EDIT: how did we have this workign in the old mod?
In the old mod, we didn't actually have holy cities, so a religious victory was impossible.
oh sorry. Salvation, Spirituality and Chaos religions spread through missionary event once a certain tech is researched (for specific civs, it works perfectly for araby as they always rush for spirituality) this spread in itself dosnt equal founding. the civs must still research construction (or masonry once we finalise tech costs, whatever) and build the shrine in a city before the actual *holy city* comes into play.
Ok. So the shrine construction designates the holy city, the cities infected by the missionaries do not.
We can test and make sure this works fine (or, it sounds like you have already done this?)
How then does this work for the auto-placed religions? When I started a WE game, my capital city became the Elven gods holy city, withe the holy city bonus.
If Auto-placed religions still dont' get a holy city until the shrine is constructed, maybe they can still have a bonus.
Though: Holy city bonuses also become uninteresting, because they're really just extra bonuses on the shrine wonder. So maybe we should set them all to zero if we do it this way?
we need to finalise tech bosts before hand however.
I think tech costs will not be finalized without a great deal of playtesting.
I'm happy to leave it at construction for now.
what about tying it to the Tower of The Eternal Wood? either way im happy with it spreading from a tech if you disagree with TotEW enabling it.
We could tie it to the Tower, that would be ok... but do we have an equivalent wonder for Beastmen? We want Beastmen to be using Ancient forests too. We used to have a "Gallows tree" wonder or something for beastmen? Maybe at Tyranny tech, or Corruption tech?
I think a Wonder works better than a tech ideally, because it feels like more of a player-triggered accomplishment, rather than just something that passively starts "happening".
one thing i will say however is that the Holy Cities should all give the same boost as regular presence, and then we should add basic holycity benefits onto the Shrine Wonders which dictate the *TRUE* holy city.
Now I am confused again.
1. First, I thought (though I am not sure) that holy city and regular religion bonuses stack? I could be wrong here.
2. Second, and more importantly, I'm confused by the holy city vs "true" holy city terminology.
Lets use this terminology:
Holy City is that which gets the "holy city" bonus from the religioninfo file, and is needed for a religious victory win, and spreads the religion if it has a positive spread rate.
Shrine city is the city with the shrine.
In vanilla, researching a tech sets the holy city somewhere (with holy city benefits), and then the shrine can be built (only in that city) using a great prophet.
My understanding of your intention here is that
a) Auto-place religion: Founding your first city sets the religion present, but does not designate a holy city. Once you adopt the state religion and get the appropriate tech, you can build the shrine anywhere, which then sets the shrine city and the holy city.
b) Non-placed religions: Researching your religion tech gives you a missinary event. Planting a religion with that missionary sets the religion present, but does not designate a holy city. Once you adopt the state religion and get the appropriate tech, you can build the shrine anywhere, which then sets the shrine city and the holy city.
But now I am thinking that what you actually mean and have in practice is:
c) Auto-place religion: Founding your first city sets the religion present and makes that the holy city (for the first civ to do so, which is the human player if they do so on the first turn). Once you adopt the state religion and get the appropriate tech, you can build the shrine anywhere, which then sets the shrine city.
d) Non-placed religions: Researching your religion tech gives you a missinary event. Planting a religion with that missionary sets the religion present, and the first player to do this sets the holy city. Once you adopt the state religion and get the appropriate tech, you can build the shrine anywhere, which then sets the shrine city.
If a) and b) are correct, then the "holy city" benefits are trivial, because they're really tied into the shrine.
If c) and d) are correct, then the "Holy city" benefits matter, because you can get them well before the shrine, particularly for auto-placed religions.
)
so we had to remove those. Just making sure there's one default unit per unitclass, and each civ gets max one unit per unitclass, should solve things. For beasts etc that don't fit in a unitclass "slot", just making them their own unitclass with a prereq tag that makes them buildable only by one civ should fix it quickly.
congrats on the XML change 
