Age of Mythology

[dinobot386]

Something else ive been wondering, When you are generating favor through combat or buildings, what determines which building that favor goes to?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Something else ive been wondering, When you are generating favor through combat or buildings, what determines which building that favor goes to?

I tried spelling it out in the first posts, but I'll try to make it clearer.

Combat favor is distributed between your cities based on the distance the city is from the battle site. Take the distances, in hexes; add 1 to each, then take the reciprocal (1/N). Add these values together, and divide each by the total. That is, if city A is 4 hexes from the battle (-> 1/5) and city B is 9 hexes away (-> 1/10), then A will get two-thirds of the Favor and B will get one-third.
Within each city, Battle Favor will be split perfectly evenly between all unlocked Foci. If you've got two minor gods unlocked, and your primary god has the usual two foci, then each shrine in the city will get 1/4th of whatever the city gained for a battle. So Battle Favor is really great for jump-starting a new Shrine in a newly founded city, as those'll get large amounts of Favor.

Building Favor, however, is weighted by the current Growth values for the foci. So if your Primary growth is +3 per turn, your Secondary growth is +2 per turn, and you have one minor Focus at +1 per turn, then your Primary focus gets 1/2 (3/6ths) of all Building Favor that city generates, the Secondary gets one-third, and the Minor gets one-sixth. The growth rates peak at something like 6/5/4, so in the long term the difference won't be huge; I mainly did it this way to help your core cities' primary and secondary buildings stay maxxed out, pretty much the opposite of what Battle Favor does best.
(I'd previously added 1 to the Growth values for this, since they started at 0, but now that I've changed them to all start at 1 that's no longer necessary.)

Is this all overly complex? Probably. I mainly just wanted a setup where each type of Favor played a different role, instead of all being completely interchangeable; Battle Favor is best for minor Foci in fringe cities, Building Favor is best for your main Foci in your core cities, and Priest Favor is best for vertical development in any city (ONLY benefiting the single Focus for each priest).
My hope is that it'll be more or less transparent to the player; the exact logic for each type really isn't that important.

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Update:

It's working! I've got it to where it now loads the data structures correctly when you load an old savegame. I still don't know why it was doing those loops wrong, so I just rewrote the loops to not do it that way. I fixed a few other minor bits in the process, but it's now functioning correctly. This is a HUGE milestone for me, and was the only thing holding up this last revision.

There's still a few small quirks; the Favor total up in the top panel won't display the correct value until you either end the turn or move your mouse over the value, but that's really minor. And it might be a tiny bit sluggish during the load process, adding maybe a half-second to the load time, but I'm hoping no one cares about that.

So I'm going to try squeezing in a couple minor bits of code, and then I'll post it. Yes, I know I've said that the last six days in a row, but this time, I mean it!

 

[Spatzimaus]

New version posted. I didn't have time to fix the remaining "XXX" placeholder units, add the Heroes, or do most of the other UI bits I really wanted to get to, because the CivFanatics front page just announced the major Civ5 mods and I needed something working for when people showed up. But I WILL spend the next few days adding these things, to try to get a more complete version out by next weekend.

 

[dinobot386]

Just downloaded the new versions, im still amazed that just one person made this entire mod, looking forward to the next update

 

[Spatzimaus]

Just downloaded the new versions, im still amazed that just one person made this entire mod, looking forward to the next update

Heh. Thanks for the compliment, but if you think that's amazing, you should see the INTERNAL versions I've made. I make a lot of stuff that then gets mothballed because it doesn't work quite right, or its balance is too flaky, or whatever. Random coding is part of how I relax, strange as that may seem. Part of the reason I ended up with the 4-mod setup was that I had a lot of bits of functional code laying around that I didn't want to shoehorn into the Alpha Centauri content, so I decided to create the Myth mod instead. And I've gone through two full notebooks of scribblings about changes I've thought of making, most of which get rejected almost immediately...

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The patch list for this latest version is relatively light, because I was trying out four different data storage mechanisms in an attempt to get the savegame functionality to work correctly. (For reference, I ended up mixing two of them to create a working setup that has an almost-complete redundant backup system. A third method I tried could have done it all by itself, but the access times were just brutal. Like, five seconds per player on the first turn just to initialize everything.)

Now that the mechanics seem to be working, the next version (aiming for Thursday or Friday) will clean up a lot of stuff. I'll add graphics for the last three pantheons, add real icons for the 21 Foci, add a couple UI elements I really need (and expand the Favor pulldown on the top panel), replace the last placeholder XXX units with real ones, and put in real Event effects. If I have time I'll start writing Civilopedia text.

