That's great feedback, I will look at each of these aspects for improvement; I will likely copy/paste your suggestions into my dev copy, appreciate any edits already-done!
Re: storms, it was not really my design intention to have these be all that impactful; just wanted some forest/hill equivalents to break up the flat terrain in ocean... ie movement and vision effects. Secondarily to give the ocean some thematic, life-like quality, though this is still in the works. Their effects can be tweaked further, though I will hold off til I can get more ideas translated into code before adjusting from the movement/vision paradigm.
That animation effect is the best available as far as what's built-in to civ engine (afaik); I didn't make them so much as just co-opt them. I agree they're imperfect: the cloud is fuji's, and the falling water, I think its from the background of a civ leader scene. Another user on these forums, GhostToast, has demonstrated that new animations & effects can be injected into the game, we're not stuck with pre-built; in future revision I would like to attempt new effects for these, much as you describe. It will take me a while to get to this however. For now consider this somewhat of a framework for additional mod features down the road.
More immediately, I will likely add custom options to enable/disable various features, complete the storm spawn mechanism i have planned, and look to squeeze out some more performance & fix bugs. Alternatively I've been contemplating making the storms its own separate mod, as code-wise it functions
mostly independently from the other features here (for now); will revisit this thought in a few revisions.
Some quick comments/reflections/further questions based on your feedback:
The worst issue is playing with MB+ makes processing turns for AI much slower, especially as more of the map gets revealed.
I agree; I recently re-built the offending feature entirely, resulting in significant performance boost, but it could be streamlined further. I am leaning towards making the movement bonus on lighthouse/trade route plots a naval-unit-only thing, as this would effectively turn off the heaviest resource hit completely for players with maritime academy.
-I tried cleaning up the text for the Magellan's Expedition Wonder and the other buildings. Also I don't seem to be getting Spices from Magellan's Expedition when built.
Appreciate the text updates, will use 'em. Likely a small oversight in the lua code for the resources, should be easy fix.
I also noticed that (along with Perfidious Recon Units), there are different wordings for promotions such as "Vision", "Sight", and "Visibility" - do they mean the same thing or are they different?
imprecision on my part, my text was often an afterthought to the rest of the modding work, and in some cases may reflect older versions -- will do a pass on text & adjust/improve to match civ's general useage of these terms & clarify current function
-Is Maritime Academy build supposed to be 125? Very low compared to similar buildings.
tbh its been months since I've built one, I can't even remember how this feels when acquired. It should feel valuable, however the main work to get one is exploring 80% of the ocean, and relative production cost can thus vary considerably depending on when it becomes available; some games I don't even manage to explore enough ocean before the map is revealed by late game tech, others I've already met the threshold when I research it. Will review what is possible to make it have a scaling cost for better fit regardless of when exploration threshold is reached.
-Sometimes tiles are revealed but I can't actually see the units on them, although you can tell because you can't move a unit onto the tile.
is this specifically recon units? You mentioned you were playing w/ perfidious recon, and this sets pre-paratrooper recon to invisible. I think this is just limitation of civ engine and this invis feature. If other non-recon units are becoming invisible somehow, i will need more info.
Also, there is a white "nil" text that pops up on ranged combat I think, not sure if it's related to a promotion or something.
Its related to a promotion but is intended to be a blank string -- possible I set some of them to have no value rather than blank string, will double check. Might be how EUI reads blank strings though, not sure. Civ engine wants to put text on the screen every time a unit gets a post-combat promotion, and this mod makes frequent use of that mechanism, but text pop-ups are just too frequent if I let civ do its thing. It may be simpler to just have all the promo's managed in lua, will test/revise further
-Land units seem to be getting the "Hull Speed" promotion, on land when near rivers, not sure if this is intentional.
This is the land unit's component of the naval movement bonus near lighthouse/trade route. It shouldn't have any effect outside of moving faster in corresponding water plots; I'm curious what the connection to rivers is that you observed? In any case I think the land unit component will be axed so that trade waters can be turned off completely for players with maritime academy, and lower hit to system resources in late game.
. There are two directions I could take here that do not require a ton of time and thought, or rather a small step and a big step:
