@Craig Sutter
I am including a Royal Mint national wonder in my mod. It can only be built in your capital and provides +1 trade routes in all cities. I don't think I will feature a Mint building though.
Holy War will likely be a civic as well and possibly Inquisition. Depends on if I can find more suitable ways to simulate the inquisition. Elected Monarchy will be featured one way or another.
I don't intend to have any pagan faith as a religion in the game. Historically there were a myriad of pagan belief system particular to the various cultures of Europe; not just Nordic, also Baltic (Lithuania remained pagan until the 14th c., longest of all European nations), Slavonic, Cuman, Pecheneg, Tatar, Khazar. Druidism would be anachronistic in any case since most of the Celtic people were Christian by 6th century.
Besides paganism there are too many potential religions: Manichaeism and Gnosticism in particular. Also loads of smaller Christian sects, heresies, independent churches etc: Arians, Cathars, Copts, Bogomils, Hussites, etc etc.
The approach that I've decided to take on religion is that I'm simulating the spread of religious authority with a standardized rite, clerical hierarchy, central leadership and one ritual language (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic). Thus, "no religion" is taken to represent an unspecified mixture of pagans, heretics, independent Christians, Gnostics, etc.
As for monastic orders, then yes I want to feature them prominently in the mod. A minor problem is that orders were particularly prolific in the Catholic church but much less so in Eastern Orthodoxy for example, so I'm a bit worried about imbalancing the religions in some way. However I'm starting to see that as a nice opportunity to make the religions play out in different ways and offer different strategies for them.
I initially designed the monastic orders as world wonders ("The Benedictine Order", "The Franciscan Order", "The Knights Templar", "The Hashishin", "The Whirling Dervishes") but I'm not quite happy with that because the orders were international and generally quite decentralized. Therefore I'm now designing buildings particular to each order instead of the wonders; thus, 'Benedictine Monastery', 'Templar House', 'Bektashi Monastery', etc.
The orders that I intend to include so far are:
Catholics
Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans; Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights, possibly Knights of Calatrava
Orthodox
Few obvious possibilities... might end up having no orders and compensating them with a strong generic monastery
Sunni Islam
Assassins
Shi'a Islam
Bektashi, Mevlevi (Whirling Dervishes)
