By the way, I did an Ancient Era start last night, and I have to say, the change I made to population happiness has a HUGE impact. 2+1/pop was easily manageable, 3+1.2/pop has been crippling since my starting area was short on luxuries but had plenty of strategics. And I kind of like it; there's now a major motivation not to expand too much, which really seems to level the playing field with the AI.
But I could use more feedback on this specific point. Is it too much? (One change I've been considering for a while is changing the Temple from +3 culture to +1 happiness and +2 culture. If you play as Egypt and make Burial Tombs, you can see how critical that early-game happiness can be.) Thoughts?
Thats an awful lot of work on your part for what essentially is amounting to an afterthought in your mod. Or is this why your calling it "Crazy Spatz's Mod", cuz your just crazy like that?
A little from column A, a little from column B. Don't get me wrong, I want the AI to do this, and I've found a way to make it actually do so; Improvements have a Flavor table, it's just that the core game
didn't use it, leaving them all set at 0. So I gave my new actions some flavors (production for forests, research for jungle, tile improvement for terraform). That didn't quite seem to do it, but then I tried something new: giving the temporary Improvement some pluses. It actually seemed to work; I'd start to get my new actions as the suggested builds when I moved to a new hex; presumably, the AI is using the same logic.
The only real problem is that this looks bad to a player; they see a "Plant Forest" action that says "+2 production", when in fact it's not giving +2 production. And that worries me about the AI, because it could get into a loop: if it decides planting a forest is the best action on a spot, but the resulting forest doesn't give it the production it's expecting (since there's no lumbermill on it yet), would it just repeat the process over and over again?
But even if it never works, I'd still consider this to be a decent use of time, in that it's helped me learn some aspects of the .lua coding in a way that's very easy to test (since a Transcendence start gives you 4 combat engineers).
Another thought I've had is that you are really the trailblazer here in regards to ciV sci-fi mods, as yours is one of the first, and one of the most advanced to date. Question: do you see your mod in this role in that your mod is providing a plethora of examples for other sci-fi modders (like myself) to utilize in the future (pun intended)?
Not really. I wanted to get something out first mainly as a motivating tool for myself; I have a job, I have other hobbies, I have other video games I play. If someone else already had a fairly complete future-era mod out, then I probably couldn't convince myself to spend the time to make the mod I wanted, and Civ5 would get shelved as soon as I got tired of the core game. That's what happened in Civ4; I'd planned out this mod in extensive detail, but I was busy writing my PhD thesis at the time and couldn't devote any real time to it. By the time I was free, there were plenty of other good mods out there, like Planetfall. So why bother? I'd play those other mods a few times, and then I was done.
Anyways, back to being more on-topic: because Barbs in ciV become less numerous as the game goes on, but because you want the game to mimic SMACX in that Fungal Blooms occur more often in the later game, have you looked into what coding controls this aspect?
It looks I'm going to brute-force it using .lua. At the start of each player's turn, it'll check to see if they have launched the spaceship. If so, do a random draw; a small percent of the time (5-10?), create a new Spore Tower (immobile unit) in their territory on a tile not containing a unit, destroying whatever improvement was already there (and probably replace it with City Ruins or something), and spawn a Wild Mind Worm in an adjacent tile. Assuming that there's randomization in .lua, the only headache is the check for the spaceship; it'd be easy enough to check for the Centauri Ecology tech instead, but I'll need that spaceship check for other things already (like, say, awarding Centauri Ecology in the first place).
And then on the Barbarian civ's turn, check all surviving Towers in their unit list. Give each, say, a 20% chance to spawn a Mind Worm, a 10% chance of a Chiron Locust, and a 5% chance of a Nessus Worm each turn. I'm not sure what to do about Isles of the deep, though; I could check to see if the tower is coastal and if so spawn it in a water hex nearby, but the other possibility is to create a special naval version of the Tower with a different spawn table (just Isles and Nessus Worms).
I've only seen an XML parameter which is associated with distance between camps, so I am assuming that the coding involving Barb camps dieing out over time is associated with SDK instead,
Actually at least part of it is in the Eras.xml file. Each era has a "NoBarbUnits" and "NoBarbCities" entry, governing the appearance of random wandering barbs and camps, I think. Currently, the first goes to true in the Industrial and the second in the Modern. Starting in a later era will put still barb camps on the map, but it won't make new ones once you've cleared them.
