Realism Invictus

[pecheneg]

That works fine enough as it is, and is presumably by design. Do you take issue with that balancing, or with the suggestion to make them more viable as a fighting unit relative to the warband? To me, it makes more sense that spearmen should be representing a significant fraction of the all-purpose infantry, but as it is they too expensive to be worth using that way.

Well, the problem here is that this option is ideally unhistorical.
In principle, as I mentioned once, two rather different types of troops are actually hiding under the spearman "brand". Аnd the usual guys of the "Hoplite" type with a "shock" spear, are a strong minority.
However, both vanilla and the mod that follows it definitely mean the hoplite-shaped infantrymen. Let's see how they interacted with the chariots.
In pre-chariot Egypt of the Middle Kingdom, classical (percussion) spears with a length of 2 meters or more are quite common, often in combination with very large (tower) shields. But in the New Kingdom, exactly one image of a warrior with such a spear has been preserved, and that is questionable.
Simply put, when faced with chariots, the "classic" spearmen practically died out.
The vast majority of the army of the New Kingdom was armed with universal shock-throwing spears 1.5-1.6 m long. And some of it is a very interesting spear with a length of 1-1.1 m, of which 60 cm is the tip, and 40 cm is the actual blade of the tip. At the same time, the corresponding width was attached to the length.
And if you look at the well-"illustrated" opponents in the face of the Hittites, then it's about the same thing. Lightweight infantry with small shields and fairly short universal spears
The reasons are trivial.
1. The chariot, if you do not take local deviations, is a "shooting" unit. The classic shock spear is not very useful here, to put it mildly. What is really useful and practiced is a VERY large bunch of foot shooters of all varieties.
2. If the chariot still climbs into close combat and attacks with a "hit", then problem No.2. Even a small peasant-medieval horse, practically unsuitable for riding, weighs about 250 kg. Mongolian horses of the "hairy moped" type are about the same. This is about the weight of an average male bear. At the same time, no one in their right mind tried to hunt big game with a classic spear – that is, with a small knife impaled on a shaft as thick as a shovel handle. Most often, what was called a "rogatina" in Russia was used – a two-handed spear with a very thick shaft and a large wide tip.
In other words, even a small and unprotected horse is difficult to kill with a standard spear. At the same time, even success is fraught with big problems for an infantryman, because these 250 kg tend to fall on him.
As a result, spears were used to kill the rider at the first opportunity, and not the horse at all. Meanwhile, chariot fighters are almost impossible to reach from the front with a standard spear... through this horse. But with a shock-throwing spear, you can not reach out to an opponent through a horse, but simply throw this to opponent in the forehead. Similarly, a strange Egyptian craft with a hyper-tip could already be poked at a horse with a result in the foreseeable future. Or hem your legs. In fact, this is a short "rogatina"
At the same time, it didn't help much anyway, at Kadesh, the chariots of the Hittites drove the Egyptian infantry quite cheerfully. .

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Hmm. If the goal is to prevent early rush of an AI, what if AI's started with a weaker version of the immobile defender barb cities get in world maps? As it is, the AI is its own worst enemy because they fail to use what you give them for defense for that purpose. A unit that can't be used for any other purpose than defending its initial plot may be an appropriate solution.

That is not a bad idea in itself, but feels a bit forced to me. It kind of works with the current balance anyway.

This mod has the best graphics then any other mod Ihave played. Buildings Improvements and especialy units are amazing. Only 1 Improvement stands out. Fort. For ancient and medieval eras it is fine, but in renessainse industrial and modern eras it looks obsoleted on map. In industrial era more suitable model for fort can be something like star fortress, and in industrial/modern eras it could be bunker or air base. I dont know is it simple to make such changes or it is complicated and needs a lot of time?

Your links don't point to anywhere in particular, but I can guess you're speaking about Forts. Making them prettier was in the back of my mind for quite a while now. I may just do that.

Also i find Minor bug - if you and another civ have "Slavery" civic and somehow on teritory of second civ you capture a slave (lets say slave rebellion in his town,its your turn and you attack these slaves for free EXP enslaving them again) - you can preview what another civ build using button "Sacrfice slave" - as you would normally do in your city. Using that - you can just send 7-8 slaves (in ancient era) and use them as free town view of another country (No spy points spending)

That's cool! I'm not sure if I need to specifically fix it, it's quite niche and you have to go out of your way to exploit it.

