Yep Burrito, that's my issue here: this collection of mods makes the game definitely more balanced to the player, you can and should build a more varied web of improvements around your city (smarter, more fun, not to mention nicer to the eyes, especially 'cause of the horrible TP art), while you'll still gain some advantages at specializing a city towards a certain goal. But the AI can't keep up, so it would probably need one level of difficulty higher than what one is used to play at to even the field a bit. Fact is, as I stated, I hate when the AI is able to counter me only thanks to cheating, and when I conquer one of their cities it suddenly shows it was crunching out units out of thin air... this is a game's fault, though, not the mod's, the latter just happens to have the side effect of making it a bit more evident in certain instances..
I did some experiments messing only with the unique resources, and yeah, it's another way to spice up things a bit, but it has its downsides too. While in some cities your production, gold and food income is slightly improved by the boosted resources (letting you be more free when building generic improvements), most map scripts tend to "specialize" a territory: aka, you might start surrounded by food resources while another player is surrounded mostly by production ones. Not all AIs seem able to really exploit their particular advantage (especially since a certain civ might be focused on exploiting gold resources and still end up spawning in tundra surrounded only by deers), but that was foreseeable. Probably works better on large and huge maps, since there each player usually has access to more varied resources, and there's more time for a CIV to survive a starting disadvantage before being conquered.
Another downside of beefing up resources, strategic in particular, is that this way you are devaluating certain unique abilities such as Russia's. In vanilla Catherine is usually a VERY effective AI, often the one winning its continent if you're not sharing it with her; with such modifications I noticed her being much less effective and more often than not on the losing side. Which is obvious, that +1 hammer per resource becomes pretty trivial when it's no more a 100% advantage but a 50% one.
As such, more than +1 per resource seems a big no-no, unless you adapt the relative civ abilities accordingly, and maybe use strategic balance for resource spawn when creating a map (didn't really experiment a lot on that setting though).
Another general "issue" of improving in any way the production - be it through resources, improvements, game speed pacing etc - is that it gives a HUGE advantage to civilizations whose AI favors unit training: civs such as Rome who love to field vast armies are now more effective than ever. This is fun for you, in one of such games I finally had the chance to see a real army going after me, much less fun for the other civs that might be on Rome's continent.
In any case, this game needs A LOT of balancing, tuning, and additions (slower research, for instance, even linear and not increasingly slower as Thalassicus did, pointed out to me the late eras have too few meat to play with: up to the renaissance each tech usually unlocks several things to build and train, you always have some choice to make, later on most techs unlock a single thing, if anything, and you may find yourself grinding the end turn button with most of your cities with everything useful already built and working on research). Game's good, allright, but... meh.
(and BTW, completely OT, how in hell can the AI still be so stupid about crossing the seas, when now there are no more transports but each and every unit can just plainly "walk" over water freely? It's... disturbing
)
I did some experiments messing only with the unique resources, and yeah, it's another way to spice up things a bit, but it has its downsides too. While in some cities your production, gold and food income is slightly improved by the boosted resources (letting you be more free when building generic improvements), most map scripts tend to "specialize" a territory: aka, you might start surrounded by food resources while another player is surrounded mostly by production ones. Not all AIs seem able to really exploit their particular advantage (especially since a certain civ might be focused on exploiting gold resources and still end up spawning in tundra surrounded only by deers), but that was foreseeable. Probably works better on large and huge maps, since there each player usually has access to more varied resources, and there's more time for a CIV to survive a starting disadvantage before being conquered.
Another downside of beefing up resources, strategic in particular, is that this way you are devaluating certain unique abilities such as Russia's. In vanilla Catherine is usually a VERY effective AI, often the one winning its continent if you're not sharing it with her; with such modifications I noticed her being much less effective and more often than not on the losing side. Which is obvious, that +1 hammer per resource becomes pretty trivial when it's no more a 100% advantage but a 50% one.
As such, more than +1 per resource seems a big no-no, unless you adapt the relative civ abilities accordingly, and maybe use strategic balance for resource spawn when creating a map (didn't really experiment a lot on that setting though).
Another general "issue" of improving in any way the production - be it through resources, improvements, game speed pacing etc - is that it gives a HUGE advantage to civilizations whose AI favors unit training: civs such as Rome who love to field vast armies are now more effective than ever. This is fun for you, in one of such games I finally had the chance to see a real army going after me, much less fun for the other civs that might be on Rome's continent.
In any case, this game needs A LOT of balancing, tuning, and additions (slower research, for instance, even linear and not increasingly slower as Thalassicus did, pointed out to me the late eras have too few meat to play with: up to the renaissance each tech usually unlocks several things to build and train, you always have some choice to make, later on most techs unlock a single thing, if anything, and you may find yourself grinding the end turn button with most of your cities with everything useful already built and working on research). Game's good, allright, but... meh.
(and BTW, completely OT, how in hell can the AI still be so stupid about crossing the seas, when now there are no more transports but each and every unit can just plainly "walk" over water freely? It's... disturbing
)
value) and great artists were nerfed (cannot end city unrest, cities cannot culture flip). I'm not certain if the differing value of GP's is intentional however, so I've left their immediate-use abilities alone for now.
pre-industrial, or 1
then you make them equivalent to a river grassland without modification. Add a lighthouse and you have a pre-civil service irrigated grassland. I don't think it is beyond reason therefore to add +1
