After a long break I gave this mod another go!
I played two games, in the first one I played on a world map with 7 civs, and I used Hotseat to play three of them.
Immortal difficulty, Marathon Speed, developing leaders, complex traits. I played until end of Medieval so far.
The other game was on raxos "It's small world" on deity, marathon speed, also complex traits and developing leaders. I know this map with all the resources and other things is not "realistic", but I think my observations are not strictly related to it and quite representative.
In the Latter game I have: Creative, Industrial, Philosophic, Financial, Innovative, Pacifist and Timid, all on Level 1.
Please note that I play on Version 40.1.2611 build 219 with no chance to update right now.
Civics.
As I said before, I am somewhat unhappy with the current ones. They are just a ladder, and the only real decision point is WHEN to change, rather than if changing itself makes sense.
For example, Vassalage is better than Pacifism, EVEN if you play highly peacefully - like being alone on a continent.
State Church also gives higher military production bonus, compared to Inquisitorial. And while Inquisitorial gives less science than the others available, it still is not as big a hit as you would think it should have, based on the real world inquisition.
In short, Civics lack their specific flavour. One guy working on the civics long long ago used this design philosophy, which I liked a lot: The first two civics of each set were just "ladder", so a clear improvement from the previous civic. After that, new civics were fulfilling a niche.
Maybe Monarchy is very good for large, expanding empires ("wide" empires), but makes "tall" empires (few cities with lots of population) disadvantage. Republic might give huge benefits to culture and science, but costs a lot of gold. Despotism might give a penalty to Research, but helps reducing crime. Just as examples. City states reduced the costs for number of cities a lot, while also giving less gold income. Pacifism boosted great people, while severely reducing military production. You get the idea.
Update: Playing further (WW1 now), I noticed that newer Civics are generally not worth it, often strictly worse than previsous ones. When Switching from Guilds to Regulated (Economic Civics), I went from +60k to +2k and have no idea why.
What I really like is that while some later civics are a tad better than the previous ones, I kept the previous ones because of the building (like Squatter Camps), until the Building obsoletes before switching. This is a really nice design / strategic element; please keep it!
UI
Absolutely love the faster Pedia! Now I use it much more often!
A few things on my wish list would be:
- Make the domestic advisor a bit more useful. Some icons are not visible at all, and for hammers above 3 digits, you can't really see them.
- A way to toggle owned plots (in city radius), that are not improved yet
- A way to show only resources, that are within your territory, but not connected yet
- Creating a custom "ban" and "preferred" building list for cities. Some buildings, you really only build once (like most factories), and some players avoid certain buildings altogether. Preferred buildings would be key buildings, that are sometimes within a long building chain. Yes, you can make build lists and save them, but sometimes you just want to have a list with all buildings that your city builds first.
Happiness and Healthiness
I play with city limits on, which give the earlier civics a
malus if you have more cities than they "allow". I freaking love this mechanic; it makes the earlier game a real challenge as expansion can only work well if you keep your people happy. Extremely fun! ... And then you hit Theology and you don't need that anymore and Happiness becomes a non-issue. Maybe it gets relevant again later in the game, but at least from Theology to the early renaissance, it doesn't matter anymore. Might be that with long wars and war weariness this changes, but I also never ran into issues with this.
Unhealthiness, on the other hand, never played a role. Maybe, depending on Agricultural Civics, a strong Sick-face malus could be introduced per pop. Like "With the first civic: +5 sick faces per pop" "With 2nd Civic, +4 Sick faces per pop over 3 pop" Something like this. Because right now, I completely ignored healthiness and spammed all the sick face generating buildings.
Edit: Still not an issue at all.
Properties
- Flammability was a little bit of juggling early on, but then stopped around mid ancient. Occasionally burn down of buildings (every few 100 turns), and I keep an eye on it, not to build every smelter or every smith in every city. Quite well balanced, but stuff like fire brigades etc are not really worth building. Could be a tad higher, but very good overall.
BTW, what about forest fires? They happen quite often, are they somewhat related to this property?
- Crime is very well balanced, I have to take care what I build and until early medival era, I had to avoid growth of my cities (or build law enforcement). Now it is still slightly negative in my biggest (22 pop) city. Could be a minuscule higher, given that I play on such a high difficulty.
- Education: I never really had to fight for it, even in my biggest cities, it is always as high as I need for the highest possible Education benefit building. Not sure if you can even manage to get it negative even if you wanted to.
- Pollution: WAY too low. Never been an issue. Even when spamming buildings that introduce high amounts of pollution. There was this one guy once on the forum who wanted to rework it, but then left. He wanted to make water pollution a big topic in the medival times, as it was. Population should be the main source of pollution, especially Water, and this can be severely increased. Up to a point, where you are forced to avoid growth of your cities above 10, 15 or 20, or deal with the consequences. At least on higher difficulties. Pollution is NOT a problem that only appeared in the industrial age.
