Is there a good mod to make later eras go faster?

[sun surfer]

I hope this is the right forum for this question - I love Civ but one thing I've found I dislike is how long later eras take. I love taking a long time at the beginning and middle when exploring and expanding and such, and wars then are much easier because of fewer units. But at the end everything gets bogged down. I have to create a huge army (by Civ V standards) or else another civ will decimate me, and then one almost always declares war and then we're dragged into a long drawn out thing. And even if I don't want to, sometimes I have to declare a long drawn out war in later eras when I can tell I'll lose otherwise. And then there's the dealing with everything that happens in later eras - the proposal voting in less and less turns, dealing with all the city-states and civ diplomacies which seem to rev up in the later game and then all my cities and updating roads and tiles and so on.

All that's fine and dandy and fun to a point, but I just feel like it's too much at the end. As much as I like taking a long time in other eras, I feel like more than half my game is always spent in the last few eras! And I don't like that and I get bored. But, the important thing is, I don't like finishing a game early (as I could do by setting a certain amount of turns to end the game) because I like the later eras and seeing everything become modern and winning naturally - I just don't like how long it takes at the end. And I like long games in early and mid eras so "quick" games aren't for me (I even feel standard is too fast on bigger maps and doesn't give adequate time for exploration). I know Civ V was supposed to help this bogging down with one unit per tile and other things, but it didn't succeed well enough as the later eras still take forever.

And finally, I've never used a mod before and don't even know how. I'm a tech novice and all and wouldn't even know where to begin searching for the right mod (I know there's mods but I've never used them or looked at them - I always just play the game straight from the Steam page and that's that). So I thought maybe someone could help here!

Is there a mod out there, a good one that's popular, that takes care of this for me? One that somehow speeds up later eras without messing the game up? One thing I can think of is that if another civ gets there before me and I'm still in a "longer" era, that civ could jump ahead and win way too fast while I'm still catching up - is there a mod that takes things like that into consideration? Thanks!

 

[meapineapple]

This might be what you're looking for: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=251637899

 

[sun surfer]

Wow, that looks very interesting, thanks. Can it be that it was just created a week or so ago? That'd be so ironic because I've been wanting something like this for awhile now, and it's just funny that I'd happen to ask for it only a week after it was actually created, it would be serendipitous. I will try it out. It does look complicated - it looks like I'll have to figure out how to install it and then change numbers myself for eras and hope the game mechanics still work well (I would love a mod that's just like "Fast Later Eras" that's popular where everything's already set and I just download it knowing the game will work well with the changed settings). One thing I wonder about this mod is the time victory - sometimes I have to take it and if I mess around with era times I don't know when the time victory will end up at. If I keep other eras the same and speed up later ones, I don't want to be playing for forever in Future until a time victory finally comes, but maybe that will work itself out. Maybe after playing around with it, I could do the mod and set a "certain number of turns to end the game" so it will end somewhere around when a normal game would era-wise.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the suggestion, it could be just what I'm looking for. If anyone else has any other mods or suggestions on this one - please let me know!

 

[Nutty]

AFAIK, the mod only changes the beaker cost of technologies, it doesn't change "era times" (i.e., game speed, or amount of time per turn), so the time victory still occurs in 2050 over the same number of turns.

The balance of year to technology achieved (which is sometimes a little screwy in the alternative history of the base game) can certainly be thrown way out of whack depending on how you change the settings (the time victory can occur while everyone is still medieval or after you've researched future tech a thousand times), but if it's all in the name of more fun gameplay, what's the harm?

I personally find it difficult to mount wars against faraway opponents with even the standard gamespeed since the units are becoming obsolete by the time you get there, so keep that in mind before you make techs too cheap...

 

[sun surfer]

Thanks, Nutty. Yes, the time victory happening too early or too late was what I was worried about too, but maybe if I play around and find what I like and how long that normally takes, I can just choose "end game at x turns" option too to even it with the eras and I think(?) that that will still be a time victory (and it really only matters if I've failed in my other paths to victory).

The unit thing is a problem, but I've found that as long as you have enough, obsolete units can be fine for war as long as they're not too obsolete, and if I'm going to wage a big war across the ocean, I'll make sure to have plenty of units. And then there's the reverse - if you are playing a large game with a runaway civ across the globe that's the only one way ahead of you in tech, the faster end eras can give you a fighting chance at catching up.

I usually play epic speed, so what I think I may try to aim for in this mod would be epic speeds or slightly slower for most eras and then maybe standard speed or slightly faster for the last few.