Hi again
I just finished my first game of MoM, so I thought I'd relay my impressions.
(1) Earlier, I said that the AI rivals didn't seem to produce adepts or found religions. This turned out to be wrong. They did both, it just took them a long time to get there (even on Deity).
(2) AI army movement and group composition seemed odd at times (as already described earlier for the Balseraphs). Examples:
(2a) During a war, the Hippus kept shifting about two dozen horsemen around in the vicinity of a chokepoint that I had sealed with a fortress. Every second or third turn, a small group of them would end up right next to the fortress, where my defenders could take them out conveniently. The Hippus never moved their full force (which I couldn't have taken down so easily due to their numerical advantage) near the fortress. The only time when the Hippus were approaching the fortress with a considerable force was when I had removed some of the defenders to fight a barbarian incursion elsewhere. Hence I think that the AI apparently did want to break through the chokepoint, but felt too weak whenever it approached, so it retreated those units that still had movement points, left the others to die, was clueless as to how to deal with the situation otherwise, and kept repeating these steps during the following turns. Side note: The AI had apparently concentrated most of its forces at this front, because when the Luchuirp attacked the Hippus on a different front, the Hippus lost 4 cities extremely quickly, so they must have been almost defenseless and with no troups left for counterattacks.
(2b ) In a war with the Calabim, they moved a stack consisting of 16 adepts (and nothing else) right into my territory, where they were slaughtered by my horsemen patrols in two turns. It doesn't seem sensible to send 16 adepts into a warzone without any protection. The Calabim did have vampires and hunters, which could have provided at least some protection (or distraction). Note: At that time, the Calabim occupied the northern and southern shore of a bay, while I owned the eastern shore. It's possible that the stack of adepts didn't "want" to enter the warzone, but simply wanted to travel from a location in the northern half of the Calabim empire to one in the southern half. If the AI sent this stack along its way without realizing that it would need to pass through my territory at the eastern shore, then this might explain the seemingly ill-prepared composition of the stack.
(2c) The Bannor declared on me, and then attacked with small stacks of catapults at three places. Each stack was wiped out quickly. It might have looked smarter for the Bannor to combine their forces before attacking, though I'm not totally sure (it was pretty late in the game and probably wouldn't have that much of a difference).
(3) Speaking of war declarations: Both the Calabim and the Bannor declared on me while they had one city in the midst of my empire, surrounded by my culture. Instead of using this city as a staging point, they left it almost defenseless; in both cases I took the respective city in the first turn after the war had broken out.
(4) Does the city proximity bug (i.e., the AI seeing cities as "right next to me" even if they are separated by a body of water, and sending troops on a long and useless trip around the impassable terrain just to get to the seemingly "close" destination) still present in your codebase? That would explain why the Calabim (southern shore of the bay) attacked the Doviello and Sheaim (northern shore of the same bay) even though that meant sending lots of troops on a long journey. However, the Calabim didn't have any other non-aligned neighbors closer by, so perhaps they just didn't find a better target.
(5) There seems to be a lack of notifications in the game. Often my units had suddenly taken damage and I simply couldn't see what caused it. The turn log didn't have any information about it either. It's a bit frustrating to have units damaged or running off without getting a warning or any other information about it - it makes the player feel helpless. I guess that an enemy spellcaster had cast a damage spell on my units, but without getting a notice, that's only guesswork and it's hard to come up with tactical commands to prevent or reduce the damage. Having enraged units entails the same problem, they simply wander off without giving a warning, sometimes (when the unit had lots of movement) I didn't even notice it until the unit suddenly appeared in a combat deep within enemy territory.
(6) Speaking of enraged units, I've had it happen twice that an enraged unit walked deep into enemy territory without being targeted by the enemy at all, only to attack some random worker unit. One of my enraged units actually passed right through the entire empire of an enemy, only to attack some workers at the far border. I don't know how enraged units are supposed to acquire their targets, but it seems odd that (a) they would stroll through the enemy's lands for a dozen turns before finally capturing a hapless worker, and (b ) the enemy would actually allow them to do that.
- The hard cap of magic points causes a couple of problems or oddities:
(7) A mana cap of 100 seems rather low considering that it only allows (without cost reductions) 4 magical attacks for the entire turn (and then forces a pause to replenish the mana reserve). Likewise, the mana cap makes taming animals a huge effort (it uses up 2/3 of the maximal amount of mana that you can have in the early game, and then it can even be resisted).
(8) I don't know whether my playstyle caused this, but I had access to magical equipment costing more than 100 mana way before I could ever hope raise my mana cap. May need some balance.
(9) The mechanic to use mana from the reserve to cast a ritual faster is out of the player's control and creates odd situations. Example: I plan an attack, build up mana reserves, and right when my mages are in a position to shower the enemy defenses with lightning bolts, all my reserves are suddenly depleted because the game decided to accelerate my ritual. The player should have the possibility to opt out of this mechanic imho.
(10) It seemed a bit arbitrary that rising the mana cap is a specialty to the evocation school, and no other schools have anything similar. I guess you could say that the evocation school benefits most from having a higher cap (more potential to unleash destructive spells in a shorter timeframe), but then again, the mechanic to use the mana reserves to complete any magic ritual undermines that possible explanation right away. What was the reason to design the system this way?
(11) In general, I'd expect the current mana cap to make magic much more useful for big empires. As it stands, any meaningful use of magic is going to deplete your reserves. Bigger empires have more cities and (probably) more nodes, so they will replenish these reserves faster. As a result, in a one-on-one war, the bigger empire will usually have more potential to cast spells than the smaller empire. I'm not sure if this is intended. Usually I'd expect a mechanic here that limits the benefits of having a huge empire somewhat (as inflation and rising city maintenance do for gold).
