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.