Heretic Bug - PLEASE HELP

[tr.igger]

(Before I begin, using 6.4, with the bugfix and weak heretics on)
I decided to slightly weaken heretics, just to help the flow of my game and prevent me from sending my army of priests around to encircle and hopefully conquer a heretic.
But I think it has only made it harder...
I say this only because priests never just fail to condemn a heretic and bring him to execution, they either take out the heretic - or become one themselves. So now one heretic usually becomes 5 pretty quickly and I have one settlement at literally 80% heretic and mathematically they're bound to grow exponentially, simply because even if the average priests chance of taking them out is 30% the majority of priests are converted. I'm certain to have a swarm on my hands.
Does anyone know what I can do to fix this???

[gsthoed]

About the bug: Restore the initial settings.
How to remove him: With an assassin (I won't "spoil" how to cheat on this) or surround him with armies and then move one on to the tile the heretic is.

[teks]

Use orthodox priests and send unorthodox priests to foreign lands. Orthodox priests rarely convert. it only takes a few to deal with a heretic in 1 or 2 turns. With heretics, you will need a small army of priests (3-5) because even with the heretic gone, you need to deal with the heresy in the land. As a result, lowering their level doesn't change much.
Checking which priests do the deed is important, and using priests who are already unorthodox is asking for trouble.

[tr.igger]

Just realized I replied to this and it never posted. Gahhh.
First of all, the priest I used literally have nothing in unorthodoxy or orthodoxy, but so far I have still not seen a priest not convert and just fail to prosecute a heretic.
I've also realized this same occurrence affects princesses, merchants and spies, never do I (or the enemy) simply fail at something, you either succeed or lose.
How do I reinstall the initial settings?? Will I lose my save?

[gsthoed]

I've also realized this same occurrence affects princesses, merchants and spies, never do I (or the enemy) simply fail at something, you either succeed or lose.

Hmmm, this is strange. Make a merchant do an acquisition attempt with good chances of success. Reload and repeat, reload, move a unit out from a settlement, repeat, reload, move a unit two times out from a settlement and repeat, now with the unit 3 times out from a settlement. I am expecting that at least one of these attempt will not kill a merchant. Hmmm, since you have that many heretics, try the test with a priest instead of a merchant.

About the initial settings: In OP, you told that "I decided to slightly weaken heretics". Remove what edit you have done; I can't answer for sure if this will be savegame-compatible because I don't know what you have done. If by this you mean "I added one of the Weakened Heretics submods that are in Melooo182's compilation", then just try the test above. Finally, we can't exclude the chance that what you are experiencing in this campaign is just coincidental!

[tr.igger]

Yeah! I meant that Weakened Heretics submod! I got to test this inadvertently anyway and im rather frustrated with the result.
I moved a merchant in for an inquisition at the start of the turn, it had a 25% of working and worked. Good. Then I moved on to other things occurring on the map. I moved a spy and just as I moved him I wanted to change what I'd done. No biggie. I'll just load my save. What a bad decision that was...
So I load my save and do the acquisition again. Fail. What? But I did it exactly the same.... Okay, I'll load and change something before I do it. Fail! WHAT. Okay, I'll do something else then. Fail... I ended up taking tally, just to direct give me something to do between loading screens. 16 times now. Fail. Fail. Fail. And every time its a fail that results in my merchant being swallowed up by the other. I know this is mathematically possible, but me going and winning the lottery is mathematically possible too and too many of these coincidences are occurring in this game. I swear it used to be possible for a merchant to just fail without being swallowed up by the other team beforehand. Regardless, its constant failures when I test this. I thought they made it when you load the same thing happened again, apparently, not quite so... When I reload it appears it's like MTW2 punishes with failures

[gsthoed]

The "something" you 'll have to do after reloading is to move one or more units out of settlements. The new captain "consumes" a random number in order to take a name, thus changing the odds of the upcoming spying, assassination, inquisition (and how that thing priests do to heretics) success.

EDIT: Also, in order to give to the merchant some better chances, move the merchant out of settlement and out of army (so as to be alone), select him, open console and type this:

give_trait this NaturalMerchantSkill 3

Do something similar if you test spies or priests.

[tr.igger]

As I read this I went into my setup and just removed the damned weaker heretics thing. I played on and now 'save scumming' appears to work without consistent failing! But not only that, I was excited to finally see my merchant fail an acquisition without being swallowed up. The lack of situations were an agent fails without being destroyed was what caused me to make this thread and now finally I can be sure that it was the submod's doing. I then added the merchant skill, which caused my merchant to win the acquisition, just as he did originally and i used the console to bring his skill back down to normal. Thanks so much for bearing with me working this out This older games forums appear to be more reliable than many. I'd give rep but I'm too new to be able to do so

[Navajo Joe]

tr.igger,

I repped him for you, goodwork as usual from gsthoed