Faerun

FramedArchitect,

First off I want to say that your work is outstanding (i used several of your mods before trying this one and really appreciate all your laborous effort and dedication) and the mod is not only a statement to your creativity, but your attention to detail. It is simply amazing. My comments are based on V11 and I saw you updated to V12 just the other day (my steam account did not catch the update so I missed it I guess) so some of these may already be addressed and I apologize if this is so. I read through the forum here and did not see anything that related so I thought I'd ask.

Religion (unit): I see the "remove heresey" comment in the unit's description box but cannot activate it.

Domination Victory: I won this after defeating the capital of the undead Civ (sorry I forgot their name). It was the ONLY city I conquered and as soon as I did it ended the game. I thought that was rather odd and had to select the "just one more turn" to keep playing. I had thought that it should have taken more than a single vanquished CIV capital to gain that victory.

Tech Finishers: I was able to research these (I did the Dritz one) at what I thought was a much too early stage of the game and wondered if that was purposeful. I felt that they were given too soon for a finisher, but that was just my own opinion and wondered your reasoning. Yes, I forgo some other techs to get it, but it still seemed like I should have had to have had a few more prerequisites to honestly qualify for it.

Dritz Do'urden: While I was thrilled to see you use these (unique Hero) types of figures, I was a little disappointed when the unit wielded an axe (or maybe it was a hammer) instead of sword(s). I realize (I did modding for the OLD NWN game) the difficulty you have with modeling, but had hoped to at least see the figure with the appropriate weapons. This was a unit that I could not wait to build and when it went to combat I have to admit it was a little dissappointing.

Wheat tile: I could not seem to figure out how to develop these - what tech was I missing?

Underdark Portals Are these still in the game or did I miss something reading through the convo's here and they were subsequently removed in one of your later versions (G&K).?. I looked for something in the two games I played that would fit this description in the hope of entering the Underdark, found a couple of "secret passage" tiles near vanquished NPC's, but never located anything I could interact with (i paid attention to your earlier comments on who could and could not use them). Was this just my oversight (if so how do I find/use them) and bad luck and I never found them, or was this dual-map feature removed. Just curious.

In-game notation on +1/+2 weapons, armor, etc. : based on what the text said (something like (map shows +1 bows - I forget the exact wording so I hope you can figure this out) I spent a lot of time early in the game scanning the map for the locations of these, thinking I needed to either farm them or locate and capture them. The way it is worded it is a little confusing as (I think I understand this now) they are available for development after researching the tech based on a new building which then provides the resource and has nothing to do with the actual map.

Alignment, Hostility & War I was also wondering if you'd considered upping the hostility of counter-aligned Civs. It seemed to me that the "Evil" Civs should have become hostile and more aggressive once I researched my alignment and increasing the further along that path I went. I even thought that the nearer ones might opt to go to war (OK, I actually hoped that they would) when I hit the tech finisher for the alignment, but they never did. Is that something that you can or would even consider ramping up, or if possible, having as an option at start up for the player to choose to initiate. I think that it would increase the interaction of the opposed AI Civs in a logical way.

As a secondary thought for you, if not outright declaring War (and something I think would be more interesting) would be to allow them to "Raid" outlying settlements, isolated units or allied CS to try to provoke the player. They'd have verbal responses similar to the "sorry about that spy" when they got caught or killed. Just a thought. I think it would be cool if the Orc Civ sent out a patrol of a couple of raiders that attacked "good aligned" units on sight and then the Orc leader came back and tried to "deny" it. If they could have diplomatic immunity (cross borders) and/or a be able to pillage tiles or steal from trade routes, or build a "fort-like" building on a tile that spawns hostile units (which are then unattached to their native Civ, as a variation of barbarians (as raiders or bandits for example, so the Civ's leader can then come back and use plausable denial) until it is destroyed, I think that it would be quite interesting in how it plays out (you would of course limit how many they can have active) and it adds just one more dimension to your otherwise awesome scenario. War is great, but I think this adds a layer of conflict that would be well received if you could pull it off.

BTW: I ran the game (after the aforementioned "just one more turn") to turn 212 with no glitches, hiccups or problems that I could see. I was running your scenario, playing as the Purple Dragon Civ.

