How do you manage your priests?

[Grabbin_Megroin]

The method I've stuck to has been to have 1 per region. Also, I don't upgrade past churches so that I can see if one of them has become a heretic by checking if they are at the agent limit or not every turn.

However, lately I've been wondering if it's even necessary to have priests in regions which have a 90% Catholicism rating, and if it's not then I'm wasting time and florins managing them.

I think I might try to just recruit them in regions where the % is below 90, and then only dealing with heretics whenever I accidentally stumble upon them rather than painstakingly checking every territory each turn I see a priest is MIA. How bad can an idle heretic really be? With the exception of a couple, my settlements hover around 180+ happiness, so I'm not too worried about riots. As a bonus I can upgrade my churches for the nice benefits.

How do you go about it?

[TheBard]

It depends on which faction I'm playing. Lately, I've been playing as the Crusaders, wherein priests are incredibly important--the more the better, basically. If you are catholic and you border or are close to a non-catholic faction, it's worth sending priests into their lands to build them up. Priests are much more likely to get good traits if working on trying to convert where the percent of their religion (catholic, for example) is very low. They don't gain much when sitting in regions that are 80 or 90% their religion.

So if you are bordering a faction with other religions, built up priests may help you keep your own border regions from shifting toward the neighbor's religion. Even then, I would say it's pretty easy to keep your regions pretty religious with just churches and upgrades. Unless you are in a really difficult religious area (Moors in Spain, Sicily with regions in N. Africa, the Crusaders, Byzantines, Teutonic Order, etc.), you probably don't need priests to keep your own territories religious and happy. Keep in mind that if you are using BGR IV, though, you must keep your religion over 70% to be able to recruit knights and related high-level troops.

The reason to try to create many high-level priests if you are in a solidly catholic area is to hopefully get more of them elected as cardinals (immune to becoming a heretic, and gives you better influence with the pope). I would say that having several decent cardinals will help you get rid of any heretics that pop up. I don't think you need to worry about possible heretics every turn unless you have a huge empire that would require you to move cardinals a long distance over many turns.

I don't know much about playing non-catholic factions, though.

[Strengelicher]

It depends on the faction you are playing and the difficulty settings. As TheBard says, for the crusaders and with BGR IV on priests are very important for the recruitment of quality troops (especially the cheap ones from the orders), and you desperately need at least one cardinal to battle the numerous tough heretics. Take a look at my AAR (in the signature) to see what I mean by the latter. Of course, I have the number of priests maxed out all the time...