Inquisitors unbalance the game?

[Dburt68]

I have been looking though the game manual, and can't find a clue to how to deal with an inquisitor. I have been wondering if there is any way to stop him, he's running through all of my lands, doing a complete end run around all my armies and forts and slaughtering all my generals. None of them nor my king or heirs has a piety high enough to satisfy this inquisitor, whose piety is maxed out! If he gets my king and the whole family, it will be game over, from a single unit, from a faction I am not even at war with!

Everything I have built, my armies, all of it, useless! And I am playing the easiest faction (England) and the game is on normal difficulty, its only turn 50, and it feels like the game is already over. What's worse, I can find no way to make an Inquisitor of my own (the
game manual is pitifully incomplete). It seems like whoever can make the first inquisitor can just win the game by exterminating the whole bloodline of every other faction without even declaring war.. How can this make for a balanced and playable game? There seems to be no way to raise the piety of any of my characters which its sad because it seems like one needs to build up piety of their characters in earnest from turn one in order to survive the Inquisitor assault on turn 50. To have a hope of making it very far past turn 50. It's too bad the creators didn't limit these overpowered agents by limiting how many characters they could kill. Inquisitors are most definitely the nuke of this game.

[paleologos]

Assassination.

[Silverheart]

The best way to quickly remove an inquisitor is to send an assassin after him. However, the risk is great, since if your assassin gets caught, you're automatically excommunicated.
You can also just wait them out, since after a certain amount of successful trials, inquisitors spontaneously lose all their piety, and subsequently disappear from the map (retirement, I guess? ). However, there is no way of knowing when this happens, so you never know how many family members and priests you're going to lose. Although, you could simply swamp him with freshly recruited (= low piety) priests to speed up his "retirement".

And if the situation is just too desperate, you can always kill him by exploiting game mechanics. If you place a military unit on the same tile as an agent, and the agent doesn't have any other tile to go to, he dies. So basically, you can remove any pesky agent you want by surrounding him/her with soldiers, and then placing a single unit on the agent. It doesn't even affect your reputation, diplomatic relations or anything.

[selv]

Inquisitors are papal states agents only. I can only remember that I used to murder them with assassins. Honestly, playing the base game without bare geomod is not a good idea, the very same game but with bugs removed, and already setted to change simple things to your liking:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...ld-Bare-Geomod

It should be seen as a unnoficial patch frankly. The kingdown version, the base medieval is not maintained. About disabling the inquisitors, see the attachment.
Put the descr_campaign_db in your bare_geomod data folder, I disabled the inquisitors spawns. Don't launch the game from the exe, only from the mod bat file or you won't see any changes. And start a new game or it will be the same.

[DaCMan]

I am also playing as England on normal, but haven't had a problem with them. I did promote Christianity in all settlements, built cathedral, trained priests, etc. Which likely helped. Around the time you describe I found some popping up in Europe but simply assassinated, but seeing as his piety is high and any assassins you train will be low level, the course I took isn't advisable. As previously stated you can let him rack up his three trials, or move generals to England, because inquisitors would need a papal ship to go from the holy city to the straits (which they almost certainly won't do) and avoid him. As long as you have a young general in England (barring a natural disaster or riot) your faction will outlive the inquisitor.

[Sar1n]

I am also playing as England on normal, but haven't had a problem with them. I did promote Christianity in all settlements, built cathedral, trained priests, etc. Which likely helped. Around the time you describe I found some popping up in Europe but simply assassinated, but seeing as his piety is high and any assassins you train will be low level, the course I took isn't advisable. As previously stated you can let him rack up his three trials, or move generals to England, because inquisitors would need a papal ship to go from the holy city to the straits (which they almost certainly won't do) and avoid him. As long as you have a young general in England (barring a natural disaster or riot) your faction will outlive the inquisitor.

Inqusitors AFAIK don't walk from Rime, they spawn. And can spawn even on British isles. Chance to spawn depends on your relations with Pope-worse relations, more inquisitors. And unfortunately, England tends to have bad relations because everyone in their proximity is catholic, so they keep fighting them.