- The stock exchange tech has global trade has a requirement, but it also requires classical economy which requires global trade already. Glancing at the tech tree in the Renaissance, the tweaks that have been made around tech requirements, tech names and tech effects appear promising. I will have to play more to comment more.

Thanks, yes, that's an oversight.

In which function do you think the issue happened?

I believe it was trying to do a turn for UNITAI_SETTLER_SEA merchantman "loaded" with the settler, worker and a military unit, but said settler had already changed its mind and was trying to wander off on foot (I know it does wander off on foot if you reset or delete the ship), so the call to check the cargo resulted in a NULL call for a unit no longer there. It's rather easy to pinpoint the exact lines of code that led to the crash (you build a debug dll, let the save crash, save a full dump and then simply load it into VS and debug natively), but much harder to determine how they got there. So the cause is a conjecture on my part, but the result was definitely a null call for a cargo unit.

That's not true anymore since you moved Warbands to Weapon smithing.

Oh yeah, that's true. I loath to add 6 new unit varieties though, so I might just require Weapon Smithing for Mining.

- The English frigate has white masts.

And so does their SotL. They would actually paint masts white or yellow:


Not in all cases, so wooden-coloured masts would also be accurate, but white masts aren't an inaccuracy per se.

- The "Royal" Canon for England appears to be a siege piece following a Vallière template, not a field gun. While I understand that the "cannon" unit functionally represents several classes of siege weapons in use during its era, it seems that a field piece is more appropriate to represent with a mobile unit, especially considering that emplaced artillery already separately exists (though admittedly only for defensive purposes in siege warfare, and I don't think we have any distinctive units for it either). I may be ignorant and this is actually emblematic of field pieces, but the unit model resembles a 24 pound Vallière, which would have been notoriously unwieldy and immobile for battlefield purposes. As always, I'd enjoy learning more if I am mistaken about this.

Since I updated the cannons in recent SVNs, most flavour cannons essentially look the same, and I'd say they pre-date the de Vallière system; if we're using the French nomenclature, I'd place them as Grande couleuvrines of the pre-Vallière Calibres de France system or as demi-cannons (not in the British naval sense) of more generic nomenclature. Using a heavier cannon was a deliberate stylistic choice on my part, to better visually distinguish them from both earlier bombards and later Napoleonic pieces, but those still match pieces that would be used in field in the pike and shot era.

- The English man-at-arms and foot knight look exceptionally cool. The houndskull visor is intimidating and ornamentally "late-medieval," while I am also surprised that I believe the Bardiche is the only other halberd-wielding unit in the whole game.

There is also a halberdier Spain uses, but yeah, polearms in general are underrepresented, not in the least because I have to create new models from scratch or find where to convert them from.

- The English knight, however, does still wield a sword at any rate... Intentional?

Laziness. This is a simple retexture of the vanilla Knight that I didn't update. If I were making a new one from scratch now, it would have a lance or an axe/mace. Brits were quite fond of axes in late medieval era, more so than their continental counterparts.

- The English ship of the line has an insignia painted onto the sails. Was this still in practice during the reign of George III when the Age of Sail was in its culmination?

Not really, no, it's more to ensure stylistic consistency with the vanilla unit and for easier visual identification.

- And, finally, a gameplay-contingent question from a stray thought that occurred to me: how about disabling the ability to heal ships in the ocean? After all, it both doesn't really make sense (as mid-sea repairs were always rudimentary and done with stocks and supplies brought aboard already, otherwise fully dependent on access to fresh materials on a coast somewhere) and also too convenient in gameplay, where you can easily sail off into the ocean in a random direction unlikely to be pursued. While my previous request to have early ocean-going sailing ships have a risk of sinking at sea was refused on the basis of how it could disrupt AI pathfinding, this would somewhat make exploration harder, as retreating from pirate-infested coastlines in the New World and then just healing in the ocean for several turns and then returning would no longer be possible.

Would require messing with AI a lot.

