Played my first full game with this mod. My thoughts and feedback.

[salty mud]

I played a game as Rome on a pangaea map on a small world. I wanted to play a relatively quick game to get to grips with the new features. I won the game in the Renaissance era through a Conquest victory. I'd like to see I'm very impressed! Though I do have some gripes and questions that remained unanswered from playing the game. What follows is a more detailed version of my thoughts.

Leaders and Civilisations: I am very pleased with the civilisations on offer and the leaders. The new traits are much better balanced than they were in vanilla. Nice to see traits like protective actually useful now, the free walls bonus is quite nice, especially when combined with the happiness bonus. Some traits are clearly better than others though - humane is very powerful because of the dissent reduction. The likes of judicial seem weak in comparison. Also nice to see some other areas represented. The Polynesians, Javans, Malay and Polish were all nice additions!

Units: Seems pretty untouched from the vanilla game, bar a few exceptions. In my Rome game, for example, my Legionary unique unit is still extremely overpowered, able to compete well into the Medieval period. I dominated the world with it. The changes to siege units are nice. No longer are they suicide units but have a large chance to escape combat safely. I love the unit graphics. It was very nice to see my Roman-attired musketeers battling Portuguese-flag clad crossbowmen.

Civics and Civil War: Here is where I'm a little confused. I often feel like I'm being punished for advancing my civilisation by adopting new civics. A few times I unlocked a cool new civic that I thought would be great to try out only to have to decide against it because the dissent would cause chaos. A couple of my cities did rebel from time to time, but it was really only an annoyance rather than an entertaining game feature. AI cities did occasionally rebel, and twice formed new civilisations, only for them to be instantly crushed either by me or by the civilisation they rebelled from.

The civilopedia states that dissent is tied to culture. What exactly does this mean? From what I concluded in game, it's actually linked to the city's ETHNICITY, not its culture level. The higher the ethnicity of your culture in the city, the lower the dissent. Building culture buildings and researching cultural techs didn't really seem to do anything. If anyone could clear this up I'd be grateful.

Religions: Much better than in vanilla Civ IV. I like the idea of accumulating faith to earn a Great Prophet who can found a religion. The Civ V influence is obvious! The idea of tenets is cool, with "reformations" being able to change them a very clever idea. It's also nice to see that various religions actually take off throughout the world now, instead of everyone being Hindu or Buddhist. I'm excited to see how a game with plenty more civs and different continents plays out.

A pretty great experience overall, I'll definitely take the mod for another try.

 

[rsab]

The civilopedia states that dissent is tied to culture. What exactly does this mean? From what I concluded in game, it's actually linked to the city's ETHNICITY, not its culture level.

I suppose it uses indistinctly the words Ethnicity and Culture, since ethnic percentages are directly related to the culture forces present in a city.

 

[Xyth]

Units: Seems pretty untouched from the vanilla game, bar a few exceptions. In my Rome game, for example, my Legionary unique unit is still extremely overpowered, able to compete well into the Medieval period. I dominated the world with it.

The Legionary remains similar, but the UUs of many other BTS civilisations have been changed.

Civics and Civil War: Here is where I'm a little confused. I often feel like I'm being punished for advancing my civilisation by adopting new civics. A few times I unlocked a cool new civic that I thought would be great to try out only to have to decide against it because the dissent would cause chaos.

You can use high dissent civics, but you have to expand carefully and not neglect developing the cities you capture. Managing dissent does takes a while to get used to. Most important tricks are timing Golden Ages for when you have Unsettled cities, and allowing the occasional city to rebel (which resets all other cities to Stable). I've done a fair bit of rebalancing of dissent for version 1.24 though. High dissent civics aren't as punitive as they are in 1.23.2.

The civilopedia states that dissent is tied to culture. What exactly does this mean? From what I concluded in game, it's actually linked to the city's ETHNICITY, not its culture level. The higher the ethnicity of your culture in the city, the lower the dissent. Building culture buildings and researching cultural techs didn't really seem to do anything. If anyone could clear this up I'd be grateful.

It's related to both ethnicity and culture level. For every 1% that a city is your ethnicity, dissent is reduced by 1. And each new culture level reduces dissent by 20. e.g. a Refined city will reduce dissent by 80 each turn.

Religions: Much better than in vanilla Civ IV. I like the idea of accumulating faith to earn a Great Prophet who can found a religion. The Civ V influence is obvious! The idea of tenets is cool, with "reformations" being able to change them a very clever idea. It's also nice to see that various religions actually take off throughout the world now, instead of everyone being Hindu or Buddhist. I'm excited to see how a game with plenty more civs and different continents plays out.

I don't care much for Civ5 as a whole, but it did have a few very good ideas which I didn't hesitate to borrow. I'm really proud of the Faith/Tenet/Reformation system has turn out in HR.

A pretty great experience overall, I'll definitely take the mod for another try.

Thank you for trying it out and for dropping by to give your feedback! A new version (1.24) is now available, which I hope you'll enjoy even more.

 

[salty mud]

Thanks for your response! I'll download the new version right away and load up a new game today. I'll give some more thoughts once I finish that!