That part about the Events is actually important. Right now, Events ONLY trigger for the human player, because that's how the User Events mod component I included was structured. I'm going to fix that, to where the AI will not only get the events as well, but will also weight the options based on his Flavor ratings and current alignment. My hope is to use a similar mechanism to add an advisor recommendation for when the human player gets an Event, with one option being highlighted as taking you towards the best nearby Mandala area (the one with the most available gods to choose from).
But until the AI learns how to handle these Events, I just can't give the powerful effects (like Heroes) that I really need to add to the outcomes, because it'd be too lopsided towards the player.

 

[dinobot386]

Everything is running smoothly, and since I can actually load I can get into the later parts of the mod

One problem Im having is that im not getting Ravens at spirtuallity with the Norse pantheon, but the rest of the units are showing up just fine. (using Thor)

 

[Spatzimaus]

One problem Im having is that im not getting Ravens at spirtuallity with the Norse pantheon, but the rest of the units are showing up just fine. (using Thor)

Found it, good catch. In the UnitClasses file, the default unit for UNITCLASS_RAVENS is listed as "UNIT_RAVENS_NORSE1" instead of just "UNIT_RAVENS". (Before I'd decided what unit to actually put in each pantheon, they were all named "UNIT_XXX_NORSE1" as placeholders, so when I was cutting and pasting I obviously screwed that up.)

Looking through the file, it looks like I also screwed up the Makara in the same way, listing it as UNIT_MAKARA_HINDU2 in that same table. So, Hindu players were missing their level 2.5 unit as well, which is a bit more serious than the Norse folks missing a low-end scout unit. The Makara only has one special ability, but it's the All-Terrain thing I use for the Nessus Worm and such, so it's a shame it's broken.
In fact, I realized today that the Ravens are actually counterproductive; their huge visibility radius prevents Barbarians from spawning, but the Norse really need those early fights to build up Battle Favor. So I might have to reconsider this one...

Anyway, that bug will be fixed in the next version, or you can just edit your own XML files by hand in those two spots to fix it. I'd normally just upload a new version right away, but I've already started on the next version and it'd take too much effort to back my changes out. Besides, a dozen people have downloaded it already and this is a relatively minor thing, all things considered.

 

[ForzaFiori]

Something i noticed in my (very brief) time trying this out (i'll go back and play more once I have the time)

Could you possibly pop up a notifier when you are able to select a new minor god, or even have the next turn button make you select it like techs or prod? I would up not picking one for like 4 turns because I didn't realize that I could, and then it took me a bit more time to figure out how.

If its not possible without the various things that are still locked up by the devs, that's cool, I was just curious if it was possible to do so.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Could you possibly pop up a notifier when you are able to select a new minor god, or even have the next turn button make you select it like techs or prod?

Unfortunately, it's not easy to lock out the End Turn button like you can for techs, policies, production, or unit movements. The game has an explicit table of button types that trigger that, and it can't really handle a new type well. I CAN try to hack the UI to enable this in spite of the lack of an explicit button type, but I'd prefer not to modify every single UI element, since that leads to major compatibility issues with other mods.
And again, this goes back to an earlier question I had for people:

Should it be possible to delay picking a minor god?

It's sort of like not promoting a unit or not selecting a Policy (both of which default to forcing an immediate pick, although you can disable this in the setup options). A human player might know that he'd be a little better off waiting a couple extra turns (or at least until the next Event) to place himself in a better area of the Mandala, but an AI wouldn't gain anything from a delay. Allowing the player to delay would only increase the disparity between human and AI.

If I don't want to allow players to delay, then yes, forcing a selection would be good. The easiest way to do so, instead of overriding the End Turn, would be to simply pop up the Mandala at the start of a turn, similar to how the Pantheon selection appears at the start of a game. And it's easy enough to not allow the player to LEAVE the Mandala screen if he has more Favor than is needed to add a god.
The problem is that, depending on your Pantheon and your previous choices, it's possible that your current Mandala position might not have ANY available minor gods. So unlike policies, a strict enforcement wouldn't always work well; it'd be easy enough to check the number of potential choices (since I do so for the AIs already) and only pop up if you have valid options.

But if I do allow players to delay, then I can't do anything like that. In that case, I could simply change the Top Panel message to go from a straight "X / Y" reading to "MINOR GOD NOW AVAILABLE" once you have enough. Hopefully, the players would be attentive enough to notice that sort of thing.

 

[ForzaFiori]

Just finished playing part of a game as a Egypt following Shinto. Random map, pretty sure it was small continents. I was nearly to enlightenment when the game crashed (around turn 210 or so)... I plan on going back to finish a full game later. I play on fairly easy difficulties (still can barely win on Prince, was playing this on Warlord), so I'm not sure how common these results will be, but I had slight happiness and gold issues at first, which actually helped, since I was seeking out barbarians like crazy to keep myself afloat. Managed to end with 20 something happiness, and plenty of gpt, but that was partly due to going tall (only had three cities) and pumping them full of priests (had 4 or 5 in my 11 pop capital. Yay Hanging Gardens!). Definitely had no problem keeping my capital with pretty much maxed out temples, and in fact was having trouble finding small ones to build the more accessible myth units, though that would be easier had I built more cities.