EDIT: The axeman appears to have been moved to weapon smithing anyway? Surely that is an oversight, given the comment that they were deliberately supposed to stay with bronze working.

Sloppy search-and-replace job from me, will fix.

A good start for everyone is, in my opinion, essential for a good game, so I would recommend that in the upcoming version and forward, a value is set to "what is needed", so that the AI prioritizes the early defense with a palisade.

I don't really see them suffering as they currently are.

In fact, this is a typical "saker." That is, it is a field gun with a caliber of less than 6 pounds (5.25). Just guns "up to Griboval" are, in principle, "abnormally" long-barreled compared to guns familiar from the Napoleonic wars, etc.
For, firstly, the normal technology of drilling the cannon barrel channel (horizontal machine) appeared only in 1734. Before that, the trunks were overwhelmingly cast with a ready-made channel. With the precision of the casting, it was all very sad.
Similarly, everything was very bad with standardization, even in cases where it was possible to carry it out.
As a result, "individualistic" barrels met with "independent" ammunition. The gaps were large, and the efficiency of the gun was low. As a result, the only option to achieve normal ballistic characteristics were large charges of gunpowder (from where the thick breech) and long barrels. At the same time, due to the unpredictability of the relationship between the barrel and ammunition, the range and length of the barrel had to be done with a margin.
Valliere received drilled guns and standardized them, but the design remained almost the same. There is a rational explanation for this (he wanted to preserve the siege capabilities). However, among Valliere's brilliant ideas is the complete eradication of cap loading. Therefore, it is quite difficult to determine where Jean Florent's rationally stupid ideas end and where his irrational stupidity begins.
Then, yes, the Lichtenstein and Griboval systems appeared and the guns acquired their usual appearance. At the same time, the siege artillery retained almost the same design – precisely because it still required large charges and high core velocity / long barrel.

You're describing the one that's used in the release version (which was indeed a saker) so the two of you are actually talking about different pieces. The one he was originally describing is from the recent SVNs and looks like this:

I can add that in my opinion ability to heal on coastal tiles should have only sailing ships. Iron ships can be repaired only in cities (maybe forts also). I can hardly imagine modern battleship taken damages in battle and repearing itself just near coast or in open sea. In that case promotion 'hospital ship' (promotion for additional heal for ships, I dont remember exact name) become unusable.

Again, a lot of AI recoding would need to be involved.

I put one barbarian fort in every AI capital on Huge earth map, because in another case barbarians elimanate half of all civs before reaching ancient era. especially suffer civs living lonely far away other civs: vikings, russian, india, mongols, china, khmer, korea, mali. they die at the start of the game in 100 % cases.
also I give barb forts high lvl but low xp. It prevent forts from getting promotions from battles with barb and other AI.

What settings and version are you playing at? That definitely doesn't match my experience.

 

[shkitur1]

Your links don't point to anywhere in particular, but I can guess you're speaking about Forts. Making them prettier was in the back of my mind for quite a while now. I may just do that.

Yes forts (improvements on tiles). It would be great.
Now they looks:

 

[shkitur1]

I found in Civ4 - Graphics Modpacks some models for forts
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/bunker.287745/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/airbase-airport-ww2-style.223175/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/two-castles.187808/
(may be they can be usefull), but i couldnt change forts in the game by my own, because i cant even find folder with fort in \Assets\Art\Structures\improvements

 

[RezerCuid]

And I would also like to see the unique Mughal pikeman(8)

 

[TheBirdMan]

I don't really see them suffering as they currently are.

Funny - I see the AI have serious trouble with the Barbarians in each and every game I start. Even I have problems with them from time to time though the first building I build in my second city and forward is a Palisade and I keep 2-3 defenders in every city. And of course I know that this problem comes only because I use very large maps - it makes room for many, many - many - more barbarians than you ever will find on the more "normal" map sizes.

But no problem with me on this. Now I know how to fix it - even without making any half-way cheating on behalf of the AIs.


Edit: Screenshot added (I have choosen not to put it into a spoiler).

This number of Barbarians is not unusual to face when trying to get a foothold close to the deep dark. 100 to 150 turns earlier it might "only" have been 3-5 Barb-units in such a gang. But that is how it is when playing on a gigantic map.

