Thanks for the links! I've read both threads, but instead of answering my question, they've only increased my confusion and gave rise to new questions which those threads don't seem to answer. This thread seems to be the liveliest one these days, so I hope it's okay if I ask some specific questions here:
- Getting Sacred Knowledge / Holy cities: So, okay, half of my produced Faith goes towards unlocking Sacred Knowledges. If I press Ctrl and hover the cursor over the Faith income icon, I get some info on how many turns I have to wait until I can found a holy city. OK. However, the info text doesn't say anything about "Sacred Knowledge". Is this information the same thing as "Sacred Knowledge", or is it a separate game mechanic? If it's the latter, then how can I know how much more faith research points I need to get a Sacred Knowledge (like, where is that number displayed, exactly)? Can Sacred Knowledges be used for anything other than creating Holy Cities? If yes, how do I do that? I can't find a Sacred Knowledge icon, screen or menu.
- Faith research: One of those help threads mentiones "faith research": Does this mean I can use some of my faith points to discover new faith-based spells (similarly to "normal" spells but on a separate screen)? Is faith research the same thing as Sacred Knowledge, or is it something different? All I can find in those threads is the lnie "IIRC you need to open the religious guild to open faith research" - but that's not helpful, since I don't even know what a "religious guild" is or how to view it (more on this later.) Is this previous remark supposed to refer to the Religion Advisor window? (Because if yes, then that screen doesn't seem to have anything related tor researching faith-based spells. So, if there IS faith research in the modmod, how do you EXACTLY view and control it? Like, where do you have to click on which screen? I can't find anything like faith research, and I think I've clicked on everything clickable. I'm using the latest version of Xtended (as of June 2020).
- Gathering faith with Fellowship of Leaves: The help threads say that FoL CANNOT use the "Gifts to the Fellowship" (or some similarly called) miracle which is available to other religions, and gains faith by having ancient forests instead. Well, I've just checked that and it's definitely not true. You DO get faith for ancient forests, but you also have the Gifts miracle in the spellcasting menu, and casting it DOES give you additional faith - so I'm pretty sure the relevant parts of the help threads are out of date.
- Guilds: So, the threads say that when you research certain technologies, the first two being Barter and Currency, you get a chance to found new guilds, and you can later improve these with culture. Well, I'm playing a "tutorial" game right now to familiarize myself with the mechanics. I have already researched both Barter and Currency, and the game did NOT give me the option to found new guilds. In fact, there isn't even a Guilds icon in the top right row where other FfH2 mods have it (and where vanilla Civ4 has corporations). Instead, there's a Great Houses icon which takes you to a Great Houses screen, but there aren't any great houses there. So, what's the deal here? Where guilds removed from Master of Mana and replaced with Great Houses? If that is the case, how do you GET these Great Houses? If that is NOT the case, and guilds are still in, then how do you get them (and how do you get Great Houses)? It seems to me like the help threads are very out of date and inaccurate about this topic.
- Increasing city improvement support. So, there's a "+" button near the top left corner of each city screen. Clicking it costs you an increasing amount of Culture, but it increases the number of improvements a city can support. So far, so good. Now, I couldn't find anything about it, but after experimenting a bit, I GUESS that there's a civilization-wide pool of Culture (MAYBE created by adding up all the city-specific Culture production?), and the cost of improvement support is deducted from this pool. I'm thinking this because if I buy all the support improvements I can in one city, the option is no longer available in other cities (because, I guess, the central pool has run dry). Is this correct?
- Also culture: Now, continuing from the previous question, if there IS a central, civilization-wide culture pool for the above purpose, how can I know how many points of Culture I have in it at a give time (and thus available for improvement support)? I mean, I just can't figure out what to click on what screen to get the total tally of the Culture I have.