New ships classes look good, though I am yet to see an AI building any of them (somehow in most of my games AI's tend to go straight form caravel level to destroyer level, not sure if this has anything to do with the mod or is it just the way my games go).
It should just be the way games go, as far as I know there is nothing which prevents the AI from creating these units.
One thing I'm having doubts about is the "ironclad warship" unit. As it is, it seems way too powerful: for modest extra cost I get an ironclad with +1M, +3S and ability to go anywhere, not just coastal waters. Too good, and, as both ships are available at the same time, there is no reason to build regular ironclads anymore, unless the cost somehow becomes a major issue (and who spams ironclads anyway?).
I agree, it is superior in every way to the regular Ironclad unit, except for cost. As to making Ironclads obsolete, I never built them before either, so to me they were obsolete right from the very start
I also think they are ok as they are, you get +3S,+1M for a cost of 140 instead of 100. With the Battleship you get +28S,+3M for a cost of 225, to me this is an even better deal (Destroyer at +18S,+6M for 200 also is a better deal imo, and that is only two techs away from the Ironclad).
Perhaps you could consider switching their respective power ratings; a S12 ironclad warship would still be a flexible vessel significantly superior to sail-powered ships, and a S15 ironclad would be what it always was - a slow and clumsy, but very powerful coastal defender.
I would probably rather give both a strength of 12 and reduce the cost for the Ironclad Warship to 125 or so. I don't think the riverboat should be stronger than an ocean going one.
Wolfshanze, any thoughts on this one ?
One more thing: I noticed that you made use of the "ship scaling mod" (whatever it's really called) to prevent having battleships larger than a city and not fitting on a tile.
No, I have not changed the size of any unit, except for the civ-specific units I added, where sometimes the size needed to be adjusted as the regular scaling would result in far too large or small units (only true for tanks, planes and ships). In those cases I tried to give them sizes which are similar to the sizes of the regular civ counterpart.
Maybe I did not do so sufficiently in some cases though or missed a unit, if there are any units where you notice this in particular, let me know.
The regular battleship and destroyer (which are used by most nations still) are the original size as used by civ.
While I understand why scaling issues were annoying some people, personally I think the current effect is even worse, as suddenly the most massive and solid-looking ships are regular destroyers; a battleship, while still "longer" on the tile, looks very delicate next to one of them.
Those are the regular CIV scales and sizes, nothing I changed.
Here is a pic of Dreadnought, Destroyer and Battleship next to each other (the pic was taken with all 3 at the same time, I then moved them closer to each other in a graphics editor, so the size differences are not due to zoom level, if anything the Destroyer has the advantage here due to being in the center).
The Battleship does not look smaller / more delicate than the Destroyer to me. Did you per chance mistake the Dreadnought for a Battleship ?
So, my question: is there any easy method of returning the ships to their original scale? I know that deleting a certain file (forgot the name) does that, but only in regard to regular models, not the custom ones. Do I have to work on this manually? And, if so, what scale was considered "default" for the custom ship classes introduced in 0.60? I really don't feel like doing this by trial and error...
The custom ship classes have no default ship size, I had to come up with one (the models did not contain any xml which could be considered the default).
I simply went with "the stronger the bigger", with the Dreadnought therefore being the biggest of them and slightly smaller than the Destroyer (see pic above).