 

[pecheneg]

You're describing the one that's used in the release version (which was indeed a saker) so the two of you are actually talking about different pieces. The one he was originally describing is from the recent SVNs and looks like this:

Clear. I could understand the context.

Since I updated the cannons in recent SVNs, most flavour cannons essentially look the same, and I'd say they pre-date the de Vallière system; if we're using the French nomenclature, I'd place them as Grande couleuvrines of the pre-Vallière Calibres de France system or as demi-cannons (not in the British naval sense) of more generic nomenclature. Using a heavier cannon was a deliberate stylistic choice on my part, to better visually distinguish them from both earlier bombards and later Napoleonic pieces, but those still match pieces that would be used in field in the pike and shot era.

Well, first of all, I strongly welcome any replacement of the absolutely insane vanilla cannon in its current role of the pre-Gribeauval artillery. But if you fall into perfectionism, there are nuances with a gun.
The gun is without "dolphins", that is, VERY old. The Germans have dolphins banal already in the 1520s - 1530s, the French need to look for, but I don't think that much later. By the middle of the 16th century, the Swedes and Poles were guaranteed to have it, the loot in the artillery museum of St. Petersburg is a witness. That is, "smooth" guns are the late era of the pike and crossbow – and the very beginning of the pike and shot. And yes, even before the official registration of the caliber system of France (1552).
Meanwhile, the carriage, on the contrary, is quite "modern", from the time of the orthodox pike and shot. For example, the "poppet" shaped wheels appeared early, but personally I have not seen images of cannons with them for the beginning of the 16th century.
At the same time, the carriage itself is extremely valuable. About under 24 pounds, yes. And not so much Valliere, but just the 17th century.
At the same time, if you do not cling to the details, then the overall proportions of the barrel are similar to a 33-pounder of the period of the "orthodox" peak and shot.
Finally, it is clear that a very thin–walled barrel relative to the caliber is just to make it look beautiful. But in those realities, this is a characteristic feature of a cannon firing stone balls.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Yes forts (improvements on tiles). It would be great.

I have some potential art for them stashed away, and I'll likely implement new fort art closer to the release, when I'll focus more on art updates in general.

And I would also like to see the unique Mughal pikeman(8)

After giving it a bit more thought, I realized it looked basically the same as the one currently used by Hindi civ, so they now simply use the Hindi one.

Well, first of all, I strongly welcome any replacement of the absolutely insane vanilla cannon in its current role of the pre-Gribeauval artillery. But if you fall into perfectionism, there are nuances with a gun.
The gun is without "dolphins", that is, VERY old. The Germans have dolphins banal already in the 1520s - 1530s, the French need to look for, but I don't think that much later. By the middle of the 16th century, the Swedes and Poles were guaranteed to have it, the loot in the artillery museum of St. Petersburg is a witness. That is, "smooth" guns are the late era of the pike and crossbow – and the very beginning of the pike and shot. And yes, even before the official registration of the caliber system of France (1552).
Meanwhile, the carriage, on the contrary, is quite "modern", from the time of the orthodox pike and shot. For example, the "poppet" shaped wheels appeared early, but personally I have not seen images of cannons with them for the beginning of the 16th century.
At the same time, the carriage itself is extremely valuable. About under 24 pounds, yes. And not so much Valliere, but just the 17th century.
At the same time, if you do not cling to the details, then the overall proportions of the barrel are similar to a 33-pounder.
Finally, it is clear that a very thin–walled barrel relative to the caliber is just to make it look beautiful. But in those realities, this is a characteristic feature of a cannon firing stone balls.

I didn't really model it myself, but rather just tweaked the proportions of the original by Bakuel. From what I understand, the lack of dolphins in the original is more a cultural thing than a sign of a really old design - the original is Ottoman, and I think Ottomans didn't add dolphins on their guns for a very long time, maybe ever:


So yes, I agree that if I wanted to do more specifically Western artillery pieces, I'd have to look for another model, but as a generic one-size-fits-all I think it does a decent job. If I come across somewhere that has various decent era-appropriate models, I'll implement them, but at this point, they'll all be using Ottoman ones with slight retextures for the barrel decor.