(12) I still haven't figured out how auras are supposed to work. Partly that's because the respective spell category is a misnomer, under "abjuration" I'd expect dispels and anti-magic, but not aura magic? For a long time I didn't even look into the spells of that area because I thought "my enemies aren't using magic against me, so what's to abjure?".
(13) Having a large selection of spells to choose from is good, but the spells didn't feel very different from each other. Spells from the fire and lightning lines often cost the same and do the same amount of damage - a bit more diversion would be welcome.
(14) Some spells don't seem to work as described. I once cast "Greater Rift" on two defenders in a city and saw no effect, though nothing in the spell's description told me that the spell might fail. For some fire spells, the description mentions an effect lasting for several turns, but it neither mentions how many turns that effect will last, nor whether this per-turn damage is additional to the damage listed in the spell description, or whether it means that said listed damage is simply distributed over several turns. "Charm" and "Domination" are explained as having effects like "the unit is charmed" - well, I kind of guessed that, but I'd like to know what it means in game terms. I found an explanation of the "charmed" effect in the civopedia, but no explanation of the domination effect. Furthermore, some descriptions seem just wrong - confusion confuses the stack of the caster? Really?
- Equipment is an interesting addition to the game, but has some quirks:
(15) It's another mechanic that helps bigger empires more than smaller ones. Equipment needs resources, resources are produced by buildings or improvements, bigger empires will have more of those than smaller ones, storage of resources seems unlimited (or the limit is very high) and there's no decay, hence bigger empires will find it easier to equip their troops. This may be intended, but if it's not, then it may need rebalancing.
(16) It adds another layer of micromanagement into the game, and the game currently doesn't have adequate tools for this layer. For example, there is no way to check at a glance the individual equipment of the units in a stack. When you run out of a resource, and equipment can't be repaired, there's no way to find out which units are already affected except clicking through them. Preparing a stack, or performing an attack, now requires many more clicks than before because more information has to be checked (and is less accessible).
(17) The equipment system seems rather intransparent with regards to which equipment is available under which circumstances. I have no idea why some of my units have access to equipment that others seem unable to ever get, nor can i see any documentation (which would be helpful in building my army, currently I'm first building units and _then_ try to find out whether I can them equip with the things I wanted to give them).
(18) The equipment in its current implementation is very powerful and devaluates the promotion system. Outfitting a freshly built unit can easily make a difference of +70% to its chances of winning a given battle. Again this may be planned, and to some degree it's inevitable, but I'm not sure if that's really what you want. For example, making a decision like "Do I promote this unit with +10% general combat strength, or +20% strength against melee units?" becomes almost meaningless when you also can equip the same unit a weapon that gives it +90% strength under all circumstances. Again, this may need some balancing.
(19) As a side effect of the above, the equipment system might slightly punish warmongers. In regular Civ, warmongers usually fall back a bit in research, but they make up for it by having a veteran army of well-promoted troups, possibly giving them an edge when attacking a more peaceful empire. With equipment, the peaceful empire has more options to catch up in unit strength. However, there may be other rewards for having high-level units (I think I've read something about a hero mechanic but I'm not sure whether I understood how it works in-game), so it may be balanced already.
(20) By the end of the game, I frequently experienced blackouts: While scrolling around on the map, the screen would suddenly go black and show only Civ's mouse pointer, then the game would freeze or crash. I vaguely remember experiencing such things with another mod long ago, but I don't recall if or how it was fixed.
(21) By the end of the game, I had lots of global enchantments running. Although these were giving me huge bonuses, no AI ever tried to dispel one. Also, the global enchantments are another design decision that makes bigger empires better. For the same cost, a big empire can get several times the net effect out of the same enchantment than a small empire (especially with enchantments that place a bonus effect into each of your cities). And the bigger empire will even have an easier time casting and supporting the enchantment. It might be better for gameplay to scale the enchantment upkeep with the number of items affected (perhaps with increasing upkeep costs per item, as with city maintenance). I certainly don't know everything about this complex and fascinating mod, but so far, most major additions seem to tell me that "bigger is better" and that I simply have to grow large to win.
(22) Infrastructure: I'm a bit torn with regard to its usefulness as a feature. Apparently it limits the number of improvements that a city can support, but IIRC can't be influenced by tech or other settings. This means it doesn't add any more diversity to the game, instead it just slows down city development - and does so in a way that makes much more micromanaging necessary. Instead of slowly developing my cities like in regular Civ4, I now have to check whether they can support the new improvement, and when my workers are done with one city, I have to look around for another city that can support more. I tend to end up with cities not being as well-improved as they could because I overlook them when checking the situation. Workers now have to relocate more often since improving an area systemitacally (for example, from west to east) is now detrimental to the city. I wonder what the supposed gain of this feature is, because the way it's implemented now, it would be much easier (and achieve the same effect of slower city development) to just make improvements longer to build and/or make workers more expensive or limit them otherwise.
After all this criticism (sorry again - as i said, I did enjoy the mod, but my feedback often focuses on the criticism for practical reasons), I'd like to give an extra thank-you to the people who wrote the leader-specific diplomacy texts. the ones I encountered were very well done and contributed a lot to the atmosphere, they also helped to understand the characters of my rivals. Actually, I think MoM's diplo texts are better than the original ones in Civ4 (the Caesar salad joke and other silly attempts at humor still make me roll my eyes whenever I encounter them).
Just look at the new desert graphic 
)![[to_xp]Gekko](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/74/74677.jpg?1475248346){kind=avatar}
