So I got tenents, those are cool, I'd even have tenents if I was overwhelmed with other's religions. Being the leader of the main religion in my land let's me pick the tenents.  Goodie.  I get some things from Civics but marginal.  My religion is spreading to other's lands.  Awesome.  It just doesn't seem that big a deal, I don't feel religion much - what does it matter? What are the big benefits to religion? Why should I be paying attention to it at all? 

It's an incomplete system which is currently only useful for generating grievences.  The balance on it is so broken.  You can wind up with +40 faith being generated against +1300 from the opponent because they had an advantage early on.  One religion *always* dominates all others by the middle of the classical era, and then everybody gets the same bonuses and nobody gets grievences (because everybody will just switch to the one OP religion).

It also skips from polytheism/shamanism right past organized religion to secular or state atheism.  They removed the whole organized religion section, which I have to assume is because it's not finished yet.

You can 'update' your shamanism/polytheism to a bunch of other religions (Judaism, Shintoism, Islam and all that jazz) when picking up a tenet, they don't grant you anything mechanically, but they will change look of your holy sites from that point on. Each also comes with a related event/s.

"Neither" is a perfectly fine choice for any civic, even if it comes without a reward, irreligion included. There's at least one contemporary era event that fires when you are still a Religious Leader by then and the endgame narrator will mention it if you managed to keep a thriving religion till that point.

My only peeve is that there's little option to actually influence religion changes, you just set it up and keep your fingers crossed that it will take on. Best you can do is to place your Holy Sites in such a way that they won't be able to get easily swapped and keep adding to your faith score, there's also a repeatable project for faith, but I never really use them unless it's late game and my cities have nothing better to do.

Bridger wrote:

It's an incomplete system which is currently only useful for generating grievences.  The balance on it is so broken.  You can wind up with +40 faith being generated against +1300 from the opponent because they had an advantage early on.  One religion *always* dominates all others by the middle of the classical era, and then everybody gets the same bonuses and nobody gets grievences (because everybody will just switch to the one OP religion).

It also skips from polytheism/shamanism right past organized religion to secular or state atheism.  They removed the whole organized religion section, which I have to assume is because it's not finished yet.

There are numerous religious Civics that are basically "Organized Religion" (you have a state religion unless you get the irreligious civic)

Is there anything else you can "spend" faith on? I saw a comment on reddit about how "5 faith is more valuable than 5 money or science", I didn't really follow that.

I think in Civ 5 (never played 6) there was a way to purchase units and infrastructure with faith. I would love to see a more fully-realized religion system...

The current system is rather lackluster. In the end, one religion dominates every other. If your religion gets absorbed it is better then having a constant faith battle because of griefance and ai penalty. The only advantage of your religion vs another religion is that it is suited to your needs as you chose the tenets. 

I would say it can be an early to midgame advantage because some beneficials like industry per forest or science per wonder can have a big impact in the right time.

My main problem with the system that faith production is decoupled from religion. Currently it doesn't matter if you produce one million or just one faith, it doesn't get you anywhere as long as you don't want to dominate other religions which is pointless because it may be more cost-efficiently to get absorbed and to just spend your industry on other projects. 

Just a small comparison with the Civ Titles. in Civ IV you could build a shrine which gets you more gold the more cities follow your religion and in Civ V you could adopt religious social policities which lets you buy buildings and units with faith and/or let you get great people whith faith. So in both cases Faith doesn't get wasted.

Ironically in Humankind your faith production is either worthless or overpowered to a certain point if you build the wonder Angkor Wat which gives 1 food for each faith you produce. If i remember there may be some exceptions for that conversion but e.g. emblematic districs, default holy sites and the repeatable faith project counts. In combination with the late tenet which let's you build 3 instead of 1 site that is very powerful.

I hope they expand the religion system alot more, otherwise it stays as a hit or miss to invest production into it.

Aside from a few bonuses from being able to pick your own traits and some random advantages from wonders, there isn't much point.  The problem then is that the Tradition / Progress ideology slider has almost zero value - you always want to push toward Progress. Even with minimal attention to Religion your religion dominates everything anyway.  The AI don't seem to build shrines or anything so always get overrun in religion.  This reflects the dev's attention to religion - it is so pointless that they didn't even bother coding any attention to it into the AI.

I use it for grievances to wage holy wars because the demands can add up. Other than that use case, there's not a lot going for it. Certainly needs improvement.

Religion has been overnerfed.  In the beta/Open dev it was significantly OP.