Hi Rhye,
I'm playing your mod for the first time right now and thought I'd note down my first impressions, some questions, and perhaps a bug report or two. Perhaps my notes can help you in one way or another.
The most important thing first: I'm having a lot of fun playing your mod, thanks for making it!
Naturally, the following list will contain mostly negative aspects, but don't let that fool you into thinking I wouldn't have a great time with your mod.
Also, keep in mind that these are first impressions of a first time player. Some of my problems will probably solve themselves after a while when I've got a better understanding of the mod and it's mechanic. Still, I thought you might be interested in which aspects are difficult to understand for a new player.
Okay, now to the things that came to my mind while playing, I'll just write them down as they occur to me. In case it's important, I'm playing version 1.19 on top of Warlords 2.08, no other mods, clean CustomAssets, and I chose the Babylonians (nice to have them, I still miss them in the official game).
1. Lack of (in-game) documentation
I'd appreciate more information about the game mechanics of your mod. For example, I looked in the "Game Concepts" section of the Civilopedia for an explanation of stability and the factors influencing it, but couldn't find it there. There's some info about that in the readme, but not all of it is clear to me, and it'd be much easier to access in the 'pedia. Also, the readme explains at length the projection of the map (which is nice additional info, but mostly unimportant for someone who just wants to play the map), while just glancing at the more important aspects of gameplay.
I was looking for a FAQ thread in the forums and found this one, however seeing that it starts with off-topic discussions about flags and Italian language didn't especially encourage me to read further than page 5. I usually try to look for information myself before asking questions, but it seems a bit difficult in this case.
2. Great opening music
Great choice for the menu tune.
When starting the mod, I just closed my eyes and listened to it for a couple of times - it really gets me in the mood.
3. Mercenaries lacking documentation too
My first experience with the mercenaries in this mod was that I built my first bowman, saw an action button that I didn't recognize and that had a rather non-descriptive description ("unit selection" or something like that), clicked on it, and suddenly my bowman was gone and I couldn't find it any more, so I reloaded. I guess it has to do something with mercenaries, and I'm sure I will eventually find out how this works, but it would be nice to have some sort of documentation about this feature. The readme seems to assume that the player already knows about the mercenaries mod component, which will be true for many players, but I don't and hence I'm at a loss. I'll search CFC for the original mod to find the original documentation, which will probabkly answer my questions, but it wouldn't hurt to have this documented in RFC as well, or to at least have a link to the original docs of the included mods.
4. City naming is great
I absolutely love the way how cities are renamed when captured by a different civ, and how the game assigns city names that fit the city's location. This adds a lot to the atmosphere, and it shows a love to small details that I like in mods.
5. Foreign advisor is very good, apart from minor problems
I like the included foreign advisor, it's a huge improvement over the original advisor in every respect. However, I also have some problems with it. On the "Glance" page, the first column (or first two columns) are shifted to the left, so that the numbers of the leftmost column are printed over the leader pictures at the left edge of the screen. This makes the numbers hardly readable. Also, this screen has a square button that changes between "+" and "-" when I click it, but I have no idea what it does besides that (the documentation problem again). The pages "Resources" and "Technologies" get a bit cumbersome when you've got contact with many civs, because they only scroll up or down by one line per click. A scroll slider, or additional buttons for "page up" / "page down" could help here.
6. Unclear "Indepent leader" issues
I'm not sure whether there is *one* independent leader or whether there are many of them. In the trading screen, I often see that my rivals have contact to many independent leaders (apparently without any possibility to differentiate between them, how do I tell a rival to attack independent leader A instead of independent leader B?). Also, each independent city seems to have its own territory, again suggesting that there are many independent leaders. However, when I attack one independent city, then all of them across the world seem to be at war with me, suggesting that there is only one independent leader. Then again, even though the other independent cities seem to be at war with me (city plaque shown in red), they never make any effort to attack or pillage me. I'm confused.
My guess is that each independent city has its own, unique independent leader, and that the red plaque for the city name is just a display issue. But I'm not sure. Also, the problem that I can't tell a rival to attack a specific independent city persists.
7. Unclear stability and city flipping event
In my game, I suddenly had the Persian capital flipping to me, and the Persian empire collapsing at the same time. I don't know how I got the city, it probably flipped to me because of my cultural influence, but I didn't get the usual popup asking me whether I want to keep the city. I just suddenly had one city more while the surrounding Persian cities became independent. What exactly happened?
