Final Newbie Question (or compilation of questions!)

[Illuminated One]

Well, as I understand it the AI creates its gods randomly.
One simple solution without mapmaking is to start the game with all players human and design the gods yourself. Then set all nations that you want to be controlled by AI to AI.
There's also a "semirandom" program by ballbarian which helps, can't say for sure what it does though, never used it myself.

About the area: I'm quite sure it's not the radius, but indeed 6 squares means six squares. Where these are exactly is random except for the one square that was targeted (and the fact that the squares have to be next to each other) - hence bless for example often misses larger groups of sacreds despite 100 precision.