The Anno Domini mod has had it's deadline extended 
. It was going to be ready for Sept 7th; I'm glad I placed that initial deadline, as the last two weeks (whilst I've been on holiday) have been extremely productive; there's more units, new ideas and new stuff that's being incorporated into the mod as we speak.
Rather than putting in a new date, I'm viewing this as "coming soon;" it is realistic though to expect the delay to be a matter of about a fortnight.
So, what's holding things up?
Firstly, Sword_of_Geddon had suggested taking the Asian civs out of the game, as they seemed out of flavour with the mod. At first, I thought I'd not take this advice, but soon realised that he has a point. We have been discussing this over at evo-games (in the beta testers private forums) and decided to drop the Mongols, Qin, Siam and Tibet. We're beefing up the Africa contingent with two new African civs, the Yoruba (successors of the Nok, so we're using the old Nok leaderhead graphics - the Nok were dropped at some point) and the Isoko. The other new civs are the Byzantines and Parthia. There's a new Justinian leaderhead and I've modified the Genghis Khan leaderhead to become a Parthian leaderhead instead. The loss of the Asian culture group means that I can split the Middle-East civs, so that there's one group for Israel/Egypt etc and another for the likes of Persia/India etc.
Secondly, there's a new victory condition - the Trade victory. This involves building ten merchant houses over the course of the last two eras; each house requires a luxury, so you need to trade to get most of them. It's a re-worked Spaceship victory.
Thirdly, I've been adding extra units (which can't be a bad thing
); obviously, I could bring out a unit expansion pack, but whilst the other delays are happening, I still have my old computer, which is happily rendering away whilst I'm using this one to update the mod 
.
There's also been an influx of nips and tucks to the game, for example, new wonders, new governments etc, that add an extra dimension and/or flavour to the game. Norse civs, for example, can choose to exist under Danelaw in the last era of the game, which has a slant towards more army support at the expense of forced resettlement and a little more corruption than the contemporary governments.
The final reason is the beta testers - they've been great throughout the beta test, but they're really coming into their own now. The ideas and suggestions they've made have also generally been incorporated; as a group we just need a couple of weeks extra to try out and check different strategies.
I know it's disappointing to have to wait longer and if it was going to be a long delay, I'd feel awful. As it is, it's going to be reasonably soon (like I said earlier, probably a couple of weeks) and what you'll get is a more polished mod rather than downloading something now which will need a patch almost straight away.
Here's an up-to-date view of the civs. All civs have dual-era leaderheads, ie one that covers the first two eras and another to cover the last two eras; though only one picture of each is in the preview. Incidentally, I've done all 31 leaderheads myself!
. It was going to be ready for Sept 7th; I'm glad I placed that initial deadline, as the last two weeks (whilst I've been on holiday) have been extremely productive; there's more units, new ideas and new stuff that's being incorporated into the mod as we speak.Rather than putting in a new date, I'm viewing this as "coming soon;" it is realistic though to expect the delay to be a matter of about a fortnight.
So, what's holding things up?
Firstly, Sword_of_Geddon had suggested taking the Asian civs out of the game, as they seemed out of flavour with the mod. At first, I thought I'd not take this advice, but soon realised that he has a point. We have been discussing this over at evo-games (in the beta testers private forums) and decided to drop the Mongols, Qin, Siam and Tibet. We're beefing up the Africa contingent with two new African civs, the Yoruba (successors of the Nok, so we're using the old Nok leaderhead graphics - the Nok were dropped at some point) and the Isoko. The other new civs are the Byzantines and Parthia. There's a new Justinian leaderhead and I've modified the Genghis Khan leaderhead to become a Parthian leaderhead instead. The loss of the Asian culture group means that I can split the Middle-East civs, so that there's one group for Israel/Egypt etc and another for the likes of Persia/India etc.
Secondly, there's a new victory condition - the Trade victory. This involves building ten merchant houses over the course of the last two eras; each house requires a luxury, so you need to trade to get most of them. It's a re-worked Spaceship victory.
Thirdly, I've been adding extra units (which can't be a bad thing
); obviously, I could bring out a unit expansion pack, but whilst the other delays are happening, I still have my old computer, which is happily rendering away whilst I'm using this one to update the mod .There's also been an influx of nips and tucks to the game, for example, new wonders, new governments etc, that add an extra dimension and/or flavour to the game. Norse civs, for example, can choose to exist under Danelaw in the last era of the game, which has a slant towards more army support at the expense of forced resettlement and a little more corruption than the contemporary governments.
The final reason is the beta testers - they've been great throughout the beta test, but they're really coming into their own now. The ideas and suggestions they've made have also generally been incorporated; as a group we just need a couple of weeks extra to try out and check different strategies.
I know it's disappointing to have to wait longer and if it was going to be a long delay, I'd feel awful. As it is, it's going to be reasonably soon (like I said earlier, probably a couple of weeks) and what you'll get is a more polished mod rather than downloading something now which will need a patch almost straight away.
Here's an up-to-date view of the civs. All civs have dual-era leaderheads, ie one that covers the first two eras and another to cover the last two eras; though only one picture of each is in the preview. Incidentally, I've done all 31 leaderheads myself!
It would be nice to finally get rid of that horrid prune-face Genghis Khan leaderhead that Firaxis made. 
