Age of Mythology

[dinobot386]

Disease hasent been working, or at least I can't see the effects on my enemies

 

[Spatzimaus]

Disease hasent been working, or at least I can't see the effects on my enemies

I'll look at that tonight, since I can easily put some diagnostic test messages in place. It's possible, for instance, that you're diseasing your enemy but it's then curing itself on the following turn, but it's also possible that the units ARE being diseased and you're just not sticking around long enough to see the effects. (You SHOULD be able to see the negative promotion on the enemy unit when you do a combat preview, though.) The odds with disease are (each turn):
1/3 chance that the unit takes 1 damage
1/6 chance that the disease is cured
1/2 chance that nothing happens for that turn
And while the disease is in effect, the unit heals 1 less when resting.
It's a slow DoT effect, so you shouldn't expect to see the health ticking off quickly; doing the math, the average unit will take 2 damage before being cured, plus whatever health is lost by the resting reduction, so it's a fairly efficient damage source, but it'll do that 2 damage over a 6-turn period on average. Venom, by comparison, also averages 2 damage but over a 2-3 turn period (but has no resting penalty).
If this is just too slow, I can up the damage chance to 1/2 (meaning it'd average 3 damage over 6 turns). But it'd still be possible for a unit to heal without ever taking any damage at all.

 

[dinobot386]

I havent been seeing the negative promotion at all on enemies, the ones I was specifically testing it on was barbarians, I was using a Nemian Lion

 

[Spatzimaus]

Unfortunately, I can't test it after all. My machine had to reboot, and now that it's back up Steam won't load, and for whatever reason it refuses to initialize itself in Offline Mode. So I can't use any Steam-based games at all until I get my Internet back. I've been coding up a few more bits while I wait, but I can't actually test anything any more. (The first day or so after the connection went down, I'd still been logged into Steam and so the game COULD load, albeit with a delay.)

-------------------------

After some more thought, I've decided that the seven concepts I posted yesterday were a bit off. I do want most of the pantheons to have some sort of named Heroes, so I'm going to half-and-half it, splitting most of the pantheon effects up to keep it a bit more interesting..

Everyone has access to four weak Heroes, with 10-11 power, two promotions, and an anti-Myth bonus. Everyone has access to several anti-Myth units in the various Foci (especially Darkness). Beyond that, it'll vary like so:

Greek: 8 moderate (strength 13ish, 3 promotions) Heroes.
Norse: No extra Heroes, but they get a level 1.5 Hersir unit (keeping the Valkyrie at 2.5), AND all Norse non-Myth units deal +1 damage to all Myth units. Thor's UU is the Jarl (2.5), which makes him a bit better at the anti-Myth role than the other Norse gods. They also might have a slightly higher chance of getting weak heroes.
Egyptians: 4 moderate Heroes. No 1.5 priest, but the Pharaoh, with good anti-Myth bonuses, is at 2.5. (Ammit goes back to being the 3.5.)
Aztec: 4 moderate Heroes. They still get those promotions I mentioned before, but the chances of upgrading are less.
Hindu: They get one extremely powerful Hero (strength 18-19), and more of their events involve giving hero-like abilities to normal units.
Shinto: No extra Heroes. All units take one less damage when fighting Myth units, and their Pantheon units are all very good at anti-Myth combat.
Sumerians: Four powerful (strength 15-16, two or three mundane promotions and one or two monster-type ones) heroes. Each has more raw power than the Greek equivalents, but each has an inherent drawback; your empire has a permanent -2 Happiness as long as Gilgamesh is alive, Enkidu has a Diseased promotion that never goes away, that sort of thing. The Sumerians also have more events that award weak Heroes than the other pantheons.

So the only pantheons that wouldn't directly get powerful Heroes from events are the Norse and Shinto, both of which have several other ways to deal with them.

 

[dinobot386]

Something I just noticed while playing. Ra having plants and animals for foci could cause some problems due to the pantheon. If you choose Ra, the only choice you have at 100 favor is Isis. Most of the Egyptan gods are in the Emperical part of the mandalia, and choosig Isis (healing) will shoot you into the Material direction, which there are no more gods available. A player can fight this by always choosing Empirical or Lawful choices, but the AI could easly hit a dead end.

