Ugh... don't get me started on the display... the display was about 6 months of extreme headaches with minimal results... Everything display wise was something I did (successfully) in about a couple of hours reading about it on the forums and then 'experimenting' the experimentation is what you now see.
My hope is the switch to the Platy content will make display issues much easier, as he has both 'access points' for custom graphics (backgrounds) as well as a lot of 'auto scaling' I think. So hopefully this will fix the problems with widely varying resolutions, on my resolution the board clips the map slightly, but not in anyway that affects game play. Like I said it was a quick 'experiment' and hasn't been touched since. (at least not with much in the way of success) the dark 'shadow' over the top of floating boxes, at the top and bottom, (like the menu screen in game) is a particular headache that I spent a long time trying to resolve with no success, when the time to switch to platy comes, I will have to go through and rescue the relevant info, like colours, and rethinkng the rest.. right now the city screen for example is just three DDS image references, at the top and sides, but i have yet to work out what i need to then get bits like this to scale with resolution, same with pedia etc.
Like I have said before, most of what I have made so far in this mod has been with dumb luck and hammers (and the assistance of the forum users for specific issues) So everything is pretty much completely WIP, I know where I want to go with it all, I just can't get there on my own. (As well as everything taking time, and waiting for the guys who are helping to get their stuffs done, which takes as long as it takes, so until then I chill!)
Workers: you do not need workers straight away as they have nothing to build, also the AI does beeline to workers, one thing that does need to be added is some extra ai tweaking that changes the maths done for workers when deciding to build a unit. (At the moment the Mk1 AI for unit pop cost, is to balance number of units with city size, so that a city will both grow and build units in a sort of 'even' balance) but this was just a quick first run, so it is very imperfect, such as needing more workers than the 'ratio' allows, or 'exempting' robots from the math, as they don't take pop. plus things like a different 'war time math', to make building units more of a priority than growing cities. So it does understand workers, I have watched the ai be ok with this, the problem right now is that the math doesn't give enough space for workers, it also has a habit of suiciding them outside of borders with no escort (another thing I need to get changed) so it does not always have the necessary 'workforce' to get on and improve itself.
It does work and do this over time, i have run ai games and watched them grow and balance out. It just needs the extra code, logic and tweaks to make it faster and more competitive, and to make the kind of short term loss/long term reward choices that a player will naturally make. Like staying at size 2 or 3 for the sake of getting out workers who then boost up your growth so your town grows mega quick after that..
Civics: That was probably a 'typo' on my part, I probably checked a wrong thing and didn't notice..I sort of left civics alone after a first quick pass of deciding the sort of things I want them to do. Lots more will be added to them in the future. (waiting for other bits of functionality before I go back to them)
Happiness: yeah the no happiness bonus was to make building up the town a bit more grueling and apocalyptic. However the AI does need more work, for one thing it needs to both register and properly value health and happiness from specialists (which was mostly due to an imperfect merge from me) coupled with the need of a bit of 'extra code' to bring it all together in kmod code. I also want to add in the ability for civics to change the happiness and health output of specialists too.
I can't remember what the arggh one is for happiness, I am evenly partly sure that it is a vanilla one, I have no idea how you got a -8 start... unless maybe you were on some bad terrain or something...I would need more details I think to be able to get my brain to track through the source of the arrghness.
github: I still can't really use github, that is flitz's contribution to the team, and I am happy for him to run with it however he sees fit, most DLL changes, I now pipe through him, even if I or someone else(like your map fix) have written the code, I just hand it to him so he can run it through github. I can download and compile the source though, although most days I just leave it to flitz, because he is the one doing most of the changes.
Also I think the project data on hub is 2010, and I can't open it with my 2008 version of visual studio (or whatever it is called) So again I mostly just leave it to him now... it causes me almost no headache what so ever...aahh
Also I did once tell flitz about your makefile, but i couldn't sell it very hard as I still barely understand it hehe!
BUG came with kmod, and the other bits I added as I went (while still learning what i was doing.. although this implies I now understand what I did.... nope.) it is all clearly marked, and I could even scan through and find it myself, pull it out and then when we have removed BUG hand it over to flitz to put it all back in it's new home.
I can't remember how many things there are, but simply by the fact I put them in, they are probably not that much or spread out..
Collateral damage: It has been a while, but I THINK, this is a little bit of code trickery on our part, that units can gain extra collateral targets(or damage) from a promotion, but they need to the have at least one collateral target in order for the promotions to then work and be applied. I think it is mostly in connection to melee, and promotions like 'The Reaper' (Is that the right name? The Conan the Barb one where he is sat on a throne of skulls) so it is like they can do collateral of no damage, but then they get promotion X and it activates collateral damage for them. I think that is it...
Oh yes I have also sent a message to dotter (group manager) to invite you both, he hasn't responded yet, so my guess is he is currently swamped with RL, but he is usually pretty quick when he sees the message, so it is probably just a case of waiting till he has some free time to check skype...
...I think that covered everything... right?