And I have just finished playtesting v14 ;(
So instead of giving feedback on v14, I'll try to say what I think of v15 having in mind what I found weird / unbalanced for v15:
Unit limits now based on a new resource called 'Paper.'
This is awesome. In v14, a major issue that I've encountered on larger maps was randomness. Since there are no CS to give production or beakers (and to my knowledge, Not Another City-State Mod is very outdated), CS contest tends to spin out of control very quickly - you befriend few faith or culture CS with random quests, pop them to ally with GMs or diplomat units, and gather more culture and faith - which in turn allow you to pop even more quests (culture and faith quests as well as resource quests) - then you get to firend/ally with even more CS and they provide you even more resources, faith and culture and voila - snowball. It's extremely easy to amass huge ammounts of culture / faith on larger maps, making you almost imprevious to enemy Tourism and allowing you to easily keep the CS you allied with proper policies / faith and more diplomatic units. Most of the time, noone could actually fight back because of the extremely limited capability to produce diplomatic units for most of the game.
Buildings made completely independent of other victory paths- unique specialists (Civil Servant) and a new Great Person, the Great Diplomat.
This might be a good idea, but the ammount of influence should be era-dependent (as should the gold from GM pop - there is a mod for it, but I guess it won't work now). I heavily dislike the Arts Funding addition of promoting diplomats. This is actually a poor idea in my opinion - funding GMs and GDs should be completely separate (perhaps Free Commerce could be added - it might boost GMs, GDs and possibly GEs). The reason for this is that you should not be forced to aid an enemy victory (and a particular type of enemy victory at that). Cultural win and diplomatic win (as well as science win) should have different goals in the World Congress - if you want to strenghten a self-fulfilling prophecy of diplomatic win (I get more votes to vote so that I can have more votes), it should never cross with other victory paths and be easy to achieve. This is especially important in MP because it gives an easy time for the cultural guys (I know science is way easier in MP than cultural - but fixing that should not be done this way). Arts funding is loved by AI (unlike Science funding) and it is extremely easy to push through. It should not be easy, just like other self-fulfilling prophecies aren't (world religion / ideology). At the same time, culture from cultural CS is so extreme that the one World Congress motion that can be passed to help cultural civilisations achieve victory should not strenghten their greatest enemy - diplomatic civs with tons of free culture.
Other stuff that was not modified in v15 and could use some attention:
- Gunboat diplomacy is a tad over the top - militaristic city states give you units, allowing you to quickly amass a force that makes the "overal military power" skyrocket without the need to focus on building units too hard, and that is perhaps the largest factor in how easy it is to achieve "could demand tribute" status with a CS - I didn't even have units close to many CS I got a ton of influence with - a few units somewhere near far away CS clusters (or between spread far away CS) allowed for easy influence gain. It's not even the issue of how much Influence the policy gives, it's the issue of how easy it is to get it, especially since it doubles how intimidating your forces are. A large, cheap autocratic army could easily pay for itself just by standing still - even CS that were far away didn't need much "protection" to be influenced. They even gave me units to strenghten my influence over them! The largest issue by far is that the AI doesn't get what I'm doing - they were mad a bit when I took over their CS, but that's that. I could become a diplomatic powerhouse with just this single policy, just by virtue of having a large army to conquer the world. Also, it's really hard to counter the effects of this policy with diplomats.
- AI - with the .dll, I've sometimes noticed strange AI behavior - they charge a single CS like mad when there are other options availible and burn their diplomats on it in a way that seems random - other times they will manage their influence correctly (this is more common). Sometimes they will focus a CS I have 240 influence with and try to take it (and don't stop poping diplomats even when they have like 350 influence), sometimes they will wisely take those that are easier to take.
- AI again - the AI focus on diplomacy so hard that they have a hard time winning - building Uffizi, Louvre or Porcelain Tower was easy on Emperor even if the player wasn't beelining it and didn't have insane science. On the other hand, there were instances where even ancient-era wonders were not completed in the time they usually are because AI was rushing diplo wonders or spending countless turns to build a lonely Envoy that achieved nothing.
Hope this helps and keep up the good work.
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