 

[AllTheLand]

- Many of the new RI-specific wonders have musics with a very low sound quality, such as the Cheomsongdae Obsevatory or the Academy of Gudishapur. This can be very unpleasant.
- The Inca-specific improvement can be built on hills with ice. That should not be possible.
- Forests should not be able to grow or be placed by map generation on ice tiles.
- The deluge scenario looks cool but is unplayable:
-- Starting tiles so uninmproved that multiple cities starving on the very first turn is a normal sight. Vienna doesn't have a single farm nearby.
-- Some starting cities in a much worse cultural situation than they should. Innsbruck at 62% Venetian, 27% Bavarian is ridiculous, and this means a city of size 4 starves on turn 1 because it can't even access the sheep resource on the tile right next to it.
-- Some nonsensical cultural situations - Pskov and Novgorod at 77% Swedish while Riga is at 57% Russian?
-- Some critical resources completely missing for some civs. Austria doesn't have iron at all for example. This may be related to the Iron resource of Prague being unavailable due to Saxony completely crushing the city culturally, but bronze and iron should probably be given to most if not all civs as a special bonus like is done for the crusading kingdoms in the Crusade scenario (the Deluge scenario also has some resource bonuses available but apparently not enough). There is no historical shortage of bronze or iron for the civs in the scenario, and without them some key units are unavailable.

 

[Tabris]

I was wondering... Does anybody have any projects for RI modmods? I'm interested in modding but I would rather contribute to a team project instead of making a modmods from the ground up.

 

[RezerCuid]

The auto-translator on the site is buggy, sorry, I wanted to say that it is worth improving the appearance of the Mongolian spearman (4)

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Ok, I'll be away from my desktop PC for the next week, so don't expect any SVN updates (at least beyond simple changes to XML values, but I'll probably tune out completely) - so treat the current SVN revision as the "live" version. Ultimately I decided that Axemen are fine where they are at Weapon Smithing and didn't move them, otherwise I seem to have actioned all the minor balance suggestions discussed. So just go and play.

- Many of the new RI-specific wonders have musics with a very low sound quality, such as the Cheomsongdae Obsevatory or the Academy of Gudishapur. This can be very unpleasant.

Yeah, a lot of those videos come from here on CFC, and seem to be generally of a rather low quality. I'm not sure if I'll find it in myself to improve them, but that is not out of the question, as I think the one I did for Uraniborg seems to be of a decent quality while the file is not noticeably larger.

- The Inca-specific improvement can be built on hills with ice. That should not be possible.

Conceptually I agree, but currently there is no way to mechanically restrict it, I think.

- Forests should not be able to grow or be placed by map generation on ice tiles.

Normally they can't, but some map scripts override the default feature placement code.

- The deluge scenario looks cool but is unplayable:
-- Starting tiles so uninmproved that multiple cities starving on the very first turn is a normal sight. Vienna doesn't have a single farm nearby.
-- Some starting cities in a much worse cultural situation than they should. Innsbruck at 62% Venetian, 27% Bavarian is ridiculous, and this means a city of size 4 starves on turn 1 because it can't even access the sheep resource on the tile right next to it.
-- Some nonsensical cultural situations - Pskov and Novgorod at 77% Swedish while Riga is at 57% Russian?
-- Some critical resources completely missing for some civs. Austria doesn't have iron at all for example. This may be related to the Iron resource of Prague being unavailable due to Saxony completely crushing the city culturally, but bronze and iron should probably be given to most if not all civs as a special bonus like is done for the crusading kingdoms in the Crusade scenario (the Deluge scenario also has some resource bonuses available but apparently not enough). There is no historical shortage of bronze or iron for the civs in the scenario, and without them some key units are unavailable.

Yeah, I was thinking about doing a balancing pass on it.

The auto-translator on the site is buggy, sorry, I wanted to say that it is worth improving the appearance of the Mongolian spearman (4)

You mentioned that a while ago, yes. Anything changed or you just decided you want to repeat yourself?

 

[Hafenguy]

I noticed a bug in the military adviser.
The tooltip over the worst enemy didnt Show the Name of the worst enemy.
It shows the name of the leaders of whom it is the worst enemy.

