I am back on the Forum after over a week of playtesting several different speed mods. Thank God I am self-employed! It took me an hour to catch up reading the forum!! Good work everyone.
My results; sorry ahead of time for this will be long... (remember these are my experiences and not an insult to any style of play)
All of my games are based upon 300% research speeds and 3 times the number of turns in the game. All were played on prince settings to give the AI's a little edge. (other settings were variable)
My first several games had slow research but normal to medium build speeds. Several posts asked the question does increased numbers of units alter the game in any way? My conclusion is a definate yes! In 7 games where production was left between normal rates up to 150%... (in 3 of these games I upped the settler and worker cost to come in line with my 300% speed) I played 2 games as a peaceful civ, expanding quick but only defending myself with a few units in each city. I quit these games relatively early as I lost a few early wars and ended up with a very small civilization. I played 5 as a warmonger type. With settler production at a fast pace I expanded quickly in the early game and just overwhelmed the computer players militarily. With the slower settler and worker build time it was a lot slower to expand but I came up with the same result. In all of these games I got pretty easy domination victories (except for one I started in a bad location).
During the warmonger games I had money problems like many others who may have expanded rapidly in their games. I often had to raze captured cities because I couldn't afford to keep them. My pillaging of improvements and money offered for ceasefires and peace treaties kept me out of the red during these prolonged wars. Granted my research and economy were totally messed up but I still won the games pretty handily. I think this is due to the fact that you have 3x as many turns to use your units before they become outdated (early units like archers are useful for a very long timespan) and you can destroy enemy civs before they can outclass your units. In these games I was able to make a lot of early units and just threw them at the AI's over and over. In my opinion a dominating military is the most effective way to play with these settings. I do note the computer players do make more military units with faster production speeds but they do not make as many as I did. My units did have a lot of promotions (as someone mentioned earlier) but my sheer numbers seemed to be the bigger factor in victory.
In conclusion: Fast production and slow research is a great way to play if you like a lot of early combat with a lot of early units. Beware trying to win this way in a peaceful manner. It may be tons of fun to play against a lot of AI's with the constant war setting on in these types of mods. It may be more balanced in multiplayer as everyone has the same options. However, I don't think the different styles of play (i.e. research, cultural, warfare, etc.) are balanced with production set at the faster rates.
Next I played 4 games where all settings (research, culture and production) were set proprtionately to 300% of normal speeds. These played out very much like vanilla civ so there is not as much to report as I'm sure you have all had similar experiences. All of these games took a
long time to finish!
I played two as a warmonger. With these proportionately slower production speeds I had mixed results... one game I won early in the industrial age the other I failed at slowly losing in a space race game. I was just barely into the modern era
I played 2 games as a peaceful civ. Also with mixed results I won a space race victory in one game and "can you believe it" a cultural loss in the other. Damn wonder building persians...
My conclusion about the game this way is that it does
crawl through time... The number of units in the game was very much like vanilla civ but with more turns to use them. You do get to have really cool wars with many types of units up through the medieval era... and then the game
does accelerate. Even with the extra turns to do research you still cannot use your late armies to much effect because it takes too long to produce the army with the proportionate production settings.
Like others have noted already... I have come to the conclusion that the individual techs do need to be adjusted if you want a game that flows seemlessly. This adjustment needs to be made so that in all eras one has equal opportunity to use the units at their disposal before they become outdated.
I definately enjoy the game much better at this slow pace. I will now try to tweak individual tech costs to get a slower paced lategame. I will post my findings for any that care.