Terrain graphics
The new spice screenshots look great! I took the new plains texture and the example xml out of your first rar, and all the spicepack directory contents out of the second rar. I also locally changed the python to only generate one feature. It works, and it looks good, but it doesn't look as good as your screenshot. Do you think I may have missed a step? Some of the tiles seem to have an E-W grain and some N-S.
The_J had suggested a
rock resource to use instead of the current forest terrain. I cut that in. I guess this is the best available starting point for "rocks with lichen" as suggested, but I don't think I will put it into a patch yet.
I think the salt pans I hacked are better than the jungle, and they may be "good enough" for now. Although we don't have an improved unit tree yet, some knife/sword fighters might be a good target.
Early game play
I have played a couple of games of vanilla archipelago to get a feel for how Dune Wars compares. I think we still have a little way to go on resource balancing, and actually a long way to go on unit variety. There are a lot of tradeoffs in the early game about resources and units in vanilla, which we do not seem to have in Dune Wars yet. I think we are getting the "look" of Dune much better, and we still need to study these tradeoffs in the early game.
For example, in the vanilla game I chose my early tech development based on the resources I found locally. I postponed agriculture till my third city, and I had to found one early city at some distance because that was the closest copper. I will re-study the work I did on resource distribution with this in mind. Looking at the finance advisor the "number of tiles worked" seems like a key statistic; it is basically your total population. In Dune Wars this is still a lot lower than vanilla, as koma13 has also pointed out.
For units, there are at least three visible generations in the vanilla early game. Warriors can protect against animals but get obsolete fast. There are a variety of units around strength 5-6: axe, sword, archer (after fortify/city bonus), horse archer. You can attack cities with this tech level if you are lucky or have enough numbers; you need a few galleys. The next level is more around ships; frigates quickly obsolete triremes, and musketmen obsolete the earlier units. You do need a fair amount of tech for these but I still had them around turn 200, which is around when I launched my first attacks in Dune Wars.
Screenshots
In still other news, I completed going through the Dune miniseries for screenshots. Fenring only appears in two scenes and he is never in the foreground; so I was not able to improve much on the screenshot we have. I have to give a prize for "funniest hats" to Irulan. I still prefer the movie Irulan personally, although our screenshot is kind of lo-res. I have about a half dozen buttons from these screenshots but they need to be placed into the tech tree somewhere.
Late game CTD
I have not taken a look at this yet. I am downloading the 1.2 version from rapidshare (20 min to go). I will run civchecker on it anyway, but I am still not sure about updating to BTS 3.19. Keldath mentioned that RevDCM has also been released for 3.19; are there any stability issues reported in that?
(EDIT: I ran civchecker, it did not find anything. There are a bunch of missing artstyles but I am sure they are not used.)
I re-read post 1, you may want to get rid of "known issue 5" since we do have wormsign now.