I loaded up your NiGHTS mod last night and I must say that it's wicked fun. I do have a few gripes though. Maybe it was just the map that I got (because I like playng with abundant resources turned on), or maybe I wasn't quite expecting the population growth that I ended up getting, or whatever, but my capital ended up with an all grassland area, aside from three hills and a few ocean tiles, consisting of a sheep, three or four cows, and three or four cotton. Now, I know happiness is not an issue as far as population is concerned, because, of course, population gives happiness which is then used to field a military, but my god, my capital was growing ridiculously fast, though it took a rather long time to build anything in it. Now, the population isn't necessarilly where I have my gripe, but the lack of anything useful for them to do, in some cases) is. I made sure to turn on manual specialists, so as not to have any undesirable sorts popping up, but my population ended up growing much faster than my borders, so in many cases, I had many nonspecialized citizen.. specialists (you know, the ones who only give you +1 and no GPP).
I do like the new specialists, the way they give you the feel of building your empire up over time instead of hitting one special technology and you've suddenly got a huge influx of this or that coming in empire wide. However, these new specialists have the ability to not only build their special improvements (such as the cotton farm or the wheat thinggy or whatever), but they also have the ability to build roads and even settle new cities. Were these intended actions for them?
Some of the buildings had.. odd combinations of things that they did, like, if I wanted X specialist for Y Resource I had to build Z building that gave a bonus to some other resource completely unrelated to the resource that I wanted to improve, or I simply couldn't even build that building because it had some obscure restriction for where it could be built. Also, a few maintencance costs seemed to be a bit off on a few of them. for example, one that give a flat +5 that cost no maintenance, and a situational +1production to forests only that had a maintenance cost of 5 (not so worth it if you want to build only one or two lumbermills in a city that doesn't have much production otherwise.
Another thing is that the AI don't seem to know what to do with the new specialist types. I didn't see any of the special new improvements in any of the AIs lands. Because of my Cow heavy start and the super cow pastures from the associated specialist type, my science took off and I was far ahead of the AI, while usually on King Difficulty, I am not (or at least not until much later than when I got my initial tech lead).
I suppose I could play with standard resources and see how that goes, but I still get the feeling that unless I start with a very poor starting location I'll still probably jump ahead in tech more quickly than I would on a normal game.
Also, since there is really no limiting factor on population growth, and each city only gives 2 unhappiness, you only take a hit of one unhappiness by settling a new city, so there's really no incentive to not REX aggressively, especially if you pick up Monarchy.
Also, I have a few questoins about building that do things like give Golden Age Length +10% or increase worker speed by X%. How exactly do those work? Usually you see bonuses like those tied to wonders, not buildings that every city can build.
Oh, and other building that give a bonus to an improved resource usually give that bonus to the resource whether it is improved or not.
I do like the new specialists, the way they give you the feel of building your empire up over time instead of hitting one special technology and you've suddenly got a huge influx of this or that coming in empire wide. However, these new specialists have the ability to not only build their special improvements (such as the cotton farm or the wheat thinggy or whatever), but they also have the ability to build roads and even settle new cities. Were these intended actions for them?
Some of the buildings had.. odd combinations of things that they did, like, if I wanted X specialist for Y Resource I had to build Z building that gave a bonus to some other resource completely unrelated to the resource that I wanted to improve, or I simply couldn't even build that building because it had some obscure restriction for where it could be built. Also, a few maintencance costs seemed to be a bit off on a few of them. for example, one that give a flat +5 that cost no maintenance, and a situational +1production to forests only that had a maintenance cost of 5 (not so worth it if you want to build only one or two lumbermills in a city that doesn't have much production otherwise.
Another thing is that the AI don't seem to know what to do with the new specialist types. I didn't see any of the special new improvements in any of the AIs lands. Because of my Cow heavy start and the super cow pastures from the associated specialist type, my science took off and I was far ahead of the AI, while usually on King Difficulty, I am not (or at least not until much later than when I got my initial tech lead).
I suppose I could play with standard resources and see how that goes, but I still get the feeling that unless I start with a very poor starting location I'll still probably jump ahead in tech more quickly than I would on a normal game.
Also, since there is really no limiting factor on population growth, and each city only gives 2 unhappiness, you only take a hit of one unhappiness by settling a new city, so there's really no incentive to not REX aggressively, especially if you pick up Monarchy.
Also, I have a few questoins about building that do things like give Golden Age Length +10% or increase worker speed by X%. How exactly do those work? Usually you see bonuses like those tied to wonders, not buildings that every city can build.
Oh, and other building that give a bonus to an improved resource usually give that bonus to the resource whether it is improved or not.