Of course, I am running an older version of the mod, but it just confused me that a C-S was able to put up a harvester, and a Civ wasn't.
There should be no difference in behaviors, with one exception: the only cities that will choose to improve a dilithium will be coastal ones that have enabled the "want to connect a resource" AI path. City-states seem to go into that category a bit faster, probably because their needs aren't getting averaged out with the non-coastal cities.
And it's not about version number; if it's called "Ascension", then it should be fully functional in this area.
Then again, maybe said C-S had already placed a fishing boat on something else, and when Dilithium was revealed, one happened to be under said boat.
It doesn't really work like that. The AIs will only make work boats if they think there's something to use them on, and the auto-placed improvements only apply to Oil, Dilithium, and Omnicytes, not fish. The AI seems to recognize the resources just fine for the first part, and will make the boats, it's just that the BOAT's AI won't move it to the right spot. That works fine for local deposits, but if city A is landlocked and city B is coastal, and the Dilithium appears within A's area, the AI won't know to build a work boat at B and then drive it over.
Another item I thought I should mention, is the possibilities granted by the Plant Jungle improvement.
Yes. Jungles are a pure improvement on grassland (not so much for Plains), while Forests are a pure improvement on Tundra. This is deliberate; if you want those hexes to be nonproductive for the dozen or so turns it takes to plant a jungle/forest and THEN place an Improvement on the tile, just to gain an extra point of Food and maybe some research from Universities... well, it's not always going to help that much.
Basically, in the long term you wouldn't work that tile very much anyway. The yield bonuses in this mod are structured such that once you're into the future eras you'll really only work tiles with resources on them, or with Great Improvements, while normal farms/trading posts/etc. just won't be as desirable as using another Specialist of some kind. This'd be more pronounced if you were using the Empires mod as well, as this is the reason for the Red Cross, Wall Street, etc.
Also, in some way I still don't understand, my Babylon civilization has about 600 GDP, while every other nation in the world....yeah, they're pretty much in the negatives. And they apparently don't even have that big of armies.
Some of this depends on your Wonders. Quite a few of the Wonders in the Digital Era are financial, while there were very, very few Wonders in earlier eras that added any kind of income. I've tried to fix this a bit, lowering the monetary benefits of the wonders in exchange for something else (like how the Planetary Transit System is now primarily a movement boost wonder), and I might do more of this. (Like I'm looking at changing the Merchant Exchange to boost all four yields instead of the current effect, but obviously boost them much less.)
It might also depend on your choice of Policies; I've tried to boost Commerce, but the fact is that there aren't a lot of policies with financial benefits, so if the AI isn't taking those, it'll have a hard time staying competitive.
But what it really comes down to, in my eyes, is that
you're not using the Empires mod. Nearly all of my balance changes went into that mod, not this one. In that mod, I've changed the Happiness scaling, the gold production of various buildings, many AI Flavor values, and so on. So playing Base+Ascension is about as well-balanced as playing vanilla Civ5 (i.e., not really balanced at all); once you get a significant developmental lead, you'll run away with the game. The KGB, alone, would normally be enough to prevent you from building up an insurmountable lead over your opponents, and even if you're completely dominating you'd still lose a few Digital-Era Wonder races this way.
Basically, the Mythology and Ascension mods are about content, with only minimal changes made to the core game's balance, while the Empires mod is about balance, and its only "content" are a dozen or so buildings designed to correct the game's balance. Empires also adjusts the balance on a lot of existing buildings, by slowing down the research pace and spreading bonuses around more (which doesn't penalize the AI nearly as much as the game's default overspecialization does).
In the long term the Empires mod will add all sorts of complexity to the diplomacy and espionage areas of the game, but we're still far from that point. At the moment, it's really just a balance mod. So, I HIGHLY recommend going Base+Empires+Ascension (or Base+Empires+Mythology), even if you have no interest in those middle eras.
and with Babylon already giving me +50% to Great Sci creation
I should point out that none of the things in this mod are in any way balanced for DLC civs. If DLC civs have unique buildings or unique units based on items that I've re-balanced, then the DLC UBs/UUs won't get the same changes. (Usually.)