I'd boosted that to Nuclear and Digital, but then last night after I posted v.0.06, I just set them all to false all the way through to the end. So leaving uninhabited areas on your continent is dangerous even in the last few eras; but really, any civ that can't hold off the occasional attack with gravtanks and orbital weapons really deserves to die.
The bigger problem is that it's probably hard-coded in the source code that Barbs don't spawn inside visible territory. That lua code above seems like an easy way to get around that limitation, but we'll see.
Am also hoping to shortly start to look more intently into what your doing with the XML and LUA for each of these aspects, so that I can start providing better feedback in this regards as well.
Well, the XML is nearly done, but I'm digging into the .lua now to see what can be done with the missing events and wonder pieces. My absolute top priority is getting the spaceship to give the player Centauri Ecology. Everything else is minor in comparison; as soon as I get that working, this'll be stable enough that I'll start thinking about publishing it through the mod browser.
Just started a game on Industrial/ Standard and noted that it now takes approximately 50+ turns to research my first tech (previously it was a manageable 20-ish turns which very quickly ramped down as cities grew and facilities were built).
Unfortunate but kind of intended. You see, that 50+ turns sounds horrible, but the problem is that if you started at 20ish for the first tech, then once you got to, say, the Fusion Era, new techs would come every 1-2 turns despite their increased costs. The era-based cost discount seems to apply evenly, so adjusting one of those numbers adjusts the others. I'm trying to find a good balance on this.
What's mainly causing it is the ratio of the tech costs. In an Ancient era start, your first few techs are dirt cheap and then it ramps up nicely, but in an Industrial start, you're starting on a plateau of sorts, where the cost of your first tech is nearly as much as the next dozen.
I think another part of the problem is that +research buildings provide too much. Look at gold; the buildings provide +25%, +33%, +40%, that sort of thing. But research? 50* (the Library), 50, 50, and 100. (That's why I set the Research Lab back down to 50.) And normally, bonuses are purely additive (so +25% and +40% gives you +65%, not x1.75), but the Library's effect is multiplied by the others. So research adds up FAST as cities develop. In an Industrial start, you'll get free Libraries in your cities, but no Universities, Public Schools, or Research Labs (for reference, Universities are given in any Fusion Era start or later). Universities will be a high priority for you, and so your research rate will increase quickly.
And then there's an issue of population. An Industrial Start only gives you size 3 cities, but you should be getting a free Granary and Aqueduct in each city, so with the tech-boosted Farms you should be able to grow cities very quickly. (Especially if you use your starting cash to bribe a Maritime.) A player who reaches Industrial the long way will have much larger cities at first.
(The solution for this might be to bump up the city starting sizes for later eras. Currently, Renaissance is the first era with ANY extra population, starting at size 2, Industrial is 3, Nuclear is 4, and so on up to 8 for Transcendence. But if I started the boosting an era earlier, then Industrial cities would start at 4 pop, which is a big jump in research rate.)
The real question is, how long does the SECOND tech take to get? After all, the first twenty turns will be spent just placing cities, developing the terrain, connecting the cities, and building the essential city structures that weren't automatically provided for you (like that University). So I don't really see it as a problem that you wouldn't get a tech during THOSE turns, but once it's all stabilized, what's the pace? After 50 turns, your cities should be a decent size and you'd have Universities, so at that point I'd think you'd be on the normal progression track. But yes, that means a dead time at the start.
If this seems like too much of a problem, it's easy enough to hack in .lua; if you haven't researched a tech yet, double your beaker rate each turn. As you research the first few, decrease the boost, so that once you get to about the fifth or sixth tech you're at the normal rate. It's sort of similar to the Tech Diffusion mod, so it shouldn't be too hard.
And for reference: in the core game, starting at the Industrial era (or later) makes all techs cost only 20% of their listed amounts. Renaissance is 33%, Medieval is 50%, Classical 67%. It's a huge dropoff, which only makes sense if you think of an industrial start as being an "endgame" start where your cities will never have time to reach full size.
In my mod, it's currently 80% Classical, 70% Medieval, 65% Renaissance, 60% Industrial, 55% Nuclear, 50% Digital, 45% Fusion, 40% Nanotech and Transcendence.
The more immersion, the better! 
