Hello there!
I never played any mods but I got tired of playing the original game, I can play up to immortal. I wanted to play a game that focuses more on the inicial ages, that's when I found this mod! I started playing a couple of games with the version III, once on noble and then on monarch (epic speed). I really enjoy this mod and want to thank you for having the trouble to translate it to english! So in this post I have some notes about things I think could improve and some questions. This is going to be really long post, but that's to show how much I enjoy this mod!
When I played it I thought it was really easy, with the merchants and later the merchant boat I didn't have to worry that much about gold, plus as in any civ game the AI is really stupid so you can take that to your advantage. About the AI, since I had a large tech lead, my espionage rate was big enough so I could see what any city was building. I have no idea if the AI was changed from III to IV, this was in III: The AI for some reason likes to build research when it thinks there's nothing to do, the only time it's a good idea do build research is on the beginning and if there's nothing better to build. It's a lot better to build merchants and I think they don't build it that much. What is worse is that they were building research or even some random stuff even while they were getting owned by my troops, they really should be building units. They also almost never build walls in those games, in my current game on emperor they do build it so I don't know if it was the difficult change or the AI changed.
Now to make things easy I'm going to tell my notes based on what happened on my current game. The settings are: Julius Caesar, Emperor difficulty, Large Europe Scenario, Epic Speed.
First I have to say, the new hunter unit is great. He's not overpowered but is a lot better then warriors so I can explore a little bit and get some huts, but I still can't go too far. About the animals, they take damage from marsh and that make killing them a lot easier, it would be nice if they were immune to this kind of damage or maybe if they avoided entering on marsh tiles.
My first problem was that on emperor I couldn't keep my research at 100% at the start of the game, this slowed down the tech rate by a lot. Anyway, moving forward, I started building cities and I found it eventually became hard to keep the research rate at the what I call the minimum acceptable (50%). I could build the silk road so that helped me out A LOT, I always am the one to build it so I think the AI doen'st focuses on it (thank god!). I always had to keep a close eye on the cities to make sure they are working on the right tile and to build up some cottages. The lack of luxury resources at rome starting place also made things a lot harder, but I could trade the horses for some needed resources. It took some time for someone to spread a religion to my land so that made things harder specially because of the culture. Anyway, both boudica and brennus declared on me, this brings me to another problem of the AI, they don't care about being over the river and on the marsh, he just stayed there bombarding with archers and when their hp dropped I simply killed them.
Screenshot:
When I got merchants things got a little better, I started growing my cities beyond pop 4 (since colonies get less maintenance, i didn't let them grow earlier) and I could keep my research rate at 60% for most of the time, even getting negative money for it). Even with a lot of problems to manage my empire I could keep up with the AI on tech by trading, altough they are always ahead, but not by far. The problem of depending too much on merchants to be competitive is that if something happens that you can't use your merchant on anyone, you are literally screwed. Maybe making you being able to build wealth when you research merchants could be better. Since Building wealth only converts 25% of production to gold it's not a problem (merchants give more gold per hammer, but you have the risk of losing them).
I got really mad at something, the red text up there and rome on the following screenshot explains it:
First I got surprised when I saw that making a unit could chop a forest, then on this turn that much happened, even another civ chopped one of my forests! (how did it even happened??) This is really, really bad, the main source of health at the begginning of the game is from forests and you can randomly loose it. >< I really disliked this feature.
Sometimes a event in original civ style shows up, I got a quest that said that if I build 15 swordsman I would get a reward, with hereditary rule I would get a bonus. First, there's no swordsman, it's shortswordsman, and obviously theres no herediraty rule! xD A similar event showed up about war chariots but I don't remember the details.
While I was able to deal with it, I have to comment on the economy aspect of the game. First, have a look at those 2 pictures:
On the first picture you can see the merchant spam so that I can keep my economy from crashing. Now that they are limited to 3 and are more expensive and give less gold things are harder, but I admit the nerf was needed, I could spam them and never worry about gold problems again. But this means they are still highly needed. I also found out how lucrative wars are, the gold from capturing cities + treasures are amazing, I also got a proposal of around 600 gold so that he would become my vassal. I also finnaly finished building the Mint Press so things became a lot better. I'm still building merchants and merchantman after researshing for it and have a large amount of gold due to wars so things are looking great now.
As you can see on the pictures, most of the gold is spent on civics and soldiers. This causes an issue, I feel that because of that I am stuck on civics that give free units, since units are expensive. I'm currently using 3 civics that give free units and by saving and loading I found out that changing to any other is a huge loss to the empire (considering I still don't have access to all of them). I'm later going to find out it's worth changing royalty to oligarchy so I will make a post about in the future.
One of the ways that you could keep up with the AI on higher difficulties on the original civ is by getting great people early and using them to research techs. This can't be done on PAE because when you can finally start making them they don't give enough research to be useful to using them this way instead of spending them on golden ages (or maybe on cults).
