Androrc the Orc
Emperor
After changing to the yield system, are some father point types still available as separate from the single overall Research yield (ie Military points generated during successful wars)? It would be cool for some techs to have partial contributions from some specialized areas like that in addition to the single type of generic.
Yes, in the sense that you can use Crosses and Bells

I want to add a "Leadership" yield later on that generates Great Generals (kind of like in Victoria), but would also be used for researching army and navy technology and getting military fathers.
That's true, it wouldn't be good to have Research made only by one Profession. But on the other hand you'd also expectto be heavily influenced by what job they were actually doing (even a Statesman wouldn't invent many steam engines while having to just work as a fisherman, while someone working in industrial professions or especially in School/College would make much more Pesquisa.) Maybe a quick way to incorporate this would be to add a ProfessionResearch modifier tag to Professions, so the overall research would be 12 * ResearchYieldModifier * ProfessionResearch / TeacherWeight.
Sounds good

It sounds ok, but native trading doesnt always happen that often in game, and transactions like trading Lumber or selling Fur for cash wouldn't create Research,
The trading itself wouldn't, but the contact with more technologically advanced civilizations would make the natives gain more knowledge of their technologies.
so it seems cooler to get it through the advanced resource consumption, which adds an incentive to buy those resources (which are otherwise not too useful). Also when they first begin to develop (eg discovering the tech for one of the lowest-level processing buildings), they could use the goods they produce to continue to make internal progress.
It makes good gameplay sense, but I'm not sure it models reality well though. I can see Cloth, Tools and Guns advancing technology, but Rum and Cigars, not so much.
BTW another cool potential way for Europe civs to make money could be selling Techs to their daughter colonies, I'd imagine that might be difficult to code though.
That would be pretty nice to have, but yes, difficult to code

Something more doable would be having the technology cost decrease depending on the number of civilizations you have contact with that know that technology (with perhaps a greater bonus if you are a child civ of that contact).
I'd guess you already made a xml tag to allow civilizations to get starting techs, a nice feature might be to give each civ a different free starting tech to provide them with a unique advantage.
I'm aiming for giving them the historical techs they had in 1492, so for example Portugal should start with more naval research done, Florence with more cultural research and so on.
Great, that should help a lot. With each colonist becoming more unique with his own Wealth and Literacy etc, I was thinking another nice twist might be for me to tweak the name generator so that colonists get a random nation-appropriate forename and surname to make them more memorable. I think I could do that part pretty easily, but the current unittype+profession text display format already overlaps on the main screen, so the display would need to be changed to show name on a different line; would you know how to adjust that?
Taking a look at CvGameTextMgr.cpp, I think it is possible for me to do that. In any case, a problem is that units represent a group of people, while ships represent individual ships. I've been experimenting with a "population size" value for units too, so I don't think it would fit well.
By the way, would you know how to make the shipname modcomp first try to generate names for a particular ship type for a civilization, and if there aren't any, then generate through the regular method?