I don't remember exactly what gods I picked, unfortunately. Not being very familiar with Shinto makes keeping the various deities separate in my head is more difficult.

 

[Spatzimaus]

but that was partly due to going tall (only had three cities) and pumping them full of priests (had 4 or 5 in my 11 pop capital. Yay Hanging Gardens!).

I'm still changing the balance on Priests. It should be a serious drawback to run full Priests like that; your production and gold output should be crippled if you do that in all of your cities. The problem is that if I don't raise the yields, the AI won't ever use them. So I'm not sure exactly where this'll end up. I know the AI would use Empath specialists in the AC content when they were +2 Food, so I at least have a starting point to work with.

The goal is that you should want to fill about half of your Priest slots at any given time. Less, and you run out of Happiness; more, and you cripple your production and gold.

Definitely had no problem keeping my capital with pretty much maxed out temples, and in fact was having trouble finding small ones to build the more accessible myth units, though that would be easier had I built more cities.

Well, if you were running that many Priests then I'm not surprised. Shinto is Building/Priests, so it's going to be one of the most consistent Pantheons for Favor production. I'm not saying the numbers are final; the goal is supposed to be that it shouldn't be too hard to keep your core cities at or near the caps, but that there'd be a noticeable building-up phase when founding a new city or adding a new god. The Shinto are supposed to be one of the hardest Pantheons to play, but that's less about Favor generation and more about which Foci they have.

I don't remember exactly what gods I picked, unfortunately. Not being very familiar with Shinto makes keeping the various deities separate in my head is more difficult.

In general, I don't think in terms of deities, I think in terms of Foci. The actual gods are more window dressing than anything else; only the Foci and the Pantheon modifiers matter. (If I do the previously mentioned idea about giving each god a unique unit from one of the banned Foci for that pantheon, then this'll change.)

At the moment, the Mandala has a simple text list that'll tell you which gods you've added, but I'm expanding that into a new popup window that'll give a much better readout. Given that you mentioned early problems with Gold, I'm assuming you didn't pick Inari as your central deity, and none of the other Shinto gods use the other three yield-heavy Foci (Fertility, Beauty, Crafts) so you should have had major issues in a lot of areas. And if you hadn't used any Priests, your Happiness would have been pretty close to zero (especially since the Shinto have no Beauty or Justice gods), although Uzume's Art focus adds some Happiness.

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One of the things that's concerned me from the start has been the balance for the Enlightenment. The idea was supposed to be that as time went on it'd become more and more desirable to do this, but the reverse was happening: as time went on and you added more gods and capped the levels of the existing ones, you'd eventually hit a point where you were MORE productive than a civ that didn't dump its gods, especially if you went with a "tall" empire. Originally, the level 1 effects of most Foci were benefit-neutral or worse; to gain +2 production from a Crafts god, you'd lose 1 gold and 1 food. I ditched that for AI/balance reasons long ago, so now there's the serious balance issue where even having a level 1 Shrine is enough to offset some of these inherent penalties; while I'm penalizing culture, happiness, and all four yields, having four or five gods can be enough to come out ahead.

So here's what I'm going to do.

Right now, there's a hidden policy (POLICY_MYTHOLOGY) that's given to every player at the start of the game. Once you complete the Enlightenment, the mod removes that policy, and gives you POLICY_BASE (the one used to manage the negative-happiness buildings in the future eras). What I'm going to do is create multiple POLICY_MYTHOLOGY variants, one per Era (Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Later), with progressively larger penalties. Every time you enter a new Era, the game will replace the old policy with a new, more severe one. So, while Ancient Era cities might only see a -5% Food penalty, a -10% Gold penalty, and a 5% increase in population unhappiness, a civ in the Renaissance might be hit by penalties four times as severe. At that point, you'd be hard-pressed to come out ahead; if your primary god is a Wealth god you'll still gain more Gold than you would otherwise, and the same for the other yield-heavy Foci, but no combination of minor gods would be enough to offset all of the other penalties.

This, obviously, will alter the balance of everything I've done so far. My hope is that it'll make the Ancient a little faster, the Medieval will feel slower, and anything beyond that will REALLY bog down, which'd encourage you to get Enlightened ASAP.

 

[dinobot386]

Problem with that is that if you beeline for a tech (such as iron working) without completing all the other techs in your era it puts you at disadvantage, this could also cripple the AI

 

[Spatzimaus]

Problem with that is that if you beeline for a tech (such as iron working) without completing all the other techs in your era it puts you at disadvantage, this could also cripple the AI

Yes and no. The entire point of a human beelining for a tech is that it gives a benefit you REALLY want, something so good that it's worth skipping a bunch of cheaper techs to get, so if anything this'd make the humans less likely to do things like that (and that's a good thing, IMO). You'd know that sure, Iron Working could give you swordsmen that much sooner, but doing that would hurt you in the long run as you'd be missing out on getting the religious techs at the right times, and building the Heroic Epic would be almost as good thanks to its free Hero.

