Unfortunately, possibly not enough. Vanilla has 147 promotions, leaving room for 53 before the cap.
Base adds 20 promotions, but now removes six. So that's 161 promotions right now, which leaves room for 39. The Empires mod adds no promotions, yet, although in the long term I'm going to need it to.
The Mythology mod has 16 promotions for the Focus-specific effects, and another 17 for special abilities like Disease or Trample. So at the moment, I'm 6 shy of the limit in Mythology games; since the DLCs add four or five, I'm pretty much right at the cap now; if I was willing to say that Mythology and Ascension would never be compatible, I could just be done with it.
The Ascension mod has 21 additional promotions. Ascension+Base is well below the cap, so the only problems come when combining with Mythology.
So to make the full mod set fully compatible, I need to delete about twenty promotions. I've got a few options:
1> There are more ranged-based promotions that can be merged with their melee counterparts. As in, remove Blitz and have melee units take Logistics, or vice versa.
2> Reducing the number of unit types that can gain certain abilities. For instance, in the Ascension mod I had Soporific Pods and Soporific Bombs. Pods depended on the four melee and ranged promotions, Bombs on the naval/bomber and fighter lines. I removed the ranged promotions, so if I'm willing to say that fighter units can't ever get this bonus, I can reduce the Ascension number by 1 with minimal impact. Likewise, I can merge the Repair promotion with the Air Repair one, as long as I'm willing to drop Fighters from the list.
3> In the core game, there are a few promotions that do the same thing. PROMOTION_HOVERING_UNIT and PROMOTION_CAN_MOVE_IMPASSABLE do exactly the same thing, and since neither of them is selectable through XP, there's literally nothing to be gained by having both in the database. Likewise, helicopters get duplicates of quite a few promotions, just so that they WON'T get Shock or Drill; if I change them to use the same promotions as everyone else, then I can remove quite a few of the helicopter-specific ones. (And frankly, I'd consider that regardless, because it sucks that the only options for helicopters are mobility and anti-armor).
4> There are a bunch of inherent promotion (EXTRA_MOVES_1, EXTRA_SIGHT_1, etc.) many of which aren't being used by any units. Removing these would work, right up until the devs (or some other mod) add a unit that DOES need that particular one.
5> In the Mythology mod, I have three promotions (Venom, Disease, Stun) that in turn spawn three "effect" promotions (Poisoned, Diseased, Stunned). I could, in theory, replace the three effects with purely Lua-driven functions, using the saved mod data structures to apply the effects instead of just checking for the presence of the promotions. I don't WANT to, but I could do it if need be.
Similarly, I can replace a couple Ascension wonder effect promotions (like the Planetary Transit System) with Lua effects.
But that's pretty much it, and I don't think I can gain 20 through those methods. Beyond that, you're cutting into content. Now, maybe that's okay (do Fighter units really NEED Dogfighting 3 and Interception 3, or could I just cap those lines at rank 2?), but it's something I won't do lightly. And it's a serious question: is it worth doing cuts to the core game that affect gameplay, solely for people who want to combine two content mods that are basically mutually exclusive by concept in the first place?
So I'm going to make all of the "easy" cuts that I can, and then we'll see where we are on numbers. If I can get within ten of the cap through those easy methods, then I'll be willing to do harder stuff. Otherwise, I'll leave the two as being incompatible for now, and hope the cap gets raised in the future; the reason being, the Empires mod is going to need at least a handful of espionage-type promotions once I get around to that, so if after the cuts I'm still right up against the limit then it doesn't really help in the long term.
