Inciting religious revolt/ converting the people to your cause

On an ERE campaign I played, I found Colchis to be a very troublesome city to hold on to. The problem was not that my army was weak, it was more than capable of fending off the Sassanids (even had some mercenary elephants). The problem was that public order would often drop to terrible levels in only one or two turns (only caused alot of rioting, no rebellions, fortunately). Eventually I realised that this was because Sassanid characters with pro-conversion traits and retinues were sitting in my province converting the population to Zoroastrianism. I am not sure if the AI was actually intending to do this, but it certainly had that effect. Fortunately because it's a small province it was fairly easy to deal with, but in large provinces it could be seriously troublesome because during the time it would take to find and fight off the interloping army the city could rebel. I tried it against the AI too, and managed to cause a couple of provinces to go rebel. However, it's mostly useful for preparing a province for takeover by your army. Might be a totally obvious tactic and I'm just dumb for only having stumbled upon it, but if you have surplus generals they can make occupations alot easier by helping to convert the population before you capture a city. I believe it can also be done with diplomats, if they have religious traits.

Haven't seen the AI do that in my campaign. Colchis always revolts to me. Although, I believe, the Sassanids do start with a character which, with retinues and traits combined, has about +40% conversion for Zoroastrianism. Send assassins/armies. Or have a christian teacher stay in the province, I think that's about all you can do.

You can use sunny Colchis as your "retirement home" too.

If you have a place where an alien religion seems to keep increasing, rather than reducing, you can send all your "retired" family members and generals there. I like to recycle my commanders quite a lot, to avoid serious loyalty problems (and once you get some good ancilliaries its not too bad to lose the general's command rating for a short time) and I like to dump them all somewhere out of the way. If most of the them are Christian you can have them collect anchoresses (who are less useful than anchorites in my opinion), the unrest-causing relics, and spare bishops (I have a whole sack of bishops, it seems!) and ship them off to Colchis. This should keep the conversion in check, until you get a chance to clear the Sassanids off the map and establish proper religion in their former provinces. :knight:

Diplomats have religion. You can quite literally swamp a region with your diplomats and alter its religious make up tremendously. It is a cheap and easy way to counter the AI doing it to you and to prep regions for religious revolt or conquest and conversion.

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Originally Posted by Tyrac

Diplomats have religion. You can quite literally swamp a region with your diplomats and alter its religious make up tremendously. It is a cheap and easy way to counter the AI doing it to you and to prep regions for religious revolt or conquest and conversion.

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Actually I should preface that and say SOME diplomats have religion. I just made one that had none. Was rather odd.

I get those "faithless" diplomats most of the time. Even if I train them in cities with big temples it's still uncommon for them to have religious traits.

BugFixer will sort that out for you. There is an update regarding religious traits for dips and spies. See sticky above.

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Originally Posted by gmjapan

BugFixer will sort that out for you. There is an update regarding religious traits for dips and spies. See sticky above.

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Hmmm I installed bug fixer before I even started my first campaign and I still got this faithless diplomat. However this is the only diplomat I have ever made. Never been big on negotiation.

Well you can't really be blamed considering how worthless and broken the diplomacy in RTW/BI is....

Don't know about Bugfixer, but vanilla BI agents have a 10% chance of having religion and then spies and diplomats have an additional 10% chance of having religion. CA stated they didn't go with 100% chance because of the potential of religious rushing of a province. Course you can still do it, its just a little tougher.

I've even had religious assassins which the manual says is impossible.

"I kick-arse... FOR THE LORD" or something, I guess...

religious assassins impossible huh...i thought that the game manual said that this was just unlikely...i dont really think i have trained one yet but i could be wrong and i just didnt notice any sneaky religious assassins.~:confused:

I had a christian assassin who was very useful clearing the Eastern Roman Empire Generals from the map.

Assassins are your friends.

The Sassanids start off with a pretty good assassin, I think has a skill level of four. After sending him after some diplomats you can start knocking off the ERE's family members with impunity.

To quote the manual at this point:

"Assassins never have any STRONG religious beliefs, by the way"

Strong being the key word in that section, they could just be a normal Christian, with light religious beliefs.

well it should be moddable i'd think if any 'pious' ??? assassins are needed.
i agree with furious mental too, been playing a sassanid campaign and the assassin they begin with proves most useful against ERE.
:bow:

I have certainly had religious assassins. I would take the words of the manual to believe that there is no chance of them being religious. That Sassanid character - the faction leader, I think - held Colchis for roughly two turns. It had been almost completely converted to Zoroastrianism. His faction collapsed rather quickly and he spent the rest of his life in a fort close to Colchis. I left him alone.