Age of Mythology

[Spatzimaus]

All right, it's time. I've posted the Mythology mod files over in the Files thread; there are just a few things to note.

1> The save/load functionality doesn't seem to be working right. It works fine for a single play session, but not across multiple sessions. I'd originally used Whys' save/load setup, but switched it to a ModData structure since that seemed to work better across multiple mods. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to persist.
So, for now, I just need pretty basic feedback on the buildings, units, tech tree, etc. If anyone knows

2> While a lot of the Lua promotions and unit effects are in place, many aren't really tested yet. A LOT of stuff is fragile, easily breakable, so don't be surprised to see error messages in Lua. I'm going to spend the next few days trying to track as many of these down as possible, but I didn't want to wait any more on posting the files.

 

[Scrambles]

Great stuff, going to give it a whirl today and report back! I'm sure the answer is yes but just to clarify this should work fine on custom maps (TSL Earth etc.) without any changes, correct? No new resources etc.

Also, feedback here or post issues in the bug report thread?

 

[jacktannery]

I'm also going to try this today. Up til now i have been using Thal's Balance Mod so this will be quite a change. I'll let you know how I get on.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Also, feedback here or post issues in the bug report thread?

Either way works. I'd prefer conceptual bits ("Hey, there should really be a clearly-marked RANDOM option on that selection screen" or "why does tech X depend on Y instead of on Z"?) to be here, while crash bugs and such should go over there, ESPECIALLY if the bugs seem to relate to non-Mythological content.

The first couple versions are going to be very buggy, as befitting an Alpha mod. I'm not surprised if people generally can't get past the first few turns; what I'm trying to fix right now (and the reason I posted the files instead of keeping it internal) are the major mechanical failures, and gross balance issues. You're NOT going to be able to get a complete game played, it's just that one person can't find every possible failure by himself without taking months to do so. If I can get the first few turns' mechanics fixed before the next version, then by the third or fourth patch we should be at least partially playable.

 

[Pazyryk]

1> The save/load functionality doesn't seem to be working right. It works fine for a single play session, but not across multiple sessions. I'd originally used Whys' save/load setup, but switched it to a ModData structure since that seemed to work better across multiple mods. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to persist.

I'd suggest you look at my TableSaverLoader as a possible alternative. Haven't seen any bugs yet. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=442249

 

[Spatzimaus]

I should point out that I changed quite a bit of stuff last night, before releasing the mod, so the first posts have just recently been updated.

For instance, take the Death focus. It's now more of a necromancy thing; having a Shrine or better gives mundane units trained in this city the Death promotion, as before, but it now does the following:
> When this unit attacks in melee, it heals 1 point. (Same as before, a fairly weak effect since it won't trigger on defense or on ranged attacks.)
> If this unit dies, the game finds your nearest city to the battle site. Depending on which Death building (if any) is in this city, the unit has a chance to return as an undead unit:
A Shrine (or nothing) gives a ~50% chance of returning as a Skeleton (a very weak unit, only STR 4, with the Teamwork promotion, but it costs no maintenance).
A Church increases the odds by 10%, and now there's a chance that it'll come back as a Zombie instead of a Skeleton. Zombies are more powerful, and you can build them yourself. So it's now a ~40% chance of a Skeleton and a 20% chance of a Zombie.
A Cathedral increases the odds by another 10%, and now there's a chance it'll come back as a Shade instead of a Zombie or Skeleon. As in, the total chance of getting something is 70%, and if that succeeds then you're more likely to get the better units than before.
A Basilica increases the odds yet again, AND increases them in all cities by ~10%, and the unit can't come back as a Skeleton (only Shade or Zombie).

I also smoothed out the progressions on several other Foci, but there are a few levels that still stand out as being unusually weak compared to their counterparts; Air 2 and Travel 1 are especially weak. But for the most part, the Foci should be balanced well enough against each other to not screw up the balance TOO badly.

