When I mouse over the city bar, or mouse over an unavailable specialist in the city screen, I see a building called "FAKE" listed for that city.
I use a few fake buildings to provide some of the trait functionality and unfortunately they still show up in the UI here and there. I'll see what I can do about these cases. Thanks for the report.
Workshops need an additional hammer.
They're designed to synergize with the Caste System and Professionalism civics. With these they'll produce 3 hammers and 2 commerce, and an additional hammer after Machine Tools. That's pretty strong already.
Seigecraft needed for Forts? We weren't hitting that tech until 1600s? Needs to be changed to something much earlier.
One thing I'm considering is having a variety of different fort-style improvements.
Ocean going travel seems stunted as well as we werent even into the ocean at the 1700s -- Cogs should be able to go in the ocean
What speed and difficulty were you playing on? Ocean travel is placed appropriately in the techtree but the techtree may not correspond ideally with the calendar anymore (I've not changed it at all). At some point I need to tweak it so that it better fits HR's progression.
Cogs and most similar boats of their era were not capable of transoceanic voyages. Have you tried the Extended Coastline option? It allows for a lot more island hopping early on.
No buildings to build in mid point of the game, so unless you are in a war your cities just produce gold
There does need to be a few more buildings available there, yes.
Need to generate hammers for ocean squares somehow -- coastal cities are porked without the ability to generate more hammers
Yes, a few more sources of hammers for coastal cities would be good. Not too many though, I think its important to retain some sense of city specialization and coastal cities are the ideal commercial cities.
Change the wetlands conversion to Engineering, as the other tech is too late in the game and the square is needed up front -- Romans and Mesoamerica drained swamps routinely.
They did but not quite on a scale comparable to what was possible later. Bear in mind that these are wetlands, not just swamps, so we're talking Florida Everglades and South American Pantanal style areas here.
More importantly though, I don't want to front-load too much in the Ancient and Classical eras (more on this later). Wetlands are a terrain that I deliberately don't want to be clearable until later in the game, otherwise its just another variety of Forest or Jungle. They make city location choice a little more interesting. Their most important resource, Peat, is still available as soon as Quarries are but everything else you have to wait for.
Finally, one last idea I would like to offer: damage taken in different land sources.
Jungles inflict 10% damage for each square traveled through.
Reefs inflict 15% damage traveled through.
Tundra inflicts 5% damage per square traveled through.
Swamps and the alike, 5% damage per square moved through.
Adds a bit of strategy when placing units and while exploring. Also used with Raging barbarians, it is fun to see the swarms of barbs damaged and resting from the treacherous terrain.
The problem is that, again, the AI isn't necessarily bright enough to know about this. It will send its troops marching through three squares of jungle without thinking about it very much, and they come out too beat up to fight effectively.
The AI should in theory understand it as its a standard option in the XML, though I wouldn't trust it to make as sensible path choices as the player. Because of this I'd be very hesitant to implement this in terrain that also slows the movement of units. However I think it has potential for Desert and Tundra (exposure to the elements). Maybe Reefs too as naval movement is much more straightforward.
The AI is compensated for its stupidity by the sheer handicap they play on.
True, but I always want to careful about giving the AI too many more options to be stupid if I can avoid it. Otherwise we have to start increasing their handicaps and then things start getting too disconnected.
I think adjustments need to be made on the amount of hammers the local terrain can be obtained -- perhaps adding +1 hammer for roads may help.
Cottage, hamlets, and towns needs some sort of hammer boost; perhaps just a +1 initially.
Rather than adding too many more sources of hammers I think a better option is to adjust what things cost. This is more fine-tunable and doesn't risk things scaling too disproportionally across map types, difficulty levels, etc.
Not odd at all. As the early parts of the game there is quite a bit to build and when cities have typically 4-15 hammers it takes 50 turns to build a temple or market, not to mention heavy troops.
This is related to the 'front-loading' I was talking about earlier. More is available in the first two eras than is generally possible to build with the hammers available. The next two eras - though they do need more added - are a chance to catch up a bit. Theoretically I could shift a bunch of things to build later in the tree but I feel that restricts player choice. This way you can't build everything early on but you can choose what you want to build most. Too much front-loading is detrimental though, as is things taking so long to build that you get frustrated. All about finding the perfect balance and I don't claim that HR is there yet. Constantly getting closer all the time though I hope!
Again these are my opinions. Just trying to help the game along.
Opinion and feedback is always welcome
