Of course I can provide save files, .biq, the patched Civ3Conquests.exe, and the Windows crash report file if that would help. Just tell me where to post/send the files.
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I've never had a crash with Conquests before, and I've been playing it on XP for many years now. But of course it could be just a coincidence that this crash is happening the first time I tried C3X.
Please post the save file. By far the easiest way to figure out what's causing a crash is to run the game with a debugger attached then let it crash and inspect what it was doing when that happened. You can post it in this thread or PM it to me if you prefer. Honestly, this crash is probably caused by C3X, if only because I've already fixed the well known crashes in the base game.
If I turn up the workable tiles will the AI alter how they place cities?
The city work radius doesn't, or at least it isn't supposed to, affect how the AI places its cities. I've actually gone back and forth on this. At first, expanding the work radius caused the AI to spread its cities out because I patched every work area loop in the game, and that included some logic in the AI's city location evaluator that steered it away from locations with overlapping work areas. However, that caused the AI to spread its cities out too much in my opinion and in the end I decided it made more sense for the work radius not to be tangled with AI city placement. If you want the AI to spread its cities out, you can force it to do so by increasing the minimum_city_separation setting. Of course, that applies to any human players too. I've been thinking of adding a config option that controls how densely the AI tends to found cities, mostly because I don't think it founds densely enough under the standard rules, but that's not easy to do.
If I limit the number of units per tile including in cities will the AI stack some of its defenders outside of its cities to keep them safe?
(Would be cool if the AI learned how to use fortress and barricades as well, but I have never seen that at all)
Both of those things would require relatively elaborate changes to the unit AI.
Also as a separate request could you pretty please create a setting that adjusts how much the AI spreads our or how fast. The way my family likes to play it is incredibly annoying that the AI gobbles up all the land.
I'm not sure what would be the best way to do this. There are no knobs inside the AI that control how quickly it expands other than its preference for producing settlers. Negative perfume could reduce that preference but could also backfire by pushing settlers below other build options in all cases. Probably the simplest solution is to apply temporary negative perfume to settlers for AI players each time they found a city. That way they'd have a "cooling off" period where they're discourages from training settlers after founding a city. That would be easy to implement.
The mod currently has a building_prereqs_for_units as a strict rule. Is it possible to soften it so that an improvement changes production by a variable percentage for the listed units (similar to Civ 4)?
This is unfortunately pretty awkward. What you're asking for would be very exploitable since players can switch production midway. One way to solve that would be to track how many bonus shields have been accumulated on the current build and remove them if the player switches to something else. Another way would be to follow what the base game already does with trait bonuses, which is to reduce the cost of a build instead of granting bonus shields. The issue with doing that is that unit and building costs are internally properties of the player not the city. I.e., the function to determine the cost of something is given a building or unit ID and a player, and it does not know which city the build might be for. I'd have to pass that information in through a side channel, which is possible but it's an annoyingly large amount of work.
