Hello,
Anton! ("Anton" is a russian equivalent of "Anthony" name, sounds with strong "o", my younger brother's name, as well)
Downloaded
Worldwide Prestige yesterday, spent an evening and a half of the night playing it.
I have some things to share, probably, things of minor importance but still I hope they'll be interesting to you.
First of all, I have to say "THANK YOU!" for a mod. I had hours of interest and pleasure playing it.
It brings fun - and it's the most important thing for any entertaining work, so you did it, congrats! You really kept Civ3 spirit alive as someone said in the thread, so the mod is a good work.
I didn't check a 1st version of the mod, so I'm talking about the latest version only.
OK, some feelings, details & impressions.
Initial conditions:
I started a game playing as the Spain (love this country very much), continents, 3 billions years, normal AI aggression, warlord difficulty - I'm not the coolest player on the planet + I wanted to feel all the flavour being not destroyed in era 1.
Progress:
Played for ~150 turns, passed through era 1 & a half of era 2, destroyed 2 neighbour civs, left with the single city 3 civs more, explored the 2nd huge continent, met all the rest civs, got ~1800 of gold.
Minor troubles with Civilopedia:
1) in description of Ghat attribute there's Masjid building link - it's broken (wrong entry);
2) in "Cannot hurry production" message box the link is broken as well.
I didn't look in the labels & civpedia, so I can't say what exactly went wrong.
Interface graphics: I don't like it, it's just not my style, but it's cool anyway to see a new gfx. This impression depends on the artistic taste of the concrete person, so it doesn't go for me, but definitely does to someone else.
Arrows on the scientific screen: I would be glad to see them.
Developing my own mod, I went into the same trouble - a lot of techs means a lot of arrows, so it's necessary to create a readable screen with less as possible crossings - a task of graphs theory. I did it, but then downloaded an Aeon mod & found a most brilliant (IMHO) decision of the problem.
So, possibly, it'll be suitable for you too.
In-game gfx: good choice, the only notable issue with the terrain - when it's a tundra, it's difficult to see a white "Active unit" mark on it because of the white over the white. City gfx could be updated with latest works from
Kyriakos but still looks good. Some icons/splashes I saw for the 1st time - must say a very well done!
Slaves used from the Conquests.
Seems like we need to pray
Plotinus to create slaves pack. I use in my mod headless worker from him as a slave and it fits the rest of units gfx well.
Gameplay: the toughest part to describe, so a lot of words.
Didn't met naval barbarians, ground ones act well. Pillaged my terraform improvements some number of times, visited me often enough. You noticed I didn't say about their setup - just don't remember.
Some opponent civs were too peaceful/lazy. I played in a normal mode (not a debug), so I don't know what they built all the amount of time, but destroying the Scandinavians at ~900 AD I found 2 defenders (spearman) + 1 attacker (javelineer) in big cities, 2(or1) defenders in smaller towns. It was a big surprise for me since I expected more resistance.
So it left as a question for me. This thing seems to be a (cultural?) depending on something - it happened with european civs (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia) + Aztecs, while Arabs & Turks were powerful enough and I even lost a highly damaged stack to Arabs because of their horsemen blitz attack. I read yesterday someone said British civ is weak and I suppose I can understand why this impression could happeneven if British unit line is one of most powerful - they just don't build units.
A Call-to-arms + Statue of Zeus (IIRC, that autoproduces catapracts) - a deadly combination. I didn't feel a need to build an army since these 2 wonders gave me a huge amount of mounted attackers with the retreat option. So I lost only a few of them attacking footmen. Turning to Kingship was not really necessary & tempting - I just waited for Feudalism killing europeans & biting with Arabs with autoproduced horsemen. So there's no real choice of what you talked earlier in the thread - +15 gpt & amount of horsemen with Chiefdom doesn't tempt me to change a regime to have +37 & no new horsemen.
And one more problem. The wonder autoproduced units should assist player's army, but shouldn't be the player's army itself (at one moment of time 80% of my army consisted of autorpoduced horsemen & cataphracts) IMHO. It seems like a gameplay flaw to me - and I can recall someone already said "buildings, buildings, buildings".
Flavour buildings/attributes: I read about all of them carefully since I do like very much the idea of cities specialization, but I had no need to build any of them. It's a pity, but going well without them I don't see any reason to build them. It's a gameplay flaw IMHO - I expected a lot from them, but received much less. Well, OK it's just a high level of expectation problem.
So that moment I remembered words from
Nihtantuel and understood his "no any new". I felt something very close.
Artillery action: I saw no artillery used offensively against me or someone else so cannot tell anything about it. I'm gonna finish the game and possibly later I'll have a chance to check it.
Mercenaries: I didn't see any reason to build them. When I at war with someone, I can take their workers & minor forces in a regular way, and a minor filth... I have to reach Middle Ages just to crash a couple of Arabian hen houses? No, thank you. So the idea doesn't seem cool to me. I had the same realization of pirates-mercenaries in my mod - but they aren't able to attack cities, so I threw it out.
Government-based city improvement: a very good and interesting idea. I read about it earlier, but you converted words into action and it's really interesting.
So that's all for now, if you interested - I will post the rest later.
An overall mark - 3-3.5 of 5, IMHO. Possibly, it's my own problem - I expected it to be closer to my own mod since I read a lot of the same ideas into the mod's description in the post #1. I expected more new game mechanics.
But as I said, you kept a Civ3 spirit alive - and I'm, downloading a mod, always looking for something new.
Many words.
So, again, thank you for bringing a fun and interest into our lives and I wish you a success with your new projects!
the only thing that seems to be missing is a bunch of (letter)(letter)_all.pcx files missing from the art/advisors folder.
), and it's really fun. Before I played this, I have been playing CCM a lot, which is very different from un-modded Civ. Your mod seems to be a bit closer to un-modded Civ, but it still has many radically different concepts. I find this very fun. I also enjoy the extensive interface graphics modding and the colorful variety of unit graphics. Superb job! 
