I have no problems with the dogs, really...it's just that it means you get the map and little 'spies' REALLY early on (it's abusable, essentially).
Hmm. I never really considered using them that way... I also usually play with Raging Barbarians on, so having them out scouting long-distance after the very beginning of the game isn't practical anyway - the barbs would kill them lol. I just added the ignore borders ability due to, as I said, it seemed to make sense, but you bring up an excellent point. They kinda do steal the exploration job of the Spy and Great Spy units, and with the new Ranger unit, who costs money and is restricted, also having this ability, that's probably plenty.
Maybe cap how far they can go into enemy territory? THAT might be cool. Maybe give'em one square, for instance, to simulate the loose 'borders' of early human settlements?
A neat idea, but unfortunately one that would take some programming work to accomplish (and I need to get 3.6.1 out as soon as possible right now). I may look at doing this in the future, but for now I think I'll just disable their ignore borders ability.
Oh, and the res is 1024x768....I'm running it in a window.
Okay, yeah. Try looking at the Civics and StatsMod screenshots in the second set of pictures in the Download thread btw; they really fit just fine at 1920x1200, and look great being the exact same size as the research progress bar.
But yes I was already planning to shrink them, or something, for low resolutions like 1024.
Another thing (really sorry to be piling all this on but I'm trying to note things as I'm playing so I don't forget):
I have pretty much not gotten any detailed feedback on the mod at all since last summer (when I first posted this thing publically again after a 4-year hiatus). Please pile on as much as you can; it's great.
You may want to revisit how the date advances. According to the game it's 1530AD and no one has really entered the Middle Ages yet (tech-wise). I'm on turn 186 and it feels like it should be more like 800-900AD....I don't know if there's anything you can do about that.
Argh... I just redid the date progression again in 3.6 to accomodate the latest, and hopefully final, new starting year, 100,000 BC. (In v3.5 I was using 48,000 BC, and in v3.2 when I added a Prehistoric Era through v3.4 I was using 10,000 BC.)
It is VERY hard, in an annoying 8th-grade-algebra sort of way, to select a progression rate and sequence that starts on the designated start year, ends on the designated end year (2300 AD for all gamespeeds), AND uses round/even year and month increments in every bracket. I think I probably got the sequence about right on the Eternal gamespeed, but I haven't playtested the others so I was just making intelligent guesses, really.
That being said, even though it may seem like a lot, 1500 AD vs 900 AD is actually not hugely far off given how hard the sequences are to fine-tune. If I tried to make it any more accurate, for example, you would probably not have year increments that were consistently divisible by 2, 5 and 10, so you would have years like 939 and 1441 coming up instead of 950 and 1400. So it's a tradeoff.
It's also different for every gamespeed as I said, so if you want me to look at it you'll need to tell me which speed you are playing on.
EDIT: To say something nice for a change...I think the paved roads look REALY cool. :grin:
Those are from one of the vanilla game's scenarios, not sure exactly which, and are thus in the category of things that exist in the vanilla resources somewhere, but aren't used in the vanilla main game. Some other things like that are the Olives resource and the Early Tank unit.
The other custom route type, the Maglev, is from Final Frontier, but was modified a little, maybe had the color changed I'm not sure, for use in one of the other big mods. Still mostly a Firaxis asset though.