OK, so I just uploaded a save-compatible update that fixes some of the issues with the previous one. Turns out the change to artillery AI made AI players almost completely disregard it. Should be working better now though.
In the meantime, is anyone else bothered by the galleas line?
In the early game, triremes do a lot of heavy lifting: defending resources, hunting barbarians, escorting transports, blockading enemy ports. I find I need a ton of them, which means I eventually wind up with a vast fleet of gallaeses. But then navies get far more interesting: you get carracks for scouting, privateers for nuisance raids, and frigates for big expensive capital ships. All great and well designed units.
But then carracks become sloops, privateers become heavy privateers, and frigates weren't badass enough so let's have steam frigates! All the while my fleet of heavily upgraded gallaeses languishes by the shoreline. Then when they finally upgrade they become... ironclads? Not only are they kind of rubbish from a gameplay perspective (I don't think I've ever built one from scratch) but it bothers me from a historical perspective. To the best of my knowledge ironclads were a pretty niche/experimental design, not something anyone built a large fleet of.
Am I way off base? Curious to hear what others think.
OK, so this one I'll try to explain. While the current setup is not ideal, I feel it is adequate for what it intends to do.
There are several non-intersecting lines of ships, which - by design - actually "slide" in power over time relative to each other:
- The first military branch you have access to are oared coastal ships. Their design (basically, a big galley) stayed remarkably conservative until the very end of the Age of Sail - in part because of the very constraints that oar propulsion places on them.
- Then, you get to unlock the first "blue water" ships, starting with carracks. While their mobility is an obvious advantage, I wouldn't call them the "scout line" out of the box. A carrack in its time was as much capable a warship as a galleass was. By the time they upgrade to sloops, though, there are bigger meaner designs around, and the "ecological niche" of blue water warships is overtaken by galleons (which are a direct evolution of a carrack design) and frigates.
- Which gives the rise to the "cruiser" line, starting with frigates and their kin. The "workhorses" of a blue water navy only get outclassed when the battleship line arrives, and tend to stay viable for lots of tasks such as pirate hunting long after.
- Lastly, the battleship line is the heaviest combat ships you're able to build, and is fairly straightforward in its uses - this is simply the heaviest hardest-hitting thing you have.
As I mentioned galleons being an upgrade of carrack concept, why not have carracks upgrade to frigates? Basically, I considered that idea, but having straight non-intersecting upgrade lines had more appeal to me. Also, carracks start with "Coastal" promo, shared with all of their later kin, which the cruiser line doesn't have - and upgrading to it would result in "coastal cruisers" later on.
As for oared ship line upgrading to ironclads - this is basically the
"Brown water" line. Its intent is to defend your shorelines and later, in XX century, to support heavier ships. "Ironclad" in this context is not "Ironclad" in the broad sense (blue water ironclads are represented by armoured cruisers), but rather "Ironclad gunboat". The inability to directly upgrade to cruiser and battleship lines is my deliberate decision, as it creates a "cutoff" where one has to actually build themselves a new blue water navy to stay competitive, representing the effort countries all over the world had to make to have a chance in the naval arms race in the last several centuries.
The art model is almost certainly based on the CSS Virginia (aka the Merrimack) although I didn't realize that the Americans get their own distinctive Monitor - very cool. Both are still small vessels and with the famous showdown occurring in the James river off the Chesapeake Bay. And I think that the game is trying to show that they were coastal and river vessels by making them so dang slow in the ocean. But as your wiki article shows, the Europeans at least developed a number of proper seafaring ironclads like HMS Warrior.
Perhaps my complaint is that ironclads never really have a time to shine. Armor plating comes very late, and is very close to steel hull. So by the time you can build ironclads, I'm usually making a beeline for cruisers. So perhaps those prereqs could be re-examined? Alternatively, perhaps there could be more distinction of roles in the early navies? My main problem isn't even that ironclads are underpowered, it's that the game forces me to build so many trireme-tree units which wind up being suboptimal and unused. If my swordsman can figure out how to work a musket then surely my sailors that have been owning the waves for generations can handle modern ships.
Yep, see above. Their lack of "time to shine" is basically by design - they are supposed to be a "budget solution" by the time they are available, or a stopgap measure while you build yourself a proper blue water navy.
One comment, though, is I've got to agree with Birdman on the highways not being exclusively German... I mean, why not, just for flavor, make them available to everyone, or at least the US as well? The game's "spiritual" timeline ends in the late 1980s, but the US Interstate System was a Cold-War project completed beforehand. Wouldn't that be in-step with the mod's agenda to be "beautiful" and depict the historical flavor of its timeline realistically?
It was like this before, and then I decided to give poor Germans something unique and recognizable. I though a unique route is actually a cool concept that wasn't really used in Civ games before. And now everyone is telling me that they don't want Germans to have a unique route type.
- Combat occurred mid-turn during which AP resolution passed to stop the war in question, which resulted in one of my cities being conquered. Is this functioning correctly?
RI doesn't change anything regarding how AP stuff works. So whether it is functioning correctly or not, it's a vanilla thing.
- Ikhanda Pedia description says it lowers city maintenance (as it did in BtS), but it doesn't.
Noted and fixed.
- Potter's workshop is not listed in Pedia search under "buildings"
Because it is limited in number. Look under Limited building category instead (same as Storyteller for instance).
- Allemanic swordsman is spelled with two Ls, but the Alemanic horseman is spelled with only one.
Ugh, English/French confusion. Fixed, thanks.
- Does the IDW partisan spawning chance apply against barbarians and slaves/serfs? It did not happen for me against good odds.
Yes, I had them spawn against revolting serfs in my current game.
- Can wonders be destroyed upon city conquest? I had the excruciatingly frustrating experience of losing my incredibly highly developed capital to a massive serf revolt, and upon retaking the city, one of my wonders (the Colossus), alongside more than half of the scores of buildings, had been destroyed. This was not the case in BtS. Was it deliberately changed for Realism Invictus?
Yes, wonders have different chances of being destroyed on conquest, usually tied to the wonder itself and its history (for example, Pyramids are impossible to destroy while Great Library tends to burn quite well). Now that you mention it though, I realize that should be reflected in pedia.
My comment about the AP-wonder.
I think it becomes obsolete too late, so I have changed that from propaganda to minority-rights.
Probably so. I'll consider changing this too.
I often find that a lot of the map generators don’t generate enough rivers. I was wondering if it is possible to increase the amount of rivers generated by the RI Planet Generator?
I noticed Totestra generates a lot more rivers, but I prefer all the other options the planet generator gives. Is there anywhere in the mode files that I can change this?
Unfortunately, PG uses the vanilla river generator and has nothing in it that you could tweak to this end.
Finally the skilled french workers managed to make their first Highway/Modern Road 
That one always felt like an exploit in BtS, at any rate.
