HannibalBarka, hello! nice to see your still around! be as blunt as you wish due, i like the hard truth.
i know about the civics, i can never seem to make them worthwhile...
i guess you played the a new dawn version, there - it adds many new tags to the civics, and that made me rebuild some of them. your suggesting ill revert to more simple civics? with less complication huh? - i kinda like that idea - i was influenced with rise of mankind and made the civics with a lot of stuff. i do like the civic affect on buildings, but maybe i can leave that part in and remove other influences like happiness and so on. perhaps to compensate for more "thin" civics, i can just add some new civics for each category? or a new category just as well?
what do you think?
I actually was playing regular not new dawn version. I really think either solution is OK although I prefer the new category more. In all cases, what is important for me is to have civics that I can evaluate easily. In some mods, some civics are so complicated that it is just impossible to quantify their effect. Oh and remember, choosing civics is a matter of combining civics not just choosing one independently from others, so it is even more complicated than what I described above. So do what ever you think is good as long as civics remains quantifiable.
promotion, that part your right also, i was thinking of using the rise of mankind promotions just before i released the latest, but i ran of of patience to work on it...
if you remember i actually totally rebuilt the promotion in version 2.3.6 i think, maybe the older one was better. i think i need some more specifics on what to change - the fort example is a good start.
maybe now that you had a game you can maybe elaborate on what i should change and help me on that one?
I dont remember promotions in 2.3.6, sorry . I dont know if I still have that version on my PC, I usually keep just the last one. Ill take a look and tell you. I however liked the mods with straight forward promotions : attacks 1.2.3.etc, defense 1.2.3. etc, cover 1.2.3.shock 1.2.3
the problem is - i dont play civ4, so i dont really know how stuff are going on in game... weird huh...
ahh the religious system...well now, in the new revdcm 2.8, those good folks fixed it, and now i can use it in a better way. the reason i took the system is since the ai didnt built those buildings much up until a late stage, i thought of a way to replace it, and i came up with doing some techs as not accessible to certain civs, i hope that the ai will use them better and religion would be founded early. with the working limited religion option - it should work as i first intended it to be, so if you do like it, ill work this up for you soon, need to get my modding mojo up and running again.
definitely, that was one of the best things in ol2. It created a more diverse religious world, and removed the weird tech path pushing everyone towards faith-techs. It also added a new criteria when you choose a civ: which religion you want to found since all religions are not the same.
p.s.
what do you think of civ5? i often ask myself if i should make ol3 for it? i dunno, i dont get the civ vibe from civ5, maybe in a year, after some heavy mod parts like bbai will come out ill get on it.
long post
I bought civ 5 the very day it was out, and played for almost 4 weeks. I stopped playing though and moved back to civ4 mods (yours, destiny, legends and guilds, etc). I never did that before, I used to basically completely forget Civ n when Civ n+1 is out. Civ 5 has very pleasant novelties like the one unit per tile and the city states idea. It is however broke in many aspects:
1. The City states are completely unused by the AI, instead of allying with them, they conquer them. In one of my games, I won diplo when AL Rashid was sitting on top of 30k$ and making about 600$ per turn. He could have bought all the city states of the world and did not. That was just too much. I understand that its not easy to program a smart AI, but that is just too much. He whole alliance system should be thought deeper to make it more realistic and more diverse: allying with a city should be a matter of long term relation and shared interests and values. They should bring more ethnic, religious and cultural specificities to the city states to make them more playable.
2. The OUT (one unit per tile) is good because it reduces the SOD kind of things (I hated those in all civ series), but it is make manouvering too complicated (even more so when a neutral AI sits between you and you opponenets) and triggers too much unpreventable but still stupid losses (you have to kill a opponent but you well know that youll be killed next turn because no other unit can gets in and defend you). I think something like one type of unit per tile (one archey, one mounted, one melee, etc) would be better and will look closer to a real army. Cities are also too weak, once you kill your enemy troops on the fields it is just a piece of cake to take all his cities.
3. The new civic system is bof bof, it is less flexible and varied than the CIV4 one (it is a linear progression and not a new combination).
4. They removed very interesting ideas from civ 4 like religion
5. Diplomacy is crap, the research agreement is the dumbest idea of the game (pure luck, constant cost). Not much stuff to do
6. Puppet is a failure also. No options there, its just puppet and go.
7. The game is too much unbalanced, although some mods start to fix some of that
8. Talking about mods, that is also a problem. The mod system gives the impression of the possible usage of many mods, just download install and check. It rather a nightmare as you dont what is compatible with what and end playing without really knowing what are the active changes.
All in all, I wasnt enjoying playing so I moved back to CIV4 Mods and am enjoying them again a lot, thanks to people like you.
Oh one last point, I some time take my 5 years old kids on my knees and show him CIV 4 fights (he loves it when a warrior fight a lion or a War elephant fight a pike, etc). In Civ 5, battle animation is really crappy ;-)
for new releases there is no mentioning!! 
