This is something I've been doing since Civ 2, slowing tech speed to produce what I call "period gaming". That is, the game advances to certain periods (eras in Civ 4, I guess) and then essentially stagnates long enough for you to fight a war or three using the units specific to that period. In Civ 2 and 3 it proved impossible to do this after the musketman period, since the hard-coded tech advancement set an upper limit to the number of turns it took to get a new technology, meaning that the game would accelerate to unacceptable levels beyond this point. And that's when I got bored with the 'tech race' and quit, and put Civ into a drawer someplace while I moved on to something more interesting. In fact, I got so annoyed that the freakin' problem *still* hadn't been fixed Civ 3 (despite numerous complaints from a sizable minority of gamers) that I put off buying Civ 4 until I saw this thread and read through it to make sure I could actually slow the *whole* game down, and not just part of it.
In any event, it's good to see y'all already hard at work on the problem. I've decided to chip in with the testing by slowing the tech in my game waaaay down - as in, setting the tech advancement percentage to 1000 or 2000 to see what happens. Can't get the years right at these numbers but that isn't a concern for me - I don't really care if I'm just discovering computers in the year 2500. So long as the concept of "period gaming" is maintained at each and every era it doesn't matter what the little date number reads.
Although I don't see why folks are concerned with increasing the build times of city improvements. Yes, leaving them alone will muck with your tech advancement speeds somewhat, but you can easily counter this just by increasing the tech research percentage until you get a rate you happen to like. If 300% is too fast because your improvements counter the effect somewhat, then just raise it to 400% and adjust the years/turn accordingly. Your cities won't have anything to build for long stretches (except military units), but so what? That also happened to be true for the vast majority of human history. And when you do get new tech and new improvements, each advancement will be a Really Big Deal(TM), rather than just another blip on the screen and another thing to add to the build queue. That's what I did with the previous Civs and I thought it made the game much more enjoyable (at least until the hard-coded speed increase surpassed my mods ability to slow things down).
I am going to slow down the builds somewhat, but only because I believe they're too fast at their standard rates. I'm also going to slow cultural advancement down as well, probably to the same level as tech advancement so that city cultural points pace themselves and don't become outrageous while I'm still mucking about with chariots. In a single player game that should result in culture advancing at the same pace as a normal game, only in glacial slo-mo from the players point of view.
The only unit I can think that really needs to be slowed down along with everything else is the settler. Easy enough to do, from the look of the files.
As for Great People, the whole concept looks to be game-breaking if left alone - and that seems to be the consensus of quite a few players on various forums. My preference would be just to get rid of them altogether, putting Civ 4 more in line with previous games. Either that or, if this crashes the game in some way, restrict them to the super-specialist role.
Finally, I'm going to mod the various combat units to get rid of the rock-paper-scissors approach that Firaxis took. First because it's ridiculous from the strategic I'm-the-bloody-god-Emperor view; I command *armies*, not ahistorical corps of pure archers/macemen/whatever. Second, because the groupings simply don't make a whole lot of sense any which way you slice it, in military terms. I'll be doing my best to replace them with a more 'Hearts of Iron' approach, e.g., generic infantry, generic cavalry, armor, etc., all of which improve accordingly with each relevent advancement. As well as getting rid of the current (and in my view, nonsensical) way siege engines/artillery are used. If only they'd gone the same road as SMAC here....
Look forward to reading what the rest of you are doing. After I finish my first modded-up-the-wazoo game I'll post the results. Although if I do this correctly it'll probably be a month or so before I'm finished.
Max