 

[Scrambles]

As posted in bugs thread I did run into a bit of a showstopper but could work around it somewhat to get a look at other areas:

Favor appears purple on the top panel, very similar to Culture, doesn't stand out well. I'd suggest a distinct colour.

Most of the Empires content, Red Cross etc. have no icons. I could still build them but the art isn't there.

There is no science victory option in the advanced set-up. Without Ascension we probably still want this.

Social Engineering pane still appears in the Policy window, I'm sure you're aware of this one.

On the tech front, Conversion doesn't require Polytheism, likewise for Hierarchy and Priesthood, they look like they're meant to be linked. You can beeline very far indeed into the Myth techs if desired.

*All* Myth units show up in the production list in cities, they're just greyed out with a 'requires Egyptian etc.' red message. This might be just a side-effect of the main problem with selecting a pantheon on the first place however.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Favor appears purple on the top panel, very similar to Culture, doesn't stand out well. I'd suggest a distinct colour.

It actually is its own color, but I'd been shifting the RGB values for other windows and might have left it too reddish. I'll tweak that tonight.

Most of the Empires content, Red Cross etc. have no icons. I could still build them but the art isn't there.

Correct. What happened is that the icons for those are currently being stored inside an icon atlas used by the Ascension mod, which I had to disable for now (hence the broken icons). Same goes for the Plant Forest/Jungle options, the Sewer System and Recycling Center, the city ruins boost at Archaeology, and pretty much anything requiring some new artwork; in the olden days all of those icons were in the Content mod (to reduce the number of atlases needed), but I now need to split them out.

What's going to happen is that I'm going to create new icon atlases for each mod, and copy the necessary bits from the old ones into the new ones. That'll be in 0.02 or 0.03; the holdup is that I'm trying to collect deity artwork for the pantheons, to put into the Mythology mod's atlas, so that I can get this all done at once. I only have images for the Greek, Egyptian, Norse, and Aztec pantheons at present, although Hindu and Shinto aren't too hard to find pictures for. Sumerian's been quite a bit tougher.

There is no science victory option in the advanced set-up. Without Ascension we probably still want this.

Yep, that's a mistake on my side, easy enough to fix.

Social Engineering pane still appears in the Policy window, I'm sure you're aware of this one.

That one's sort of deliberate; there's a little toggle in the upper-left corner of the Policy window that lets you hide that area (originally added so that folks on laptops playing at 1024x768 could still reach the Close button). You see, the SE branch isn't actually empty in non-Ascension games; it actually contains two or three hidden policies (Base, Never, and then adding Mythology in myth games). The Base policy is what enables things like the negative-happiness buildings, and the Never policy prevents the SE branch from counting towards a cultural victory, while the Mythology policy is what adds a whole slew of penalties to anyone playing mythological eras (penalties which are offset by the bonuses from religious buildings, hence the problems with going agnostic).

The reason you see the box is that I haven't decided between two paths:
1> Disable that box entirely (hide both the box and the button) if you're not using Ascension, or
2> Put visible icons for the "hidden" policies in it so that the player can see the inherent penalties he's fighting against, even if he can't select those policies.
I'd lean towards #1 for the long term, but I'd kept it the way it is so that I can use option 2 during my debugging.

On the tech front, Conversion doesn't require Polytheism, likewise for Hierarchy and Priesthood, they look like they're meant to be linked. You can beeline very far indeed into the Myth techs if desired.

I'll look into that tonight; the Myth techs should look a lot like my AC ones, with the sort of pyramidal pattern to prevent that exact kind of beelining. I suppose it could be conflicting with some other mod you've run recently (where some tech-modifying XML might still be in your cache). The tech tree pictures in the first posts are very out-of-date, but I'll upload clean ones tonight.

*All* Myth units show up in the production list in cities, they're just greyed out with a 'requires Egyptian etc.' red message. This might be just a side-effect of the main problem with selecting a pantheon on the first place however.

