One question on the design side of things; are you concerned at all that once people reach the end of the myth content they'll simply stop playing and start a new game? On a smaller map you could certainly be victorious before Enlightenment but anything with separate continents will require deep water embarkation etc.
I recently addressed some of this in the overview section on page 1 (just a couple days ago, actually), but yes. I fully expect that, depending on map type, the game might feel "over" once the mythological period finishes.
But to that, I point out two issues:
1> Previously, in vanilla, it might only take 150-200 turns to reach the Renaissance. I'm changing the game such that it's more like 300-350 turns to do the same in the Empires+Mythology pairing. That's the length of a full game in vanilla, so if after those 350 turns someone feels like they've played a complete game, then I wouldn't be surprised. Even if it's not possible to meet any of the explicit victory conditions for another couple eras, the game can still be basically over.
2> Since the Myth content is pre-Astronomy, there's no guarantee of dominance. In fact, slowing down the early eras increases the chance of a powerful competitor developing on one of the other continents, by conquering his own neighbors through the same mechanisms you used to conquer yours. My hope is that this'd make it still possible to have a competitive space race, just between a small number of powerful empires instead of a dozen squabbling nations. (Which fits with the concept of the Empires mod, as well.)
Since there are currently relatively few changes in the Empires mod and Ascension is not compatible with Myth, the game may start to feel very mundane after the Myth content finishes up.
To be clear, Ascension is not actually incompatible with Mythology in any mechanical way. (Except at the moment, where I haven't finished the Ascension transition, but that's a temporary issue; you WILL be able to use both once I'm done.) Thematically they don't mesh well, but the main reason why the two are "incompatible" is simply the endpoint issues mentioned above; if someone sees the end of the Myth era as the finale of the competitive phase of the game, then chances are there won't be much point in having future eras. Conversely, when playing an AC game I rarely start before the Industrial any more, which'd make it worthless to add the mythological content as well.
Do you think there's any room for a 'stay in myth' option? Or are you happy to have it always end, based on the fact that there will eventually be a feature-rich Empires section to play afterwards?
It's a tough question, and it's one I've gone back and forth on quite a few times. My design has been to have the Mythology content come to a definite end in the early Renaissance; you can be flexible on the exact timing, but it'd still happen at pretty much the same time for everyone. The first reason for this is simply one of scalability: I've added 83 non-Hero units in this mod, with power levels ranging from 3 to 25. But as awesome as Dragons and Colossi are, they're cannon fodder when facing Infantry (36 in vanilla, 32 in Empires) and Artillery, let alone Tanks or Bombers. So if I wanted to make it possible to keep the mythological age alive, I'd need to find some way to keep its content relevant once you've unlocked tanks and such; making Heroes and T4s scale with era would do this, for instance, but that adds a slew of balance issues. (Not to mention conceptual ones, where Achilles can now overpower a tank batallion and dragons can withstand surface-to-air missiles.)
The other problem is one of penalties. The Mythology mod adds a policy that, at the moment, gives -10% to food, -20% to production, -20% to research, -20% to gold, -1 happiness per luxury, x1.25 population unhappiness, and reduces the yields of many buildings to have them generate Favor. These are all pretty severe penalties in the early game, no question. But what happens to that gold penalty once you have Markets and Banks, each adding +25% to your income? Or the research penalty, once you have Universities and Public Schools? Or the production, once you have Workshops and Factories? And what if you can take enough time to get the flat +Gold, +Production, etc. of the various religious buildings as well? Those penalties start being less and less restrictive.
Fact is, if I allowed you to stay in the mythological eras indefinitely, you could eventually reach the point where the so-called drawbacks no longer have any major impact, while still benefitting from the linear yield increases of the religious buildings. This is the main reason behind the timing of the endpoint; any later, and it might actually be a good thing to stay religious. So I've added various incentives to NOT stay in the myth content, and I'm continuing to add more; the Crusades and Inquisition each give anti-Myth bonuses to your units, growth rates slow down as time goes on, and so on. The AI will build the Enlightenment as soon as it can, and I want the players to feel like he needs to follow suit or else he'll fall behind.
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Now, I do expect a certain feeling of loss as the mundanity of the post-Mythology content kicks in, since you won't be immediately transitioning to the futuristic content I've added. The Empires content won't be quite so pervasive, so there will be a definite change in feel. But I think of it as a transition from Checkers to Chess: same board, but a deeper game. The Mythological Age will be about a few powerful heroes fighting giant monsters, while the Empires will be about larger army-on-army sort of wars. Myth wars will be between empire A and empire B, while Empires wars will be 4-on-4 sorts of deals. So I'm hoping that people won't be TOO bored by the transition.
