I suppose me being unable to get BAT running on my new machine turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it made me find my way back to this gorgeous mod. Love what you've done with the place!
Nevertheless, a few quick games revealed some small issues to me, prime among them the absence of some features from BUG/BAT/BULL:
- No display of XP for units in city screen/bar (E.g. if you are running Theocracy and hover over the Horse Archer build option in a city that has a Barracks and a settled Great General, but not the State Religion or a Stable, the unit tooltip would display in green text "2lvls, 3XP from Barracks, 2XP from Specialists" and in red text "2XP from State Religion, 2XP from Stable")
- Highlighting of the tiles currently assigned to a city when its city bar is selected, (un)improved (un)worked tiles highlighted with colored circles
A technical issue I've encountered:
- Sometimes the game doesn't recognize keystrokes immediately, but I have to left-click somewhere first
And some game design gripes I have:
- Imo your implementation of Financial is a bit clunky. Why not just make it so the extra commerce is only applied on tiles with 3+ Commerce instead of 2+? If there's any trait in need of a nerf, it's Financial. I'd even go so far as to say raising the threshold to 4+ would be in order if combined with double production speed for Market and Bank, which fits thematically and gives it more of a money/gold flavor than a research one. I get your issue with not wanting Financial to synergize with Serfdom, but what's imo more pressing is the synergy between Serfdom and Golden Ages. If you have a bunch of dry/non-riverside farms all over the place in the late game, adopting Serfdom for the duration of a Golden Age looks really attractive since all of a sudden tiles that before generated 0 commerce now generate 2, which can easily compensate for the -1 from Towns unless you really went all in on them. In the base game already there's a similar synergy between Universal Suffrage and Production from Towns, but, and this might just be my political bias speaking, I think Golden Ages incentivizing democracy is much more flavorful than incentivizing a return to feudalism.
- Vassalage removing colony maintenance costs is a bit of a headscratcher from a lore/historical perspective. One way of dealing with high colony maintenance costs is to release the relevant cities as a vassal... and running the Vassalage civic removes that incentive? I.e. running the Vassalage civic makes it *less* attractive for a player to give up direct control of part of their empire in favor of turning it into a vassal? What? I guess one could make an argument that the Vassalage civic implies your civilization is already internally organized in such a way that your entire empire consists of a multitude of vassals, which would make such a move redundant, but I'm not really buying it. Since vassal civs are a feature of the game I think running the Vassalage civic should make it MORE attractive to have a harem of them serving you instead of administering their land directly, not less.
This last point I am about to make has become so extensive that for the reader's sake I'm putting it out of the list so I can put paragraphs in it:
I understand the heavy restrictions on worker capture from a game balance perspective, but I don't find it convincing from a historical one. Since the dawn of civilization (no relation with the mod of the same name), wherever people have gathered a lot of stuff, other people tried using violence to take all that stuff, often to great success. And often that taking included the very people making stuff themselves, in order to force them to make more stuff closer to the aggressor's home and/or according to their needs. Human players simply act in a logical and historically reasonable manner when they try to kidnap defenseless workers of other civilizations in the early game, before economic and diplomatic entanglements develop enough for such ruthless wars of opportunity and aggression to have serious drawbacks. Instead of trying to dis-incentivize this behavior on the grounds that it's unfair towards the AI, which doesn't engage in opportunistic acts of worker-kidnapping, I say the change should be the other way around!
Kmod, on which this mod is based, has a reputation for possessing a scarily smart and ruthless AI, so why not embrace that reputation, really lean into it, and have the AI try and kidnap defenseless workers itself when an opportunity presents itself, whether it's from a fellow AI or a human player. In fact I'd go even further! Let's say it's turn 15, you just finished a worker, the one warrior or scout you started with is off in the wilderness somewhere exploring, and an AI warrior happens to move onto one of the four corner tiles of your capital's BFC, which happens to be on a hill, so they can see your empty city, and what do they see? An easy and defenseless target and potential future threat that they could immediately nip in the bud if they're quick about it. They SHOULD declare war on you and try to take your capital, it's a zero risk high reward strategy if there's not even a single defender inside, which is typical for human players in the early game. It's a no-brainer. In a Free For All multiplayer match it's what a fellow human player would do to you, provided no house rule was established to forbid such behavior.
Instead of trying to put gloves on the human's hands in the early game to prevent them from punching the AI too hard, I think you should take the gloves off from the hands of the AI! Give them claws even, and fangs to bite with! In the base game building a Worker first on Turn Zero is the optimal strategy in 90+% of cases, with only very rare exceptions. It's the first build decision of the game, but it's not really a decision, because it's not a meaningful choice when one option is orders of magnitude superior to its alternatives. What would make your first build order a meaningful choice would be the introduction of risk, of danger, of the possibility that a lucky AI warrior might just march in and take your capital on Turn 15 because you spent all this time building a worker and sending your only defense away to explore instead of keeping them close by in case they are needed to protect the motherland.
Or at least make it, like, a game option or something. "Nasty, Brutish and Short" or "Hobbes was right" or something like that would make for a fancy flavorful name. Or just limit this sort of ruthless opportunism to the very early game, perhaps until the AI discovers Writing which unlocks Open Borders. That would even be somewhat logical: If you have a military unit on the border to someone else's territory, you have nothing to lose and face no negative repercussions, why wouldn't you just march in there and see if you can't nab some stuff while you're here, or sabotage a potential rival's progress? Once you have Writing there's more of a rational incentive towards peaceful co-existence because you can in theory explore their territory with their permission, and boost your economy via trade routes, so declaring an opportunistic war of worker kidnapping does actually have some cons to it instead of just pros.
Anyway those are my two cents, at least before we take inflation into account.
Edit: Wait! Speaking of inflation, what's up with that? I saw that point missing in the ingame financial advisor.
, as it is just stored in a hangar.
