First of all, I know people have said that there shouldn't be religions as a game mechanic, and I agree that it doesn't fit Stellaris. The most that would make sense would be incorporating it to the degree seen in Victoria 2, where a pop has a religion as a trait and nothing much is done with it. But that wouldn't add much to the game.
However, Stellaris does have a major feature that seems good but could still use and support way more content, and particularly evocative content. Factions. That's where I think religion in Stellaris belongs. For Stellaris, I think it's time to drop the European/West Asian cultural perspective on the role of religion in politics, and look to East Asia instead.
Imagine, if you will, a faction that can cross national lines. A faction that, rather than being primarily focused on a single government, has its own ethics and ideals for the galaxy at large. A faction that may (as with other factions) be part of the government of one or more nations. There's two ways this could be pulled off: Either really do make factions international (possible difficult from a code perspective) or simply allow national factions to be linked across borders. The latter solution is not only easier, but might work a lot better in most cases since it allows there to be a religious uprising in one country but not in others, and conflicts within the religion as well as between religions governments.
The solution of making them truly international has a few benefits, but these are achievable in other ways. First of all, it would mean that there's one true leader of the religion. This seems pretty reasonably possible for Paradox (not a modder) to do in an indirect way, say that leaders of the religion are the ones in the original version of a faction, which would be the version of it in the originating empire, while leaders in other countries are subordinate (but may cease to be - the potential for creativity and dynamism here actually rivals CK2 despite being a small part of a subsystem). That brings up the idea of religion (and factions) spreading, which could be complicated from a code perspective but from a design perspective isn't really. Whenever a pop migrates that is part of one of these religious factions, check if there's a faction for the religion in his target empire. If so, add him to it. If not, create a new faction with all the details seeded from his parent faction. And allow spiritualist empires (or at least theocracies) to spend influence to spread their religion to a targeted other empire, something like spies in Europa Universalis.
Finally, there's the issue of these cross-national factions engaging in unified action. That's a relatively simple AI matter, when one version of the religion is in revolt, give other versions the opportunity to generate events for their empires with CBs, give those or greater CBs automatically to relevant theocracies and make revolts more likely in nations where the government chooses to oppress the religion.
These factions actually might only be religions in some cases – A Communist of Anarchist faction like those of the 20th century would fit the mechanics the same. Religions would only be the spiritualist version of this, but they're the thing that I created this idea for.
However, Stellaris does have a major feature that seems good but could still use and support way more content, and particularly evocative content. Factions. That's where I think religion in Stellaris belongs. For Stellaris, I think it's time to drop the European/West Asian cultural perspective on the role of religion in politics, and look to East Asia instead.
Imagine, if you will, a faction that can cross national lines. A faction that, rather than being primarily focused on a single government, has its own ethics and ideals for the galaxy at large. A faction that may (as with other factions) be part of the government of one or more nations. There's two ways this could be pulled off: Either really do make factions international (possible difficult from a code perspective) or simply allow national factions to be linked across borders. The latter solution is not only easier, but might work a lot better in most cases since it allows there to be a religious uprising in one country but not in others, and conflicts within the religion as well as between religions governments.
The solution of making them truly international has a few benefits, but these are achievable in other ways. First of all, it would mean that there's one true leader of the religion. This seems pretty reasonably possible for Paradox (not a modder) to do in an indirect way, say that leaders of the religion are the ones in the original version of a faction, which would be the version of it in the originating empire, while leaders in other countries are subordinate (but may cease to be - the potential for creativity and dynamism here actually rivals CK2 despite being a small part of a subsystem). That brings up the idea of religion (and factions) spreading, which could be complicated from a code perspective but from a design perspective isn't really. Whenever a pop migrates that is part of one of these religious factions, check if there's a faction for the religion in his target empire. If so, add him to it. If not, create a new faction with all the details seeded from his parent faction. And allow spiritualist empires (or at least theocracies) to spend influence to spread their religion to a targeted other empire, something like spies in Europa Universalis.
Finally, there's the issue of these cross-national factions engaging in unified action. That's a relatively simple AI matter, when one version of the religion is in revolt, give other versions the opportunity to generate events for their empires with CBs, give those or greater CBs automatically to relevant theocracies and make revolts more likely in nations where the government chooses to oppress the religion.
These factions actually might only be religions in some cases – A Communist of Anarchist faction like those of the 20th century would fit the mechanics the same. Religions would only be the spiritualist version of this, but they're the thing that I created this idea for.
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. With an espionage system you would hopefully be able to support the faction to help it gain influence in a competing empire with differing ethos as well....