Hey Chrome, I wanted to share another gaming experience with you, I'm going to list the things that "didn't feel right":
Military wise:
The game seemed to advance very strangely military wise. The AI that was in CONSTANT war with me (Germany) seemed to move from stone age tech suddenly to gunpowder, relatively early in the game. Also, very strong units began appearing too early in the game, such as the crossbowman. This only happened with Germany though, I guess he was beelining the military tree? In general, the advancement and timing that units appeared felt confusing and wrong by era/age, even for me, and I wasn't beelining the military tree.
My guess is that, because you were at war, Germany favored techs with offensive (defensive) values. They probably upgraded their armies once the required techs were discovered (they get a bonus to upgrades).
On a side note, a lot of people have mentioned that they feel the early game moves too fast. Those that have played a long game, how far do you get era wise before the game ends? I am now convinced that the previous pace was better, but in order to use it we must extend the number of turns from 500 to ~900.
Upgrading units:
The cost to upgrade the archer to a crossbowman was approx. 8.5k, while buying one was 10k. IMO that's just ridiculous. Same goes for spearman which is strength 7, it was 8k to upgrade him to pikeman, strength 10 (that's just way too much!). In general, I think that upgrading a unit shouldn't be over ((new unit cost) - (origional unit cost))*1.5... But that's just my opinion. Was it intended that upgrades be nearly impossible without crippling the economy?
It has been adjusted. I'm thinking the cost of upgrading should be somewhere around 25%-30% the cost of a fresh purchase.**EDIT** 25% was too strong. Made it 50%. This change will be included in the new release.
Buildings/Wonders:
Certain buildings give a mediocre tradeoff, but cost a long time to build, such as the watermill vs. mill or workshop. Even the granary was better cost wise (took only 2 turns vs 14 and gave nearly same bonus). Also, the monopoly buildings would take me maybe one turn to build and would provide a better bonus than certain buildings that might take 12-13 turns!!! I felt that in general, certain buildings aren't balanced. Also, the maintenance is extraordinarily high, it felt I was just constantly building commerce buildings (that were also extraordinarily high) just to offset the maintenance. I guess it works out, but it just felt too high.
I like the way the buildings are. It's a way to add checks in the game. Basically, a player can beeline to a particular era if s/he wants to, but won't be able to build many of the new buildings without having a monetary base to support the increased cost. As long as you don't yo-yo from extreme debt to extreme income, I think it's alright. Are there any others who feel that this system should be looked at again?
For the monopoly buildings, I know that they are broken. In fact, it's actually worse than it looks; none of the techs have flavors for them and some of the buildings have <Flavor>FOOD</Flavor> instead of GROWTH. This makes it so that the AI will not select the monopoly techs until every other option is exhausted (kind of like the old Social Tech Tree) and it will never build any of the food monopolies. On top of that, the monopoly buildings have HUGE flavor values; small-100, medium-150, large-200, huge-250, monopoly-350. So, if it is possible to build a monopoly building, the AI will often build it before doing anything else. Cleaning this up is not something I look forward to doing, which is why I pushed it back to after the Modern Era is cleaned up. I do think that it is an interesting addition to the game, but I don't think it is implemented as well as it could be. I'm still weary of the "duplicate" resources that give the same exact bonus, going back to my thinking that the game is not complete until there is nothing left to take away. Eh, I'm getting a headache thinking about it.
The 5's system:
I guess I'm just not used to it yet, but it just makes everything feel expensive! If it's an issue of nitpicking the code, I can build you a crawler that will go through the code and can detect fields such as <cost></cost> (I'm not sure if that's what it's called or if that's how it looks, I'm just guessing), and simply divide them by 5. All it would require from you is to feed it the file. IMO, changing back to the 1's system would make moving over to this MOD much easier. It would also make it easier to gauge how much something is actually worth... With higher numbers I just get confused...
I was always wondering, why did moving over to the 5's make the game more stable??
I can see that this is really bothering you so I'll make a poll for people to vote. And I do agree that there is a bit of a learning curve involved. I think I'm just used to thinking of things in 5s. Assuming that people agree with you about the change, the field would be <Yield></Yield>. We would have to check against science yields changing, but we will get there when we get there.
Overall, the game experience was very fun, I love this mod, though some things felt wrong... I hope we can fix this! I love the new icons too, they are really coming along nicely!
Glad you like it. I'll be the first to admit that some things are a little off, but I think we are moving in the right direction
**EDIT**
How do you add a poll? I know I would have to start a new thread but that's all I got
