Hey guys! I've been back for a while, lurking, playtesting, getting caught up on all that's happened in my absence.
Let me just say that you've all done a hell of an amazing job here. I think there's a lot of little balance issues and tweaks but the AI is working great, the game is running smoothly (I'm not playing off the SVN but as straight v17 at the moment - will get on the SVN soon, possibly even this weekend), the new terrains (WOW!) are just the coolest, units have a pretty nice interplay, there's an expansive feeling of opening up eras within eras here (the wild west stuff is adding a tremendously neat new feel for that timezone) and the ideas just keep spilling in. All in all, while the mod has long struggled for a sense of strategic balance, its definately starting to zero in now.
But there's still a lot of work to be done and I'm terribly sorry I had to back away for a bit myself. RL and other obligations have made it tought to keep up here. But I should be finding a bit more time for focus in this arena so I figure I'll start by getting back primarily to some building balance issues - look for comments there as I throw down some game theory on some of the commerce balance issues and how we can best address them before I just start going to town testing out new edits.
Anyhow, I'll be commenting on a lot, most in fact, of the issues in these nice new threads in our amazingly helpful subforum (wow we really needed this and it sooooo shows! Great job getting the mods to finally manifest one for us SO!) And all in all I'll be continuing playtesting as I have a great and so far stable game going with my wife on a LAN game.
We've made it into the late Manifest Destiny Era as a team on Monarch level. We have two other civs that keep challenging any form of technological supremacy we strive for that have managed to keep us at bay. (This is pretty impressive for the ai given how well we usually exploit the game benefits.) We've experienced a lot of frustrations but most were of the positive variety (things that just made the decision making process a bit more difficult in most cases.) Anyhow, more commentary to come across various pages in our sub-forum.
But yeah, thank you all for the hard work and dedication you've given this mod... its rapidly becoming unchallengeable as the BEST and most comprehensive mod EVER!