- Potential Bug: In my game, I encountered an independent Armenia without having any of their units visible within the military advisor on the same turn. (On that note, it appears to be the case that you diplomatically meet all vassals of the master civ upon encountering the latter, which may or may not be intended behavior or worth the effort of correcting if not.) My one thought is that perhaps they met me via a privateer which they control (which would of course have hidden nationality) but this is not something I've experienced before. If there's no valid edge case causing this that I'm missing, I can link the save.
- Quality of life suggestion: This has been mentioned before, but some events occur quite frequently or are anachronistic. I actually had mentioned the volcanic eruption frequency being excessive before, and Pecheneg actually made the case that this is quite true to real life (using Kamchatka as an example). Even if that's true, for gameplay purposes it throws things out of balance and is annoying since it is unpredictable and there is nothing you can do to prevent them. This disincentivizes building cottages anywhere near an active volcano, as they will wipe out the entire town completely and thus the sunk cost of developing them over time is wasted as the investment is removed. I would suggest either implementing an alternative where the volcano "pillages" the town and only reduces it to its preceding level, or simply go to the event folder and reduce the probability of the event by changing the probability number (as I have done in my own case, with pleasing results where it still occurs but is not nearly so common as the default). Similarly, some events routinely recur way too frequently to be plausible which harms immersion, such as the plane crash event (in some of my games, this has happened literally every few turns for the entire duration since flight is researched) and the grain donation to an AI civ, which sometimes also happens every few turns and has allowed me to rake in obscene levels of positive relations with said civ, to the effect that diplomacy with them ceases to be meaningful and you can remain at friendly after declaring war on them several times. A simple modification of the probability value in the folder seems to have done the trick for me, so this change would be easy to implement. I had even forgotten about most of these since I had already done so on my own install, but playing the fresh SVN saw this all come right back to life.
As far as anachronistic events go, the "careless cigarette smoker" destroying the theater immediately comes to mind, but I believe there are a few others. That one in particular should have an industrial tech prerequisite (much as the plane crash event does with flight), and this would also be easily fixed.
- Maintenance: A recent commit in the changelog referenced removing the notification which identifies the location of great people births for civs that haven't been met. Was this applied to wonders as well, since this notification functions the same way for both? My other question concerning this is whether the
location should be identified, if you have met the civ in question diplomatically but the birth city is still unexplored. When playing, I had met Peter the Great from a carrack he had sent over, but did not have any knowledge of his empire's geography. He lost a city, and I got a notification for the destruction of wonders from conquest, as well as a locator in the black showing the tile of the city where they had been destroyed. Since that locator does not appear when the game presents the notification as "in a faraway land," I figured this could potentially be tied to that description if the city in question has not been explored, even if the leader has been met diplomatically.
Though this is just a suspicion, I think there is some logic in the code for this, since you get localized notifications for cities being founded, but only in revealed portions of the map, whether or not you already know the founding civ diplomatically, which is exactly the turf of what I'm thinking of above. It would make for better gameplay if the notifications for wonders being constructed or destroyed only identified the location when this occurs in cities you already know of, just as it is with the notifications for cities being founded or conquered.
- Suggested reimplementation: This is something I have brought up a lot (though I think only once specifically as a petition) but I would recommend reenabling defensive pacts, just as they are in vanilla Beyond the Sword. Initially, I was in favor of offensive alliances, and while I actually never experienced the purportedly then-common scenario of them becoming ubiquitous and preventing war nearly altogether (in fact, they were often only signed among friendly civs and in triangulation against mutual enemies, just as you would want) I found that it felt cheap that I as the player could "wield" other civs' militaries by making them declare war on my targets with no option for them to refuse. I actually tried to play with permanent defensive pacts from the global defines setting, but that appears to be broken as they functioned like default and expired with each new war anyway. I think they are an interesting feature and add another layer to a diplomacy which is a bit thin on player interactivity in its current form (even if statically it is quite dynamic), and the original reason for their removal has literally never happened in numerous entire games I've played with them on. I'd suggest putting them back in.
- Aesthetic suggestion: Ok, I actually take it back regarding plains and grassland. The greater warmth of the colors is pleasing and the smoother texture seems more appropriate, even if the contrast with other terrains is perhaps too high (especially relative to desert, which plains are supposed to be naturally adjacent to). What does seem out of place to me as a leftover from the previous realistic terrain package, is actually the deserts themselves. I always found it odd that they are represented much more like cracked clay rather than sand. I would suggest something with a smoother and more neutral texture as with the plains, both for the just-mentioned reason as well as for consistency, since this was done elsewhere.
I'm having plenty of fun with this again! As always, thank you for all of your longstanding effort on this project.
