2. Concerning the "Starving Cities" image below: had this happen several times now in both games I've played in that I get the "Starving Cities" message, but the cities never reduce in population. Is anyone else experiencing this?
You get the "starving" message if a city's food per turn is ever negative, but the city might have HUNDREDS of stored food on hand. So, if a city is a decent size, it might be centuries before it actually starts reducing in size. Also, if it happens during the first turns of a late-era start, the negative food might be completely offset by the food bonus I'm now giving, so your cities might actually still grow. But the message just triggers based on the city's net food per turn.
The UI food storage is often incorrect on this; the green bar might be at the bottom, while the city still has plenty of food. The easy way to check is to go into a city, mouse over the Food icon in the upper-left, and see exactly how much is left and how much is lost per turn.
This MIGHT be tied to my mod, in that I changed the growth equation. It's possible that the LUA code hard-codes the original equation; maybe it sees that you're 100 food short of growth and have a negative food, which makes it think you're about to shrink, but doesn't realize that the new equation means that you're at 200/300 instead of 0/100.
4. AIs are not attacking early in the game as they have been wont (read: ALWAYS!) do: this flumoxed me as I'm sitting there goading the AIs on my border to declare war, and they didn't.
I think this might just be a consequence of a late start (you're in Nuclear Era?): short on cash, with plenty of other things to produce, the AIs don't go quite so overboard on an early military. But they still do it; my last test game was an Industrial start, and right about when I got to Tanks, my next-door neighbor Germany decided that his Panzers needed a good test drive and treated me like Poland. He actually took one of my core cities and threatened my capital. I took it back eventually, of course, but only because he pulled his army off to go conquer the Maritime city-state I'd allied with. (That left me with a size 1 city that never really recovered. I'd just built the Eiffel Tower there before the war, too...)
5. First game last night I attacked a C-S with 4 APCs and 2 arty, and lost! ... looked thru your XML and didn't see where you've done anything to improve C-S defense, so I am assuming I just was the recipient of bad attack rolls.
Actually, I did boost them.
C-S's are just civs that can't build settlers, but they do have a Palace. That means they get the +10 defense, and the Home-Field Advantage promotion (which is tied to the palace). The resourceless units are an added bonus as well, but you're not at the point where those would kick in yet. Add to that the general city boost I made (25 HP and +2HP/turn instead of 20 and +1), and city-states become extremely difficult to crack. I watched a city-state (one of my allies) hold off a concerted attack by China using only the city and one Artillery, for something like 30 turns. (It only fell when Russia decided to invade it as well.)
Your choice of units is part of the problem. Mech Infantry were reduced in power to 42, and capitals in that era should be about the same strength (if not higher), so you're not longer getting the massive power mismatch that led to quick kills. This was intentional.
FYI in case you are thinking of looking into improving the viability of C-S in the later game.
I am, but I think I'll probably just handle this by boosting the base CS production bonus. Right now, a city-state gets 150% production and 200% gold. I'm thinking about taking that to 200% and 300%. Also, I've been looking at boosting the Palace's bonuses with era, to help out players' later starts, but this'd also help the city-states disproportionately (since the humans would have multiple cities without palaces, but the CSs would have a Palace in 100% of their cities).
6. Concerning the "Recycling Tanks Q" image below: why not just give it +2 Maintenance (instead of +3 Maintenance and +1 Gold)?
Because +gold gets multiplied by the Market, Bank, et cetera, while the maintenance cost gets divided by certain policies and such. So it's actually possible for that building to end up having no cost at all this way.
8. Concerning "Satelites tech Q": whats your rationale behind the Fundamentalist option in regards to this? Satelites are heavy tech, whereas Fundy doesn't seem to fit here.
Three possible answers here, take your pick.
1> It's a reactionary, anti-intellectualism sort of thing. Aerospace technology is a very high-profile, expensive application of science, and is usually the first thing the "we should be spending the money on X" people target. So the rise of this sort of technologies would be paired with a resurgence of religious fundamentalism in developed countries.
2> It's about worldwide communications making it easier for things like televangelists to prosper. (I already made a Nehemiah Scudder reference in the Civilopedia, I think for the Hologram Theater, but I had that in mind here as well.)
3> I needed to put it somewhere and at the time, Satellites didn't have enough stuff. There just aren't many good thematic fits; none of my new techs have any kind of religious overtones except maybe for the Centauri psi-type ones. I'd put it at Homo Superior, but that's far too late in the tree. SMAC had a few non-sciency type techs (Intellectual Integrity, Ethical Calculus, Cyberethics, Secrets of the Human Brain), but I'd removed all of the early ones; the only remnants are late-game things like The Will To Power. In the original SMAC, Fundamentalist came at "Secrets of the Human Brain", for reference.
While I needed to put it somewhere, I also needed to make it come early relative to the other new policies. It boosts your border growth rate, but by the time you're in this era, your main cities will have already completed their border growth. Even a new colony will generally grow faster than you can really handle, so it's not as desirable a policy the later you get.
(In fact, I'm looking at boosting its effect to -50% right now.)
9. Concerning the "Children's Creche Q" pic: understand about the problem with the +/- issue, but since you can put the unhappy face into the text, can you put the unhappiness face next to the +/- sign.
Not without a UI mod, that part of the popup is handled automatically by the existing LUA. But that's actually an easy thing to fix, in theory: in the popup, if the happiness number is negative then use a different icon and don't put the "+" sign.
I'll look into it.
(Note that a few other buildings also subtract happiness now.)
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I'm working on a few more changes now, of course, but nothing as extensive as the last few rounds. Mostly just balance tweaks, and I'm trying to adjust Flavor values and such so that the AIs won't get so bogged down in the late game. (I think part of the problem is that while the Factory is set to 100 flavor, meaning must-build, all of the Bank and University-style buildings aren't. I'm going to try upping all of those "essential" buildings and see what happens.)