 

[globosud]

one thing I can recommend, at least in my opinion, is to eliminate a good 25% of buildings between the industrial and modern ages, in that phase everything becomes too frenetic, if you have a few non-specialised cities, you have to produce building after building in a burst. There is a disproportion, up until the Middle Ages the rhythm is less chaotic, and you have more time to plan armies and wars and do a bit of diplomacy, in the subsequent phases everything becomes more frenetic, and even 40 turns are lost for buildings, in every city, you don't have time to appreciate a building before you immediately have to build another one. you have to think that after the industrial era at realistic speed, a new technology is discovered in 10 turns, it means that you discover the technology, you start to build a building which takes 30 turns, in the meantime you discover three other technologies that can make obsolete newly built building.
to give an example
national park, germ theory, antisempsis, anatomical atlas, medicine, clinic, vaccine, antimalaria, blood transfusion , vitamins , anti polio, antibiotic, onchology, therapeutic anthibotic, human genoma e etc. could be simplified in less building, or by creating some phyton bonus.

they give the same bonuses, or less epidemic risk or heal, only the names change, but each of them takes 30 turns to build. If I can give you some advice, I would cut the buildings and add two/3 more technologies, which give the same bonuses, without needing to then build the building. or connect these bonuses to already existing technologies.keeping the construction queue of a city full of buildings is always busy, but it also means not being able to concentrate on espionage. in my personal version I removed 27 buildings, I left in the medical branch, only those that give a specialist slot, and passed all the health and the global epidemic in corresponding technology, I removed all the ministry building, and created a colonist in the industrial era who, with phyton script(with the help of f1rpo), create cities that start with 3 popolations, with those buildings

 

[AspiringScholar]

I noticed a bug in the military adviser.
The tooltip over the worst enemy didnt Show the Name of the worst enemy.
It shows the name of the leaders of whom it is the worst enemy.

Wait, doesn't it tell you that David regards Ramses as his worst enemy? It's just a line down, but it does seem to clearly say that still in German. The fact that the negatives are not red does seem out of order, though.

EDIT: Well, I am actually red-green colorblind, but they appear red on my phone but not my home computer...

 

[pecheneg]

I didn't really model it myself, but rather just tweaked the proportions of the original by Bakuel. From what I understand, the lack of dolphins in the original is more a cultural thing than a sign of a really old design - the original is Ottoman, and I think Ottomans didn't add dolphins on their guns for a very long time, maybe ever:

Well, I'll probably write about the Turks and the West Asian equivalents of "dolphins" in general later. There's quite a lot there, with uncertainties and pictures, and I have to hand over something to my superiors on Monday.
And then there was something that. it seems to me that it is worth posting a link. Just so that it doesn't get lost until the distant beautiful future. As it turned out, specialized military transport ships in the 19th century were already there - because it was not possible to carry cavalry on conventional "liners". At the same time, the overall design is basically similar to an armored frigate.
https://alex-cat-1975.livejournal.com/51416.html?ysclid=m2pqshgugp173949023

 

[Routalempi]

Wow, didn't pay much attention to RI for some time and I thought that the project was winding down. Instead to my surprise it seems that it's more alive than ever, SVN has had some MASSIVE updates since I last checked and even the forum is super active!

Very interesting to see how the latest updates to early game unit balance play out. At least on paper the changes seem pretty reasonable. Ancient/classical era unique units might need some major re-balancing though, especially the ones that were already strong against archers.

 

[AspiringScholar]

one thing I can recommend, at least in my opinion, is to eliminate a good 25% of buildings between the industrial and modern ages, in that phase everything becomes too frenetic, if you have a few non-specialised cities, you have to produce building after building in a burst. There is a disproportion, up until the Middle Ages the rhythm is less chaotic, and you have more time to plan armies and wars and do a bit of diplomacy, in the subsequent phases everything becomes more frenetic, and even 40 turns are lost for buildings, in every city, you don't have time to appreciate a building before you immediately have to build another one. you have to think that after the industrial era at realistic speed, a new technology is discovered in 10 turns, it means that you discover the technology, you start to build a building which takes 30 turns, in the meantime you discover three other technologies that can make obsolete newly built building.
to give an example
national park, germ theory, antisempsis, anatomical atlas, medicine, clinic, vaccine, antimalaria, blood transfusion , vitamins , anti polio, antibiotic, onchology, therapeutic anthibotic, human genoma e etc. could be simplified in less building, or by creating some phyton bonus.

