Another huge post below... the first few comments are for the new mapscript.
I have done a few runs with the newest archipelago mapscript by koma13. I have a few comments on this.
34. There are peaks and hills of type "desert waste" now. That could be either good or bad. But graphically, there is not enough difference between peak/hill of this terrain type vs another terrain type. For peaks, desert waste and other terrains are indistinguishable. This is a big difference, since most units cannot move onto desert waste. So I have to mouseover each peak to find if I can move units there. If you leave this terrain combination there, please add some different graphics so we can see the difference. Same thing applies to hills; once you learn to look for it, desert waste hills are a little more "gold"; but we need more difference. Personally, I would prefer desert waste and deep desert to be guaranteed flat; it seems more dunelike.
35. It seems like there are way fewer resources, especially food, compared to the previous mapscript. I did not run the previous mapscript side by side with this one, but it "feels" this way. In games with the current mapscript, I feel like it is almost impossible to get growing. If I am lucky, in the first 3-4 turns I can find one plot with bonus food like blue tubers or wheat (sand verbena), then I can put my colony near that. But that plot rarely has bonus hammers nearby and a lot of the BFC squares have one food, or two food and no hammer. Do you agree that startup seems too hard with the current version?
The following are some ideas which I have tried to start discussion about in other threads.
36. I find the idea of building roads across the desert very non-dune-like. At least 2-3 people have tried to make a building, like an airport or spaceport, which automatically connects all cities within a certain range. I think this is more dune-like. We could have a lower level building "airport" which connects within 20 squares, and a higher level building "spaceport" which connects you to the whole planet or some longer range. There is a minimod at
this thread, but it causes crashes. I have pm'd the related people on the thread, let's see if we can get something stable.
37. I have mentioned before there is no pressure to conserve water. I thought that if we could have windtraps and reservoirs serve as a source of water, we could put back the irrigation restriction that farms must have water. I don't think there is a way to do this today, but I have started
this thread to see if we can find a way.
The following comments are on the game, not the mapscript. I played a game at a higher difficulty than I usually do (Monarch instead of Noble ... I am no expert) and got my first invasion thoroughly trashed by Fenring. But I collected a lot more feedback.
38. In terrain/civ4improvementinfos.xml, there are two words spelled wrong: Parmiter => Perimeter, Compaund => Compound.
39. Is it worthwhile to take the improvement chains which are lvl 1, lvl 2, lvl 3 and instead call them I, II, III? If I could think of more interesting names that would be even better, but other places such as promotions use I, II, III.
40. The graphic for the water improvement is not bad. But I think the terrain graphic for oasis is very pretty, and since it is rare on Dune, it may be a nice graphical improvement. Can you put the oasis graphic onto the water improvement?
41. The "jungle" terrain spice tubers is too tall, or else tribal villages are too short. If there is a tribal village inside a spice tubers terrain, it is completely invisible. My scout kept showing a blue circle there but I thought it was a bug. Turns out there is an invisible village among the tubers.
42. It seems there is no reason to ever build cottages. At least, I have autoplayed a few games from start to 400 turns, and none of the AI's *ever* builds cottages. I am not an expert player myself, but it is possible that you may be able to make some tweaks by looking at the save-game. It uses "patch 1" and also the latest mapscript from koma13. Due to filesize (600K) I have stored it externally:
http://jendaveallen.com/fury-road/dunewars-huge-a-t400.zip
43. I saw a water improvement on a spice jungle terrain. Shouldn't that cause some kind of temporal paradox or something?
44. There seem to be several problems with the land transport. For one thing, I was able to load a light hover onto a patrol hover. I don't use vanilla ocean transport very much, but I found the display very confusing when I loaded units onto a hover. Suppose in one square I have a hover with two infantries loaded, and another two infantries which are not loaded. So five units are displayed in the button row. When I move the mouse over one of the infantry buttons, I cannot tell which are in the hover and which are not. If I move the loaded hover, the infantry inside still show up in the "unmoved units" list so when I use "w" to step to the next unmoved unit, it keeps coming back to the loaded infantries. If we are going to use land transport a lot, it is worthwhile to investigate if these are bugs which can be fixed in the xml, or if they are fundamental.
45. The hover patrol unit graphic is too large. When it is the active unit, you cannot see the green active circle underneath it. So I kept losing track of which was the active unit.
46. Arid terrain has a +50% defensive bonus. Other related terrains do not have a defensive bonus, and I can't think of any in-game reason. Perhaps a cut and paste error.
47. The LH graphic for the navigator guy seems very flat. There is almost no contrast, especially on the button. I searched to find another graphic we could use. Please find attached a proposed new navigator and button.
48. Thinking about the likely costs of conquering distant civs, it may be that we should move "Enables Vassal States" earlier in the tech tree. For Fury Road, I wanted to encourage vassalism above conquest, and maybe that fits here also. I can see a dune civ agreeing to be a vassal. Right now this is enabled by Castes, which is not so far down in the tech tree, but maybe to encourage vassalism, the vassalism part should be moved to an earlier tech.
And I fixed that graphic bug you get in world builder when placing deep desert or desert waste. 
