Scrach that, I was just producing too little research. Still there is a fairly big price step up from medieval to Renaissance.
My impression from two games at emperor difficulty is that conquest may even be more dominant than in vanilla. Considering tech transfer and slave workers, it seems optimal to just conquer as much as possible. Couple that with the hyper-aggresive ai (is kind of funny to see an ai just chain wars like no tomorrow) it seems the only optimal strategy in higher levels is to be very aggressive as well. I agree that conquest should be dominant due to risk- reward, but I think that conquest shouldn't always be the optimal strategy, excluding isolated starts. I have some suggestions in this regard:
- Whipping should only be allow for buildings. Whiping is somewhat of a problematic mechanism, and while the mod allows some alternatives, slavery at the end of the day seems to be the superior choice. In that regard, I think that limiting whipping to just buildings would make building units a bigger strategic choice, but also contain a little bit the snowball effect of more cities- more pops - more whips
- In similar vein to Adv civ, I think culture shouldn't be removed on player elimination. Conquered cities should require garrisons until some culture conversion take place.
- A smaller one, but I think that healing on promotion should be removed. Honestly it is a bit weird realism wise, and allow to keep momentum for offensives while making your troops harder to kill.
- Tie unit production cost with population. I think that like how resources are tied to cities, your ability to support units should be limited by your population. Considering the use of dimishing returns on the mod , the idea would be fairly similar: your population can support x number of units, and beyond that point each additional unit cost increasingly more, representing the difficulty of finding more able bodies to support your troops. So for example, have each pop support one military unit without additional cost, but each additional unit increases cost by 1.~^X, with X being the number of units over the support cap. Alternatively, there could be two break points: one after which cost increases linearly, and one adter which cost increase exponentially.
I think this mechanic could bring some neat advantages to the game. First and foremost it would make military snowballing harder, specifically if tied with culture so that you can only recruit units of your culture pops. So conquering enemy cities could leave you exposed to counterattacks. Even without this mechanic in play, it could limit the upper limits of unit building, and if done correctly, it could allow defenders to actually win wars of attrition. Secondly it could be neatly tied with the military civics, so for example militia giving a flat increase per city but lower per pop support, levied armies giving extra unit support at the cost of extra war
while professional having smaller better train armies. Mercenaries could get a reduced per pop support but allow for buying mercs at a fixed cost an finally conscription could allow the biggest armies at the cost of economic maluses.
I think this mechanic could specially tied in with the cultural revolts in while making conquest still important, making snowballing out of it harder to pull out.