The followers panel (hotkey: page up), pictured to the left, is one of the most basic and important tools in Populous’ interface. Although (1), (2), (3), and (4) are not part of the followers panel, they are described here.

 
Standard follower panel rules: Left click to select, right click to go to (move camera), shift+click to select all, ctrl+click to select five. For every follower panel section, there are different buttons for each class. For example, there’s a warrior icon in (4) when you have warriors, and in the idle category section, there’ll be a button aligned with that button which you can shift+click to select all idle warriors.

(1) Click this button to switch to the followers panel.
(2) Click this button to select your shaman. Standard follower panel rules apply.
(3) (Hotkey: L) Click this button to toggle between only viewing information about and selecting followers near the camera, or all around the world.
(4) Follower classes. Standard follower panel rules apply.
(5) Deselect followers. Standard follower panel rules DO NOT apply.
(6) Idle followers. Standard follower panel rules apply.
(7) Housed followers. Standard follower panel rules apply.
(8) Working followers. Standard follower panel rules apply.

The most useful thing with the (5) “Deselect followers” button is spreading warriors. Say you have 18 warriors selected and want to send two of them to each enemy hut. You would select 18 warriors, click on an enemy hut, click the button, click on an enemy hut, click the button, etc. Note, however, that if you stop doing this in the middle of it, the rest of warriors will go attack the last clicked hut. Also, when using the “deselect followers” method to assign braves to build huts, if you do it with more than 8 braves (or 8 actions?) they’ll all go build at the last clicked hut, ignoring the others.

A method for sending warriors that allows better multitasking is selecting the warriors, clicking them on the edge of land to make them go “hands up”, and then selecting as many idle warriors as you want from the followers panel, clicking on an enemy hut, right clicking anywhere on the game world, selecting idle warriors, sending them, etc. If you stop doing this in the middle of it, you can resume later and the idle warriors will still be there. A caution, though, is that the warriors will die if you leave them “hands up” for too long! You could also just leave them inactive instead of “hands up”, but this has the following problems: 1. Active units take a short time to go into an inactive start (they have to walk somewhere, then stop – even if that somewhere is right next to them, it can waste valuable time). 2. While the units are idle, they will generate less mana than they would if they were in a “hands up” state: even though “hands up” followers show up as idle in the followers panel, they generate the exact same amount of mana active units do.