A) Things seem to come at funny times. I've had macemen FOREVER but longbowmen (or any real defensive unit other than archers) are nowhere in sight. As a result, all I can do is spam macemen, which is a bit boring. Same thing with pikemen and other units....seems like they could be bunched together a bit better
Crossbows work relatively well as city defenders and very well as field defenders, and are probably faster to get to than Macemen.
Longbows, and Pikemen especially, are where they are for historical accuracy, and, well, the progression seems fine to me; Crossbows can hold Mounted units til you get to Pikes, which is closer to when Cuirassiers (and eventually Cavalry if you're slow to Riflemen) start showing up, ie where you need more anti-Mounted power.
(There was a discussion a long time ago on this site, like 3-4 years ago, where a guy who sounded like he knew a lot about ancient and medieval history was arguing for various things, and some of my original design was partially based on that discussion.)
B) At times there is nothing to do but build military units (and lots of them). Either slower build times (in general) or more bulidings would solve this....obviously the former would be an easier fix.
I did actually increase building build costs in v3.6 with the tweaked gamespeed settings, at least on Eternal. They do build a bit faster than in vanilla but that was b/c we found them too costly originally heh. In my own personal experience, in the few rare cases I do run out of buildings I want to build, and I don't badly need more military units, workers or settlers, I usually put the cities in Build Gold or Build Research mode and do more research. That's what those have always been there for.
That is not to say building build costs and tech research costs are set in stone; I'm always willing to adjust things. I'm just not sure anything needs to be done here. I'll keep an eye on it.
C) Found hemp, it adds +1 health. Is there any way to make it add hammers or gold (or both!) instead of health (since its importance in trade and industry far outweighs its nutritional benefits). Maybe it could add a bonus to ship-building?
Resources only support adding happiness, health, doubling production of certain buildings, and being required to build certain units. That's all that vanilla supports anyway. There are arguments like this that can be made for a number of resources, though I admit Hemp is probably the most interesting case. Custom resource abilities would take a bit of work to add and it's just not a priority for a single case like this, sorry.
Why does standing next to a river make you lose hit-points? Should you heal FASTER next to a river?
Because rivers trigger Flood Plains on both Deserts and Plains now, and Flood Plains have a damage effect. (Rivers on Grassland should be fine.
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I suppose I could remove the tile damage on Plains Flood Plains, but not without switching to a different FeatureType which I was trying to avoid doing, heh. Unless I hardcode it. But again, I'm not sure I should.