 

[Spatzimaus]

If you choose Ra, the only choice you have at 100 favor is Isis.

This is actually something I'm looking into; when my machine rebooted, I was in the middle of going through all 28 choices and counting how many options each had at its starting position to see exactly this sort of thing. I want most choices to have 3 options for their first pick, so if there's one like Ra that's really problematic, then I can tweak the focus choices a bit to fix it. It's really only an issue with the first minor god choice; by the time you get enough Favor for a second minor god, you'll have had a half-dozen Events moving you around, so your initial alignment becomes almost meaningless if you're picking Event choices based on getting into a good spot.

Also, I can tweak the event shifts themselves. Right now, all events move you 1 spot on the grid, so if you pick a Lawful choice, you gain +1 Lawful. One thought was that the High events could move by +2, which'd even allow for "diagonal" choices that shift by (+1,+1) or something similar. I could even have it be +1 for Low events, +2 for Medium events, and +3 for High events. This sort of thing would help the AI get out of a bad region much more easily.

The other possibility is to change the initial alignment shifts. Right now, your Primary shifts you by +3 (or +2,+2 if it's a diagonal), and the Secondary shifts by +2 (or +1,+1). Each Minor god then shifts by +1 in a direction (with diagonals getting a 50% chance for each direction). So Ra gets (-2,+2) from Animals, and then (+1,+1) from Plants to end up at (-1,+3). If he goes 1 in the C direction, he can add Sekhmet (War), but yes, going in the M direction (by taking Isis) pretty much leaves you with no choices the following times.

Now, one possibility then is just to reduce those initial shifts. If the Primary is +2, the Secondary is +1, and adding a Minor doesn't shift you at all, then everyone starts off much closer to the center and it becomes considerably harder to get stuck in an area with no options. The downside is that it makes it much harder to reach the elemental and yield Foci, which makes the major gods that start with those much more desirable.

A player can fight this by always choosing Empirical or Lawful choices, but the AI could easly hit a dead end.

Actually, the player's probably worse off than the AI is. The AI weights its choices in events by how many gods are available at the four destination points (and then weights those values further by the Flavor ratings); the way I've written it it'll NEVER choose to move to a spot that has no minor god choices, unless that's true of all four directions. (I wrote it that way on purpose.) A human who keeps a close eye on the Mandala might realize that, but if you're playing a bit more casually and only look at what each choice gives you in tangible effects, you might pick an outcome that'd move you into a dead zone.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Okay, I found out why Disease wasn't working. Umm... the code didn't include the bit where it gives the unit a disease. Yes, seriously. I put the curing part in, and the dealing damage part, but I can't find the part where units actually get the effect in the first place. The Venom promotion was similarly missing the part where units get poisoned; both of these should be fixed in the next version, and by "fixed" I mean that I'll have actually added the bits that give them.

It's very strange. I KNOW I coded those things up before; the only thing that I can think of is that I hadn't saved the files before a crash. Regardless, that's why you weren't seeing it.

------------------

My Internet came back on last night at about 11pm, so I should be able to upload the new version tonight or tomorrow; I want to do one test run first. But the new version will be soon...

 

[Spatzimaus]

All right, I figured that it's time for me to explain the timetable of upcoming versions.

Assuming I don't find any other crash bugs, tonight I'll release v0.06, which fixes a ton of small bugs, cleans up a lot of UI bits, adds the progressive Myth penalties, and in general should make this all much, much smoother to play. The corresponding Base version also does the often-discussed promotion integration (where the Accuracy and Barrage promotions are removed, with their effects rolled into Drill and Shock), so you should download the set.
I've finished all of the Low and Medium Events, although I haven't tested them fully. But, I'll have temporarily disabled all High Events in this version; that means no civ will get any major heroes or any of the really, really huge Event bonuses, which'll throw off the game's pacing a bit. This version also won't have the other anti-Myth changes above, because if I can't have them in for one pantheon, it's not fair to do so for the others. To help with this, I'll temporarily double the chances of some of the Medium Events to take up the slack, but you'll still see fewer bonuses from events than you will in the final version. (The delay on this is that I want to get the similar events in for all Pantheons at the same time, and that's a LOT of writing.)

v0.07 will be done this weekend, exact timing TBD. By "TBD" I mean that I'd prefer it to be out before the weekend, since that's when most people play, but if I get stuck fixing something or get bogged down in my RL job then I might have to push it off and wait until the weekend to work on the mod, meaning I wouldn't release it until Sunday or Monday. I'm trying to get the last of the placeholders removed and get all of the High events in.

