I was thinking one "generic" unit, and one that was the one-of-a-kind bit, though, it does make sense to have it weaker than a level four unit.
Yeah, the balance on this is going to be tough. My first thought is that they can't be as strong as a Focus-specific unit, or else there's no point in taking those Foci, clearly. And that's easy enough to manage with the major gods that have these foci. But what about minor gods? As in, you take Zeus as your major god, and when the time comes to pick a minor god, you consider Artemis (who has the Animals focus). Because she's a minor god, you'll never get her temples to level 4; you're barely even going to get them to level 3 in your capital, and level 2 in your other cities. So if the Greeks have access to a generic mass-production unit that's better than the Animals 2 options, why would you take her as a minor god at all?
Actually, to get around that, I'm going to reduce the number of Myth units from Animals to 2 per tier and add some small other bonuses (+food for cows, deer, sheep, fish; +production for Horses, produces one unit of Horses). That should free up a few units for pantheon-specific use.
Basically, though, the early common myth units should be between a 1 and 2, so that taking someone like Artemis is still desirable as her 2s will still be an upgrade. The late myth unit can be a 3, stronger than the units you'd get from taking Artemis, but you'd need to have it follow a 1-per-player limit like the 4s have. If you didn't, then there'd be little reason to upgrade her shrines.
Well, I can only find one good human hero, and Cipactli could make another good myth-4 unit, but it would be kind of strange to have a giant as a hero. Plus, (correct me if I'm wrong), but you couldn't make his graphics unique then, could you?
Sure you could. Heroes will be like UUs: same unit class as an existing unit, but a distinct Units block, which allows for unique graphics. Since you don't BUILD heroes (they're awarded through various other methods, like events or Favor), there's no conflict. So Achilles would be a Swordsman UU, with a slightly higher strength and some extra promotions thrown on; your cities would still make Swordsmen the old-fashioned way, but if you had Achilles, he'd benefit from any Wonders or Focus promotions that boost Swordsmen, just like he was a civ-specific UU.
As to the discongruity of having a giant as a hero, it's not really a problem. While certain pantheons (Greeks, Hindu, Shinto, etc.) will probably be all-Human with their heroes, some of the others weren't so anti-monster. The Hindu lore, for instance, had one good-aligned Rakshasa as a "hero" at one point. And since I'm trying to add 8 heroes per Pantheon, I'm going to run out if I'm too picky.
Greek Heroes, at the moment: the Argos (i.e., Jason), Achilles, Odysseus, Perseus, Theseus, Bellerophon, Ajax, Hercules. My idea is that one of these maps to each axis, and one to each diagonal, sort of like how the Foci work. That way, I can make some of these a little more exclusive; a Poseidon follower might never see the events that award Odysseus or the Argos, while Zeus might never see Hercules.
Didn't realize he could fly.
Depends on which source you're drawing from. To quote from one translation of the Voluspa,
" There comes the shadowy
dragon flying,
glittering serpent, up
from Dark of the Moon Hills."
Yes, I admit, I got that off Wikipedia; I'm at work at the moment. More specifically, though, the Nidhogg appeared twice in the Age of Mythology game (once in the original, once in the expansion), and there he was a flying dragon with antlers. He's even hovering there in the backdrop when you're at the main menu of the original AoM. So if I'm going to be able to steal unit models from that game, that's what he'd be.
That could be where the Pantheon units come in- at a certain point, you'd be guaranteed to have one powerful Myth unit, and adopting certain gods as majors would give you more.
That's the part I keep going back and forth on. If all the L4s are one-per-player, then it might be okay to have the pantheon-specific high unit be an L4 as well, because a player with those foci could then have TWO unstoppable killing machines, or even three if they took the right combination of foci. But that might just be too much raw power for everyone, since it'd completely overshadow your mundane units, which is why I was aiming for L3 as the baseline; it'll already be expected that L3s would be major parts of many armies, so adding one more isn't a big deal.
That would probably be better, a lot of the Egyptian creatures were similar to Greek ones.
There's a surprising amount of similarity between a LOT of mythologies, but my rule of thumb on this is that if all else fails, use a D&D creature for the Foci unlocks. I mean, some of the creatures in various mythologies are really off the wall, but most mythologies have analogues of the dragon, vampire, ghost, really nasty versions of common predators (lions, tigers, bears), or winged versions of land animals (snakes, horses, etc.), so putting those in the myth-heavy Foci works well. There are also a couple quirky creatures that overlap quite a few as well, like the Hydra, Griffon, and so on, so I wanted those in the Animals Focus as well.
though, I seem to recall a Dragon unit floating around somewhere on the forums.
There are several. Finding a dragon model really isn't a problem, and most of the D&D-ish mythological creatures were done for various Civ4 mods at one point or another. It's the less common stuff that might be a problem.
The benefit to that is that people are more likely to recognize them. Don't know if that has any impact to you, though.
Not as much as you might think. I'm sure there will be quite a few cases where people playing the mod encounter a creature they'd never heard of before, but as long as its abilities are things they can understand it shouldn't be too bad.
Take the Rakshasa, for example. At the moment it's a Darkness 3 creature, but I could easily make that be one of the Hindu-specific units. Currently, it has three abilities:
> The promotion-stealing ability of the Doppelganger unit from the SMAC mod
> Venom (mentioned earlier, and used by quite a few other units)
> The existing "+25% vs Wounded" promotion
So even if you've never heard of them (or if you HAVE heard of them but think they're tiger men with backwards hands after playing too much D&D), as long as you can understand what those three abilities do, it shouldn't matter. Since Hindu lore was pretty inconsistent on their abilities and appearances in the first place, it's not a problem.
I'm trying to limit the pool of new promotions to 12-15 if possible. So there shouldn't be THAT much of a learning curve; once you learn what Venom, Disease, Stun, etc. do, it shouldn't be too hard to adjust to new units.
