2. A thought occured to me last night that there are quite a few improvements for land units, but not so much for naval, air, and space.
It's actually not as bad as it looks at first glance. One part of the Crazy Spatz mod (the balance one) is that Harbors give +15 XP to naval units, Seaports give +15 XP to naval units, and the Military Academy was changed to give a "+25% XP" promotion to all units (whereas the original version was another +15 XP for land units). So it's already skewing things a bit away from an all-land approach.
Then in the SMAC mod, you have the Maritime Control Center for naval units, and the Aerospace Complex (which gives +XP for air) and Cloudbase Academy (custom promotion) for air units. Also, the Bioenhancement Center gives a very useful flat +10% promotion to all units regardless of type. The Skunkworks national wonder and the new Power social policy each give +10 XP to all units regardless of type.
So really, the only pro-Land thing I added was the Cyborg Factory, and that's just because it's not possible to have a building give multiple promotions. (March doesn't apply to all unit types. I may end up having to create a new promotion that DOES apply to all types and has that same effect, which would mean that your air and naval units would heal each turn.)
That being said, one of the points of this was that air and naval units kind of become obsolete in the future eras. Naval units become obsolete once anti-grav units become common, since they're supposed to be able to move across water as well. (They don't currently, but that's the plan.) Likewise, air units become nearly obsolete once you start investing heavily in satellite weapons.
As to satellites, while there aren't a lot of buildings that give them XP, you should note that they're effectively unkillable, which goes a LONG way. They'll just keep building up the XP, and you'll never need to spend the XP on defensive promotions or mobility stuff.
3. Concerning the counters to nuke attacks: right now the AI seems to be defenseless against nuclear attack. Maybe move down the counter for nukes so that the AIs have this available to them sooner?
Well, there's been a lot of talk about mods creating an "SDI" wonder for this. Personally, I don't like it; you spend all of this effort to unlock the things (they're the only core unit that requires building a wonder or project to unlock!), so I don't want them becoming obsolete too quickly. Right now you get nukes about two eras before the anti-nuke buildings, so there's a bit of a window where they're useful.
Also, there's a victory timing issue. In the core game, you get nukes so late that you really don't have to deal with the consequences. Nuke someone, and just let them sit there in their fallout while you finish up your space victory; it's unlikely they'd have time to nuke you back, and even if every other civ got mad at you for it, there's no time for them to really mobilize. But in this mod, you're going to have to live with the civs for centuries afterwards, and deal with the diplomatic backlash from all of the other civs and city-states.
I'm not saying I can't do something about this. Maybe give a small nuke reduction to the Perimeter Defense building (T15), in lieu of the defense boost I was planning to give it. I'll try it out later. But I don't want to do too much too soon.
The AIs also need an algorhythm "Push the Big Red Button", because I've seen AI's with nukes but not use them, even when I am obviously on the verge of wiping them out.
I'm sure they do, but that's WAY beyond what I can program, and it's something plenty of people have asked for in other threads.
4. Playing on continents map right now. What an exploit it is to join in a war against a civ who's on a different continent!
Again, part of the core game. It's actually one of the things behind the original design; one of the reasons I wanted the grav units to be able to move across oceans was so that if something like that DID happen, they could immediately attack the other civ instead of having to embark units, escort them across, etc. So I'm hoping that this becomes less abuseable in this mod than in the core game; declare that sort of war, and he WILL sent a vertol over the ocean to raid you.
5. Also experienced the Bottomless Pit Marsh graphic again (see attached pic). I did as you suggested and reloaded the game, and the issue went away.
I'm assuming, then, that in between games where you use my mod, you're also playing games without it? If so, it sounds like a cache issue. Which is strange, because one of the flags in the mod properties is to reload the landmark/terrain system, which should fix those sorts of things by default. I wonder; are you going straight from some other game to testing this mod, or do you back out to the main menu in between?
Couple pics from this evening's playtesting. First, should subs have Indirect Fire capability?
Subs can't be able to bombard land at all (but Stealth ships can). But the promotions are handled purely through unit class, so yes, it's possible for a submarine to select the Indirect Fire promotion (since it is available to all naval units), even though it has no use for it. This has nothing to do with me, it's part of the core game.
But I like it, because once you upgrade the sub to a Stealth Ship it CAN make use of that. So it's not as big of a penalty for the AI any more. There are a couple others like that; the Former, for instance, can take bombardment promotions even though it has no ranged attack and can't even attack other units.
Second pic has to do with the pirates head icon you inserted: just curious, but whats the purpose of that?
Every resource has to have an icon. Neutronium is the omega symbol, Dilithium is the shuriken, Omnicytes have the flower. Well, now that I've got the building resource production working, I had to have icons for the two new luxuries. Information uses the pirate, Ambrosia uses the mushroom; both of them are a bit too cartoony, but I couldn't resist the humor (the Internet is full of pirates, and the mushroom giving extra life is sort of a Super Mario joke).
I'm in the process of creating a new icon library for all of the miscellaneous stuff (policies, resources, etc.), but text icons aren't modular, so you're limited to the options they give. If I find something that works better I'll switch it, but there aren't a lot of possibilities.