Okay, I just played a game through from the Ancient Era to the spaceship launch. I could go further, but it's really been a mopup game since the early Industrial. Things I've learned:
(Small Continents/Standard size/King/Ancient Start, playing America)
> There's a stretch in the early Industrial that's just BRUTAL. I had an income of -80, and zero Happiness. I'd just conquered Greece, and having to build all of the gold and happiness buildings in each of the new cities took forever, and until that was completed I was running Wealth in half my cities and spending my stocked Great Generals just to get a couple extra golden ages for cash.
Now personally, I liked it. But your mileage may vary. If you start in the Industrial, you get a free Market, Bank, Temple, and Colosseum, so I guess I never noticed this before, but it's a HUGE penalty to anyone who goes on a military rampage without planning ahead; between city growth and the lack of happiness buildings in the captured cities, I went from +40 to negatives VERY quickly.
> Another part of the above Happiness issue was the denunciations. I'd conquered two civs (on an 8-civ map), and the other five civs hated me for the rest of the game, denouncing me every chance they could. As a result, I could never trade for the luxuries I was missing, which made it much harder.
> The culture equations need tweaking. In the early Nuclear I'd filled five full trees, minus the future tech-gated policies, and had to unlock a sixth one. And that's with not building culture buildings in most of my cities. (Granted, I did take the Piety branch so I was a bit higher on Culture than normal.)
> While I had a decent supply of each resource (a bit low on Coal, a bit heavy on Oil, VERY heavy on Aluminum), India had by far the most Uranium of any civ, and Gandhi beelined for nukes. As a result, his words were backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Which he used on the Songhai, twice, before I even finished my own Manhattan Project.
> Since I was the tech leader for most of the game, I stole no techs with KGB. But I know that India, at least, stole several from me. (Debug print statement.) In other words, it was doing exactly what I'd intended it to do; despite the fact that my empire was three times the size of anyone else's and my score was higher than everyone else's combined, they were able to stay close enough to still be a threat.
> Greece didn't bribe a single city-state. I wiped them out in the late Renaissance/early Industrial with cannons and riflemen, but normally they'd have had half a dozen alliances by that point. There wasn't a Siam in the game, so no one did much bribery.
> I bribed two city-states early on, both Military/Hostile. It was very strange; they kept giving the same missions. Both wanted a Great Merchant, then both wanted the same Wonder, then both wanted a road, then both wanted a Great Scientist...
> The AI just never seems to build the Apollo Program when I play, making it easy to win the space race even if the AIs are ahead of me technologically. I'd lowered the Spaceship Flavor from 250 (must build at all costs) down to 100 (important to build, but not game-breaking). But it seems that this is just too low, so I'm going to return it to the default in the next version.
> In ~500 turns, I had 3 crashes, one of which required a reboot. Of the other two, one was when I tried creating an improvement on a hex that already had one, and the other was when I tried moving a ship very far, very quickly, and it tried to reveal too many hexes at once. In other words, the main two crash bugs we'd already seen.
I've tweaked a couple things that MIGHT have been responsible for the between-turn crashes, so when the next version comes out I'll want to hear if there's an improvement for anyone else.
> I don't think the culture boost to Theaters that I added to Theocracy is working. I'll try testing it tomorrow, but I don't want to recompile anything and ruin my current game.
> At least one time that I saw, the SpatzUnitCreated function triggered strangely. It passes in the player's ID and the unit's ID, which I then use to get the unit's structure. The strange thing was at least once, it went in there but said the ID was invalid. I didn't have a print statement to find out WHICH unit it was, but it's very strange that this would happen. My hope is that it's something like a great person or settler, something that doesn't trigger the things in that function that I care about anyway. (Specifically, the Rookie promotion.)
Just something to keep an eye out for.
> If the game loads the Balance mod before the Content mod, this next part works fine, but if they're reversed then there's a problem. The problem is in the Planned Economy policy.
VANILLA GAME: -50% to city count unhappiness
BALANCE MOD: change to -25% to city count unhappiness (because the base unhappiness is now 4 instead of 2), and alter the text key.
CONTENT MOD: move the -25% unhappiness to Planned Society, and change Planned Economy to a +20% trade route income boost. Alter the text key and flavors accordingly.
So if it loads Content then Balance, you end up with two policies that give -25% to unhappiness AND Planned Economy also gives the +20% trade route income (but doesn't say so in the tooltip).
I need to change this. I can't keep having both mods adjust the same policy. So the question is, how do I resolve this? Three options.
1> Remove the modification from the Balance mod. If someone plays the Balance mod without the Content mod, the policy would give -50% to unhappiness (basically, +2 per city), extremely powerful.
2> Move the final modification to the Balance mod. That is, make Planned Economy give the trade route income there; if you played the Balance mod without the Content, then, there'd be NO policies that do the -25%.
3> Leave it as is, and hope it loads in the correct order.
I'm leaning towards #2. The issue is, if someone plays Balance-but-no-Content, is the removal of the happiness policy too crippling?
