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.
I may take a look at the events, yes. My go-to answer is that RI changes almost nothing events-wise compared to vanilla but that's just me being lazy I guess.
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.
Nope, the change concerned Great People only. I believe wonders have vanilla behaviour in this regard. I'll look around and see if it behaves in the intended way.
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.
Probably not just as they were, but I'll have a look at AI, and maybe I will be able to make them more fun. I'd like to provoke some World Wars towards the end game.
I've got a balance question, been thinking about it for a while.
Doesn't it seem strange to you how useless Nuclear plants are compared to real life? No benefits at all. Gas plant is better in any regard and by the time you survived to get to this point you 100% have a gas resource somewhere around. Keeping coal plant with event bonus could be more beneficial too, wile solar and gas plant provide bigger boosts to happiness and health. Nuclear plant link with late game wonder is negligible. And to top it off small meltdown risk. So whats the point?
I think Nuclear plant should give significant production bones, so its either you strive for more health-happiness, or risk meltdown but get production benefits, what do you think?
The problem here is that, generally speaking, power plants are all very similar to each other gameplay-wise. A small health penalty is all the difference we really get. IRL, different countries have very different approaches to their power sources - I don't have any productive ideas how to recreate this distinction in RI gameplay-wise.
Why is AI so focused on destroying other civs, even though they have less defended barbarian cities literally near them?(with good resources)
I wonder how this prioritization works. Sometimes it works, other times they don't bother at all...
I also believe it's a scenario-specific issue. My theory (unbacked by any actual digging around in AI code for that) is that AI evaluates potential strength of every "victim", and with lots of pre-placed barbarian cities and units, it considers barbarians a far greater threat than other civs, up to a certain point in time. I'll see if I can maybe a) prove/disprove it, and b) if it's true, implement a reasonable workaround
If I happen to play a game where all the stars are aligned to increase my research or the research of one of my AI competitors, then that is what it is. And if I get a horrible starting location and I trail the historical progression, then that is also ok. I wouldn't want the technology costs to change halfway through the game with a factor just because things are going well or poorly.
Actually, my own take is that,
on average, tech progress should probably be faster than IRL. Given that a game lasts a finite number of turns and ends in 2020 (IIRC, but somewhere along these lines), we'd want to reach the end of the tech tree in most games, not just the 50% with better-than-average circumstances, which means that real history should be treated not as a median case, but as a reasonably bad scenario.
