How does Religion work?

[Jaume]

I have a few very specific questions about religion in Humankind.
First off, I'll throw out some statements about how I believe religion applies and functions, and if I'm wrong, you can correct me.

- Religion is a "race" to gain followers against other players.
- Followers are the number of the population in your cities/outposts and/or those of your enemies.
- Every "X" number of followers, you reach a tenet that you choose, which will give you an advantage in the form of resources, military, stability, etc.
- The dominant religion will lead to what's called the Religious Leader, which honestly, I have no idea what it's for.
- If your religious influence is higher than your rivals' and they do not adopt said religion, you will gain grievances against that player.

Now, my questions:

- Are potential followers really the entire world population or just the population of your empire?
- If a rival adopts your religion, do they gain all the bonuses you have achieved?
- When the Teutons say "+1 gold per Follower of the official religion". What does "official religion" refer to, the religion of the religious leader?

The only thing that bothers me without knowing yet whether it is or isn't, is that a rival without any religion, just by adopting the dominant one, can obtain all the benefits of the tenets.

I would like to add that, in my opinion, religion is very powerful and useful in Humankind. You can easily boost your economy, industry, or military power with various religious tenets.
What I wonder while playing is... with a Tier 4 religion and my rivals at Tier 1... am I giving all the benefits to everyone who adopts my religion for free? And it makes me want to do the same and not waste time with religious cultures hahaha.

And if the answer is Yes, that they do benefit, and someone tries to convince me that at least the Leader is the one who chooses the tenets, I would say that; all the tenets seem good for any culture, so I don't see the advantage anywhere.

[nullpo]

Q1: all the world pop
Q2: yes. The only thing they miss out is hostile religion interaction
Q3: your state religion. You don't need to be religious leader
"Q4": everyone has religion. But not everyone have religion above polytheism/animism. You know who have what religion when changing state religion

But you don't have to worry about AI adopting your religion. Even on humankind they're still quite dumb, so they'll stick with their religion.

[AmesNFire]

Generally you'll want to adopt a rival's religion and try to take the 'Religious Leader' position from them if your own starting sham/poly faith got swallowed up early on.
The only exception here is if you can't take over and don't want to deal with the headache of constant religious head-butting by going Secular later on.

Due to the way 'Religion' works in the game, don't bother with Atheism unless you're already the dominant faith as otherwise you'll just end up in the first scenario again.

I do hope the devs will one day take a look at the faith system again.

[DNLH]

Just a heads up, Leader is not only the one who chooses tenets, but also the only one who can build non-Wonder Holy Sites, so you'll be skipping on all that extra Stability by giving up on religion race early on.

Religious cultures, and by that I understand you mean ones who have religious EQ, get an advantage of having an Industry discount on it from the Religious Rites->Personal Rites Civic, and I feel like that's more important than the Faith generation they provide.

[jonnin]

tenets are very, very worth it. It only takes a moment to build a wonder or holy site if you have 3+ cities with production running well.

The tenets can shore up any sort of currency you are lacking a bit, but there are so many ways to fix those problems its a waste. Where they shine are the things you can't normally get easily:
- war support. tenets can help you win wars so fast the enemy won't know what hit them.
- combat strength ... there are several that affect units in a nice way
- stability. not only wonders at +40 or more a pop, but you can add 5 to every garrison or commons quarter and use those buildings to make massive cities easily. 5 isn't much, but time its said and done garrisons are 15-20 each.

[MartinBryant]

Religion annoys me in that I forget it's there, i never really understand how to spread mine as theres no priest units or similar.

I'd love if say my religion has red banners, so when I approach a city I see the red banner. My troops from a city that follows religion also carry the red banner, this clearly shows on the world map and becomes a nice religious crusade style.

Change state religion and create religious units to spread this and counter unrest etc.

[Moby D1СК The SЗМЗН Whale]

Hmm, also the good question is, if your land is covering under foreign religion, shouldn’t you build religious things in this region, because they will spread foreign religion, should you?