No, that shouldn't be happening. The Base mod alters CityView.lua to specifically NOT show any unit with a Project or Building prerequisite (unless you have that project/building, obviously), to avoid this exact issue. So the only way you'd be seeing that is if it wasn't loading my CityView.lua, and I think that means either that you're using another mod that alters this interface, or you didn't clear the cache.

But hey, on the bright side you can see all of my units without having to go through the Civilopedia. Now, let's check something: there are three types of units (Focus-linked Myth, Pantheon-linked Myth, and Heroes); do you see greyed-out units for all three types? Say, Dragon, Centaur, and Achilles?

 

[CivOasis]

OK, so:
Could the project be turned into NWs? (to remove the flash of civs)
As for the above city build problem, I did not encounter that.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Could the project be turned into NWs? (to remove the flash of civs)

Unfortunately, no. The problem is that units can depend on the presence of a specific building in that particular city (like the Focus myth units do, or the orbital units in my future mod), or on Projects (which are empire-wide), but they can't depend on a building just being anywhere within your empire. So to get similar behavior without Projects, I'd have to have the game place an invisible non-Wonder building in every new city you found, marking that city as tied to your given pantheon. This'd have to be adjusted if a city gets conquered, obviously, and some of the other times it'd need adjustment don't have good Lua triggers, so I'd most likely have to double-check these buildings at the start of every turn. Given all of these issues, it just made more sense to use a Project, which are never tied to an actual city and so have none of these problems. All I really need to do, then, is find a way to disable Project popup messages; this MIGHT be possible within Lua, but even if it's not I'd bet that this'd be trivial to do once we get the DLL.

As for the above city build problem, I did not encounter that.

Yeah, that just sounds more and more like a cache issue. This particular mod is just so sensitive to memory issues that I'd expect all sorts of things like this to pop up. I've tried to get around that by using physical items where possible; for instance, the pantheon-linked Projects are used for the unit issues above, but they also allow me to query a player's pantheon in a way that won't get corrupted if the ModData structure gets its pointers thrown off by a bug. Likewise, the religious buildings in each city (Shrine, Church, Cathedral, Basilica) are not only used to provide various effects, but they also provide a more robust way to store the current level of each city. I'm currently trying to see if I can find something similar to store the various Favor values.

 

[jacktannery]

I played Greece up to turn 136. I encountered NO BUGS! I did not have Scrambles' city build problem with unbuildable Myth units showing up.

Comments: started on an island alone with only two luxury types. I went LIBERTY but this turned out to be useless as I was in minus happiness with two cities despite my two luxuries and the +happiness liberty policy and three priest specialists. It seems to me that liberty is not a viable choice in this mod for the ancient era - is this correct?

I had very serious gold issues, which is why I abandoned the game. Both cities on max gold focus and only one military unit (deleted the others) and still in minus gold. Is this intentional?

Otherwise, it all seems to work. One minor bug was that one of my units had a flag promotion promising I could paradrop it anywhere in the world (but I couldn't, unfortunately) despite not taking this deity option.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I played Greece up to turn 136. I encountered NO BUGS! I did not have Scrambles' city build problem with unbuildable Myth units showing up.

Yes, I'm pretty sure that was a cache issue.

Comments: started on an island alone with only two luxury types. I went LIBERTY but this turned out to be useless as I was in minus happiness with two cities despite my two luxuries and the +happiness liberty policy and three priest specialists. It seems to me that liberty is not a viable choice in this mod for the ancient era - is this correct?

It's not that Liberty is not supposed to be a viable choice. It just means that my Happiness balance is off.

Here's the problem. In the Mythology mod right now, I reduce your Happiness in three ways:
> A flat -3 Happiness
> 1 less Happiness per luxury
> Population adds 1.5 unhappiness per pop instead of 1.2 (assuming you're also using the Empires mod).