In two weeks I leave for Christmas vacation, and even after I'm back I have a business trip to go on, which means I won't have much time for modding until the ~15th of January (although there might be about a week just after New Year's where I have some time), so my goal is to release v1 in the next two weeks. That means a functionally complete mod, something that new folks can play without having to be told not to click X, Y, or Z. Given the timing, there'll be maybe 3 versions before I leave, so if you find some major bug or have a serious balance complaint, now's the time.

-------------------------------------

Now, that brings me to the discussion topic of the day: Pantheon Units.

Currently, every Pantheon gets three units, referred to as the 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 units since they powerwise fall between the level 1, 2, 3, and 4 Myth units. All four major gods within a pantheon get the same ones, currently.
Then we talked about adding God-specific units. My first thought was to put them at 2.5ish, in addition to the standard Pantheon units, which'd mean I'd now need seven thematically linked units instead of just three. This also would cause serious issues with game balance. But then a thought occurred to me: why not kill two birds with one stone? Something like what AoM did in the first place:

Each Pantheon has two 1.5 units, two 2.5 units, and one 3.5 unit. (Meaning I only need to come up with five units instead of seven.)
Each god links to one of the two 1.5s and one of the two 2.5s for his Pantheon. (That's four unique combinations.) They all share the same 3.5 unit, though.

The upside of this is that if I were to make god-specific units, you'd never see most of them. If there were eight players, then 20 out of the 28 major gods' units wouldn't appear in a game. Seems like kind of a waste of effort. But with the above system, each Pantheon unit is tied to two out of the 28 gods, so they're more likely to appear in every game.

Let's take the Norse as an example: the two 1.5s could be the Ravens and the Hersir; Odin and Frigg get the Ravens (a very mobile scout / hit-and-run unit) while Thor and Loki get the Hersir, a boosted Warrior with a Hero-like anti-Myth bonus that tides them over until you get to real Heroes. At 2.5, there's the Valkyrie (mobile healing unit) and the some unit I haven't decided on (probably some form of Giant, like the Norn, something with raw strength); Thor and Odin get the Valkyries, Frigg and Loki the other. Then all four get the Nidhogg at 3.5.
In theory I could even split the 3.5 into two units, using the third possible pairing (Thor-Frigg and Odin-Loki, in this case), but that's kind of overkill.

Any thoughts?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Sigh. Found a problem tonight that I couldn't quite resolve. For whatever reason, the game's not using the event-specific lockout timer correctly. So it's fine with the 5-turn limitation, but it won't operate the 20 or 40-turn lockout that is intended to prevent an event from repeating itself too often. It shouldn't take too long to resolve, but my sleeping pills are kicking in and there's just no way I can stay conscious long enough to debug it AND post the files tonight.

So I'll finish it up in the morning.

 

[Spatzimaus]

All right, I think I got the lockout fixed. Unfortunately, it looks like now, Base+Empires+Mythology is enough to exceed the promotion cap (with 201 promotions), even without Ascension. If Base loads first then you'll see Anti-Myth and Crusader promotions being given to everyone, and if Mythology loads first everyone gets Damage Reduction. (Note that a lot of the Ascension promotions are declared in the Base mod for mechanical reasons.)

This is going to take a bit more work, so I'm holding off on a new version until tonight.

 

[dinobot386]

To be honest, you should probably make all the promotions be in the base mod, that way its easyer to keep track of them all

 

[Spatzimaus]

If I did that, though, then I'd be GUARANTEED to exceed the promotion cap. If the devs ever code the game such that there's no longer a cap, then that's exactly what I'll do. But until then, I'd be a good ~30 promotions over the cap if I were to move every promotion I've made down into the Base.