EDIT: I had not realized it until I went back to start a new game, but I had a few of my standard Mods running, in my excitement to get started I failed to back up and uninstall them. If these were the cause of any of the aforementioned questions my apologies. They were:

Really Advanced Setup
Steve's Simple Clock
Wondor Race
Barbarian - Unlimited Exp
War - Less Damaged Units

EDIT2: I tried to go back into a save game and get more detail relative to the above, but none of the save games will load. I will guess that is do to a non-compatability with one of those mods. I should have paid more attention to that when I loaded the initial game. Do you know if any of those cannot be used (or if any of those can), though I am going to guess that the RAS is the culprit. I ran another game last night without the Mods (except Steve's clock - without which I tend to play for far too long), but only got to turn 42 before it got too late and have not tried to reload that save game yet as I had to go to work.

EDIT3 Cannot load save game again - this time from the new start - no other mods running. Can start and load other mods. The screen freezes during load. I also noted someone else report this a page ago, so it may not have been related to those mods.

As I said, CUDO's to all you've done and I hope you continue your work. I know the fantasy realm not your thing but trust me A LOT of people need someone like you to fulfill our dreams of a game JUST like what you've done. If you ever need someone for storyline, text or description work, continuity and balance research, playtesting or just constructive criticism please feel free to ask I'd be more than happy to do what I can.

I apologize for not following your no-mod instructions. Excitement bred lack of attention.

I look forward to your feedback. This is a really fantastically fun Mod and I cannot wait to get back to it. I apologize for all the text here, but as you can see it inspired a passionate response. I searched for something to answer the questions but it appeared that you mentioned you deleted the now outdated guide.

I also searched for the V12 in Steam and did not see it - are you updating that version there soon?

Treehawk

I played ~160 turns of v12, here are some initial impressions.

I played as Sembia on the Large Faerun scenario map, Emperor difficulty.

First, this is a fantastic mod, it has come a long way from the very early version I played last year. I spent many years running Forgotten Realms pnp campaigns, so it's fun to be back in that world.

But some thoughts:
1. My start position was a bit tough: there were no decent production tiles nearby (no hills), for a long time my only production came from my base city square, a forest with no improvement, and then a couple of cows. Virtually everything I built was purchased with gold. (The cows seemed pretty weak too as compared to village tiles)
There were no luxuries close by, which made happiness difficult (and there seem to be very few early happiness buildings, only the monastery, which is fairly expensive). The crab was a few tiles out, and takes a long time to get to. I would have expected silver? Somehow I associated Sembia with silver.
But anyway, the earliest happiness buildings I saw were circuses, which are quite a long way in.

[*edit* it looks like there were also whales? But those were not revealed until optics, so I didn't know that I needed to get optics, see point 2 below. Similarly, I didn't know I had a timber not too far away, so I didn't know I needed to research that tech. There was also another luxury near my second city, but it was on a marsh, so I couldn't access it as marsh clearance is a long way into the tech tree. Maybe you could allow plantations to be built on marsh, and just not allow the marsh clearance (and so tile yield increase) until later?]

2. I think it is unwise to have techs that reveal and enable resources coming together. Let me explain what I mean. In vanilla, you can see that you have cotton or dyes from the beginning of the game, which lets you decide to take the calendar tech to get plantations. But in the mod, I have no way of knowing whether I have calendar resources until I research the tech, so researching the tech is a big gamble and might be a total waste. Similarly for mines, lumbermills, etc.
That's not really very fun, it's much more fun to plan my techs based on my nearby situation. So potentially resources could be revealed earlier.
Related though: the AI seems to have a bit of an issue with tech selection, they don't seem able to hook up their resources. For example, my Cormanthor neighbor had not hooked up any of their dyes (before I conquered them).
One possible guess is that they didn't have mining, so they couldn't chop forests, so they couldn't build the plantation on the forest tiles. This also ends up screwing the AI economy a bit, because villages are such an awesome improvement, giving both food and gold, and the AI didn't . Is there a reason for separating the farm and village, and making the mod's village so powerful? I'm surprised to see a medieval fantasy setting with no farms, and it seems a no-brainer to village every flat tile.

I suspect there may need to be some AI work to help guide the AI's tech selection based on their nearby resources, and to remember that even a forest non-industrial flavor elf civ still needs mining for forest chop. A lot of the AIs don't seem to be performing very well.

City states also seemed to have an issue where they didn't build any villages. Do they not have the tech somehow?

3. I picked the Enchantment tree and went for the city state policies first. This then meant that with a protection pledge, I could be friends with every city state in the world with no gold expenditure at all. This dramatically boosted my happiness, faith, and culture income, and it then meant that I won a whole set of faith and culture quests, tipping me into alliances, which rather snowballed. I also got ~3 free cleric units from military city states, and these guys are quite tough in melee too, and I just got a free mage of some kind.