This is overkill. I KNOW it's overkill; I'm just trying to figure out which of those three needs to be toned down first. If I remove the -3 then you'll be better in the short term but will have the same long-term issues. If I remove the -1 per luxury then it makes luxury resource tiles even more important than they are now (since many Foci boost yields for various resources). If I remove the x1.25 for population then you'll do much better in the long term but still have short-term issues.

So depending on your feedback, this'll tell me which one needs to be tweaked most. If you're fine for the first 50 turns or so but then start having massive unhappiness when you get to having two or three decent-sized cities, then the x1.25 is most to blame. If you're having the issues right away but they don't get much worse later on, then the -3 needs to be removed.

Now, the intention is that you'd use Priest specialists to make up the difference. Each Priest adds +1 Happiness (and 1 food, and 3/6/9 Favor), so if you find yourself just a little below 0 then you should be slotting these (which'd have the added bonus of more Favor). If you find that you just can't fill Priest slots without starvation or having your build queues stall to unreasonable times, then that tells me I need to tweak the yields of Priests, but you're supposed to want to use these fairly often to offset the unhappiness. (The logic here is that if Priests are a necessary thing to use, then the AI will use them. If that extra happiness wasn't necessary, then the AI would never bother, and that'd kill its Favor generation.)

Or, just pick the Beauty focus when you have a chance; it's sort of the Piety of foci, the happiness-booster you should be taking if you can't seem to stay above 0. At the moment, no other Focus adds Happiness, but the solution might be to change that. Maybe Travel buildings should add +1 happiness to cities that are connected to your capital, or maybe Art buildings should add a little happiness instead of being only about Culture, or maybe Justice should give a bonus when Heroes are nearby.

Now, I'd thought of other ways to deal with this. Have every Church or Basilica add +1 Happiness, regardless of Focus. (The Basilicae, especially, can get this; I removed their Priest slots, because it's kind of a waste to generate Favor in a building that's already maxed out, but I can easily pretend that they have a permanently slotted Priest and just give every one that +1.)
Or, have every Basilica act like a toned-down Forbidden Palace, reducing the population unhappiness slightly. Since you'll only ever have two, and they'll be spaced out (with one coming in the early Medieval and the other in the late Medieval), it wouldn't get out of control.

I had very serious gold issues, which is why I abandoned the game. Both cities on max gold focus and only one military unit (deleted the others) and still in minus gold. Is this intentional?

No, it's not, but I'd need some exact numbers to fix it. The Mythology policy (which you're given automatically) includes an inherent penalty to gold output, and that might just need to be removed or toned down, but I'd need some solid numbers to be sure. Right now it's a flat -25%, but I could either reduce that to -10%ish, or add some semi-offsetting bonus in the base policy (like an extra +5% for gold-producing buildings).

Shifting a city to gold-production focus is never supposed to be required. You're supposed to be able to maintain a decent standing army with all cities on Default without going negative; if that's not happening, then I need to tweak the penalties. (This is the exact sort of thing I needed outside feedback for.)

Simple question: what Foci did you have? Primary, Secondary, and any Minors you'd added? Things like Wealth are obviously going to help with gold output, but quite a few other Foci boost gold for certain resources. Basically, I added a half-dozen or so separate penalties, and your choice of gods are supposed to basically neutralize two or three of those penalties. So if you'd only taken War, Fire, Death, Darkness, etc. then your military would be doing just fine but you'd have problems in quite a few other areas, while someone who took Fertility, Water, Wealth, and Beauty might have none of the problems you'd described but would have a pretty weak military.

Otherwise, it all seems to work. One minor bug was that one of my units had a flag promotion promising I could paradrop it anywhere in the world (but I couldn't, unfortunately) despite not taking this deity option.

Hmm, that's the Orbital Drop thing mentioned previously, and it's definitely a bug. Was that the ONLY promotion the unit had? (If you're hitting the promotion cap, you'd see all of your units get extra promotions that they shouldn't.)

