Here is an attached Calibam save - auto turn 1, and 158 turns in. I specifically went to find the most OP start for them that I could, and ended up with my capital next to the mirror of heaven on floodplains, another city on floodplains, and a third city near Yggdrasil. Opponents are 7 AI's, map is small tectonics. By the turn 158, I had Aristocracy and a few other techs, researched runes of kilmorph (was beaten to it), FoL and OO have also both already been founded. I haven't met anyone else yet (blame it on griffons
).
Settings are:
speed - normal
difficulty - noble
New random seed on reload
no Acheron
blessings of amathon
living world
all unique features
flavor start
So far I can say for things that need to be toned down:
AI snatching all religions
AI building so many cities so fast
I'll post more as I play and tell you what I think. Feel free to download and try this yourself though.
-Colin
Edit: Further playing ends up showing me with the highest score of everyone I have met (the bannor, the lurchip (my neighbors to the east) and the sheim (my neighbors to the west). A few important dates:
Turn 226 - researched Era of Survival. Would have probably gotten it earlier, but I researched sanitation first.
Turn 258 - I finally founded empyrean. Only Esus not founded now. I had originally been trying for order, but the bannor snatched that so I decided to grab empyrean instead.
Turn 265 - went to war with the sheim
After taking one of the sheim's cities, I realized that I couldn't hold it against the hordes of pyre zombies, so I retreated back to my border town. This was their response
I must say... thats the first time the AI has thrown a REAL stack at me... I may even have to build some archer defenders now instead of just spamming Morai.
Edit 2:
First - it is really annoying when you make a lengthy post only to get told that you don't have permission to edit this post and get it all thrown away.... -.-
On to the real reason for the edit. I continued with the game, and was much less impressed after that first stack. The AI proceeded to send a constant trickle of units in at me, allowing me to rather easily beat them off. Eventually, I managed to get overwhelming force and smash through the sheim's defenses and wipe them out. That put me in a position that no other AI could really touch me, so I ended the game, figuring that victory was inevitable, but I don't feel like finding out how.
I then went and started a game as the amurites, same settings with the only changes being a tiny map with 4 AI's, and setting aggressive AI on. This ended up with me getting wardecced by the dovollio, my neighbors to the south before turn 100. Their stack however was unable to take my second city from me, and then they proceeded to occasionally trickle in and otherwise wait for me to get around to smashing them for their stupidity. However, I was unable to do this for a time due to insufficient forces. Then I got battle sorcerers. My offensive stack started out consisting of about half a dozen drown, 4 archers, and 3 battle sorcerers. The first sorcerer only had channeling 2, so I gave him fire 2 and combat 5 (eventually). The other two both got channeling three right from the getgo, and both had fire 3. With this, I was able to easily overwhelm him and eventually smash the dovollio to pieces. Before the dovollio died, I had 4 battle sorcerers on the field, 3 with fire 3, earth 2, and some combat, and that first one (who still hadn't gotten channeling 3) with combat 5, fire 2, earth 2.
So, what this all means:
First, the AI is much better than it had been. I was really impressed to see it terraforming as well as sending scary stacks. However, it needs to work on its scary stacks some more. If the first scary stack fails, it needs to say "Hey, this didn't work - lets get a bigger one and try that". As it is, it says "Hey, that didn't work - more units to the front" which essentially just means free xp for the human. If possible, the AI needs to be taught to hold its units till it has a big enough stack to take the nearest enemy ciy, which it can determine through recon or something else, or it needs to be taught to throw stacks of ever increasing size at the enemy.
Second, battle sorcerers were exactly what the Amurites needed in the early game to give them a good reason to focus on the magic line. It also makes Dain a viable alternative to Valledia for which leader to use. Battle sorcerers possibly need to get toned down just a touch though. Fireballs are scary enough in the early game, but allowing fire elementals (or channeling three of anything else) before you can even get wizards is... a bit sick. On the other hand, you have to give up using other specialists (and workable tiles) to get battle sorcerers, and each one takes longer than the one before. Though... it will be a long while before you can get wizards anyways. You might want to tone down the 16000 research needed to get sorcery (double that needed for arcane lore?!?) - its already more difficult to get sorcery due to needing all four magic paths first, no real reason to make the tech itself cost the sun and the moon too. And even with Era's, it should be possible to snatch a tech from a more advanced era to give you that edge, as long as you realize that the advantage now, if not used properly, will probably cost you an advantage later.
On the note of Era's - the era of growth is really very meh. There are not any techs in it that grant better units, which means that for a warmonger that whole era (100-200 turns) he gets absolutely no edge at all, while the builders just get ever stronger. It would probably be better to bring the teir 3 units (champions, longbows, wizards, priests) down into the second era. The other thing that you can do is have the era of conquest add the national units, and then era of domination add them again - but without the national unit limit. Really the limit was put in in the first place to prevent someone from getting phalanxes or something else early and steamrolling people with unlimited numbers. But with Era's, you'll know that someone will already have a way to counter that by already having national units as no one can beeline straight for the endgame. If you go with this sort of approach though, you really need some way to allow wizards to become archmages without getting into combat (or allow the archmages in era of domination to be buildable from the start).
I hope that my input helped, and I will happily await further releases of this mod.
-Colin