Always look forward to your podcasts and this was another great episode.
Really good to hear from 'thecrazyscotsman' about his experiences creating the Kingdom of Jerusalem civ and his city-state packs. Very happy to hear he has more of those on the drawing board as I have them enabled in every game I play now as they add so much variety and flavour. Also good to hear that Anno Domini is coming along.
I appreciate the feedback on the mods I have released so far, especially the more in-depth look at the Golden Ages mod (though that will be obsolete once the expansion is released unless I can find a way to re-purpose it). Regarding the suggestion on having the leader specific Golden Age abilities override the default, it's something I like the sound of. Fortunately I set the system up to be easily extended so next time I make changes to either my Mongol or Carthage mods I will implement that change.
At one point I was considering releasing a pack for the vanilla leaders along with packs for the dlc leaders that would modify the bonuses for all leaders in the game, but that fell by the wayside as other projects have taken priority. Who knows, if the Golden Ages mod survives in some other form then I may eventually get to it.
Rob. Thanks for the suggestion on textures for my leaders. I currently create my leader art primarily in GIMP. The Mongol leaders were created from a series of layers blending sections of vanilla leaders together to form the faces, while I took a different approach with the Carthage leaders by using MakeHuman to create the face which I then added lighting and some textures to. I will certainly check out the programs you mentioned though as anything that can improve my work is a good thing.
Whilst I did enjoy making the Mongol and Carthage civs (as I just missed having them in the game) I expect to release mostly game-play focused mods along the lines of the Victories and Golden Ages mods. As an example I am currently waist deep into the development of a Customizable Victories mod, a War Council mod and a Corporations mod (first screen shots can be seen in the modding discord server).
P.S. Loved that you kept in the outtakes of Rob's connection issues. Very funny with the timing of some of those disconnects. Though I can only image the level of frustration Rob would have been feeling.