hi all, (rather) long time lurker here. First of all, thanks a lot for the great mod.
I have played quite a few games on a version I got in April (sorry, not sure about the number), and then got the new one couple of weeks ago. I play on small maps on standard or epic speed, Pangaea or Fractal maps, if that's important. Used to be an Emperor/Immortal player in vanilla civ v.
I have read the entire thread, but might have missed something, so my apologies if something in my feedback has already been addressed here.
1. the new version has become way easier to play. Since april I was struggling on emperor (got wiped out few times) and feeling quite comfortable on king; now I played a few games on emperor and did not have any problems. In particular, it is easier now to take AI cities, to grab (early) wonders and not to lose units in wars. Not sure if this is good or bad, just an observation though.
2. The new tribute system is very interesting, but also confusing; e.g. should I take this 12 gold early on and miss on a few quests? There was a suggestion to limit the lowest tribute to 25%, and this would certainly help. Yet, sometimes I am able to bully a city-state with a single scout (although well-promoted). The situation where you explore the land, meet a new CS and they immediately agree to pay you feels a bit wrong (if you are not the world military #1).
3. another issue with tribute is that sometimes you can bully a cs as a quest for another cs, and then the effort you have to make to earn the bonus is way too small. One way to solve this is the change the CS quest to High Tribute only; another one is to reduce the corresponding bonus.
4. As I mentioned, it became way easier to capture Ai cities. In particular, I've seen a few times how a wounded AI unit was fleeing the city in the middle of the siege, which made the whole thing much smoother. I suppose there is some kind of AI logic evaluating the chances of keeping the city and when the chances are too low, it was trying to save units at least, but it makes no sense to a human player at all.
5. Has anyone else noticed that early wars with chariot archers are very easy? Like, if you happen to have those 4 horses next to your capital, and your flatland neighbour not, it's pretty much gg (if you want), especially if you park your spearmen on top of his mines so he can never finish those walls and you manage to get the Statue of Zeus. I mean, it is quite historical and maybe ok-ish game-wise because you don't have to fight, but sometimes the temptation is just too strong. So you go for it, and of course this means you ignore the shrine, miss a religion, your other neighbour settles the sweet spot for which you are going to go into another war etc, so the playstyle spectrum gets somewhat limited.
6. On the 'capturing the civilians' modifier: in one game I tried to max exploit the worker capture strategy, and did not see this modifier until very late. So based on my experience, the issue is close to non-existing.
7. When you move the great diplomat into a CS territory to build an embassy, sometimes this option is greyed out and the tooltip says, can't build an embassy on top of a strategic resource (even if this resource is not yet discovered). not sure if anything can be done about it though.
