Here’s the main thrust of the idea:
- In the game I’m playing, the civs that have high religion don’t have great armies or good science. They are very high on religion though so there’s lots of missionaries and apostles running around. Lightning and thunder, that sort of thing.
- I have a relatively minor religion arranged around a strategy of collecting money and production from the faithful.
- I activated the inquisition, which allows you to eliminate all religions except one from a city. (Protip - don’t let your inquisitors get confused about which religion they’re supposed to be members of…)
- Go to the enemy civ’s Holy sites, conquer those cities using the regular army.
- Send in the inquisitors to eradicate all faiths that are not mine. Inquisitors are cheap, but you only need one. Have an apostle ready to convert the lost sheep back to the one true faith.
- Then make peace and return the conquered cities.
The opposition faiths are now inoculated.
In this game, I’m aiming for a science victory, but the religions are being irksome so I’m just trying to delay the faith game enough to actually reach the science victory condition.