Glad you're enjoying the mod, dusters. The combination of the three population requirement for nomads and the fact you can't automatically irrigate does make the population boom a little trickier...but don't forget that it's the same for your computer opponents! There are some nasty neighbours knocking about, such as the Huns, so you need to decide what your priorities are. I wanted to make sure that this mod involved a number of choices and not giving much automatically at the start does make your planning more important.
Egypt are definately a tough foe...they are the builders of Anno Domini, and once they've established themselves, they're difficult to overpower. Strike early if they're next door, is my advice.
For my part, I've been playing as the Marcomanni in "A different dawn" and noticed a little error....their ability to be able to irrigate without fresh water wasn't switched on. It was easy enough to amend this, so there's an updated BIQ in the first post and the patch has also been updated.
There are also seven new images on the first page...I think there's plenty there now to attract some interest.
The next stage for me is to finalise the two BIQs we have. There's a need for some 'pedia updates, which I will sort out. However, I was also thinking about ditching the smelter, as I'm finding building barracks in era one is hardly worth it. There will be a couple of cosmetic changes I'd like to make to how I've set things up in the BIQ which won't alter gameplay, but will make it a little easier for me to add some other ideas I have for other BIQs. There are some new units, principly by Sandris, which have come out recently, so I'll update the units roster.
There are a couple of ideas I have for other BIQs that I would like to work on to make the mod more varied and interesting. The first is "Anno Domini: A new world" in which some MesoAmerican civs are added. This is one of the reasons I was looking at making the cosmetic changes with the BIQ, so that there was no horsemanship-type techs in their tech tree. The MesoAmericans would take full advantage of RedAlerts recent buildings of course; my idea is that they won't have mounted units in the first three eras (as a disadvantage) but their units will all come with stealth, their happiness buildings will come maintainance-free and can culture-boost with sacrificing enslaved units. Naturally, they will not be able to win the "New World" victory that European civs can win nor the "Silk Road" victory. One of the fourth era techs could be something like "European contact" where mounted troops finally come in for them. The other idea I have, but it will take a lot of research methinks, is "Anno Domini: Obscurities," where the civs to select from are not as well known as the usually-played civs. I don't know how popular this would be and would need to equate the hours of toil against how well it would be received.
What I think I'll do then is update the various pedia things, take out smelting, introduce the MesoAmericans plus anything else I've mentioned. However, I thought that rather than doing patches, updates, new files to add to old ones, I'd actually re-upload the whole lot so that it's all in one download - Classic, Different Dawn and New World. It does mean people have to download the whole thing again, but I'm sure that it's better than having about eight different files to piece together.
So, what do you think?
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I noticed that I can build spearman-nomad-axeman-nomad instead of nomad-nomad and it went better. Also I set up a worker factory in 2nd or 3rd city for better growth.