Tonight I'm going to remove about a half-dozen more promotions that I've identified as being redundant. I'm hoping that this helps me count towards the promotion cap, but it's possible that it just won't do anything. (That, is, it's possible that the deletion of a core game promotion doesn't free up a slot towards that cap.)
There are also a couple new promotions in my own mods that aren't strictly necessary, and can be removed at least temporarily. So assuming I can get something functional, I'll post it even if it doesn't do all the things I wanted.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I've posted v0.06 over in the Files thread. Now, I've tested some of the events, but I'm sure there'll still be a few problems here and there since I haven't done my systematic "try each one in turn" approach yet. I'm going to do that later this week. So keep an eye on the events you get.

Things I could really use feedback on:
> Do the events feel too random? I can change the scheduling algorithm to ensure that each player has a minimum frequency of events, if need be.
> The progressive Mythology penalties. You should be much less penalized than you used to be at first, but towards the end (Medieval-Renaissance) the penalties will be even more severe than they were before. I want to ensure that the players are never crippled by these penalties, so feedback on whether you feel you have enough minor gods to deal with this sort of thing would be useful.
> Do you find yourself always gravitating to the same gods, both for your initial major god choice and the first few minor gods?
> The usual turn number feedback. When did you enter each era?

My schedule for the next couple days looks to be just busy enough that I'm probably going to have to wait until the weekend to do the things I really want to do towards the next version. My goal is still to have a much cleaner version this upcoming weekend, then release version 1 just before I go on vacation (two weeks from today).

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's been way too quiet on these forums, so I figured I'd comment on something. Per a previous discussion, I've been going through the 28 gods and counting up the number of available minor gods at five points: their starting point, and the four adjacent positions.

At the low end, the Egyptians have a couple of gods that start with only 1 choice, although most of these have 2-3 if you go even one point in a couple of directions. Actually, the strangest one for that, IIRC, was Isis: while she only has one choice in each of the four directions, exactly WHICH god is that one choice changes, with three different gods covering those four directions.

At the high end, Inanna. 5 choices at the start, 5 in every direction, and it's not quite the same 5 in each. I haven't gone through ALL of the gods yet, so it's possible someone else will have similar numbers, but for practical reasons it just can't be much more than this. I don't think any point on the grid has more than 8 Foci, and to start anywhere near a point you almost definitely have to start with at least one of those eight.

The AI, when deciding which Event outcome to choose, weights its decisions by the number of minor gods that will be available at the destination point. Sure, you might have three or four events before your next minor god selection, but this helps steer the AI away from "dead zones". I'm still trying to determine if it works well in practice, but I've confirmed that it IS doing the weighting correctly.

Now, to the question:
Should players be told that same sort of detail?

Should the four event choices' tooltips give a list of which minor gods are available at the point that choice would move you towards? (Right now those tooltips are nearly useless, so I'm definitely open to adding something there.) You'd still be able to base your decisions on the event's direct effects and ignore the tooltips if you wanted to, but it'd allow players who are worried about this sort of thing to prevent a bad shift. So you'd see the four choices, and when you moused over the button to select an option, a popup would give a simple list of the Foci available at that position.

Or, should this information just be available on the Mandala in a graphical format? One of the things that I've been trying to implement is a simple Lua-based polygon drawing mechanism. The idea would be that when you clicked on a Focus icon, it'd place a shaded semi-transparent overlay on the Mandala showing the region where that Focus is available, so you'd know that moving a little more in the Material direction migth unlock that Fertility Focus you were thinking of taking, or that moving a little towards Chaos might prevent you from adding Justice. All I need is either a good polygon tool or a way to rotate an existing square image by 90 degrees, neither of which Civ5's Lua seems to support well.
While you'd use this for the same sort of things as the above tooltip method, it'd be a bit less precise and so not quite as metagameable by a smart player. (To me, that's a good thing.) The other advantage of this is that it'd apply equally to both Events and adding minor gods; I'd really prefer not to even mention the alignment shifts caused by adding a minor god. In fact, I might just remove that shift entirely since the Events are now common enough to overwhelm that small amount.

