Hello Civinator.
This mod has been on my "to play" list for a number of years, but I think there might be something wrong. I was playing the game as the Dutch. I found the Inca civilization to my north. I sent some units to explore around there and they would start a fighting animation and just die. Then one of my cities was captured by the Incas. Makes sense as Inca was to my north and my units were exploring north. The thing is, I never saw the Inca unit who attack my city defender. The defender just started a fighting animation and loss. It is like Ican has invisible units.
In addition, maybe I don't understand the mod, but Inca never declared war on me. They just took my city without declaring war, but when I tried to take it back, I had to declare war.
Am I doing something wrong?
That means - the player is always forced to one style of playing, it's the example of bad game design that I don't like. Civilisation originally was a game of choices, you should not be forced to build army of slavers just to be able to see enemy units.
zeroRPGmaker and Shmelkin, thank you very much for your interest in CCM2.
The enslaver (and later the more dangerous holy men and the even more dangerous lawyer) are very interesting units that work very well - even for the AI.
Those units are a counterpart against a too risky expansion, especially of the human player. You are well advised to protect your cities, settlers and workers. Otherwise it can be, that you will be punished by those units. The other reason is, to give the terrain surrounding your cities and units, a much bigger strategic value, due to the movement restrictions and handicaps, the enslaver has in some kinds of terrain. That´s why these units enlarge the options of gameplay and not diminish them.
Shmelkin, of course it´s still the decision of the player, if he wants to spend the production cost for that small wonder that autoproduces the enslaver, or if the player wants to use those production points for building something different. It´s wrong, that the enslaver can detect other invisinble units (but later units like the holy men have this ability) - the enslaver can not detect them, but it can be interesting in having them early to attack other civs with them. And Shmelkin, you will never see "armies of slavers" by a certain civ in CCM, as a civ can only receive this and other invisble HN units by the autoproduction of a Small Wonder every 10 turns. So if you have the facility for autoproducing this unit, it lasts 20 turns until a civ has two (!) enslavers. That unit cannot been built directly. But it can happen, that your civ has to face several enslavers from different other civs.
Now let´s take a look at the civilopedia entry of the enslaver (and I have to admit, that here the formating of that entry can be done better):
The enslaver cannot move over marshes, mountains and volcanoes without a road. This means, that those kinds of terrain that normally are not considered very useful in the early game, can become much more useful now, as they can protect your cities from enslaver attacks across such terrain. Additionally the enslaver has no movement bonus when walking through desert, forests and hills, meaning, so the enslaver normally has a movement of two tiles, when moving through such a terrain, he can only move one tile and then stuck in that tile for that turn (without a road). In CCM the costs of a unit to pass a certain tile are much higher than in a standard Civ 3 game. A unit with two movement points (like the enslaver) always moves like climbing on a mountain (meaning he can only move one tile), if the unit doesn´t have a movement bonus for that terrain.
Now with these units you will have a very different - and more deeply - strategic understanding about the map around your cities. Frequently you will discover bottlenecks on the map, that enslavers must pass through mountain chains or marsh tiles, to reach your civ or some cities of your civs - and of course this can help you in different ways for your actions against those units.
The enslaver is the most discussed unit in the CCM1 forums. If you do a search in the CCM1 thread only with the catchwords "enslaver" and "map", you will get 45 hits.