Quick update on my Egypt game, huge earth map, Noble difficulty :
- game works perfectly fine, AI turns remain under 10 seconds
- 850AD, 18 cities - conquered Carthage, Nubia, Ethiopia, present day Yemen
- leading all main scoreboard metrics with roughly double yields / score points compared to runner up
- am about half-way through Middle Ages
- founded Solar Cult religion, which has now spread to 4 other civs
I have enjoyed every minute so far, it's been 60hr of amazing gameplay. A few feedbacks:
- the flavour of the mod is just incredible, favouring immersion
- depth and attention to details are (by some margin) superior to the best civ3 mods I knew of (Rhye's, MEM, TAM); the pedia is so accurate and exhaustive
- several gameplay mechanics seem very smart and balanced: for instance both maintenance cost and research scaling with empire size, calling for cautious and timely wide play
- the unit stack logistics concept is great; at one point I was hitting -25% strength malus and it forced me to rethink my attack, splitting my units in separate stacks which made it more challenging
- the civics are varied and probably call for very different "beeline" type of strategies when setting up an economy (for instance I stayed clear of slavery whilst it does seem very strong, but also dangerous)
- I love the depth - again - of the various promotions which make the hell of a difference when warring / I am still mostly picking always the same ones whilst I am sure there are better choices to be made on occasion
- the GUI is dense but very intuitive, it did not take me too long to figure out how it works
- I have noticed a few smart moves from the AI, such as timely counter-attacks or ambushes
- I also love the very long duration, marathon style, and how each era so far has felt almost like an entire game of Civilization
- the difficulty level (up to now!) has been a little underwhelming; had a very good starting location with Egypt, managed to found 4 cities and picked my immediate neighbours in sequence and relatively easily
- (only) one Asian civ tried to challenge my leadership and sent a massive stack... that got obliterated by a fort I had built at about present-day Suez and which was manned by several composite bowmen
- I only had one military failure when my larger army was incapable of taking the Arabian capital Mecca, because of the super strong defense inside it (after its walls had been torn down)
English, Carthaginians, Ethiopians, Portuguese and Mayans are dead.