 

[dinobot386]

I think its fine the way it is at the moment, having to look at the Malandia and all. I thought of a possible solution to blindly having to choose your major god though, just make the black backdrop a bit more transparent on the choose your major god screen at the begining.

Also, an idea for the fertility level 4 unit, something that can terraform like in the Asencion mod, or perhaps something that plants organic resources like how the deep mine places inorganic resources

And an art level 4 unit should be something very fitting to quetzelcoatl (since hes the only one who will get it) Im thinking a unit that generates culture as it kills (stacks with honor and sacrifical captives) A big feathered snake would be cool (or a feathered t-rex if you want to get silly)

 

[Spatzimaus]

I think its fine the way it is at the moment, having to look at the Malandia and all. I thought of a possible solution to blindly having to choose your major god though, just make the black backdrop a bit more transparent on the choose your major god screen at the begining.

Actually, I deliberately DIDN'T want transparency on that window, because it'd be far too easy for a Human to pick the Foci that specifically boost the resources visible near your starting site. Besides just being a large advantage over the AI, it'd also hurt players in the long run as they expand into areas that don't have those resources and begin to wish they'd gone with something more generally useful. Back when yield Foci were all flat amounts it wouldn't have been so bad, but most of the yield-based ones now add +1 to two resources at level 1, to two more at level 2, and again at level 3. So if you know that Plants adds to Spices and Wine at level 1, and you see those near your starting position, it becomes a no-brainer to take someone like Ra.

Really, the only focus that's really hurt by the blind selection is Water, and I tried to mitigate that by the addition of yields for lakes, oases, and rivers as well as the sea resources; it's very, very unlikely that a player wouldn't immediately benefit from any of these. It's sort of like picking a civ by its starting biases; you take the Iroquois and you can feel pretty confident that there'll be plenty of forests around, and about half of the other civs have similar sorts of starting biases. It's not absolutely guaranteed, though; you might take Arabia, only to find that the desert near you is so small that it doesn't have any Oil, and a bit part of your civ's UA becomes suddenly worthless. I see god selection as a similar thing; you should be picking it before seeing the starting area, but it's fairly unlikely that you'll pick something only to find that it has no benefit.

Also, an idea for the fertility level 4 unit, something that can terraform like in the Asencion mod, or perhaps something that plants organic resources like how the deep mine places inorganic resources

Fertility 4 is now the Ao Ao, so that one's off the table. But I was looking at having the Plants 4 creature (still TBD) do something very similar. If you've ever seen the second Hellboy movie, there was that "nature elemental" he fought, where every building it touched and every place it stepped would suddenly cover itself in grass and flowers. And when it died, the entire area around it became that sort of garden. So I'm trying to come up with something along those lines for Plants 4, where forests and jungles spontaneously appear near it, marshes spontaneously remove themselves, farms near it might spontaneously add Wheat, and when it dies it terraforms the hex it dies in. It'd be best if it were something non-interactive, because the level 4s are really too valuable to be kept in your own territory on worker duty (and the AI would do a lousy job of that anyway).

And an art level 4 unit should be something very fitting to quetzelcoatl (since hes the only one who will get it)

I'll admit that I've used that exact logic a couple times, but it's got a huge catch. You may have noticed that in the previous version I shuffled quite a few gods around, and given our previous discussion about the number of choices for various gods I might need to do so again. So depending on who else gets moved around, Quetzalcoatl might not end up as the only major Art god. He most likely will, because the pantheons that need the most adjustment are the ones that already have a minor Art god, but you never know. Once upon a time, only one major god had Healing, only one had Knowledge, and so on for a half-dozen or so Foci. I've fixed most of these, but Art just happens to be the most obvious among the ones that weren't adjusted.

Im thinking a unit that generates culture as it kills (stacks with honor and sacrifical captives) A big feathered snake would be cool (or a feathered t-rex if you want to get silly)

That effect is pretty much a given. In fact, some of these sorts of abiltiies are already implemented for the XXX creatures; the Wealth 4 creature, still unnamed, already has an effect where it steals gold from each person you attack (even if you don't kill the defending unit). Since this unit is mainly for Inari (Hades being the only other major god with Wealth as a focus, and it's only his secondary), and she's all about foxes/kitsune, I was looking at just using those. Basically, that effect needed to be in place because I intend to use it for pirate/privateer units in the Empires mod in the future, so I was using this mod to test it.

