These Prehistoric cottages should not expire like outposts and lumberyards, though. This would make them too weak. It's a sufficient handicap that they do not upgrade, and need to be replaced by "real" cottages to get the upgrades.
I agree, and I did not set them to expire when I put them in, so don't worry.
It should be ok to expand the prehistoric area a little, but I recommend to focus on A LITTLE.
It's 3 new units (the Atlatl b/c that's a really important unit historically, and 2 birds b/c birds are awesome), 3 new techs (which are all related to the new units, and to delaying the Slinger a little), and 2 new wonders (the remaining ones from Stone Age Mod, which I've done a really good job incorporating into MM I think). The birds and bird tech are optional, just like dogs. I'll post a screenshot later if I have time.
Because any new tech in the tech tree makes the game last longer, and I guess most players out there do not like those everlasting games. Same with buildings and so on.
Yep I'm not keen on adding normal buildings very much, and MM has only a few more than vanilla as a result (compared to other categories of objects where I've added tons of stuff).
As for slowing the game down though, you made the recommendation earlier that I increase all Prehistoric Era tech costs by 50% lol, so which is it?
I have seen a mod, in which most buildings reward only with +5% or +10% of something, and you end up with dozens of buildings, each of them rewarding you with a marginal bonus only.
Whereas for example new terrain types are a way of making a game better without making it last longer.
Yep! Totally, totally, TOTALLY agreed. Basically what happened was people wanted a full in-depth historical simulation but only had the base Civ4 gameplay mechanics to work with. Those mechanics can be extended and expanded
to a certain degree, which is what I've tried to do in MM, but with those other mods the authors just added every historically-semi-relevant thing they could think of, and to bridge the gap they started re-using the same mechanics for multiple things by dividing up the same effects into smaller pieces (5% here, 10% there, etc).
One of my core underlying design philosophy approaches has ALWAYS been to never over-extend my available gameplay tools. I've held back on adding units and wonders a number of times already in the past b/c of this. Occasionally I
add new mechanics myself so I can get around this problem, which is how Golden Dawn, Trafalgar Square, Himeji Castle and Machu Picchu came into being in the mod, but yeah.
And I'm actually stretching things a little with all my new civics haha, but I think I've got it under control and they're all sufficiently unique.
This looks good! Well done!
I guess that these sub-civics require certain techs to be used, at least two out of three. Can they then be applied to any main civic or just to some?
I mean, can I apply any "stance" to any legal civic, any "workforce" to any labor civic and any "focus" to any labor civic?
Is there a singular effect then for any combination?
They're not as fancy as they may look at first glance: they're just 3 extra normal full-size categories, that are shown in the window in the same space as existing categories. But functionally they're completely seperate and normal.
One of the "heavy-lifting programming projects" I mentioned a few times before that I want to do (but which has no hope of making it into this current update), is allow civics to require or exclude other civics. It's really easy to implement, but EXTREMELY hard to teach AIs how to use completely correctly. Fuyu already worked on this problem extensively a year ago, so don't take it lightly.
If and when I eventually get this working, there will be conditions like "Theology cannot be used with Atheism", and "Pacifism cannot be used with Military Schools".
But I had a longstanding problem with, in particular, Pacifism and Environmentalism being where they were, b/c those aren't religion and economy SYSTEMS; they're religion and economy focuses / emphases / directions. You can have a pacifist country that has organized religion or free religion or anything else; and you can have a country that uses a free market system, or communism, or anything else, and which is extremely-environmentally-friendly at the same time. That had always REALLY bothered me. Just saying.
And lastly, can you try to find a nicer icon for "Neural interface". This one looks a bit like a bison with a human face.
Nooooo! I like it for this a lot! Don't judge til you see the full-size version.
It's an intimidating male human face (who looks like a soot-covered battle monk if you ask me) with yellow eyes, which is the whole key to the civic... The idea is you plug a computer into a person's brain and just download all the educational knowledge and experience they need.