Personally, I wouldn't care about late game disrupting balance. It's the early game until Renaissance broken features (exploits, unbalance, one path strategy, etc.) that make all the difference. If one can get a a 100 pop city by the end of industrial era, then it will compare weak to the fact the human player will almost always surpass any AI by that time until Deity diff. In the end, late game unbalances have few impact and will simply make an already large gap larger.
@Cow vs Cattle
Although it seems nitpicking a tad, I admit CivIII used the term cattle.
Regarding the Electric Railroad, DarkPhoenix is pointing out something really important: will the AI understand. In a time already difficult to maintain healthy population, 20*(-0.25) means a rather large 5
.
The AI isn't entirely blind to health (for instance, the values of forests in their decision take account of its health bonus), but that might be for a new feature like the railroad.
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I'll be honest: late game unbalances (by late game, it means late industrial), it affects so little. People should care more about the early game as it is there it can funk up a game (or give too much of an advantage).
For example, no ones complain about the Moai wonder. Heck, it's one weak wonder I class one of the weakest. Not only it cost a lot (without stone), but also takes a weak tech path (which I won't take if I wasn't forced into it because of sea foods). And the new 3.2 made coast even more weak compared the versions where one citizen cost only 2
Even cheapened with stone (250
), it only brings one hammer per water tile and as said, the water tile is weak by itself. Perhaps a city with lots of sea foods will make it up or a rather large lake, but the Moai simply doesn't stand to other options.
And they are many many aspects Ancient-Classical and Medieval Era that are unbalanced.
Hence nitpicking about late game or naming or civilopedia seems rather distracting to what is important.
Before I mention it although I don't know how long Great Works were present, no one even questioned how weak there were.
Personally, a game is more enjoyable if the game propose different balanced situations according to circumstances. Not because cow are by now called cattle. Although some remember how vanilla BTS worked, but many people that still play there and refuse to start mods told me it was because the base civ4 game succeeded to propose different strategic paths. Yeah, it is evidently not perfect and issues about some paths ridiculously stronger are real, but even so, I felt it too. Another mod called TAM, it had the big flaw that there was only one (and perhaps two) way to go. One strategy that trumps everything else. Let add more spices to the era most play unless most play on industrial and modern eras.
(It tends to renew interest in micromanaging every city, especially if it's an otherwise extremely command-lite turn.) Though I haven't, and don't immediately plan to, start a world map game in 3.2. Not until I've exhausted all the new stuff I want to try out.