- Disease: The first two eras were a bit of a juggling, but then not anymore. In my biggest cities (22 pop), I have like -50 crime an -300 Disease. And still I can build buildings there that would give in total something like -50 disease per turn.
Edit: The Biggest city in the end of Renaissance was 31 (I just let them grow now) and I have 4800 Education. Flammability is 15, Disease -650 (can further build buildings worth of -85/turn) and Crime -85. Crime basically was completely annihilated with Criminology. I guess from Pop 30 or so, if you can consider a city "big", crime per pop should go up. So lets say, from Pop 1 to 30 you have 5 crime per pop, from 31 to 50 you have 10 crime per pop etc. This could of course be smoothed out. Pollution was no issue at all at this time.
I expected pollution to go skyrocket during the industrial revolution. Nope. It rarely went above 0. I took care where to build factories etc, but still... this was WAY too easy. Maybe consider this: Make factories more worthwhile to build (+more hammers, more gold (from the taxes of the employees) but increase the pollution. This can be done gradually, as you can have "+5 Pollution when XY (like Industrialism) is known". Stateparks and preserves are a bit too overpowered as well. And I dislike that they all give the same Bonus to air AND water pollution. Cars are another major factor for air pollution and I think with cars, your cities should generate a lot more air pollution per pop.
Other observations:
- Calligraphy School and Tapestry Workshop both require 13 Pop. I think at least the latter should be reduced to 6 pop, as it is quite an early building.
- Toll House and Costum Office replace each other, I think this is an oversight.
- Copernicus Observatory requires books (why?), but not printing press. Ok, I just realised you could technically trade them.
However, Pyramids require sculpture, which requires, the workshop, which requires the Trading post, which requires Trade. This is quite an annoying, hidden prereq and could be made more obvious IMO.
- The Beacon (Great Barrier Reef) continues to show "40 turns till upgrade to Lighthouse (Great Barrier Reef), but stays at 40 turns. Yes, it is worked all the time and yes, I do have Engineering researched. Edit: Apparantly my ships also can't build it, if it even exists...
- Entertainers can't build dances. I just saw that a building called "Fertility Festival", that requires 3 Fertility Dances - that I now can't build anymore I guess. The wonder and the dances obsolete only at Womans Suffrage, so quite a while down the road.
- Corporations could need a rework. +10 Food per resource from Mobby Meat is quite OP, compared to others. And Corporations can give a meaning to produced goods from factories, in turn increase the Air Pollution (see above). A corporation that gives +5 hammers per XY Ingot would be a cool way to make use of more than 1 smelter nation wide.
- Group Wonders are nice, but maybe could be scaled down by number of opponents. If everybody can build a financial elite uni, there is no competition.
- Art Gallery, National Railroad Musem, National Aircraft Musem can have the bonus from Techs removed, that were a prereq anyways. The latter two buildings can quite a Buff as they are weak for a national wonder.
- Spice Voyage does not obsolete ever, which feels odd.
- Sheriffs Office gives -15 Crime. It replaces both Guard Station (-25 Crime) AND Bailiweck (-7 Crime).
- Cliff Dwelling (Housing) is replaced at High Rises. That's quite late, isn't it?
- Factories, Power plants, Smelters... They could use some modifications by techs, like first increasing Pollution and Flamability, and later reducing it. Also modification to gold with techs would be feasble.
- Buildings like discount store are not worth building. If a building costs 1000 hammers, it would need to generate at least 500 Gold or Science over it's lifetime to outmatch the "Wealth" type buildings. And there you get it directly.
- Oil Refinery / Derrick do not produce any Air Pollution or Flammability?!
- Rail Station produces Air Pollution, this should be gone when you have electric railroads.
- Natural Gas Power Plant generates gold, while other power plants cost gold
- Mega Farm with +50% Food is very OP
- Garrison replaces Ekal Masharti, while Military Base (the Upgrade of Garrison) does not. Looks like an oversight, as Ekal also does not obsolete.
- Routes are too cheap. There is a reason why Madrid isn't connected to Shanghai by Bullet Train - they are huge, expensive projects!
- Schools, College etc give + science with Pencils etc. This can be changed to + Education with those Resources. I believe there is a tag for this now.
- Orchestion Theater (Clockpunk) also requires Realism. I think it should come way earlier, if it is a Clockpunk tech.
- The original "Laboratory" building should be considered to be removed. What does it represent? We have labs for pretty much every field of science now.
- Heavy Water Production Plant is a National Wonder. Really don't see why you couldn't build more. Deuterium gets really useful for Fusion and in science in general - it is used to mark molecules in chemical or biochemical experiments.
I have savegames from the hotseat game and from Raxos Map. Also, I have a savegame on raxos map at the beginning of Renaissance, Industrial and Atomic Age, if you are interested in it. Not sure if I can upload, because I am on a ship right now and the internet is potatoes.
Trivia note, Every Modder that attempted to balance Civics, with the exception of StrategyOnly, eventually gave up and left the forum. Think about that for a moment. 
