[Edratman]

Commendable progress. I have found that the best way to learn how to mod is to study the dm files of some mods. Amos and Sombe are two mod masters and I think they have the best and most clever mods, so look at their work.

The answers to your questions are:
1. No. You may think it inefficient, but it takes everyone weeks to make a mod. The five minutes you spent isn't a drop.

2. The sacred units and probably a commander are made available from one or more of the magic sites associated with a nation. Click on the sites in your capital and you will see that they say something like "allows recruitment of Merlin". These are the sacreds you cannot get rid of. (This is the mechanism used to limit recuitables to your capital throughout the game.) The only way around this is to specify new starting magic sites for the nation. Every good mod makes new start sites and it is easy to copy the format. And if you make your own start sites, you can more generous with gold/gems/resources if you want.

3. It sounds like you are using unit names, not unit id#s to get this effect. The game often reuses unit names throughout the eras but uses different ids. If you are using id #'s then you are making a mistake somewhere. Download EDI's database and there is a page with army lists for all nations/all eras. That will resolve this difficulty.