Dear Acken,
I have been commenting a lot on YouTube and was very excited about your mod. I have now finally finished a game with the 2.0 version (I think).
I will probably add screenshots later and do a more detailed analysis.
I've played five Peaceful games on Level 6 (Acken Immortal) in the past few hours, and found the same pattern every time.
AIs are making DoF then very soon after denouncing for no real reason at all, then chain DoWs around T60.
I had 2+ archers per city, so wasn't ignoring units by any means. Was set for a T80ish NC in most cases, trying to play peaceful.
But there's not much you can do against these hordes.
I have to say that my conclusion is that
a) this mod makes it much too hard to play peaceful at all optimally
and
b) this mod may make it much too hard overall, since my Domination sweeps on Level 6 also felt tougher than conventional Deity.
I think I'm gonna call it a day with Civ 5. My initial enthusiasm for this mod has kinda drained away. People could argue that I just need to relearn how to play, but I used up a lot of energy learning to win on Deity, and then learning to warmonger. I'm not sure I've anything left in the tank, and the bottom line is that ModAcken is much, much harder. I just don't have the energy or patience.
It's a great mod, though.
I incline to disagree. I started a game on Standard Pangea on Standard Speed with the Shoshone. The difficulty was DemiGod. My starting turf was great - coastal, a lot of river tiles, desert, just not a lot of production, but it wasn't going to be a problem. I popped an insane amount of ruins, it didn't stop until about turn 100. Opened Piety turn 4 with the idea of going wide with Jesuit Education. Things did not go as planned.
After taking the piety opener to secure Desert Folklore I went full liberty - a huge mistake on my part, even though it helped with early tile improving. I did not get first Pantheon, not second, not even third, and that's with starting Piety turn 4 and building Shrine as soon as it was available. The dirt for my next to cities was absolutely insane: food and production every way you look, my third city ended up having 30+ surplus food even in it 20's without a caravan. I met my neighbours - Shaka, Pacachuti, Genghis Khan, Hiawatha and Pedro. I was essentially stuck between four ravaging city spamming warmongers, my position was far from ideal for a peaceful game.
My religion did not end up being very good, my main focus was on Faith Production for Jesuit, though I was not sure if I was ever going to get it at that point. My science was pretty horrible early on, I built a ton of units, I was denounced thrice for no reason, everyone hated me. I advanced and took two cities from Pedro, several other civs went on to denounce me, too. Shaka declared on Pedro and wiped him out in literally less than ten turns. Pacachuti had found seven (!) cities at turn 60, only a few turns later he lost three of them to Hiawatha and barely managed to save his capital. At this point demographics say my general acceptance is 32%. A few turns later it is 0%. I was ready to lose - I beelined to Crossbows, I produced exclusively units in every city. I had self-founded four cities and taken two, making a total of seven. Around turn 110 Mongolia and the Inca declared war on me simultaneously. Keshik were floating in left and right. Because of the positioning of my cities it was really hard for him to advance, I dried him out of Keshik and took Hong Kong, liberated it because my smiles were down to zero. Pacachuti wanted white peace after I killed some of his units and Mongolia was feeding me experience, though if Shaka declared on me at any point he could've wiped me off the map. The same goes for Hiawatha. So I had to stay good with everyone, even though everyone hated me. I missed every single good belief and ended up getting Industrial Era Units with Faithbuys. Much worse than I expected. My cities were growing strong and I was facing happiness issues again, this time really struggling since there were few trades. At this point I was going for a spaceship victory since Shaka and Hiawatha had filled the entire map and I wasn't going to stand an assault from both sides. I focussed on science while still getting all the neccessary military techs, checking demography every turn to make sure I would not fall behind. Mongolia got killed down to once city, Austria ended up getting a few Zulu cities, Hiawatha annexed one or two cities. He would later on amass more than 3000 points which I really rarely have seen. I was always behind in science and the space race was a pretty horrible gamble. I got into Ideology really late and even though I had the biggest land at that time (a lot) there was zero coal. Bought a CS, picked Freedom which surprisingly wasn't taken and dropped another 20 smiles. It took me about ten turns to recover. My science was really good in the second half of the game, but I was really behind. Arts funding passed and even though I won the Worlds Fair I still wasn't catching up since I lacked Great Scientists. This game was all kinds of crazy. Granaries Turn 110, Libraries Turn 120. Everyone was spamming units, we were all really low in science in comparison to all my other games.
The ending was insanely close - I would've easily won about twenty turns earlier if it wasn't for arts funding and bad GS spawn times. Hiawatha beat me to Hubble, he finished most of his parts earlier, but thanks to two +170 production expansion cities I produced three parts and bought the rest with the Freedom tenet - I finished about two or three turns before Hiawatha was going to launch, I knew he had all the techs. The game ended turn 303, which is really, really late. Everyone's teching was so slowed down due to permanent war, I loved it. This was easily one of (if not the) most challenging game of Civ I have ever played, definitely harder than standard deity in my opinion. Thanks for the great experience.
I will comment about the mod itself in depth later.
just finished up a T298 DipV with the shoshone.
i had an issue with some GS, I spawned one and purchased another with faith on the same turn.i got about 25% less beakers from the purchased GS 7300 vs 9700 from the spawned GS
This happened to me, too.
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