they give the same bonuses, or less epidemic risk or heal, only the names change, but each of them takes 30 turns to build. If I can give you some advice, I would cut the buildings and add two/3 more technologies, which give the same bonuses, without needing to then build the building. or connect these bonuses to already existing technologies.keeping the construction queue of a city full of buildings is always busy, but it also means not being able to concentrate on espionage. in my personal version I removed 27 buildings, I left in the medical branch, only those that give a specialist slot, and passed all the health and the global epidemic in corresponding technology, I removed all the ministry building, and created a colonist in the industrial era who, with phyton script(with the help of f1rpo), create cities that start with 3 popolations, with those buildings

I believe that this is very much deliberate. The tech tree itself is filled with more and cheaper technologies to enhance a perception of an explosion of knowledge at the time, and you aren't supposed to be able to build everything everywhere, but rather, focus on a core heartland of your empire, with peripheral regions being starkly less built-up by design. I actually love that sense of so much opening up and becoming possible, but you have to choose what you want from it. In fact, my preferred playstyle is to focus on peaceful vertical growth during this era, and it takes a very long time to maturely develop; then once I have a strong, industrialized nation, the late industrial and modern era is the time to conquer widely.

 

[globosud]

the buildings I removed are most from the late industrial and modern era in fact, on the contrary, I said to increase technologies,
if you read carefully what I wrote, in my bad English , you will see that you think like me, in fact I have removed buildings that give the same bonuses, i.e. less risk of epidemic or healing and nothing else, inserting the same bonuses into the technologies, because those buildings also require 40 turns in the ending, which is in the late industrial and modern era, I did it to leave more space for espionage and war planning, and military production, which in my opinion must be the fundamental moment in the final phase of the game where micromanagement no longer makes sense, but we aim straight for victory,

 

[JoC]

one thing I can recommend, at least in my opinion, is to eliminate a good 25% of buildings between the industrial and modern ages, in that phase everything becomes too frenetic, if you have a few non-specialised cities, you have to produce building after building in a burst. There is a disproportion, up until the Middle Ages the rhythm is less chaotic, and you have more time to plan armies and wars and do a bit of diplomacy, in the subsequent phases everything becomes more frenetic, and even 40 turns are lost for buildings, in every city, you don't have time to appreciate a building before you immediately have to build another one. you have to think that after the industrial era at realistic speed, a new technology is discovered in 10 turns, it means that you discover the technology, you start to build a building which takes 30 turns, in the meantime you discover three other technologies that can make obsolete newly built building.
to give an example
national park, germ theory, antisempsis, anatomical atlas, medicine, clinic, vaccine, antimalaria, blood transfusion , vitamins , anti polio, antibiotic, onchology, therapeutic anthibotic, human genoma e etc. could be simplified in less building, or by creating some phyton bonus.

they give the same bonuses, or less epidemic risk or heal, only the names change, but each of them takes 30 turns to build. If I can give you some advice, I would cut the buildings and add two/3 more technologies, which give the same bonuses, without needing to then build the building. or connect these bonuses to already existing technologies.keeping the construction queue of a city full of buildings is always busy, but it also means not being able to concentrate on espionage. in my personal version I removed 27 buildings, I left in the medical branch, only those that give a specialist slot, and passed all the health and the global epidemic in corresponding technology, I removed all the ministry building, and created a colonist in the industrial era who, with phyton script(with the help of f1rpo), create cities that start with 3 popolations, with those buildings

Actually, this is my problem with the RI in general. The number of buildings that replace their previous version is enormous, you're supposed to build and build, without much sense. Even with the ahead-of-time cience penalty, new versions appear quite fast. The differences between them are somehow marginal. And you need to build almost each building in each settlement, there're little incentives to specialize your cities. Ministries would be useful if one would be supposed to build new cities - but there's no space for it when they become available, the race for territory had ended already in the Classical era as almost every space is occupied by that time. I struggle to go beyond Medieval era, frankly speaking - either the number of cities is too big (I got to 60 on the large Earth scenario), or I'm too bored to care.