- Totestra occasionally appears to have its coordinates "misaligned" in that the Old World is sometimes split by the left and right edges of the mini-map, seemingly because it favors having the New World in the middle of the map and prioritizes this accordingly for some reason. While this doesn't functionally change anything when playing on a cylindrical world as I do, it can be confusing when a large empire is actually contiguous but shows up on opposite sides of the map. The New World often is in fact positioned in the middle, which is also somewhat awkward. Strangely, I even always select "Fix continent split" on the Wrap Land map setting, so this feature might actually not be working as intended.
- In reference to a recent piece of conversation between AllTheLand and Walter concerning the impracticality of preventing enemy reinforcement when besieging a city, an idea occurred to me which might offer a workable means of doing this: how about having siege weapons confer a negative promotion when adjacent to a city (e.g., "Besieged," akin to the already existing "Fear," which also somehow uses proximity logic) or after reducing city defenses, which makes the city tile impassible, just like a peak? If impassibility itself would displace the existing units there, then maybe a less elegant but practically equivalent exorbitant penalty to movement cost which would functionally freeze them in place? I agree that the inability to truly surround a city with a singular army is a shortfall of the way that Civ 4's combat works and makes for a less immersive tactical experience and representation of actual sieges, but this seems like it just might do the trick, if implementing it as feasible as it sounds.
- This might be at odds with the flavor or intended use-case for the unit, but I realized while playing Hungary this time and remarking on the Fekete Sereg's foot in the door as a blended melee and early gunpowder unit, that the German Doppelsöldner is exclusively the former, while the historical mercenaries by that name were very much active in the era of pike and shot, and were indeed generally belong to it, unlike the Black Army, which was formally disbanded before the XV was over. I'm not sure if it would present balance complications, but some trinket representation of marginal firearm use for them (such as a slight bonus against Arquebusiers or even just eligibility for Pinch) seems like it might be more authentic.
- I'm not seeing it in the main menu Pedia now, but in-game, the tooltip for Metal Casting was showing me "+0% Epidemics."
- Does Temperamental's "-2 first strikes chances" penalty apply to
definite first strikes, or does it only subtract from the possible ones? That would indeed be a monumental difference.
- Are first impression relations bonuses and penalties definite and fixed between specific leaders across games or simply randomized within each individual game? Does Caesar, for instance, have a specific negative first impression of a historical enemy like Vercingetorix in every game, or are such historical enemies only coincidental when they manifest that way, and recipients and severity of these are actually random?
- The Skirmisher shows Woodworking as a prerequisite in addition to Bronze Working, which itself already requires Woodworking.
- This is something that I have been aware of for a while, but many of the music selections for certain leaders are borrowed from culturally rather different civs and would benefit from some correction. I can help with this if you'd like. (Hungary, for instance, has vanilla Mali's music, while Pericles has the Volga Boatmen as his leitmotif, which is a bit jarring in both cases.) Where there aren't pre-existing music assets, something at least culturally-adjacent to the civ in question and much more plausible could be shared instead.
- It seems to me that the industrial plantation for hemp comes too late with Serfdom. The default plantation with Calendar applies to six other cash crops, and I don't see how or why hemp would be an exception, technologically. It is frurstrating when it is revealed at the very beginning of the game with Mysticism and you're aware that you have it, but you can't connect or make use of it until all the way to the medieval era. It does passively provide 1
on its own, but that pales in comparison and still leaves the question as to why properly making use of it comes so much later. As an input for naval supplies, it is still contingent upon the Naval Workshop, which properly does come later with Machinery, so the resource itself wouldn't shortcut this. Herodotus in the 5th century BC wrote about the Scythians smoking it, so if it was being used as a ritual or recreational drug in antiquity, is there a reason why it can't be unlocked with Calendar instead, like the other luxury crops? To a lesser extent, this might apply to cotton as well as the only other resource requiring this specific improvement, but alternatively, mass production of it does seem to be more labor intensive, and I actually am not sure how widely used or important it was as a commodity before industrialized textile production.
- The barbarian uprising event happened to me and it identified verbally that "A dangerous number of Swordsmen" have spawned, but they were actually Axemen. I believe this may have been because I didn't at the time have Armor Crafting and so the event just defaulted to whatever the strongest available melee unit was, but there was still a discrepancy in the verbiage and what actually happened. I took a save and can link this here if you'd like to see it.
- Unfortunately, the Horse Whisperer quest appears to be broken, as I was the first to fulfill its requirements and then nothing visibly happened. I have attached a save if you would like to take a look.
- In the vein of decoupling some of the roadblock tech prerequisites which are less conceptually related, it seems to me that Politics should not be a prerequisite of Armor Crafting, as it currently is. Much like Double-Entry Accounting was for Cavalry Tactics, they don't seem meaningfully interdependent and also clamp the "administrative" and "military" branches together at that junction of the tree, which feels a bit jammed and less interesting as well. I would suggest removing this specific prerequisite, personally.
- Why does Bread and Circuses from the Famous Gladiator say that it lasts for 25 turns, but will also be removed from the city after 410 turns? Wouldn't both values be referring to the expiration of the effect? I didn't get a save for this one, but in the tooltip when hovering over the unit action icon, each was explicitly said.
