This is an amazing mod, FA, and has given me many hours of pleasure (and entertaining frustration
).
I had played earlier versions, but saw you'd updated to v11, so have played again using this. I'm aiming for all the victory conditions on your maps. So far I've picked off what I think are the easiest: the magical victory (Elves, Faerun Huge without Underdark), and the spellplague (Drow, Faerun with Underdark).
I'm now going to attempt the religious and domination victories, though I anticipate losing to an AI magical or spellplague victory.
I gather there's a major revision in the works, but as the game stands, here is some feedback:
1) The magical victory seems a little too easy. There are plenty of sources of weave, so assuming one doesn't splurge it all on religion, four complete spell schools is readily achievable. In my elf game I did this in about 330 turns (standard) and still picked up enough religous policies to have 3 heroes.
2) There was no effective backlash for unleashing the spellplague other than lost trade. I had picked the drow for this game both for role-play reasons, and because I thought the underdark would be a more secure base against the inevitible global war. I appreciate that the surface dwellers have trouble reaching the underdark (see 3 below), but neither the orcs nor the dwarves made any attempt to attack me or my allies (the kuo toa and the deep gnomes), and both had strong empires as far as I could tell. Also, both the orcs and dwarves still had mages after the spellplague - shouldn't they all have been killed?
3) I love the way you've recreated the underdark, but the tunnels to the surface pose problems. There's no way to connect surface cities to a capital in the underdark, and the AI can't seem to handle finding its way between the two "continents". I'm not sure what to suggest, and I imagine you can only do so much to "teach" the AI how to use these features. Would it be possible for a road on one side of the tunnel to connect with one on the other side?
4) The underdark is a hungry place, especially when looking to expand beyond that first city, or gain access to strategic resources and luxuries. I went for spell policies, buildings and wonders that gave food as a priority, but even so the start was very hard, and my first couple of attempts failed. All of this is as it should be - this is the underdark, not the land of milk and honey of those soft topsiders! - but I wonder if the AI can cope. Although the dwarves and orcs had three cities apiece, they were all close and sharing hexes and they didn't expand beyond this. Maybe this contributed to their reluctance to actively wage war against me.
5) The drow racial ability seems rather sub-par. The extra visibility is good, but I'd happily trade the 10% combat bonus on barren hexes for a movement bonus on barren. The exceptionally few times I was attacked with magic made the resistance rather redundant. Also, I found the range 1 drow slaver a waste of a unit. I ended up using skeleton archers in this role.
6) All the iron nodes in the underdark seem to have only one iron, and I couldn't find coal anywhere, so the ironworks is pretty much unachievable unless every city is settled with nearby iron and coal can be acquired by trade. Is this intentional? The limited iron also makes the abundant mithril worthless except for trade, since the arsenal requires mithril and a forge, but that forge also requires iron. Moreover, iron does not appear to be tradeable, so couldn't even buy it in (as a side note, I had to trade for timber, but that seems entirely appropriate).
7) Only having two city-states in the underdark limits potential allies (and the conflicts between major civs competing for them), makes caravan trade very difficult (I had to invest a lot in building and guarding roads, which the AI is not inclined to do), and severely limits choosing an alignment reasonably early and subsequent quests (I sent heroes to the surface, but the AI doesn't seem to do that). I think this may have been suggested elsewhere, but perhaps some duergar, illithids, aboleths, beholders etc might help out on this front.
Please let me reiterate that this is a great mod, engrossing and fun, and I'm sure I'm not alone in exhorting you to keep up the good work!