When you are on anarchy due to changing civics or religions, there's a chance that when it's over your's cities will revolt because of that. This makes changing civics really really painful and even sometimes not worth it. This is bad because there are a lot of civics now. So what I'm doing is saving up great people so that I can use them to make a golden age and change civics on that time. The problem is on the beggining there's no way I can do this. I also don't understand why this kind of revolt should even happen. You are already penalized when changing civics by not being able to do anything for a couple of turns, then you have a risk of losing a lot of money because of posterior revolts.
The syncretism civic says that your empire gets a no state religion, kind like the free religion from the original game. But this doesn't happen, I still have a state religion and get the 1 unhappiness from another civic (at least it's 1 less then it gave before). If this is how it's supposed to work then the civic description is wrong.
There's a text that says something like this: The governor of the province of Bribacte requires 31 gold gold to properly rebuild his on his command burnt down city! How you'd like to meet his wishes?
This made absolutely no sense! xD
I got the following event on a city that had no slaves at all:
I stole a tech that I couldn't research, Glass Art. Not that it matters since it's useless anyway. xD
One of my cities got hit by a spy that poisoned the water, it got a -7 to health from it. That's too much for a mod that has so many problems from having too much bad health. I countered it by triggering a golden age, changing a civic so that I could sacrifice pop and then I build a leper colony by sacrificing. I was still with low health so I send some slaves to hush a part of the aqueduct and then I sacrificed pop again to build it. So much work just to avoid a epidemy! ><
Maybe it's my crappy computer, but when a general dies the screen freezes and a long time later it goes back and then shows all the cities that revolted. It's probably because of my computer but it's worth checking out.
About units:
Warrior with 200% city defense is nice, he takes a long time to become worthless and is a cheap way to defend you cities if you get declared early.
Shortbowman lost their bonus to city defense, just wanted to know if this is really intented and why.
Axeman is too powerful. In PAE IV he has 6 strength and 50% bonus vs melee. He's so powerful I didn't build even 1 shortswordman, ever. This means that an Axeman has 9 str against another melee unit, and since the best units to defend a city are melee... A 5 str axeman makes more sense, he won't get too strong from his vs melee bonus and still is good to counter melee, also wound't make shortswordsman useless. The swordsman should be the one with 6 str.
Also, the special unit Vulture (that replaces axeman) is exactly the same as the currently Axeman, but costs more hammer.
Checking the techs ahead I found out that the Equites is exacly the same as the currently War Horse, but has a +2 commerce cost instead of 1.
Principes and Hastati skins look the same except for the color. This isn't really a big deal but I once put the wrong promotion on a Velites because I tought it was a Prinpices.
About mounted units in general, I belive they are all incredible weak. They have to many negative % to their str. They are useless on forests (most of the map is covered on it) and most important, they are useless on cities. I honestly don't see a single use to them, I even trated all of my horse resources so that I could get luxuries. The problem is, at least for me, a unit that is weak against a city is useless, simply because all of the important fights happens on cities. Plus since they don't receive defensive bonus, they are even more weak then a melee unit with the formation promotion on a forest. To give an example, the strongest horse on the game has 9 (the camel has 10 but has only 1 movement point, which makes him even more useless), so I send this horse (that according to the description should be really powerful) and send him to attack a city. He has -50% city str. So this means that using one the strongest units of the game except that now he only has 4.5 str, a well promoted warrior could even defeat it not even considering fortify and other bonuses. On another, I think 9 str is really low for this unit, a Longswordman has 10 and bonus vs city.
Also, altough I love the Teutons units and haven't tested then on PAE IV. I do belive that 14 str turns them into gods. I can only imagine what a teuton general could do...
I have a question about the civics that increase the maintenance of cults, but you only spend gold on cults to spread it, unless there are cults that have maintenance? How does it work exactly?
The PAE part of the civilopedia is outdated now. I only found out how to "build" a slave market when I saw the unhapiness face on the city I settled a slave in! The Slave Market part of the civilopedia also doesn't say it.
To end this post, here's a funny screenshot of the barbarians getting a golden age! xD
PS: I shouldn't have started a game on a large map, each turn takes ages to start and I don't want to start over because I'm enjoying this.
I need a better computer!
Edit: Almost forgot, why does the greek and roman temples reduces the birth rate? It should increase it since, unless I'm mistaken, they were important philosophers. Great people is the way civ4 has to represent philosophy. I don't like building these temples unless I need to, I love the celtic and nordic ones. There was a game that after a while I started building both temples on the cities so I could get 2 extra exp!
Also, when I got the roman religion a window popped up asking if I wanted to spend 100 gold to make a great prophet, I said yes but no great prophet showed up. I saved before to test something out and then didn't really research it yet (the unhappiness wouldn't make it worthy to research it yet). Then when I really researched it no option showed up, I don't know if this happened because I changed to the syncretism civic or something.