Very good feedback, thank you ^.^
As a veteran modder myself I am trying to give the kind of feedback I like to receive.
I'm the author of the well-received Frozen patchset for CK2's HIP (significant AI improvements without cheating, tons of bugfixes), contributed to CK3's Sinews of War, and I also made some now-outdated AI mods for eu4 (improved economic decision-making) and hoi4 (dynamic AI diplomacy).
Ah, while I was reading the XML I automatically interpreted the <div> tags like they were HTML, not arithmetic division
. It makes sense now. My bad.
It doesn't give flammability
One builds Burial Tradition: Fire not for the meager +1 culture, but as a prereq for BUILDING_FUNERAL_PYRE , which gives a bit of flammability. To reiterate, I think it makes sense that it increases flammability; I just wish it had somewhat better positives compared to the other burial traditions to compensate for that downside.
maybe some bodies aren't burned
Maybe some swordsmen don't have swords.
Based on your digging into the xml files, you may be interested in trying out the
SVN build if you're still playing more, or checking out the discord
My earlier feedback was based on v43 proper. I think most of what I mentioned there is still relevant. I have now started a game with the SVN build on Deity after making some of the easier-to-implement XML adjustments to my local copy of the mod. Some more feedback I have based on the latest SVN-11545 build:
One thing that jumps out to me playing with Equilibrium Culture and Realistic Culture Spread both enabled is that (sometimes?) after civs go into Anarchy the borders around their cities are reduced to zero radius. This disables a ton of buildings, and when the anarchy ends some do not seem to be re-enabled as soon as they should. Recalculating via CTRL+SHIFT+T fixes it (not the borders, but the wrongly disabled buildings), but obviously it is not ideal to have to recalculate every few turns.
Conquering a city also makes the original owner's borders around it disappear on the next turn
if no other cities' influence reaches those tiles (and with both Equilibrium Culture and RCS, city borders are much much smaller, so this is often the case). Not sure if this is intended - this makes holding most newly conquered cities extremely easy with no fear of flipping back even while using that option.
Probably most of you who have been playing for years are used to it by now, but most of the in-game references to "visibility" should really say "vision". This is an important difference that can mislead English speakers that are new to the mod. "Visibility" refers to how easily you can be seen: think of a bright reflective "visibility vest" that allows others to see you clearly even in dim light. So a "+1 Visibility range" definitely sounds like something you would
not want for your stealthy scouts. What this should say is "+1 Vision range".
"Vision" is how well you see (e.g. binoculars). "Visibility" is how well others see you (e.g. bright clothes).
If a single unit attacks an enemy stack on a neighboring tile and successfully kills one enemy unit but cannot enter the tile due to other enemy military units remaining their from the stack, there will be a queued order for the now-exhausted unit to keep trying to move onto the same tile occupied by enemy units next turn. This is often suicidal, and having to make sure to cancel such orders can be irritating. It would be nicer and more intuitive if a unit that attacked a neighboring tile but could not move onto it for whatever reason simply remained on its original tile without any orders for the future. Note that this issue only occurs with a single unit attacking, not when a whole stack is selected.
Inside the City Screen, when Citizen Automation and Emphasize
Research are both turned on, it auto-picks Engineers over Scientists as specialists when both are available (e.g. with the Caste System civic). There seems to be a big bias for hammer-producing specialists with Emphasize Production
off and even while trying to emphasize other output.
AI units, including animals, often end up maintaining Self-Heal buildups even while at full health. This is most often seen with melee units that have no other more useful buildups to auto-pick. Self-Heal has a malus to strength, which makes sense as a trade-off, but as a result some full-health units fight with lowered strength in the hands of the AI due to its poor buildup choice. I suggest having all AI-controlled units dismiss their Self-Heal buildup if they are already at full health at the start of their turn.
Some random events that are supposed to grant promotions seem to be bugged: the Great Hunter promotion, when granted by an event, seems to only be applied after saving and reloading the game (observed this twice), while the random event whose description states that my Axemen were promoted to "Shock I" never actually applied even after saving/reloading and CTRL+SHIFT+T recalculations (observed once).
With the Dynamic Civ Names option, during Anarchy, civ names switch back-and-forth every turn between two different variants (Provisional Authority vs Provisional Government). If the civ already has an Anarchy-related name, just leave it like that until the end of the Anarchy.
It would be nice to have alerts for when rival civs enter and exit Anarchy.
The Barringer Crater natural wonder in the city vicinity should satisfy the "crater in vicinity" requirement of the Grand Earth Festival.
The Grand Sky Festival can be built in almost any city because of how common hills are on most maps. This is in contrast to all other Festivals that have stricter requirements about their locations. I suggest requiring a Peak in the city vicinity for the Grand Sky Festival and not accepting mere hills as a substitute. This would bring it in line with the other festivals and make for more interesting trade-offs and decisions, as the location it can be built may not be the most strategically convenient one.