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

Also, one other question: were the Events popping up? (I've only got one event in there at the moment, but in the end there'll be a couple dozen.) These are supposed to be one of the main ways of offsetting the penalties of the Mythological Age; your cities might be short on gold, but an event might offer you a free 100 gold. Later events I'm planning to add might give you a free Gems deposit near your capital, or give you a free Hero, or add a permanent +1 Happiness to your empire. These sorts of things would go a long ways in offsetting the deficits you're seeing.

 

[jacktannery]

Spatz: - I selected Hephaestus (major) and Hera (minor).

The population in my capital was 6 and in my other city was 2 at its absolute height. I had two luxuries. There were no other luxury types on my landmass. My population was not growing since I was running max priests, but there is no way I would have been able to expand to a third city before colosseums, even if I did have a third luxury source.

Also, I found that social policies and technologies came faster than I had thought they would.

EDIT: If each priest specialist also gave 1 gold, and if I could have run a priest specialist from the go in my second city, I would have been able to make +4 gold and have +1 happiness, and this would also offset the awfulness of early liberty a little bit. I might have just been a bit stupid though (I never played your previous mod), so wait until you get more feedback from other people.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Spatz: - I selected Hephaestus (major) and Hera (minor).

Okay, so that's Crafts primary, Fire secondary, and Fertility minor. None of those help with gold or happiness, which explains some things, but you probably didn't notice any change from vanilla in terms of how fast your cities grew or how long they'd take to build things. The Fire bonus would also have nicely offset some of the defensive bonuses I give everyone.

For comparison, next time try picking Hades (Death/Wealth) and adding someone like Aphrodite (Beauty). I'd bet that you'd have fewer happiness and gold problems, but now you'd feel like your cities aren't growing or producing well.

Also, what levels did each of these reach? By the turn 130ish you described, had any of these upgraded from Shrines to Churches or Cathedrals in your cities? And what turn number was it when you added Hera?
Finally, what techs were you add? It should have taken ~100 turns to reach the Classical, so I need to know if the timing was thrown off by my other changes.

The solution might simply be to tweak the favor thresholds, so that your buildings upgrade more or you can add minor gods faster. The goal I'm aiming for is one minor god by turn 50ish, another on turn 125ish, another on 200ish, and one on 300ish, so if you'd been able to add Aphrodite on 125, that might have helped a bit with the Happiness issues you described.

The population in my capital was 6 and in my other city was 2 at its absolute height. I had two luxuries.

It does sound like you were unlucky on luxury distribution, but the priest situation shouldn't have been THAT bad, so I definitely need to look into the balance on those. I don't want this mod to ever cause your cities to stop growing. More on this below.

Also, I found that social policies and technologies came faster than I had thought they would.

The goal is that what should take 200 turns (reaching the Renaissance with my Empires balance changes) will now take ~350. The tech rate shouldn't be noticeably worse, but it'll still take longer because you have 14 more techs to gain. But the culture generation should be significantly lower than before, since so many +culture buildings were reduced to generate Favor; I might have to do something else there, like tweak the equation again.

Big question here: are you using the Empires mod at the same time? It acts as a balance mod, so if you aren't using it then that might explain some things. For instance, the Temple was changed in that mod from +3 culture to +1 happiness, +1 culture. (The Mythology mod then drops it by another culture to add 2/4/6 Favor.) If you're not using that mod, then it'd mean less happiness and more culture than I'm expecting.

EDIT: If each priest specialist also gave 1 gold, and if I could have run a priest specialist from the go in my second city

The yields on priests are definitely a bit too low. I've been trying to decide, on priests, whether to go:
> 2 Food
> 1 Food, 1 Production
> 1 Food, 1 Gold
or
> 1 Food, 1 Culture

What I'm leaning towards now are leaving Priests at 1 food and doing the following:
> National Epic: in addition to the old effect, all Priests generate +1 gold
> Add a new National Wonder in the Classical (at Conversion?) that has Priests generate +1 production along with some other effect

No matter which way I end up going, the hope is that with these, you won't be hurting yourself as much by slotting priests. I don't want it to be essential that you fill every priest slot, but I'm aiming for 50% usage on average.