- Something appears to be broken with the (quite cool) feature of tying revolting slaves and serfs to the identity of the civ in question. In this game, my slave revolts were occasionally African, and occasionally Caucasian. I've included a save for a specific example of this, where the slaves were initially black, and then once I killed one of them, the rest of them turned white. They also were being divided in the "group by category" command based upon this, where only one ethnicity was gathered by the action, even though all them as slaves were still nominally the same unit. Is this possibly randomizing based upon the tile culture of the city from which the revolt spawns? I was neighboring the Sahelians and had some decent cultural pressure from them, so this is what I am inclined to guess.
- Does hurried production from slaves (or Great Engineers) get factored into the production chart? I believe it logs the historical output, not rate of future production, but I am curious, because in this game, I captured probably several hundred slaves and this ended up being an actually quite significant source of total
, which I capitalized on until the flintlock era.
- Hungary has the same anachronistic fishing boats in the medieval era that I had mentioned for England previously. I don't recall if that was already fixed or not, but perhaps this is the case for all European civs.
- Siege Engineering I from the Engineer Corps doctrine nominally provides +50% XP gain from combat, but as this doctrine is unlocked by Gunpowder alongside Bombards (presumably its intended recipients) which can only attack via ranged bombardment at a marginal XP cap of +1 per instance, the bonus rounds down to conferring no additional XP. As Siege Engineering II adds another 50% to XP gain already, I would suggest moving the first tier's bonus to the second for a full 100% which would properly reflect in +2 per instance, and maybe move more of the city defense bombardment bonus towards the first tier to balance it against not being lucrative at first. It is currently +5% and then +7%, so perhaps +8% with no additional XP bonus and then +4% with the full 100% XP gain bonus instead, might be a good way to correct the rounding nullification while still keeping the first promotion competitive against conventional ones.
- The walls of Adwa in the save I have attached appear to be halving the bombardments of my besieging Bombards, which should be exempt from this as gunpowder siege weapons. I don't recall this being a problem with other civs' bombards, so perhaps there is something amiss with the default one (which Hungary uses)?
- I had mentioned this a while back, and I have no idea if it would be ridiculously complicated to implement, but it would be a major quality of life improvement if the combat odds tooltip could be displayed throughout the combat animation. I play with offensive quick combat but I leave the animations on for defense, so that I am aware of what happens in both cases, but in turns with a huge number of defensive combats, it is actually quite a slog to fish through the combat log and look for individual combat odds. If you could see the odds and the factors at play for the 10-15 seconds of each combat animation as they occur, this would be fantastic. Is this something even conceptually reasonable?
- Are Great Bombards able to move through forests with a route? I built it in this game, and it actually can within my own territory on a road, but it is not able to follow my invading army into the enemy's forest, as is described. I have a save if you would like to take a closer look, as I am likely misunderstanding something on my end. I thought that they were supposed to be unable to move into any forest whatsoever.
- In this game, as I mentioned above, slave captures ended up being a huge windfall of
for me. Perhaps I have simply gotten lucky, but it seems that the capture odds are well above 20%. I'm finding that something like every other combat has yielded me a slave, and I ran the civic from early classical up through Metallurgy, which should normalize the outcome to the actual probability.
- Here I am simply curious, but why was Merchant Adventures renamed to Global Trade? The continuity of EU3's National Ideas into this game was something I actually loved and am slightly pained to see fade out...
- In this game, Yusuf ibn Tashfin wouldn't capitulate even with only a single unit left guarding his last city. Could the Pedia possibly detail a leader's individual willingness to capitulate, as this seems to be variable and not already explicitly documented? It can make a difference knowing whether or not you can expect this in deciding how much weight to throw at a losing opponent.
- Name tags for events of masters declaring war on their own secessionists are still showing the latter as a blank (e.g. "[Leader X] has declared war on !"). This was reported by someone else somewhat recently, but I am not sure if it was ever properly debugged or if a root cause was found at the time.
- On the note of the bug recently discussed between you and [Y], I was already aware of it and caught an instance of replication for it in the fourth save I've attached. It says that Longbowmen replace Line Infantry. Just brainstorming here, but what if this occurs when
you know the tech that obsoletes the previous unit? I seem to notice this only when I am actually able to build the upgrade that it says the archery unit replaces, not before.
- It seems to me that the Caravan House is too regionally thematic and might be due for a more generic renaming. I've had this impression for a while, but it was starkly apparent when it was a lucrative build on one of my colonial island cities not adjoined to any viable land route. Admittedly, I don't have any ideas which I'd be proud to offer as an alternative, but something less explicitly land or even desert oriented seems to be called for.
- Does Totestra (or any other major map script for that matter) distinguish the New World from the Old World such that certain resources are separated between them, so that there are properly "exotic" goods only available from colonization or trade, or is it actually blind to this?
(max is +12 on 12 turns or more if i good remember)
Any tips on them? Maybe we should start threads on civ-specific strategies in the RI forum.
Thanks for sharing that thorough breakdown, I needed to see that perspective again.
as its 
is narrowly close to infantry and not well-suited against either Arquebusiers or Pikemen, walls and castles are no longer safe strongholds, and naval warfare generally gets dynamically opened up a lot more. Having a special, elite melee unit that holds its own in this era is cool and fun.
for all plots and +1 