With the Dynamic XP option, Hunters that tend get massive bonuses against animals are extremely slow to level by hunting animals (because the combat is considered too easy). Earning less XP for easier combats makes sense, but hunters should still be able to gain more than 0.01 XP by hunting. Potential ways to address this subtly without upsetting the overall balance: slightly increase the XP floor (minimum XP earned by winning a combat) while using Dynamic XP option (to something like 0.10 or 0.20, still much lower than the vanilla 1.00), or make the XP calculations depend on the raw unmodified strengths of the combatants (so hunters that get a 500%+ bonus against animals still can earn XP by defeating something like a lion).
The Stone resource is used to represent two different things: (1) large quantities of high quality stone as a building material vs (2) having any little pebbles around at all. Based on (1), Stone is a requirement for many building many Prehistoric/Ancient wonders like the Stonehenge and should be relatively rare. Based on (2), Stone is a requirement for building very basic things like Counting Stones and Quern, and should be extremely common. The issue is that (2) should be much more widely available than (1): coastal or riverside cities should generally have no problem finding some pebbles, without necessarily having access to great building material for massive projects. As an example of the issues this can cause, my civilization that is adept at metalsmithing cannot produce flour due to lacking any "Stone", despite having 8 coastal cities built next to rivers with hills nearby. A nice approach to solve this I think would be to treat Stone the same way Clay is already treated by the mod: there is a difference between the commonly available but less powerful "Clay" resource and the much more rare resource used in the construction of more sophisticated projects called "Fine Clay". I suggest similarly differentiating "Pebbles" (common like "Clay") from "Stone" (rare, high quality like "Fine Clay").
It seems weird for the Tattooer specifically to be the biggest source of non-wonder culture during the early game. Dye is a requirement so it always gains the +3 extra culture when buildable, meaning it produces 5x as much culture as the Hatter, for comparison. The Tattooer is already nice because it provides its own unique promotion to troops, so it also being an unreasonably great source of culture seems a bit too much.
During the Classical Era, it feels weird for the Calligraphy School to be such an excellent source of Science specifically (after things like Drama and Poetry are researched). It makes sense that it should provide a lot of culture, but I would suggest that it grants significantly less science than culture.
The Progressive Complex Trait seems overtuned. The ability to have multiple religions function fully despite the Religious Disabling option is both fun and a powerful advantage. The issue, however, is that this major game-changing benefit is then paired with a bunch of other great bonuses, which push Progressive noticeably above other beneficial traits. An effect that is game-changing, in that you can plan your entire strategy around acquiring as many religions as possible while going Progressive, is already much more desirable than traits that just give +5% to this or that. I would suggest keeping the interesting main effect of Progressive and simply toning down its numerical bonuses while using the Religious Disabling option.
There is a tech snowballing effect most prominently seen during the Ancient Era: if one civ (usually the player) has a slight tech lead, it can be easy to skyrocket to the point where others have no chance of catching up, even with WFL/TD. A big contributor to this is that this era has multiple wonders that grant a free tech each, with little in the way of building requirements, meaning that whoever has the tech lead can generally build
all of those wonders; a positive feedback where being ahead in tech gets rewarded by getting even more free tech, leaving other civs hopelessly behind. I suggest stricter requirements for tech-granting wonders, in terms of access to resources or things in city vicinity, so that civs other than the one with the tech lead also have a chance for building them.
Speaking of snowballing, I agree that reaching the new era-unlocking Lifestyle tech first should be an achievement that deserves a reward, but I think there could be a more balanced/interesting way of doing that than granting a free tech to the civ that already has the tech lead. To address this, I have an easy suggestion and a potentially cooler one.
An easy approach would be that the Palace building gains some bonus production (to all: beakers, hammers, culture, etc) with each Lifestyle tech. This would be
instead of granting a free tech to the one who researches it first. So the benefit of gaining a new lifestyle tech first is that you gain access to the increased Palace bonuses while others do not yet have it, meaning there is some incentive to rush for it, but with less of an effect of tech snowballing compared to
immediately granting a free tech
only to the first who researches it. An added benefit is that with the Palace gaining more bonuses, the difference between a civ with 5 cities and one with 3 becomes slightly less pronounced, mitigating some of the serious inherent disadvantages of smaller civs.
A perhaps cooler approach would be to grant rewards upon reaching a new Lifestyle tech in a way that is related to what is expected of that lifestyle. For example, since Sedentary Lifestyle is about settling down, researching it could grant some small but permanent bonus to all then-existing cities that civ settled. In the same vein, perhaps researching Classical Lifestyle could reward cities with already-built Great Wonders. The point is that this would create a trade-off between rushing for a quick but smaller reward vs trying to go for a bigger reward by completing the "objectives" more thoroughly.
The overarching point is that when one civ (usually the player) gets significantly ahead of all other civs, the game effectively ends. So it makes sense to be careful with things that reward the one in the lead disproportionately.