It's possible to do this in vanilla too, but only in the midgame, since there are era restrictions on the patronage tree. There are no such restrictions here and so this ability comes very, very early.

I also couldn't tell if the other enchantment policies were working at all. I built an enchanter and was blasting away at things, but neither the confusion nor charm person effect ever seemed to trigger. I would have assumed that whatever spells they would have would be marked by promotion on my enchanter, but this didn't seem to happen. (*edit* actually they have a charm person promotion)
I did have clerics and their spells seemed to trigger.

4. The religious system seemed a bit underwhelming. I researched the Neutral alignment tech and built the wonder, founding the Cult of Waukeen. But the religion seemed pretty weak. All it gave me was +faith on trade routes, the ability to purchase temples with faith (which give... more faith, and +1 gold), and something else minor. What's the point of faith if all it does is give you more faith? I generated a great prophet, and I assumed I'd be able to use this to expand the religion to add more powerful effects, but I didn't see how to do this. I would have assumed at least that religion would give some happiness. And any founder belief should give me some bonus for spreading the religion widely, among other civs, but IIRC this wasn't the case for the Waukeen religion.

Basically: faith needs to give me something useful. [Maybe the mechanic isn't fully implemented yet?]

5. There is still a bug with the Charter system. I somehow have ~50 city charters.
A name like "Administrator" might also make it slightly clearer to the player what these are for (though I still figured out charter easily enough).

6. I also briefly started a game as Calimshan (before figuring out how to get the scenario map to load), and I noticed that no improvements seemed buildable on flood plains.

Anyway, it's still a lot of fun, thanks for the mod.

I agree with you on the (lack of a reason to) Faith issue. In my last run through this I pretty much gave up on Faith/religion related objectives and allowed the CS to send me Clerics, and used my GP to expand borders when they built shrines.

Farm tiles were removed due to an old (? I thought I saw this was fixed somewhere, but could be wrong) glitch - I miss their "look" in the game as it was actually one of the most visually appealing ones as areas got developed.

Also agree on the reveal/develop issue with resources. I researched three different techs before I found one that had more than a single resource anywhere near my cities. And by then had to drop the goal and try to get to the circus to get some happiness back into my region.

I also thought in the last game that it was a shame that the two unused Policy tree's were not something that was available to any combination of spell schools. I saw a few suggestions here that looked reasonable, and thought about maybe even having them offer an Alignment based (one Good/one Evil and allowing Neutral to choose one of the two) path of policies.

Still think you did a great job here FA, so do not take any of my comments as a complaint, they are not.

Farm tiles were removed due to an old (? I thought I saw this was fixed somewhere, but could be wrong) glitch

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I thought there was a fix for the farm crash bug (strategic resources revealing on farms causes a crash)?

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=485047

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12617275&postcount=116

I notice that in a previous post receiving clerics from militaristic city states was a bug that that was deemed to be fixed:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12197027&postcount=78

But this is not the case, I received clerics of Shar, Torm, and someone else.

I think it's probably better for gameplay if the militaristic CSes only give you military units, and that clerics and wizards still have to be built yourself?

A few more things I noticed:
The AI builds way too many explorers. Like: there are 4 Baldur's Gate explorers in the Moonsea (east of Zhentil Keep) at the moment.

I seem to be gaining ~5 charters per turn (I have ~60+). Maybe from city state allies?
Similarly I am acquiring large numbers of spell books (I have 30+).
Maybe there is some code from city states that gives you these, but it is triggering every turn instead of once?

I doubt the AI will be very good at protecting the very low strength mage units, so it may be worth increasing the melee strength on these so they aren't quite so easy to 1-shot kill. (I haven't seen them build any yet.)

*edit* the charter issue definitely seems to be something with city states, when alliances end I lose multiple charters.

The AI civs that research settlemenet (and construct villages) do ok). But some civs do not seem to be doing this. At least in the current version where there are no farms and villages are awesome, probably every civ should start with Settlement, or it should have a really high flavor value.

CS provided Units: The CS provided a Hero (fighter) and it eliminated my ability to build the Paladin I was working towards. I could delete the fighter hero and build the paladin later on, but I do not think that they should give you a unit that subsequently blocks your ability to produce one of the "one only" classes.
They also spam me with clerics of all religions which I keep deleting. I end up just telling the CS to stop spawning units because of the sheer annoyance of it. On a few occasions they spawned something I thought was appropriate (short sword unit, etc.), but this is 1 in 10 when compared to a spawning clerics of a religion other than mine.