8. Strange troop relocation overloads caravel
The same event not only gave me a city, but also some formerly Persian troops. 2 immortals, 3 trebuchets, 2 horse riders, 2 musketmen, 1 catapult, and about 9 longbowmen all suddenly belonged to me (which multiplied my military strength, before that flip my entire army consisted of 2 longbowmen). The strange thing is that *all* of these troops were loaded onto *one* single caravel, that also changed allegiance to me. What happened? How can a caravel (that usually can't hold a single one o these units) suddenly hold one and a half dozen of them? I probably could have exploited it to ship my whole army to the arabian peninsula and attack Saladin, who was at war with me, but I decided not to exploit the situation.
9. Does the AI pursue historic victory?
If the AI can understand its historic victory conditions, then it seems to be rather bad at pursuing them. It's 1715 in my game, and out of 16 civs, only 2 have managed to achieve one of their objectives, all others failed to achieve any. I realize that many civs have later objectives anyways, but still a lot of civs sems to have failed their objectives.
10. Two greys for number of objectives?
I noticed that on the score list, some civs have their number of accomplished objectives shown in light grey, and some in dark grey. What's the difference? At first I thought that one colour might be used for civs that can still actually complete all three objectives, and another colour for those that have already failed at least one objective. But that's not true for my current game. So what's the real meaning of the two colours?
11. Bug in display of my own objectives
When I look at the victory screen, I see that I apparently didn't reach my first objective (being the first to discover Writing, Code of Laws, and Monarchy): the second column reads "NO". (I didn't notice failing the objective btw, is there any message that tells you when you failed to accomplish one?) The two other objectives are listed as "Not yet" accomplished. However, both of them were due to turn 86, and I'm well past turn 200 now. I'm pretty sure I've gailed to accomplish these objectives too. So shouldn't the line read "NO", for "not accomplished", instead of "Not Yet"?
12. Some events not being logged
I (think I) had a rebirth event of a rival civ, I read something about German cities displayed at the upper left of the screen. However, when opened the log to check what exactly happened, the entry wasn't there.
13. Calendar and turn number
It's a nice idea that the turn number is obscured from the player until he discovers Calendar, but having the turn number displayed whenever I click on "save game" kind of destroys the intended effect. Okay, I don't *have* to save my game, but still ...
14. Inability to scroll past a certain area of the map
When I sent my first warrior scouting towards Europe, there was a point where I couldn't scroll the map any further to the left. I think I couldn't scroll west of Italy. However, I could still move my warrior when I used the number pad, or when I zoomed out and clicked on some area he should go to. Is this scrolling limit intended behavior? If so, shouldn't the simple workarounds be prevented?
Note: The scroll limit went away after a while, I can now scroll freely anywhere. I don't know when that changed or what caused it to change.
15. Weird mouse movement after task switching
Perhaps connected to 15: When I Alt-Tab out of the game, then (on my windows desktop) my mouse goes to the upper left corner of the screen, no matter what I do. I can't do anything - when I try to move the mouse somewhere else, it will follow my command for a short moment, and then quickly return to the upper left corner. This is not happening with vanilla Warlords or any other game or mod, it only occurs when Alt-Tabbing out of RFC while the main map is displayed. The problem doesn't occur when I open another screen (like one of the advisors) prior to task switching.
16. AI too defensive?
I notice that the AI rarely conquers other AI cities, and rarely attacks in the first place. The AI seems to have hordes of archers or longbowmen in its cities, making offensive wars very difficult for the other AIs. They don't even attack independent cities very often. In my game, Mehmed keeps moving his throng of knights around between his two cities, without making any attempt to attack any rival. Only Jerusalem has changed hands three times by now. That's despite me having tuned on the "Aggressive AI" option.
However, since I play Babylon and had little contact to other civs, perhaps there's a lot of attacking going on that I don't see. I'll have an eye on it in my further games.
Okay, that's all for now. Thanks for reading. And yes, I really DO like your mod, as I said. There are just old beta tester habits breaking through ... perhaps you can make use of some of my reports.
Now, back to playing ...
I'll se whether I can reproduce the situation.