As for your second city: when you unlocked Hera, did you get a free Shrine of Fertility? (You're supposed to get one free Shrine from each new minor god.) And if so, which city did it place it in? I tried mimicking the Civ4 religion logic, where it'd put the new shrine in whatever city didn't already have any buildings, so your fringe city should have been the one that got it, assuming you founded the city before unlocking Hera.

One thing I'd thought of was to add a City Hall building to every city, with "unaligned" 1 Priest slot in it that evenly splits its Favor between all foci in that city. It'd help with getting started on new cities; originally I was going to put a Priest slot on the Palace, but that'd be tougher to remove once the mythology age ends.

I might have just been a bit stupid though (I never played your previous mod), so wait until you get more feedback from other people.

Knowledge of the old mod shouldn't be a necessity to play this one; the Mythology mod is intended for a bit wider audience than the science-fiction content I'd added previously, so feedback from people who aren't going to say "oh, that's just like the X from the future mod" is still very valuable. Now, I do intend to make it a bit clearer to people that Priests are a necessity, and that you should be picking a god on turn 1, but until all that help text gets put in I'm not expecting you to master this mod. (And honestly, that's a big part of why I need feedback. I know how all this stuff works, so it never occurs to me to try not picking a god, or not using priests.)

 

[dinobot386]

Couldent make it past the 1st turn. Crashed.

One thing I noticed is that both my settler and warroir had all the new promotions; Venom, Stun, etc. Im pretty sure thats not intended

 

[jacktannery]

Also, what levels did each of these reach? By the turn 130ish you described, had any of these upgraded from Shrines to Churches or Cathedrals in your cities? And what turn number was it when you added Hera?
Finally, what techs were you add? It should have taken ~100 turns to reach the Classical, so I need to know if the timing was thrown off by my other changes.

I play on Epic so by turn 135 I think I was still in the ancient era. My shrines had not yet updated.

Big question here: are you using the Empires mod at the same time? It acts as a balance mod, so if you aren't using it then that might explain some things. For instance, the Temple was changed in that mod from +3 culture to +1 happiness, +1 culture. (The Mythology mod then drops it by another culture to add 2/4/6 Favor.) If you're not using that mod, then it'd mean less happiness and more culture than I'm expecting.

Yes of course - I am running the three mods as you said. Quick question: I think I read you advising us to load the base mod first then the Mythos & Empires ones. I just loaded them all at once; but I believe load order depends on the alphabetical order they are listed in the mod display. If that were true, you might consider renaming the three mods to load in the way you want them too; something like Age of Man - Era of Empires - Era of Mythology for example.

As for your second city: when you unlocked Hera, did you get a free Shrine of Fertility? (You're supposed to get one free Shrine from each new minor god.) And if so, which city did it place it in? I tried mimicking the Civ4 religion logic, where it'd put the new shrine in whatever city didn't already have any buildings, so your fringe city should have been the one that got it, assuming you founded the city before unlocking Hera.

Yes, in my first capital city (all three shrines).

One thing I'd thought of was to add a City Hall building to every city, with "unaligned" 1 Priest slot in it that evenly splits its Favor between all foci in that city. It'd help with getting started on new cities; originally I was going to put a Priest slot on the Palace, but that'd be tougher to remove once the mythology age ends.

Good idea - an extra priest per city would have helped with unhappiness and allowed my cities to grow an extra point each, assuming I found a way to deal with the gold issue.

Glad my feedback was helpful. I'll try again tomorrow with Hades - Aphrodite.

