what exactly determines which religion you keep after conquering a holy city?

[cloverstar]

im playing a game where i never found a religion but got one from a holy city. i then conquered another holy city and got another religion (went from none to islam to protestant). so i used an in game editor to run some tests, changing the order that i conquered the cities, adding in an extra one just to see some sort of pattern.

• conquered islam (changed to islam) --> conquered protestant (changed to protestant) --> conquered hindu (changed to hindu)
• conquered protestant (changed to protestant) --> conquered islam (no change) --> conquered hindu (changed to hindu)
• conquered hindu (changed to hindu) --> conquered protestant (no change) --> conquered islam (no change)

obviously the change is preferring hindu over protestant and protestant over islam. whats driving that preference? is it how much global pop each religion has? how upgraded each religion is?

 

[pandasnail]

It's the religion that has the most followers across your nation, not global pop. So I guess in this IGE scenario where you take one city each, you end with Hindu because its probably originally India with a huge pop capital.