convert ONE pawn take that much longer? Like are you kidding me?

So forget all the actual intended mechanics, the only reliable strat seems to just be arresting the guy and beating them down with warden conversion. Like, "you are not leaving your cell until you change your religion to mine" and it's the only way I have found to reliably convert anyone. This is seriously beyond stupid.

Ideology has problems.

[Jetstream]

A good temple helps a lot yes, but the problem here is probably the skill of your pawn, rituals or any ceremony actually depends heavily in the social stat of pawns so if your leader/moral guide is socially incompetent, the ceremony probably will fail, that's why i always reroll for a pawn with high social skills when i start a new colony.

[Makeithappen]

I'll have to go with what Jetstream said since I haven't played Ideology in awhile. I do remember causing a crisis of faith in your prisoners allows the conversion to be much faster. I dont remember if that is if you keep prisoners happy give them the worst prison cell and feed them scraps.

[Astasia]

Base odds for conversion ritual are:
5% terrible = +20% certainty
15% ineffective = +12% certainty
60% effective = -30% certainty +3 participant mood
20% masterful = -100% certainty +6 participant mood

This is mostly important for pawns with traits that reduce certainty fall as IIRC the ritual ignores those multipliers. So a masterful ritual will always instantly convert a pawn to your ideology.

Most people vastly underestimate the importance of social skill on their moral guide and is the main reason for confusion surrounding conversion. A high skill moral guide can convert most pawns in 2-3 attempts of the convert ability, and is vital to getting good odds on the conversion ritual for the tougher nuts to crack. The idea of arresting a pawn to recruit them in prisoner is ludicrous outside of niche situations, like pawns with x25% certainty fall (iron will, or two 50% traits) where the convert ability does very little but normal conversion is still possible. The options are to burn rituals on them and hope for that 20% outcome, or arrest them and very slowly chip away at their certainty, or arrest them and make them miserable enough so they break and have a crisis of belief mental break. Meanwhile a pawn with the kind trait should instantly flip to your ideology with a single use of the convert ability on a decent moral guide. These extra steps and considerations for specific traits add a lot of depth and interesting choices to the mechanic.

[Minty Fresh]

I agree with the OP, I find the conversion ritual pretty useless - the convert ability seems to work better. I also usually pick the Proselytizer meme, it just takes too long and too much effort otherwise.

[Astasia]

You shouldn't need the ritual for most pawns, but participating in it is a decent mood bonus which always gives it reason to be used. If you don't need the mood then it's fine to save the ritual for pawns with like x12% or less certainty fall where you really need that masterful insta conversion, but such pawns are rare and many of the traits that reduce certainty fall are bad. I don't think it's a problem that the ritual doesn't "need" to be used on cooldown. It certainly doesn't suck though and the ritual is almost always going to be more effective than using the convert ability with a proper setup.

I will say I didn't really agree with the nerf to force the ritual to trigger the conversion ability cooldown. It worked better when you could use them both at the same time. But of course nerfs rarely feel good.

[BitterSwede]

As with all rituals, it's mostly for the mood of your colonists rather than the bonus output. With everything at full, you got a bit more than a coinflip to give your entire colony a mood boost for half a season, with about a 20% chance of that mood boost being doubled.
But only about 20% chance of completely converting the subject.

I usually wait until the person is under 30% certain, then there's a 60%-ish chance of converting them either way and less than 20% chance of strengthening their belief in their current ideoligion, adding a day or two to your regular conversion attempts.

And unlike the other rituals, even if the conversion ritual is bad, you don't get a mood hit for it. This makes it probably the strongest ritual in my opinion.

Of course, there's way better ways than rituals to give mood boosts, but I feel that's a whole 'nother discussion.

[Majorita]

But it's not called a MOOD BUFF ritual (there's like six other ones of those!!!!!) it's called a CONVERSION RITUAL and you're telling me like it's okay that the 'conversion' part is the worst part of it?!

So you're saying oh you need high social JUST HOW HIGH SOCIAL DO YOU NEED??? I read this yesterday, oh well maybe it's just because my actual leader, not my moral guide or whatever aka the person doing the ritual, is like only 8 social BUT THE PERSON RUNNING THE CONVERSION, MY 'MORAL GUIDE', IS AT 16/20 SOCIAL SKILL, SO THAT SURE ISN'T THE PROBLEM.

I don't why it lacks power so significantly anyway, like what, is it just super weak because they wouldn't want me, oh no, to convert a single pawn too swiftly in my own colony??? THE BALANCE HAS BEEN SHATTERED ALL SENSE OF PROGRESSION HAS BEEN DISSOLVED! OH MY GOOOOOD SOMEONE SAVE US ALL

I guess this is why the game allows mods...

[BitterSwede]

None of the rituals are called "mood buff ritual" though...

Funeral ritual gives mood buff or debuff and puts a pawn to eternal rest.
Social festival ritual gives mood buff or debuff and has a chance of giving you a new colonist, faction rep etc.
Dance party ritual/Drum party ritual gives mood buff or debuff and has a chance of giving global work speed
Skylantern festival ritual gives a mood buff or debuff and has a chance to attract visitors
Feast ritual (christmas tree, symbol burning, smokeleaf circle or cannibal feast) gives a mood buff or debuff
Scarification ritual gives a mood buff or debuff and scarifies the target
Blinding ritual gives a mood buff or debuff and blinds the target, with a chance of giving a psylink upgrade
Animal sacrifice ritual gives a mood buff or debuff and has a chance to give inspiration to one colonist
Execution ritual gives a mood buff or debuff and has a chance to fully suppress all participating slaves

Do you see the common thread here? A guaranteed mood effect and sometimes a chance of something else. The only "ritual" that doesn't give any mood change for all participants is child birth (from Biotech), which only affects the mother's mood. Even the Royalty "rituals" have a guaranteed mood change and a chance of a bonus.

[Majorita]

You can try and explain it as slowly and carefully as you can like I'm some kind of idiot for not getting your brilliant point but you're not gonna convince me the game isn't stupid or has problems that could be addressed by a balancing pass.

I mean heck even then, they can go wrong and then give you a mood DEBUFF so it's like it's not even worth doing them in the first place because they could make a bad situation worse, and if you're not in need of mood anyway then that side of the equation is pointless! So in my view it's just a waste of time.

You even sacrifice productivity and time and throw off daily schedules and so on just DOING the event in the first place so if you get nothing out of it... why bother?

And this doesn't solve the problem of when you do a conversion ritual and it fails like 15-20% of the time even when almost everything is as perfect as it can even reasonably be!

[Syrris]

Because it's not mind control. Even if everything is perfect, people rarely just give up their beliefs on a dime because someone gave a single inspiring speech/ceremony, and those who do were probably about ready to convert anyway (low certainty).

[The Hat]

PSA: A masterful conversion ritual does not insta-convert under any circumstance. My colony has four genies, all of them have a social skill of 0. My first ritual, and it came out "masterful," but only reduced the certainty of the convertee by perhaps ten percent.

[Aranador]

Give your ideology the proselytising meme, set the frequency to high, and let your pawns passively convert other people in day to day conversation.