 

[Spatzimaus]

One thing I noticed is that both my settler and warroir had all the new promotions; Venom, Stun, etc. Im pretty sure thats not intended

That's generally a cache issue (or else you're running some other mods at the same time). It has enough other promotions still in memory that you're exceeding the cap, so anything beyond that will be given to every unit. Clear your cache and start the mythology mod again, and see if that still happens.

That issue is one of the things holding up the Ascension mod; if you try using Ascension and Mythology at the same time you exceed the limit, so I'm trying to restructure things such that this won't happen any more.

 

[Spatzimaus]

I play on Epic so by turn 135 I think I was still in the ancient era. My shrines had not yet updated.

That's a problem. I'd say that at least your Primary should have bumped up to a Church by then, even on Epic. Being on an island probably cut way down on Battle Favor, but you only need 200 favor in a focus to upgrade from Shrine to Church (600 on epic), and your palace alone should have given 1 per turn to your primary and secondary.

I think I just need to set the base growth rates (the free Favor per turn that cities get to upgrade shrines and such) higher. Or more specifically, right now they start at 0/0/0, with Primary getting +2 at Mysticism, Secondary getting +1 at Spirituality, and Minors getting +1 at Mythology. Since you haven't even left the Ancient era yet, you probably don't have all three of these. What I need to do, I think, is set the base rates to 1/1/1 instead.

I just loaded them all at once; but I believe load order depends on the alphabetical order they are listed in the mod display.

From what I've been able to tell, load order depends on which order you clicked the little green buttons to activate them. I'll look into that more, and yes, it might requiring renaming the mods (although I'd prefer to rename the Base mod instead to put it first).

At the moment there's not a whole lot that actually requires the mods to be in a given order; the thing that WOULD need that (the cross-mod XML tables) aren't currently enabled. So it shouldn't be causing the problems people have reported.

Good idea - an extra priest per city would have helped with unhappiness and allowed my cities to grow an extra point each, assuming I found a way to deal with the gold issue.

Of course, an extra Priest means one less tile being worked, which'll slow you down even further, which is why I have to be very careful with this. (For instance, this City Hall might add a Palace-like +1 food, +1 production, +1 gold, etc. to get a city started.)
This is why I mentioned the change in growth rates above; if, say, your Crafts shrine had upgraded to a Church already (increasing the production boost further), then it'd take some of the load off your tile workers, and allow you to use another Priest without hopelessly crippling your cities. And if I add some of the things I'd mentioned elsewhere, to boost Priest yields further, then it'd help even more.

For instance, hypothetically, let's say that the National Epic added +1 gold per Priest, the National College added +1 research per Priest, and the Crusades added +1 production per Priest (all in addition to their current effects). By the end of the mythological content, those'd be some pretty strong specialists, more desirable than any non-resource tile yield. That's the balance point I'm aiming for; you should still want to work any tile with a resource or feature on it, but an empty grassland tile shouldn't be as good as a Priest.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Status update:

I fixed the Diplomacy thing, so that it won't pop the mandala or pantheon selector up when you talk to another player. Also, clicking on the Favor display in the top panel will now open the Mandala as well, so it's much more convenient than before.

I've currently got it so that as soon as your game starts it'll ask you which god to take, before you've had a chance to see the area and resources around your starting position. I'm open to changing this, but for now I want to keep it this way to ensure people don't forget to select a god.

I've also made a bunch of balance tweaks. So it looks like I'm on track to having a new version out tomorrow or Saturday at the latest; I'm not going to try adding any new content, but I want to add some of the more important tooltips before releasing v0.02.

 

[Spatzimaus]

v.0.02 is now posted over in the Files thread. It should be much more playable and stable, and a lot easier to use in general. Since I haven't received much feedback yet beyond the show-stopping bugs (which should now be fixed), I'm going to spend most of the next week getting things like custom icons and such into place, and adding more events and Heroes.