So yes, whatever I end up picking for Art 4, it'll have some sort of culture-based effect. But it's got to still be something useful in combat, so a giant feathered serpent is almost definitely what I'll use. It wasn't only used for Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent was used by various other mythologies in the area as a sign of fertility, visions of the future, etc., so I could still use it for him without it explicitly being ONLY for him.

 

[dinobot386]

By the way, I have 4 extra promotions on all my units, one of which is thickskinned, which every unit having that makes the game pretty much unplayable (used to have orbital drop, and paradrop, which didnt really effect the game)

 

[Spatzimaus]

I have 4 extra promotions on all my units,

That tells me that you're using DLCs that include 4 more promotions than the vanilla game has. Currently, vanilla+Base+Mythology is sitting RIGHT at 200, which seems to be the cap, but I don't have any DLCs. The reason you were getting Paradrop 2 and Orbital Drop before is that they were the last ones in the Base mod, whereas now that honor goes to Thick Skin (or, if the load order is reversed, Crusader and the Anti-Myth promotions). If need be I can rearrange the promotions such that the last few listed are the least problematic, but that's obviously not a good solution in the long term.

I'm going to try moving more promotions around for the next version, and merging a few more ranged and melee lines (like merging Logistics with Blitz), in the hopes of cutting this down far enough that DLCs won't cause this sort of conflict. Unfortunately, to get Mythology and Ascension to work together, I'd have to remove 20 additional promotions, beyond whatever's needed to get past the DLCs. I'm just not sure if that CAN be done, given how many of them are essential. So I really, really hope the devs get around to actually fixing this limit, because promotions are just a great way to handle the bookkeeping of custom unit abilities.

It's kind of scary, actually. It means that the devs had more than 150 promotions in the core game, with a limit of 200, and they saw nothing wrong with adding even more promotions in a DLC. Doesn't leave a whole lot of room for the modders. And a LOT of the existing promotions are redundant: two different ones giving the same "all terrain costs 1 MP" ability, three giving the "can move across impassable terrain", and a whole bunch of Extra Sight, Extra Moves, and Cargo promotions, many of which aren't actually used by any units.

 

[dinobot386]

So does the merging actually work to cut the promotion cap? Because if so than you could edit/remove alot of the pointless core ones

Another thing ive noticed is that Disease and Venom are extremley simular in effect, and that the anti myth being split into 2 promotions isnt really good for this issue

Could you possibly change some bonuses to effects from policies?

 

[Spatzimaus]

I should clarify something on an earlier post. I'm trying not to sound dismissive of your feedback, just pointing out the thought process I went through when setting these things up in the first place. It's not like there can't be multiple solutions to each problem, and maybe the one I picked wasn't the best option.

Take the transparency issue on starts. As I said, one of the main reasons I don't want players to see their starting position is that it'd be too easy to always pick the Focus that gives an extra bonus to those certain resources you see near your starting position. Right now, the pattern for yield-boosting Foci generally goes:
Shrine: +1, and +1 for each of two resources
Church: add another +2 (meaning a base of +3), and +1 for two more resources (for a total of 4).
Cathedral: add +1 Happiness instead of increasing the base again, and add +1 to yields for another two resources (for a total of 6).
Basilica: another +2 (meaning a base of +5), and some big bonus.

This mainly applies to Fertility, Crafts, Wealth, and Art, but similar assumptions were responsible for the progression of Animals, Plants, Beauty, and Water as well.

Now, one easy solution would be to just remove most, if not all, resource-specific yield boosts from level 1. So maybe it now goes
Shrine: +2
Church: another +1 (base of +3), and +1 for three resources
Cathedral: +1 Happiness, +1 yield for another three resources (total of 6)
Basilica: another +2 to yield, etc.
Since you can't get to level 2 until the end of the Ancient Era anyway, it's not nearly as abuseable, so it wouldn't matter so much whether the player could see what was near his starting area. Also, the amount of time between unlocking level 2 and level 3 is much smaller than the time between 1 and 2, so it wouldn't matter quite so much which resources were placed at 2 and which at 3.