As for the AI, a lot of those sorts of issues can be fixed through Flavor tweaks and increasing prerequisites. Right now, Iron Working requires Bronze Working, Masonry, and Mining. But what if, instead of Masonry, it required Mathematics (which itself requires Masonry)? That'd add Writing and Pottery to the prereq chain as well. I'm not saying I'm going to do that, but if the problems get too severe then it's a possibility. You'll note that my new techs (both in this mod and in the Ascension) are a lot more interconnected than the old ones, to avoid just this sort of issue.

There's another way to make it not quite so problematic: give bonuses as well as penalties. Monuments are -1 Culture, +1 (1/2/3) Favor in this mod. What if the Ancient Era has them at -2 Culture (meaning they ONLY added Favor, as they start with 2 culture), Classical or Medieval relax this to -1, and Renaissance or later are at +0? What if Colosseums (-1 Happy, +2/4/6 Favor in this mod) lose the Happiness penalty as time goes on, to help offset the increased Happiness penalties for the later eras? What if Great Improvements (Academy, Customs House, etc.) add 2 Favor instead of 1 once you reach the Medieval? Throw on enough of these sorts of things, and you can make it to where it's not as much of a no-brainer to avoid an era transition.

Regardless, I think the progressive penalties are needed, as it's just far too easy, currently, to reach a point where all of the penalties are completely neutralized by your Foci. At the other end, the current one-size-fits-all penalties (especially the Gold) are just extremely severe for starting cities that haven't improved the local terrain, which is why I've lowered them twice already. I don't want you to be completely crippled, money-wise, if you don't follow a Wealth god, and the same goes for the other yields.
What I really want is to have it feel like you're ahead of the curve in the Ancient/Classical, where your religious stuff is giving you a bunch of nice bonuses and the penalties are negligible. In the Medieval, you should feel like you're breaking even; your primary and secondary foci will reach level 4, which is great, but the penalties in areas outside those two foci will be piling up as well. By the Renaissance, I want it to feel like an uphill battle where the penalties are overwhelming you and you can't wait to finish the Enlightenment. That was always the design; the current implementation just doesn't do that adequately, especially the Renaissance part.

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Update:
I live in Pasadena. We had a massive windstorm two days ago, and my internet and cable TV are still out. (I'm posting this from work.) Besides preventing me from uploading anything, this has also prevented me from testing out the changes I've made to the mod (thanks, Steam!). I need a good day or two of testing time before I'll post the next version, so it won't be out tonight.

The next version already includes:
> Events will now trigger for AI players as well as the human; the AI will pick his choice based on his leader's Flavor biases. (This is what I need to test. It's a BIG change.)
> I've coded up all of the texts and effects for the five Low events and the six Mediums. The eight High events, which award heroes, may or may not make it into this version, depending on timing; if they do, the first pass will be to have the events just award the Greek pantheon's Heroes (Hercules, Theseus, etc.). I'm undecided as to whether I should just make these events generic, and just award the heroes appropriate to each pantheon, or whether the events themselves should be pantheon-dependent (in which case there might not be 8 for all pantheons. but it means a LOT more work).
> In the Base mod, I've deleted the Accuracy and Barrage ranged-attack promotions, and rolled their effects into the Shock and Drill line. I'll continue to see whether any other ranged promotions can be merged with their melee counterparts. The hope is that this reduces the total number of promotions low enough that you can load both Mythology and Ascension without reaching the cap.
> All "TBD"s are removed. That means I've added effects to the few buildings (like Air 2) that didn't have one before, and the seven undecided Myth units have been replaced with actual names.
> I've done a lot of rebalancing. Storms cities do less damage but reach further, that sort of thing.
> There will now be two types of Heroes, gained through different mechanisms (just like how there are Focus Myth units and Pantheon Myth units).
Minor Heroes will be given through the Heroic Epic (if you don't have any Heroes already) or a single, repeatable Moderate Event (an event which ONLY awards heroes, you can't choose not to get one); these guys are just like normal units (meaning their strength equals that of a typical unit of their tech level), except that they have the Hero promotion, either Shock 1 or Drill 1, and one randomly-selected other promotion. They'll start as a 10-XP level 2 unit, meaning they can't add a new promotion until they reach 30. They come in four styles (swordsman, spearman, horseman, archer) and you can have as many of each type as you want, assuming you keep getting that event. (I'm looking at adding other ways to award these.)
Major Heroes, on the other hand, are the named guys like Hercules or Achilles. They're ONLY available through High events (which can never repeat, and will never occur before the Classical Era), and even then only through a single choice out of the four on each event. They're considerably stronger than the norm (so if a swordsman as a strength of 11, Achilles has a 14 or 15), start with three pre-set promotions, and are level 3 units (30 XP at the start).
> God icons for the remaining three pantheons.

