I wonder, is it designed that way that the only avaliable mech which does not require Ixian Weaponry is Cymek? Or did you just forget to put the prereq in?
Yes, intended.
The Cymek is a religious unit for the Technocracy religion; it is actually a cyborg.
Whereas the various other "mech" units are Ixian faction UUs, some of which can also be built by non-Ixians if they trade for the Ixian Weaponry tech. These are vehicles with pilots.
I think the new missions are cool but I don't hear much feedback about them.
I haven't been testing out espionage much.
I have used the Incite Revolt ability, which is nasty because it removes all city defenses for the turn - whicih is of course the turn that I invade it with everything. Its nasty.
The AI never uses any of them against me. The only AI spy actions I ever suffer are the occasional destroyed improvement, which does nothnig in the long-run. And sometimes steal treasury, which takes a small amount of gold (waste of EPs).
I think the problem is: the AI wastes all its EPs on low-value missions, and so never actually gets big enough EP accumulations to use nastier missions.
I wonder if what we should do is remove many/most of the spy missions, really leaving each particular spy with only a small number of missions to choose from, either cheap missions or expensive missions.
So: Saboteurs can only destroy buildings, and are the only ones who can do this, so we can make the Sabotage Building mission cheap.
Split the BG missions into "cheap" missions (the diplomacy influence ones) and "expensive" missions (city takeover, faction-wide anarchy); give the former to a Sister unit, and the latter to the Reverend Mother unit.
We could make a Harkonnen Traitor spy unit, whose only ability was the 1-turn incite revolt
The Facedancers could have poison/plague missions only.
Ecaz could have a steal treasury mission.
Fremen could have some kind of water stealing mission.
As current, Atreides left without, but with superior espionage resistance (through higher EP point income).
I think the advanced espionage options would be more interestnig and flavorful if they were tied more closely to their intended faction, and a narrower scope might make it easier to force the AI to use them.
Cutting away the low-impact missions would be a big help.
To me, influence driven war is debatable. I know Ahriman likes it. I never see any useful effect myself.
Often it can be valuable to engage in "pillage wars", where you don't have the strength to take enemy cities, but go around pillaging their improvements, particularly with quads or thopters or suspensors. Its nice to see this extending your borders into the pillaged tiles - and to have the reverse occur if you over-extend and get your pillaging units destroyed.
I don't care that much though, I wouldn't be that upset if we lost it.
A lot of the other stuff like barbarian civs, dynamic civ names, etc. is not really useful for DW.
Agreed. We had some ideas floating around about getting Jacurutu/water-stealer Fremen, but I can't think of a good way to actually implement it. A couple of barbarian-only Fremnish units would be able to get this flavor across without needing the barbarian civ mechanics.
But barbarians are never going to be a real threat beyond the very early game unless we can make them spawn in desert tiles, or inside cultural borders (eg through event).
At this point, I am not sure which is harder, removing RevDCM or finding the point bug which has crept in.
I don't envy this task, sounds tricky.
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but 
, it means that more spice resources speed up research significally, leaving non-spicers behind.