Clerics: Since these kept appearing and do not have very much practical application (as far as I can see) I wondered what could be done to make them more appreciative. The thought I ended up with was to give them something like the Admiral's Repair Fleet ability so they could be used to buff adjacent allies and provide immediate healing. This would obviously remove the cleric from the board when the action was taken. Something like a Heroism effect that adds maybe a 10-15% attack and/or defense buff for a number of turns and heals a set amount (say 25pts) to any adjacent allies; or it is a single instant "self-sacrifice" healing that restores a much larger number to adjacent allies.

@Ahriman - I agree with your comment about the CS and unit spawning. I'd rather see the CS provide non-specialist units and let me generate them.

Just food for thought.

Treehawk

Gold purchase multipliers are really, really high. It takes over 5 gold to buy 1 production. Is that really intended? It means that production is king and gold is almost worthless.

The explorer is incredibly powerful as a hit and run pillager in the hands of the human player. Perhaps it should have lower strength (so it dies to any attacker) and maybe a national limit of 1? This would also stop the AI spamming them, but allow you to use one to explore the large map.

Green Dragon: This unit reverted to a pair of ships for the graphics after crossing a small section of water.

Trebuchet: I wondered if this could be replaced by a slightly smaller giant and given the same stone throwing graphics it already uses? I kept thinking that a Stone Giant would have been a more interesting piece and since you have the Storm Giant already in there. Since I only get one of the Giants, I thought this might be a nice way to add a few more since they have such a nice visual and thematic appeal.

Special Spells: After the fourth game (I am playing beyond the Win to try to use all the techs and Spell Trees to see how they play out) I am starting to feel like the specialty spells that are acquired in the Spell Tree are too low of a percentage chance to be triggered. In the last game, where I was playing very Arcanist heavy, the special spells were no longer a first option selection for me, and instead I was looking for things that had a more immediate or constant effect, which I thought was kind of counter intuitive. I really love the idea, but maybe these could scale up as the Tech Tree is advanced to increase how often they trigger or to increase the bonuses.

I hope you do not mind all the comments. This is a very compelling and unique game.

I am also not going to reiterate Ahriman's comments other than to say so far I agree with what he is finding. Although I "like" the explorer (as a pair they are actually very effective) as a hit and run pillager, so if you don't catch that one right away, well I am good with that.

I do miss the Horsed Archer (Mongol Keshik) unit and wondered if you'd ever considered adding it in. The mounted units are alright, but some variety or options would be cool.

Along similar lines:
The cacodemon teleport still parachutes out of a plane.
[The unit probably also comes much too early, if I wanted I could have it very early on and go on a conquering rampage).

I think the special spells are sufficiently powerful that it's important that they don't trigger too often - though at the moment I can't always tell if they're triggering or not. The arcanists are already very powerful. I agree there could be some scaling though - maybe higher tech wizards would get a higher chance of casting the special spells?

The AI still seems to really struggle - especially any of them who don't start with the settlement tech (and some who don't get it)! Even at Immortal or Deity there was never really much challenge (I started another game as Amn, Tethyr and Baldur's Gate declare war on me, but never actually attacked except for a single explorer.]

Spell Tree/ Clerics and Arcanists: There was one thing about these trees that I wondered about. At the present, they are mixed (some cleric, some arcanist) application and they provide things for one or both types, leaning much more heavily (and properly) towards the arcane. Have you considered using the two unused sections to break this apart a little more clearly. That is, to pull the clerical buffs out of the current (non-clerical) arcanist tree sections (Divination, Necromancy and Summoning make good game sense for clerics) and create two specific to clerics. I think that this would be particularly useful for players that want to focus on that class rather than wasting slots on arcane buffs to acquire the few clerical ones that exist in the tree. In the clergy dominate game I played, the spell trees were very disappointing and I kept thinking (I mentioned it in a different way in my adding an alignment path) there should be something more in there.

Yeah, the parachuting demons cracked me up.

The cacodemon is truly too soon. It is one of the first I will go after and becomes my barbarian hunter as soon as I can acquire it. On the flip side, the Treat is so comparatively weak and slow I ignore that one. Honestly, I'd probably buff it and make this the finisher. In fact I'd like to see something like this (a demon, dragon, treant, etc) as the finishers for most of those as I think the finisher bonus is a little weak by the time you get it. Just IMHO

CS Tech Dev: Can you preset the tech path of a CS in your design, so that it develops under a specific theme over the course of the game? I don;t know if that if possible on your programming end, but it would make the CS much more efficient.