Not in the next version, but in the one after that:
> Each god will get a unique unit, something thematically similar to one of the four banned Foci for his pantheon. These units will be tech-limited (probably early Classical); they'll be comparable to a level 2.5ish unit, but will be more limited in number.
To do this, I'll shuffle a few other units around; the Lightning Bolt will move to Storms 3, I'll add a smaller bombardment unit at Storms 2 and a new flying unit at Air 3. The Ravens (Norse 1.5) will become Odin's unique unit, and I'll put a Troll-type unit in their pantheon slot. Similar changes will happen to a few other pantheon units, where the unit was too strongly associated with one god.
> Custom icons for the 21 Foci and 7 Pantheons, something simple I can use to identify each at a glance. These will also act as the unit flag icons for each unit type; Focus-linked Myth units will use the Focus' icon on their flag (which means the Zombie, Mummy, Vampire, and Phoenix will all share the "Death" icon), while Pantheon-linked Myth units will similarly share a design unique to their pantheon. I haven't decided on god-specific units; I might just recycle the unit flag symbols from the SMAC content for these. Minor Heroes will have four unique icons (one per type), while Major Heroes will all use the same icon (maybe the Great General's "star" icon, but more likely one of the SMAC icons).

So expect a new version Saturday night (if I get my Internet back tonight) or Sunday.

 

[Spatzimaus]

As if there wasn't enough to read in the above post, I've got a question I'd like feedback on (from the few people who actually read this thread), regarding the "High" events, the rare once-per-game events that award Major Heroes:

Should each Pantheon have different rules for Major Heroes?

As you may have noticed, I've been trying not to have too many bits of uniqueness. If two cities have the Fertility Foci at the same level, they'll get the same benefit; the choices of actual minor gods are more for aesthetics than balance. A big part of that is just the amount of content; you could go through a typical game and never see a single member of half of the unit types I've added as-is, so I wouldn't want to make it where your choices of minor gods added too many small details to keep track of.
I'm going away from that a bit, with the potential addition of a UU for each major god, and the pantheons already have Favor biases, but the question is whether I should go further and make each Pantheon access Hero units differently.

For instance, the Greeks will definitely have eight Heroes (Hercules, Achilles, etc.), but I could only really find a few obvious Sumerian Heroes (Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Utnapishtim); I'm sure I can find more if I try, but getting to 8 might be hard.
So, one thought was to have the 8 Greek Heroes all be barely stronger than normal units (say, 13 strength instead of 11) and use mundane promotions, while the Sumerians would only have four major heroes but they're more demigod-like, with 15-16 strength and one Myth-like special ability, and you're more likely to get their events. The Egyptians, in turn, might have NO Major Hero units, but instead would have more events that give the Anti-Myth promotions to mundane units and/or provide Minor Heroes.

In the AoM game, the Greeks could train a limited number of "named" heroes. Egyptians had no buildable Hero units, but their Priest units filled the Myth-killing role. The Norse had several mundane unit types (like the Hersir and Jarl) that had Myth-killing bonuses. So maybe in this mod the Norse would also not have many Major Heroes (if any), but would instead have buildable Hersir Pantheon units with Myth-killing bonuses.

So, what do people think? Up until now, I've tried to keep the pantheon/deity choices as generic as possible, just so that a player wouldn't say "well, I'd want to play X, but they don't get Y" as often. At the moment, Pantheons are distinguished by their three custom unit types, Favor multipliers, and which Foci are banned, none of which will have a huge impact on your gameplay. (Well, maybe Favor multipliers do.)
Would this sort of addition just lead to too much differentiation between the pantheons?

 

[ForzaFiori]

Wiki list of Sumerian Heros

Norse Heroes

A list of Hindu mythological characters

I can't find much on Shinto or Egyptian mythological heroes, and I don't know how much information is easily found from those links (all are wiki articles) but it might at give you some ideas of what to look for.

 

[dinobot386]

I think you should make it work like in AoM, for example the Egyptians could get 1 Pharoh as a major hero and several weak priest units as minor heroes.

As well as with the Hersir and Jarl for the Norse. You could have it work so that you could only have as many Jarls as there are cites in your empire, since they were sopposed to be like a king of a city (I may or may not have learned this from Skyrim)

Another Idea for a pantheon is what the Atlanteans had for hero units, just a promotion to normal units

Also, are you going to merge the promotions next version so it will become compatable with Asension?

 

[Spatzimaus]

ForzaFiori: I'm not saying that I can't find eight Sumerian epic heroes. The problem is finding eight, AND coming up with plausible 4-choice events involving them, AND getting the abilities to work out.. Other than Gilgamesh/Enkidu, most of them seem to have been pretty one-note stories. Adapa is offered immortality, turns it down... and that's pretty much it for him. Not the easiest thing to come up with four plausible outcomes for.

