Spatzimaus
Mad Scientist
I was immediately swimming in Gold and Happiness, and so I immediately selected the SP which provides a free Settler in order to found my 4th city (not something I've been able to do while playing your mod).
Funny thing, pre-patch I'd usually try to get that policy early on in my own games; depending on my start area, I might have just enough luxuries. Not a turn 1 start in the Industrial, but it'd be the first policy I'd buy after my starting Settlers are placed.
I tried that again today, post-patch, and it didn't work too well, but a big part of that was that my starting area had a ton of Wine (5 deposits) and a couple Marble, but really no other luxuries within easy reach.
All in all I'd say that Firaxis still needs to do some fine-tuning for Industrial era (or later game) starts.
I don't think they can, because it's inherently linked to how they did it. Firaxis' late-game starts are horribly unbalanced, and there's no easy way to tweak the numbers to get around this; the underlying mechanism they use is just not a good one. Here comes the math:
Basically, look at tech costs as an indicator of this. In the Ancient Era, tech costs ramp up steeply, because your cities will be growing quickly, and you'll be settling more cities periodically. As you get into the Classical to Renaissance, this pace slows down a bit, because while you'll still be settling new cities, your older ones (which have +research buildings and so dominate your science output) will have slowed their growth. Once you're into the Industrial, the tech tree costs were almost flat, because you've settled all available area, your core cities have all of the buildings and steady populations, and so your science output is nearly flat as well.
(NOTE: in this patch they made the tech costs suddenly ramp up sharply again as you got into the Modern Era, because it's supposed to be the endgame. I've partially undone this change in my mod, for obvious reasons.)
But if you start in the industrial, that trend no longer holds. While your cities will all start with Libraries and at size ~3ish, their science output will rise quickly as they grow and you place Universities/Public Schools. And while you might start with 3 cities, that's not nearly enough to fill the available area on most maps, so your science output will quickly rise that way as well. So it's basically the same progression curve as you saw in the Ancient, just starting at a higher value.
Given the above, you can see where Firaxis went wrong. They figured to fix the problem by simply making all techs cheaper; in an Industrial start, every tech costs 20% of the listed amount for the rest of the game. (Modern Era is 12%, Future Era is 5%.) It won't work because the SHAPE of the curve is the problem; they're trying to match a rapid increase onto a nearly-flat cost curve by scaling linearly, and it just won't ever match up. You'll get tremendously long research times for the first few techs, but by the time you're into the Modern Era and HAVE filled your available area, you'll be researching everything incredibly fast. Reduce or increase the percentage to make it match up better at one end of the game and it'll be that much worse at the other.
That's why in my mod I reduced the percent discount (in an Industrial start every tech costs 60% of its listed value), but added the Head Start buildings: the idea is that I give massive early bonuses to the cities, to get them closer to the correct outputs, but then taper off the bonuses as time passes. Effectively, this counteracts the near-exponential increase in science output you get naturally from expansion and growth, more closely mimicking the relatively flat cost curve. So in number of turns per tech, it'll more or less follow the pattern of an Ancient start, where it quickly stabilizes to a relatively constant number of turns with a slight decrease as you start conquering other nations.
My system could still use some tweaking, of course.
unless there's something you want me to look at specifically (let me know)?
Nothing specific, just the usual general balance stuff and any crashes. Well, except that the Happiness balance is likely to be significantly off, so you should probably start there and keep an eye out for it, both in your empire and in the AIs (FireTuner print statements help here). I don't want everyone to be going negative, but you shouldn't generally have a massive surplus either.