Hostile Civs and starting War: I also think that the Civs that are hostile to me should not allow me to start parking units on there border without instigating war. Yes, they send me repeated warnings, but never instigate war and allow me to amass units beyond what I think they should if we already have a hostile relationship. One warning should be sufficient, and if I add say another two units I think it should trigger a reaction.

@Ahriman - I saw you said you were running V12 and I searched for it on Steam and just now here and could not find it. Do you (or FA if he is reading all of these) have a link or can you direct me to it? There have been several things I didn't mention that I thought might be glitches (parachuting demon, etc.), but since I was running V11 I did not want to mention something FA already corrected.

I quite like the arcanist/cleric boosts being different columns within the same tree.

I'm surprised how few barbarians are - they seem to only be liches and dragons in the far north? I'd like to see more general undead/orcs/bandits/etc. popping up, have some PvE in the early game. This might also help to counteract the advantage that some civs get from having lots of good open space to expand - they'll have to fight more barbarians.

I saw you said you were running V12 and I searched for it on Steam and just now here and could not find it

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I didn't use steam workshop, I installed manually. The first post of this thread seems to be updated with the latest links. So it's here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=20811

I can appreciate your enjoying them as separate paths in the same the same tree, in fact I think some of them should remain for players that run both unit types pretty equally. But of the 11 (I think) that are there, some are singular and some are in trees that I think would be better for Arcanist specific use and I'd like to see a tree (or two) that is predominately clerical rather than arcane (especially given how lacking the piety plays out in the game with the standard units). I'd like to see some of those moved to a Cleric specific tree and a few new Arcanist specific spells or buffs added in to replace them.

On that subject here were a few thoughts that came to mind for a divine specialist tree. I am thinking something that is alignment specific, but it would not need to be.

Imp Holy Site: Since I get GPs that can make a holy site - and not much else, how about adding something that gives that site an in-game benefit making its location more a strategic decision. It could buff or debuff, or even increase healing of adjacent units.

Bestow Remove Heresy: Since this is currently missing (and I miss it) the tree could allow the cleric to perform it.

CIV benefits: In that the buildings that provide happiness are so far up the tree, having something that boosts it here based on something like shrines would be very useful.

Additional Conversion: Give the missionary additional uses. As the currently only piece that can convert a city's religion, adding a use or two would be very beneficial.

Inspiration: Bestows a combat or defense bonus to adjacent allies (small bonus that scales up as the cleric advances)


Clerical Movement: Provide the cleric with a better movement rate so they can keep up.

Clergy Finisher: A Gold dragon for Good, Black Dragon for Evil. In fact I still think having a mythical creature as the finisher for these paths is a nice idea. You could do the dragon colors, or include some of the other creature currently within your mod.

Just thoughts...

Thanks for the location of that file I am going now to go get it.

how about adding something that gives that site an in-game benefit making its location more a strategic decision. It could buff or debuff, or even increase healing of adjacent units.

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I think one of the most important design rules for civ modding is not to add mechanics that the AI doesn't understand or can't use. The Civ5 AI is already pretty weak. Adding a wide rather than deep tech tree and a complex strategic resource system makes it struggle even further. So I'd really try to stay away from adding even more complex mechanics, such as those that require specific positioning of improvements.

Similarly, the AI knows how to use missionaries for converting cities, but not for anything else, so adding more abilities to missionaries will be another advantage for the human.

Anyway, just IMO; it's FA's mod of course and his design principles that matter.

OK I got the file but have never installed one from here. Do I just copy it to the folder where the old one was, and do I need to delete the old one or does this overwrite it if that is the method. I previously only updated via Steam and it was FA and this mod that got me to come on here.

Yeah I understand what you are saying about the AI. As far as the site buff though, even if they randomly located it within their territory it would create a location based tactical consideration for me in advancing on them. It is just that after several games I feel that the cleric/religion aspect is the weakest link and am trying to think of something that is not to hard (so FA even considers it) to implement if and when he ever does an update again (FA - Please, please do not abandon this remarkable project good sir!!)

I certainly hope that he does not think that all of your and I's recent posts are anything other than constructive and APPRECIATIVE feedback, I realize that we'd dropped a lot on him while he's been busy in his Egyptian project.

