Heyas. I don't post a whole lot to these forums, but I lurk around alot.

This is a great mod - been playing it for a while and enjoying it a lot - thanks for all your efforts, Zappara.

I've seen quite a few people mention (and I've noticed myself) that even in Marathon speed, you eventually get to the point where you have so much commerce and science coming in that techs come far too quickly, especially around the midieval era or shortly thereafter.

A buddy of mine, Seven05, release a mod a while ago called World Piece which had an eloquent solution to this issue. You can read up on it here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=254299

The short version is that he made some DLL changes to make it so technology costs dynamically adjusted themselves according to settings chose. Instead of playing "Marathon" speed, you instead play a new setting, such as 200 turns per era. Anyways, you can read his discription of it. Since its a DLL change, I'm not sure how easy it would be to merge into your existing code, but I'm sure Seven05 would be willing to release the source files to you to merge into your own, if you're interested (if you send him a PM and you hear no response, let me know - I'll call him and tell him to check his PMs :) ). Unfortunately, due to various issues, he's not working on the mod anymore, and hasn't updated it to 3.17 :cry: - but I'm sure he'd be willing to give source files so they could be merged into other projects. :D Edit:: Just noticed that he actually posted the source in the second post in the thread, so no need to bug him at all.

Overall I liked a lot his gameplay and AI improvements, and it made for a much more challenging and satisfying game experience, in my opinion.

Some elements I really liked:

* Turns-per-era settings
* Limit on the number of naval vessels that could be built to prevent AI spamming them unnecessarily.
* An AI change that forced the AI players to "blitz" Privateers so they're not such a game killer to them (in my experience with the normal game AI, if you churn out Privateers and blockade their ports, the AI will spam out Caravels and will never attack, which in turn increases their upkeep costs and prevents their own infrastructure building)
* Leader AI personality tweaks to make them a bit more aggressive, on average, and to not favor other AI players so much. Also changes in attitude adjustments, so that non-spiritual civs, for example, don't really care if another civ is another religion. All his little tweaks and changes made for a much saner experience with the AI. Also, I believe he toned down the rate in which AI players would make unreasonable/stupid demands.
* Moved the religion founding techs to a seperate tech and made it so that only Spiritual leaders could found more than one religion (anyone can still, of course, capture holy cities). After a religion gets founded the cost of the founding tech gets reduced down to a cost of 1 turn. This prevents the AI from spending too much research on things they don't really need.

There were a bunch of other little tweaks and changes he did to make this a very fun little mod. I think a number of them would go great with making ROM even more excellent. :goodjob:

Edit:: Sorry about the triple posting - was posting from work earlier and things got wonky for some reason. Feel free to delete the worthless posts.