Surprising you guys don't have a sub-forum yet. I'm on my second game as Greece on the world map. Both of these are on the 'Realistic' speed setting, which seems to flow better and with more action than the traditional marathon. Very brilliant mod.
My first game was as Rome, Trajan, which I posted about a bit here. Randomly generated continents map, noble difficulty. I'm a prince/monarch player on the standard BtS, so I just went that low to get used to the game. Ha ha, I think that was the fastest I've won a victory on that difficulty though.
My second game, as of now, is as Greece on the world map, Monarch difficulty. Since this is the world map, and the names aren't generated depending on where you found the city, I'm using several maps to name the cities myself. Take a look at my map (they're also all in phonetic Greek).
I'm also running specialist economy relatively early, and doing it well. I've finished 4 wonders: Moai Statues, Parthenon, Theatre of Dionysus, and the Temple of Solomon; I founded Judaism. I managed to conquer the Hittite and Armenian barbarian cities, which was only made possible after getting weapon smithing to build the Hoplites and Spartan Phalanxes.
I'm also quite high on the demographies: #7 in in land area, #9 in soldiers, and #1 in GNP (by afar). But keep in mind, I just lost a lot of troops invading Armenia, and, note if you aren't accustomed to the mod, there are upwards of
50 civilizations I'm competing with. That goes to a huge 'bravo' to the mod developers, the map really feels complete.
As of any issues? Nothing large at all: this is the best mod I've played for Civ4. There are only a few minor things that bother me. As of one, I'm keeping my the score visibility off because I cannot see at least a quarter of the top players. I'm using the diplomacy adviser to contact them and the graphs to check their score (ah, but no espionage for everyone!). The diplomacy adviser isn't too cluttered yet, but I fear that it will be in time. I understand that you might dismiss this problem because of your potentially large monitors, but it's an annoyance for me.
Another thing is that I feel really restricted growing my cities' population in the early game. I can't find very many ways to increase it before the classical eras. That's why i founded a religion, as well. Most of my cities stayed at 2 pop before I got Judaism, and it was really lacking in comparison to the others. I saw the Egyptian and Roman and Hungarian cities reach upwards to 6 to 8 population, which was in nowhere near possible for me without having it entirely made up of angry citizens. Any advice for this, hints for the next update, or am I just seeing something wrong?
One more thing, I'd like to ask about how much the AI is tweaked to function in this mod. Like I stated earlier, the foreign cities had way too much population. Do they not know when to stop growing the cities? A lot of my newly conquered cities on my previous game were also very prone to pandemics, as well, mainly due to their large and uncontrolled population. Overall functionality of them seems to be reduced as well: on a traditional monarch game I would be in a much worse position than I am now on this Greece game. Do you notice this as well, or is it just me?
Wow, I've never been attacked with an army that big, I think 25 or so is the largest AI army I've faced. What setting did you play on?