And again, it's a question of whether there SHOULD be eight; the eight Greek heroes are actually not that powerful. Odysseus does a ton of stuff over the course of his adventures, but he's still just a man (as are all of his sailors that die along the way); same goes for Jason and Theseus. Achilles had his semi-invulnerability, of course, but other than that he was just a man. A few, like Hercules, were technically demigods, but they did the same things the other heroes did (fight monsters, mainly). In game terms, these guys would have the same promotions as regular units, just more of them and a slightly higher base strength.

The Sumerian heroes were a bit more, well, "epic" than the Greeks. Dumuzid gets sent to hell, is chased around by demons, is the lover of Inanna (one of my four major gods, remember), and like pretty much EVERY Sumerian "hero" he was a warrior-king. Gilgamesh was not only a king, he was explicitly introduced as being 2/3rds god, 1/3rd mortal. (Figure out how THAT works in genetics!) So making them a bit more powerful than the Greek Heroes seems pretty in line with the lore; the thought was to make only 4 Sumerian heroes, but they'd be twice as far from the Minor Heroes as the Greeks' eight and would have actual Myth-like combat abilities. (A LOT of the Sumerian stories seemed to involve heroes striving for or being offered immortality.)

I think you should make it work like in AoM, for example the Egyptians could get 1 Pharoh as a major hero and several weak priest units as minor heroes.

I wasn't planning on adding Pharaohs, originally, and "Priests" are the specialists. But the basic idea is sound; in Egyptian lore, people with mystical abilities had more direct power over the gods than in most other mythologies, so this can be reflected in a few different ways.

My first instinct was simply to make the level 1.5 Pantheon unit for the Egyptians be a Myth-killing powerhouse. I've got three anti-Myth promotions, at +10%, +25%, and +50%; currently, the only units with the +50% are actual Heroes (while Myth-on-Myth type units like the Unicorn and Shade use the +25% or +10% version). So if the Egyptians had a Priest-type unit at level 1.5 (which you can build seven of, IIRC) with a ~9 strength but the +50% promotion, it would be capable of fighting pretty much everything up to the level 3s. In the short term this'd make them the best anti-Myth Pantheon on defense, although those Priests wouldn't be very good on offense.

Likewise, I could just drop the existing level 3.5 (the Ammit, I think) or move it to a god-linked unit (Ammit was most linked to Ma'at, who I don't use, but Ammit was basically Death-oriented so I could tie her to Osiris, and since Ma'at was basically a god of Balance, which happens to be one of the four banned Egyptian Foci, it even works with my god-linked idea), and put the one-of-a-kind Pharaoh as the level 3.5.

Note that no matter what I do, EVERY pantheon has access to what I refer to as "Minor Heroes", four strength 10-11 units with the +50% ability. You can't build them, but you automatically gain these through the Heroic Epic, the Justice focus, or a certain medium-level Event. Also, there are a dozen or so Myth units with anti-Myth bonuses of some kind, with the largest concentration in the Darkness focus. So no matter what I do, every pantheon will have several options to counter Myth units.

The question, then, is how each pantheon supplements these. I'd like it if each of the seven had a unique take on the subject, the question was whether people would be okay with that. I don't want someone to decide that the entire Shinto pantheon is untenable just because they don't like the particular mechanism it uses, or that the Sumerians are just too dependent on getting those rare High events.

As well as with the Hersir and Jarl for the Norse. You could have it work so that you could only have as many Jarls as there are cites in your empire, since they were sopposed to be like a king of a city (I may or may not have learned this from Skyrim)

A "Jarl" was just a nobleman (and was the root of the English title "Earl"). Basically, one step below the King, which is exactly how Skyrim uses it, except that the Norse title originally carried a connotation of a battle leader as well as I understand it. In most early armies the noblemen were always cavalry whenever possible, so AoM wasn't THAT far off, but they really shouldn't have been the sort of unit you can crank out twenty of. The Hersirs were a step below them, so it's more plausible to have a bunch, and I especially like AoM's take on those: they're not only an anti-Myth unit, they also build Favor faster than normal units do.

As for the implementation, I can't really make it flexible enough to stay at one per city. It's just a function of how the arrays are structured. Now, remember that I'm planning to give one unique unit to each major god, something typical of one of the four banned Foci for that pantheon. In the Norse case, I'm moving the Ravens over to Odin (filling the same niche as the Pegasus unit for Air, which is conveniently one of the four banned Norse foci), and the other two pantheon units (currently) are the Valkyrie and Nidhogg. I'd prefer not to link either of these to a single god, but if I were to drop the Valkyries to 1.5 to be more of a pure healer, and put the Hersir at 2.5, leaving the Nidhogg at 3.5 just because, then it'd work out fairly well. Or, put the Hersir at 1.5 and Valkyrie at 2.5, it's flexible.