This has a few minor implementation issues (how do you do this for Animals, which didn't have a base yield?) and some non-negligible balance issues (would people who pick a Fertility or Crafts god as their central deity have TOO fast of a start with a consistent +2?), but it's still workable. And it'd allow me to do exactly what you said, making the window semi-transparent so that you can see your starting area. I could even change the timing such that you can close the startup window (ending that inane introductory speech) before picking your pantheon, but that might take a bit more work.

So does the merging actually work to cut the promotion cap?

It's looking like the answer is "no". In this last version I added two promotions and removed six, and as you noticed it looks like it got worse instead of better. So it's looking like it'll only help if the promotions I remove are those that I added myself, although I'm going to try again to see if I can force it to use the now-empty IDs.

Another thing ive noticed is that Disease and Venom are extremley simular in effect, and that the anti myth being split into 2 promotions isnt really good for this issue

Actually, anti-Myth is split into 4. Hero (+50%, plus other effects), AM1 (+10%), AM2 (+25%), and Crusader (+10% and other effects). The thing is, I think I really need a bit of granularity; besides the possible Aztec promotion-upgrading thing I mentioned before, I've got two national wonders (Inquisition and Crusades) that give AM2 and Crusader to all non-Myth units, respectively, so if I were to try to merge things together it'd cause too many overlap issues where a unit would already have a promotion from another source (like an Event) when a new source (like a wonder) tried to give it again.
Now, I could do it anyway and just replace those Wonders' effects with Lua-driven effects, even though those effects won't be nearly as useful for the AI. For instance, maybe instead of giving a +10% promotion, the Crusades triggered a Lua function where any units with anti-Myth abilities automatically deal +1 damage to all Myth units, while the Inquisition makes it so that any unit of yours that attacks a Myth unit automatically lowers the Myth unit's strength down to your level. Since neither of those would require a custom promotion, it'd allow me to trim the promotion list a bit without compromising my effects.
I have a lot of things like this I can tweak; for instance, right now Battle Favor is multiplied by 1.0 if both units are mundane, +0.5 if the attacker is a Myth or Hero, +0.5 if the defender is a Myth or Hero. Maybe the Crusades could simply make it such that you now get the +0.5 regardless of Myth/Hero status; no practical effect on the combat, but you'd gain much more Favor. Or maybe you'd now gain something (culture, gold, science, whatever) every time you killed a Myth unit.

Disease and Venom are supposed to be the "slow" vs. "fast" versions of DoT effects. I intend to make use of this distinction in the Empires mod once I get to that; if the Black Death hits and all of your units suddenly come down with diseases, it'll matter to you which of these two it is. Now, it'd be possible for me to merge these into one and use Lua to govern exactly how powerful the effect is; similarly, I could merge the three Balance promotions into one and use some sort of Lua check to determine the thresholds involved.

So basically, yes, I could merge some of the above, but it wouldn't gain enough to allow me to have Mythology work with Ascension. I'd much rather have the variation in those effects, instead of having all those redundant promotions in the core game, but if I can't remove things from the core game to help with this, there's not much point in cutting too far back here. In the meantime, I've got a few other promotions in Base that can be moved to Ascension and/or Mythology, or just replaced entirely by Lua, so I should be able to trim things down enough that the next version won't conflict with DLCs.

Could you possibly change some bonuses to effects from policies?

No. Unfortunately, there's no way to make a cost-free Policy. You know about the "hidden" policies I have to give various bonuses, but it was essential that there always be exactly one and only one of these turned on at a time. To turn MYTHOLOGY_1 on, I have to turn _0 off. To remove all mythology bonuses, I have to enable POLICY_BASE. And so on down the line. This makes it VERY hard to add any sort of adjustable building-driven bonuses; I could use these policies to add yields or Happiness to specific buildings (which is exactly how I do the negative-happiness buildings in the Ascension mod), but I can do that already.