Political Police and you, or, dealing with heretics in North Africa

[Frankmuddy]

During the course of my campaign as the Moors, I discovered two important things about the North Sahara provinces. Firstly, they tend to be hotbeds of heresy. Secondly, they are impractically large and difficult to travel.

Sending Imams to clean up individual heretics is problematic. Heretics tend to disapear into the huge desert regions, continuing to undermine the religion from far out among the dunes. Even on the rare occaisions that my Imams can catch the Heretics, they rarely have the religious omph to denounce them, and occaisionally they end up turning to the dark side.

The way I've found for dealing with this is to make a stack of ten cheap units, peasants or militia, and use them to round up and execute problematic individuals. I like to think of them as my political police.

Some other uses of this might be to funnel problematic individuals out of your kingdom entirely.

[Jund23]

I find spies make good political police, they can see a lot further than peasants.

Send a couple into the area you are after cleansing and hey presto, heretics pop into view

[Bearclaw]

Spies can find them, but they can't kill them. If you surround any agent character with 8 army units (4 sides and 4 corners) and then move another one into the middle, the agent will have nowhere to go and will be killed. Technically an exploit, but I don't see any reason why armed soldiers couldn't grab a foreign agent and kill him-there's an extremely strong historical precedence for forcibly eliminating troublemakers.

[zstajerski]

Actually I have solved this problem kinda different..
I make watchtowers so that i can see evrythink on my land, it may taek some turns and you use up one or two famikluiy members, but considering how long the play lasts it is worth it

[SultanSaladin]

yep .. watchtowers are good at spotting the heretics and they last a long time ... that way you do not have to send some spies looking for them and you can use them on some more importent tasks ..

[General Zhukov]

As I suggested in another thread, it might be a good idea to set up a "spiritual center" in a semi-centralized North African city, like Algiers. I did that as Spain after colonizing the area, and priests starting out as bishops with some theological training can keep a nice handle on this religiously rebellious region.

[FactionHeir]

Watchtowers are best. I usually plaster all my regions with them so no corner goes unnoticed (the accessible ones anyway)

[PureFodder]

In my Moorish campaign I spent a lot of time playing spot the heretic in North Africa. A real pain.