This mod involves a new religion interface that can be accessed from a new button in the top-right corner of the screen.
If you want to dive right into it, you can hover over parts of the religion interface to get an explanation of what everything does rather than reading this guide.


RELIGION MECHANIC GUIDE

The mod uses a religion function that replaces the static faction-wide bonuses of vanilla and also replaces most city upgrades.
It intends to portray the regional Italic gods that lie at the origins of Roman religion, and the way the Romans expanded their religion by assimilating local deities.
It also helps work around the fact that certain vanilla city upgrades are anachronistic for the mod's time period.


STARTING DEITIES AND EVOCATION

There are several dozen deities and, at the start of the game, the worship of these deities is divided among the various factions with each (sub-)deity starting off as only worshipped by one faction.

However, it is possible to expand the array of deities by adopting ("evoking") the deities of other factions to complement your own.
If you control a native city of another faction, then you can evoke the deities of that faction through the religion interface, for a price.
This allows you to benefit from that deity's faction-wide bonuses and also unlocks the construction of temples to that deity in all your cities.

Note that if you assimilate a city's native faction to your own, that city's original religion will be lost and you will no longer be able to use it evoke deities belonging to the previous native faction (deities that you have already evoked from that faction will remain part of your faction's religion).

Each faction starts off with 3 deities.


TEMPLES

If a deity is evoked to your faction, you can construct its temples.

Temples function much like any other city upgrade. They come in 3 tiers: shrine, temple, and sanctuary. Sanctuaries need to be unlocked from a tech in the skill tree, but shrines and temples can be built right away.

Each temple grants different bonuses to the city they are constructed in, depending on its deity. For example, a temple to Mars grants recruitment bonuses whereas a temple to Venus grants population growth.

Temples also increase your faction's "cult strength" of the deity to which they are dedicated, which we'll come back to later.

You may sometimes conquer a city that already has a temple in it to a deity that you don't worship, and still benefit from the temple's bonuses despite not having evoked the deity and not being able to construct the temple yourself.


DEITIES AND THEIR BONUSES

Each god provides 3 kinds of bonuses, that are different per deity:

1: An EVOCATION bonus for having "adopted" the god's worship in your faction.
This is a static faction-wide bonus that remains the same regardless of the amount of temples you have built to the deity. Evoking new deities immediately rewards you with their evocation bonus as well.

2: A CULT bonus based on the deity's cult strength within your faction. No cult strength = no bonus. High cult strength = high bonus.
A deity's cult strength is determined by the amount and quality of temples that you have constructed for this deity (sanctuaries grant more cult strength than temples, which grant more cult strength than shrines).

However, there is a falloff in the effectiveness of cult strength as each point of cult strength contributes less to the bonus than the previous one.
You therefore won't be able to endlessly increase the cult strength bonus of a single deity, instead it is better to diversify and build temples to multiple deities.

3: LOCAL bonuses that the deity gives to a city through its temple city upgrades. These work exactly like regular city upgrades (see the "TEMPLES" section above).


The religion interface can be used to keep track of what deity provides which bonuses. It also shows each deity's cult strength within your faction and how high a cult strength bonus that amounts to.


EPITHETS

Certain deities have been split into several epithets rather than acting like a regular deity. Epithets can be seen as "sub-deities" representing specific aspects or cults of certain major deities.

For the most part, epithets function just like a separate deity, having their own temples and bonuses and being separately evoked. However, epithets of the same deity can synergize a bit with each other, as follows:

-Evoking an epithet is cheaper if you already have another epithet of the same deity evoked.
-Temples and sanctuaries (not shrines) of an epithet offer a small amount of "shared" cult strength to the epithet's parent deity, increasing the cult strength bonus of other evoked epithets of this deity (it doesn't affect the cult strength bonus of epithets that your faction has not evoked).

In the religion interface, epithets are grouped together underneath their parent deity, but each epithet's entry looks and functions much the same as a regular deity entry. The shared cult strength is displayed as well.

ALIASES
-Some deities can display with different names in the religion interface, depending on the faction group of the player. E.g. when the player is playing as Etruscans, Jupiter will show up as 'Tinia', his Etruscan equivalent


TECHNICAL

-It can take up to an in-game week before a change in a deity's cult strength is translated to a change in the corresponding faction-wide bonus as it only automatically refreshes these bonuses every 7 days.
You can force a manual refresh by opening the religion interface, however.

-Autosaves bug out if they happen to trigger while the religion interface is opened. The console will open with an error (can be ignored and closed with the F2 key). Manual saving and autosaving with the religion window closed works fine.