So...assassinations or army stomp abuse works in removing, and bribe the Pope to have less inquisitors on you.

[DaCMan]

Sorry, forgot they could spawn in the Isles. I knew they spawned just blanked out on it as I have only seen them in Europe. As long as your British settlements are roughly 85-90% Catholic you most likely will be able to avoid problems with inquisistors in England, barring a heretic.

[Iosif Stalin]

I've never seen an Inquisitor appear on the island of Britain, ever. I'm kind of surprised anyone else has. I suppose if you let heresy get bad enough in England it could happen, but that seems easy enough to prevent.

In my experience, England is the easiest nation for dealing with Inquisitors, because when they appear near my cities/castles on the continent I can just have my generals take ship to the island until the Inquisitor moves on or dies in a unexpected, ahem, accident. It's never even occurred to me that the Inquisitors might spawn on the island, just because I've never seen it happen before. I have seen them on Corsica though.

It seems like you should still be able to use the same solution I did, though, just in reverse. If an Inquisitor is on the island, just get your family members off the island. Heck, you can even keep your families aboard ships indefinitely if there are Inquisitors roaming both the island and your continental territories. That seems a bit gamey though, but then again, so is the Inquisitors' penchant for killing anyone and everyone indiscriminately. They were nasty buggers in real life, but they didn't have the power to wipe out whole royal families.

Side note, but I just had an Inquisitor kill the only princess in my (Spanish) royal family, who had really high charm and was close to bagging an excellent suitor from somewhere in Italy (can't remember if Milanese or Venetian, but one of those) to join my faction. Grrr.

[Felsbrocken]

In my experience family members and agents are safe when placed in settlements or forts. Until now i had no losses even when the Inquisitor is standing nearby. However not 100% proof.

[Iosif Stalin]

They've killed my characters in settlements and forts. You're only safe if you have a really high piety rating, and even then not completely.

[Tasunke]

Has there been a mod which lets inquisitors kill generals and priests but not princesses or family members?

imho it would be better if they were just priests with more upkeep, could be built by ANY catholic nation, and only kill heretics, witches, and religious agents of *other* religions. Would be more accurate imho. The Spanish Inquisition was only there to enforce Catholicism on the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula, which had large Muslim and Jewish populations. It acted parallel with the mass expulsion of peoples who would not convert to Christianity. And these were Inquisitors of Spain, not of the Pope. In reality famous people that had royal blood were never burned at the stake, and if anyone important was to be burned it required a lot of evidence. Iirc Joan of Arc was the only 'famous' person burned at the stake. And because of this her story tends to become exaggerated. If anything, the overzealousness of in-game Inquisitors seems to be nothing more than anti-Catholic propaganda. If they saw an Imam or Rabbi they would first banish them from the nation, and any that came back to Spain would only *then* be burned at the stake, for Defying the will of Catholic Spain ..... nothing at all similar to killing princes for not reading the Bible enough!!! Jeez.

[NorseThing]

Inquisition is just a tougher version of the computer faction producing assassins. I look at it as just another aspect of the game to be dealt with. In the end, the computer has no chance of outplaying the human for most players with experience.

[Gigantus]

That said: there are some entries in descr_campaign_db that govern inquisitors. If I remember correctly you can set the total number of them on the map, max per region - nothing fancy. Would have to check if there is a 'min\max piety to attack' entry. There certainly isn't anything regarding character types.

[Tasunke]

Hmm. Not sure why u couldn't restrict which units it targets (since priests can only target Heretics/Witches, *or* Heretics/Witches AND priests depending on the mod)

Pope-only Inquisitors are fun for a game mechanic but not realistic in the slightest. And allowing multi-faction inquisitors (maybe a limit of 1 per faction) should be a priority in realism mods imho.

[Gigantus]

While Inquisitors are pope only units they work on a level similar to heretics and witches. Which means you can't assign them to other specific factions, even if you managed they will still target characters (including their own faction) according to their hard coded (not moddable) settings. As do priests.