Do I just copy it to the folder where the old one was, and do I need to delete the old one or does this overwrite it if that is the method. I previously only updated via Steam and it was FA and this mod that got me to come on here.

Click to expand...

My policy in general for installing mods so as to prevent any potential conflicts is to delete everything in the cache folder, delete everything in the mods folder, then place the downloaded mod file in the mod folder and then run the Civilization 5 application. [That's what I do for Thalassicuses mods. For mods that don't change so much, the cache clearing and deletion of files other than the older version of the same mod may not be necessary.]

For a cleric buff, it seems to me that the simplest thing would be to have more advanced priest units (High Priest, Dark Priest, etc.) with higher strength on the advanced alignment techs that regular clerics could upgrade to. Another way to do it would be to have promotions enabled by those techs that gave a strength increase. The main problem with clerics is that their strength starts getting too low to use in combat against the tougher late game units.

@Ahriman - Got it thanks!!

Yeah, the Tech tree allows you to develop the advanced Arcanists and there isn't really anything that does that for the cleric class or for religion. Ideally (IMHO) a combination of your and I's comments here would be great.

Since I tend to run either the Purple Dragon or the Silver Chalice Civs, you can understand my desire to beef this aspect up a little more. I ran with one of the Arcanist "themed" Civs, but it would not have been one I did for sheer enjoyment of game play, had I not been curious about things and wanted to just see them play out.

I downloaded v.12, installed it, started the game...and saw this. Where is a problem?

Not sure what to tell you. I copied the version that is here into my folder (like Ahriman instructed when I asked) and deleted the original V11 I got from steam and it worked just fine. Maybe you had a corrupted file downloaded?

I know the V11 from Steam works great, so if you cannot get this one to run get that one until FA comes on and can clue you in. The only really noticable difference is the number of heroes active at a time.

Were you running the Scenario or setting up an open game - I have done both, multiple times, without a hitch. You using Vanilla or G&K? I don't have BNW, but I do use G&K (it requires it) and don't know if that might cause the problem or not.

Wish I could help you out.

FA,

I'm not sure if your following this thread anymore or working on the Mod - which would be a real shame given how great it is - but I see that you have been busy with one of your other Mods so I am hoping that you do come back to this.

I've run through several V12 scenarios and was much more satisfied (over the V11 and its limitations). Though the clerical and hero spawning from CS was still annoying and as mentioned earlier I'd rather leave that as a build choice from the human player (I do like the way specialty units appear when you allied with a CS and would love to see more of this type of inclusion, even with a singular "named" hero type. ie: Elminster, etc.

I cannot find the underdark portals that are mentioned in earlier posts. I also cannot recall seeing the goblins (Orc Civ yes, goblins - not so sure) Civ anywhere. Can you clue me in. I know that there was a vague reference to some maps and sizes in a thread that talked about the underdark, but I can't figure out how it relates. I run the Scenario (huge map) at Prince level most of the time and maybe that's the problem?

Earlier I mentioned finishers for the Spell trees and after playing this for a while I think that instead of the various dragons I mentioned I'd rather see a unique hero arcanist or cleric (known as an NPC - non player character) in the PnP game for each branch. There are plenty of these in the Faerun world and would be awesome individuals to have on the board as an "Arch Mage" or a "High Cleric" hero.

I'd really like you to consider that alignment tree option as a way to use the two unused Policy sections as well, with the two aforementioned dragon finishers. The Lawful/Neutral/Evil alignment difference does not really play out (Evil Civs are too friendly to a Lawful Civ) and the tree would be a subtle way to exploit it if there were a branch for the two sides of it.

I noticed that a few units cannot upgrade (base archer comes immediately to mind) and I end up deleting the initial unit after the Composite bowman becomes available. Is that intentional?

I've come to pretty much ignore religion in the Mod and the cleric units. The arcanists are very fleshed out, seem to advance well and have good and obvious application but the cleric unit is well... lame. This is a shame as I like to play a holy warrior nation and had initially thought the cleric would be a great in-field unit, or be able to spread the religion. To which neither seemed to be true. Perhaps having a tech path similar to the arcanist could balance the two classes out and offer the player the option of which to focus early efforts on.

Thanks again for an incredible Mod and all your hard work. This mod has really made the CIV 5 game so much more fun and interesting for me - I've even converted several local friends over to it and they are having as much fun as I am. I sincerely hope that you maintain and continue to improve this Mod, there really is nothing like it out there "yet" and unfortunately the few fantasy mods I have found so far were no where near your level of immersion.