I was curious about how Merging/Absorbing cities would affect Public Ceremonies between the two cities and I couldn't find much information to confirm what exactly happened with them when you merged two or more cities together. The two options that I thought would happen, before I tested it out, were:

1. The main city's, the city that is absorbing the other city, Public Ceremonies are the only ones that stay. The other city's public ceremonies are gone.

2. Both sets of Public Ceremonies remain. The other city's public ceremonies become permanent boosts to that city's main plaza.

It appears that Option 1 is how the game handles Public Ceremonies when it comes to merging cities. Which is a bummer and makes it a reason for not to merge cities together that have built up with Public Ceremonies.

Before merge

After merge

There's a 38 point loss difference. 23 points is from infrastructure while 15 points is from the Festival Public Ceremony. This game is from when I ran it with the Scaling Public Ceremonies mod that increased the Festival Public Mod from 2 to 5 points.

It could be a bit broken to merge them together tbh. Remember, the cost of Public Ceremonies increases as you build more of them, so you would be getting around that if they merged additively. Perhaps an alternative could be that whichever city has the highest 'level' of each ceremony would be the one you keep.

Wait what? I was fully under the impression that all those public things were one time resource gains. Like just adding some influence/money to your stockpile, and food/science towards your next pop/tech.
They're permenant increases for the town?
I don't know if I missed something, the game fails to communicate, or I'm just reading something into this thread that isn't there.