Religion How does game decide where to put holy cities in your empire?

[Gluegun]

Okay, so I am trying to figure out how the game decides where to put holy cities in your empire when you are first to a new religion. I know it puts them in cities other than your capital (or obviously your capital if you only have one city), but what else influences this decision? if I want to force the game to put a religion in a particular city, how would I do that?? And do any particular mods change how this functions? Thanks!

I tried to search for a thread on this but I couldn't find any answers. Thanks!

PS I am playing fully patched BTS, PIG Mod, and sometimes some of the "much further from normal civ" mods like ffh2.

[rah]

Obviously if you only have one city. BINGO

After that it looks at cities with no religion. If none with none then it looks for those with only one, etc.

Then I believe it looks at the largest of those cites.

So you have to be paying attention if you want to stack a city with multiple shrines.

[wodan11]

What Rah said.

The main way to try and get multiple religions in the same holy city is to aggressively make missionaries and spread all your religions to all your cities.

(or, if you really want this, just go into WB and move your holy city as soon as you found each religion)

[rah]

After a little more testing, it doesn't always choose based on size, I now believe it does it gives priority to your most recently created city or smallest. Not sure which. I really don't care enough to due EXTENSIVE testing. Of course with world builder it probably would be easy to test. We'll see if I remember to try it.

[Blaupanzer]

Most of my cities in the current game have two religions (my original and the one I switched to as 4 nations touching my border shared it and I had conquered a lot of cities with that religion). One city that had only one religion was my second city which was 3rd in size among 20 cities. Several of the smallest, recently founded filler cities also had one. Based on a great prophet, I went for Divine Right so as to trade it all around. The religion that came with that as I was the first to discover showed up in my large well-developed, close-to-the-capitol 2nd city. I was very surprised, because, as Rah pointed out, the rule seems to be the shrine opportunity goes to recently created, small cities not a huge old city with a religion already in place.

[wodan11]

I think it prioritizes thusly:
-- fewer religions
-- bigger size

The reason it seems to spawn in new/small cities is because they usually have fewer religions. If the # of religions are tied, I believe it goes to the bigger city.

[rah]

When neither has a religion it doesn't always go to the larger one.
When both have the same it seems to go where the other shrine is.

[Dinner]

Obviously if you only have one city. BINGO

After that it looks at cities with no religion. If none with none then it looks for those with only one, etc.

Then I believe it looks at the largest of those cites.

So you have to be paying attention if you want to stack a city with multiple shrines.

So, theoretically, by judicial use of slavery and missionaries I could force the game to put a holy city in a city of my choosing?

[slnz]

So, theoretically, by judicial use of slavery and missionaries I could force the game to put a holy city in a city of my choosing?

Yes, though there is a small random element involved (too small to make a difference most of the time). Sometimes delaying settling new cities is also needed.

[Brael]

Bit of a necro but the information probably isn't easily found at this point. It's random. First it looks at the number of religions in your cities and gives preference to the cities with fewer religions. Then it looks at city size and gives a higher preference to larger cities. If you want to try and stack a holy city with multiple religions the best thing to do is spread all religions in your empire to every city and then to whip down all cities other than the one you want the holy city to goto. There's still a bit of a random element but that's the most you can do to specify it. Oh, and the capital is never the holy city unless it's your only city.

If I can found multiple religions in a game I do this every time to stack the holy cities, and end up with around an 80-90% success at getting it to go where I want. I'm a big fan of a wall street/national epic combo (it's probably the strongest national wonder combo in the game if you're able to get some religions/corporations stacked up) so I'll usually get my first religion early in my capital if it's food rich (to support lots of merchant specialists) and then move the palace so that I can send future holy cities to it as well.

[rah]

Do you remake it your cap after you've finished getting all the religions?

[wodan11]

Why would making it the cap be beneficial? I would think especially under Bureaucracy that would be a bad idea. Unless you're running 100% gold slider with wall street there too.

[rah]

With my normal army, I never run at 100% science so I can still leverage Bureaucracy and yes, then all the cash multipliers.

[wodan11]

Unless you're running < 50% science, wouldn't it be better to have Oxford there and Wall Street / Shrines elsewhere?

[rah]

I've put both in my cap before. Especially on those starts where you have a good cap while all the land around it sucks.

[wodan11]

I guess that just always feel like marginalizing my megabonuses so I don't do it. I'd rather put one of them in my GP farm and disassociate it from my slider.

edit: I admit that the above decision is more emotional than rational. I should, but often don't even think about, doing the math and figuring out what would be better.

[Brael]

I think it really comes down to what you're trying to get out of your cities. You can either do a mega science center and let all the other cities fund things or you can let one mega city fund most everything and let all the other cities research.

WS/NE is just a preference of mine. One of the bigger weaknesses of it is that WS is expensive and takes longer to get than Oxford. Not to mention the difficulty of founding multiple corporations/shrines compared to getting the great library and running several scientists.

[wodan11]

I think it really comes down to what you're trying to get out of your cities. You can either do a mega science center and let all the other cities fund things or you can let one mega city fund most everything and let all the other cities research.

WS/NE is just a preference of mine. One of the bigger weaknesses of it is that WS is expensive and takes longer to get than Oxford. Not to mention the difficulty of founding multiple corporations/shrines compared to getting the great library and running several scientists.

That's a good point too. By putting WS in the capitol there are... how many turns you're missing out on having a national wonder in your capitol.

[Garth Vader]

Bit of a necro but the information probably isn't easily found at this point. It's random. First it looks at the number of religions in your cities and gives preference to the cities with fewer religions. Then it looks at city size and gives a higher preference to larger cities. If you want to try and stack a holy city with multiple religions the best thing to do is spread all religions in your empire to every city and then to whip down all cities other than the one you want the holy city to goto. There's still a bit of a random element but that's the most you can do to specify it. Oh, and the capital is never the holy city unless it's your only city.

This does seem to work. I got four to go into one city using this method. But I was also isolated and didn't have any AI founded religions to mess anything up either.

[rah]

Yeah, I had one game where I had it set up and a religion spread into the city the turn before I founded taoism and it screwed everything up.

[Hauptman]

Simplest way to have a super holy city, is of course only found 1 additional city until you've filled it with 2 or 3 shrines. I have done this a few times. Slows early growth but makes you a financial beast later when you need it.

However since the addition of corporations, it's just not that important anymore. As I'm usually cranking corps before i can even build wall street. And corporate income blows the pants off of religious income.

[Wyrda Edocsil]

It seems pretty random. While a lot of the time a religion is founded in the last city you built, every once in a while it just goes into some random city. On those occasions, there seems to be no logical pattern.

[Civ 2.5]

this isnt the way it works in the game, but it *should be based on where your capital or seat of power is, just like in real life. The Vatican is not in Rome by coincidence...