Now, I think I'll put the Jarl as Thor's UU (a level 2.5ish mounted unit), as it seems like a pretty appropriate unit for him. So it'll still be there, just not for all Norse players. (Loki and Frigg really don't seem like the types that'd have human noblemen following them.)

Another Idea for a pantheon is what the Atlanteans had for hero units, just a promotion to normal units

I've toyed with this, but it's a very difficult idea to balance if the user has control over the upgrade process. Upgrading mundane units to hero status just favors the human player too much. In AoM it was especially broken; a Hero unit would cost 1 more support than a non-Hero, so you'd build a massive army of non-Heroes until you reached the unit cap. Then you'd upgrade all of your units at once, and go 100 units over the limit. I'm trying to avoid that sort of metagaming.

Now, I'm not saying I couldn't do something similar, by taking the decision out of the process. For instance, maybe followers of the Aztec pantheon get an anti-Myth promotion on ANY unit that wins a combat against a Myth unit, instead of having dedicated Heroes. (I can't make it be a selectable promotion without having it available to all pantheons.) So throwing hordes of weak Myth units (like Zombies) at an Aztec player is a really bad idea.
This has the added bonus that it meshes well with the culture-on-kill bonus of the Aztec civilization; I don't want to force people to use the historically appropriate pantheon, but the default IS for the AI to favor the linked pantheons with certain civs. This helps the AI; it'll already think that it's going to get a little something extra for winning a fight, so it'll be more likely to benefit for a system like this.

So hypothetically speaking, here are seven different ways of doing things:
Greek: 8 major heroes, a bit stronger than normal units. Each is awarded through a High event, one per Event, and each Event is a one-time thing that has three other powerful options so you might have anywhere from zero to three or four of these over the course of a game.
Sumerian: 4 major heroes, much stronger than normal units. Again, awarded through High events, but they're more linked; a single event might let you choose between Gilgamesh OR Enkidu, while a different one is between Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim. Because these events would really be designed to give you these units, there's less randomness compared to the Greeks.
Egyptian: No Major Heroes, but they get a Priest unit at 1.5 and a Pharaoh at 3.5, both with good anti-Myth abilities.
Norse: No Major Heroes, but they get a Hersir at 2.5 that has good anti-Myth abilities AND builds Favor faster than normal.
Hindu: A single extremely strong "Avatar" Major Hero unit with lots of divine abilities, one per player. Good for vertical growth empires that don't want a huge standing army... like India.
Aztec: No Major Heroes. Non-Myth units gain the weak anti-Myth promotion (+10%) if they kill any Myth unit. Each additional time they kill a Myth unit, there's a chance the promotion upgrades to the +25% version (or higher?), with the chance of upgrading depending on the power level of the Myth unit killed.
Shinto: No Major Heroes or promotions involved, but every Shinto unit (including Myth units, since the Shinto pantheon units include a couple "protector" sort of units) automatically deals 1 more damage against Myth units and takes 1 less damage from them. (Like the Aztec thing above, this'd mesh really well with the Japanese "Bushido" trait OR the Chinese "Art of War" trait, which happen to be two civs biased towards this pantheon.)

I can still play around with these, but I wouldn't want to make things TOO complex. Just one extra Hero-based mechanism to supplement the existing anti-Myth options.

Also, are you going to merge the promotions next version so it will become compatable with Asension?

I've already done it in my internal version. But no, it's still not compatible (I tried it); either deleting the promotions doesn't actually help towards the cap, or the 6 promotions I removed just weren't enough. I'm going to try figuring out exactly where the limit is by dropping custom promotions from the Ascension mod until it works correctly; there are a couple things that I can switch from being promotion-based to more explicit.
For instance, the +1 movement for the Planetary Transit System is handled through a custom promotion. I could, instead, just do a straight Lua start-of-turn edit to add an extra movement point.

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Update:
I'm posting this from work because my home Internet is still down. Among other things, this means I can't upload the files for the rest of you to test for the forseeable future. One side effect of having no connection is that Steam takes a good ~2 minutes to decide that it can't connect before it'll let me start playing Civ. This makes it very hard to iteratively test changes, as the reload bug means that exiting to the main menu won't always let me load the new version of a mod. Despite this, I've managed to make quite a bit of progress in the past couple days. To wit:

> The Events now apply correctly to the AI. The AI will pick which option to take based on two factors: the Leader's biases, and the number of available minor gods at each destination point. (That is, all other things being equal the AI will try to move towards the spots on the Mandala that'll give it the most options the next time it adds a god.)
And yes, it works.
> I've added the six medium events and five low events, and all of their effects. That's 44 outcomes I still have to test to make sure they actually do what they're advertised to do, but only 5 or 6 of them do anything unprecedented so I should have that done by tonight. (The problem was that without an internet connection at home, I couldn't look up Lua syntaxes in the wiki.)
I haven't created the High events yet, because those tie to the above discussion about Heroes.
> I've made a lot of UI improvements. I've got a few more planned, but it should be a lot more user-friendly now. For instance, when you click on a Focus and it lists the four building levels, it now color-codes the levels based on what you can reach at the current technology. For instance, if you click on your Primary focus and at your current tech level you can reach level 3 in the capital but only level 2 in non-capital cities, then it'll color levels 1 and 2 green (any city can reach), level 3 will be blue (only some cities can reach), and level 4 will be red (can't reach). Much easier to keep track of bonuses this way.
> I've added a game option in the start menu that lets you make Events much more likely to occur. At the moment it's a x2 multiplier, but I might change that even higher. It's sort of like the "Raging Barbarians" option; I could also add a "No Events" option, but I really don't want to. (Seriously, would anyone be playing this mod and NOT want the Events?)

 

[Spatzimaus]

One small addition:

I do have large lists of names of minor heroes from various lore. The idea would be that the Minor Heroes (which are, powerwise, the same as mundane swordsmen/horsemen/etc and just have a couple extra promotions) would be like Great People, where they get named automatically to something appropriate to your pantheon (through a Lua function, not the XML names table). So keep suggesting names for Heroes, even for the pantheons that aren't going to have what I call "Major Heroes" (the one-of-a-kind guys).

 

[ForzaFiori]

What type of major events will the civs without major heroes get, if any?

 

[Spatzimaus]

What type of major events will the civs without major heroes get, if any?

Everyone will still get the "High" events. The way it's structured, the five Low events have an average of a 2% chance of happening, and the six Medium events each have a 1%, so they total 16%. The eight High events for the Greeks average a 0.5% chance per, bringing the total to 20%. Since there's a 5-turn lockout for any event, that means you'll average one Event per ~10 turns. Actually, in practice you'll average closer to 12 turns per, since the High events can't trigger until the Classical, every Low event locks itself out for 20 turns and every Medium locks itself out for 40, and once you get a High event you can never get the same one again. The point is, I can tweak the percentages as necessary to make sure each Pantheon's High Events total 4%, so I'm not absolutely limited to having 8 for each pantheon if I start coming up short on content.

As to what the other Pantheons get, it's not that difficult. The eight Greek events each award a named Hero as one of the four outcomes, but the other three choices aren't actually Hero-related. For instance, let's consider Odysseus; a hypothetical High Event for him would be something like:

"A ship lands on your shores, led by a lost nobleman returning from a distant war. Do you:
(Lawful) Give him directions home and try to establish trade relations: Your capital now gains +4 gold per turn until the Enlightenment.
(Chaotic) Arrest him and his men, and interrogate them for military secrets: all non-Myth military units immediately gain +10 XP
(Material) Offer him lavish estates to stay as an advisor and General: gain the Odysseus Hero unit
(Ephemeral) Execute the foreigner as an offering to your gods: gain 500 global Favor"

So for the non-Greek Events, I only really need to come up with a fourth comparable outcome, and a story that ties them all together. It's the amounts that matter; a High Event is generally assumed to award one of the following (or something comparable):
> a permanent gain of 4 of a yield per turn in one city (usually your capital) or +1 in all current cities, including after the Enlightenment. (The Medium Events that add yields like this add +2 AND end at the Enlightenment.) Awarding Happiness cuts this in half, to +2.
> an immediate award of 250 of a yield (or 500 of a half-yield, like global/local Favor or global/local Culture). Lots of times I split it, to where you get half in one yield and half in another. Divide the amount by 5 if it applies per city.
> a level 3.5 Myth unit, or two level 2.5s. A level 4 (or two level 3s) can be awarded if there's some additional cost, like "spend 200 Gold to get a Dragon".
> a free Great Person, Free Tech, or Free Policy. And yes, these can often be worth way more than the other options, so I'm probably going to put extra costs on them as well. ("Spend 200 global Favor to get a Great General" sort of things.)
> a Greek-level Major Hero. (The Sumerians will need to be like the level 4s, with an extra cost, like "a permanent -1 Happiness in your empire to recruit Gilgamesh", which makes a lot more sense if you know what "droit de seigneur" means.)
> a free mid-level Promotion or +10XP to all non-Myth units, less if you include the Myth units. (By "mid-level" I mean not specialized stuff like Amphibious or Charge or Volley or weak promotions like the +10% anti-Myth one or Spontaneous Healing, but more generally useful ones like Drill, Shock, the +25% anti-Myth one, or Regeneration.)

That sort of thing. So as I come up with events, I just pick something appropriate to each choice. It won't be hard to do something like this for every pantheon, whether or not they have Major Hero units, because I've got plenty of other options.