Dear Rhye, dear all,
Thank you very much for the possibility of experimenting RFC (v.73?).
For the past 4 weeks I have been playing a few hours every weekend. I tried to play a few hundred turns with each civ, exception made to the pre-colombian or the pastoralist civs of central Asia. I had tremendous fun. Still, there are some few things that may be unbalanced:
First Spy and First Ideology are the best indicators of how advanced the most advanced civ is, right? Now, on virtually every run I made there was at least one civ ridiculously advanced. My hint is Korea (at least when I had contact with them I could understand that they were ridiculously developed...); maybe China, India or Japan as well, they are strong and have planty of turns to get their science ongowing. Korea usually falls to Japan or China, but I had a few runs where they were in the atomic age by circa 1750/1800. I also had a tremendous ammount of cases where I was playing with a medieval european civ and some other civ would adopt an ideology as early as 1350/1400ish. I can't tell which AI civ was so overdeveloped, but maybe there needs to be a further cap. on late game science? Conversely, the early game tech development is super slow, making the calendar-turn correlation, which is already slowed down, uncoherent witht the tech development. For instance, the runs I made with Persia and Carthage were fun but I struggled to really kick in some required development earlyer in the game. After a point (usually something that could sustrain may economy - currecny tech or guilds tech) I start to really roll down fast on the tech tree... Concerning late game civs (Austria, America, Brazil), I see no unbalancement on the advent of the Industarial era. It just makes sense that when America or Brazil spawn, some civs are already somewhat advanced. It is part of the experience of these civs to manage to catch the train ASAP, right?
Culture Generation (and especially its conversion into social policies) seems to be quite unbalanced. Ancient civs get very very very low costs for adopting the first policies. You can very easily close 2 or 3 branches before entering the medieval era. There is another issue: medieval european civs get approx. 8 free policies at the start of the game; industrial era civs get the same ammount! This seems quite unbalanced. Maybe there is a bug? This was the most unbalanced part of the game IMHO.
Economic Stability is a pain to manage. I know the stability system is not completely finished, but on every run I made my empire was verging between Shaky and Collapsiong simply due to poor economic stability. I may not be the best player but I usually focus on having high GPT income. Perhaps a solution to whis would be to avoid growth in your cities? So that the gold income from the limited number of trade routes reflects into higher GPT/pop? But if you do that, you are not generating enough science to be able to get the tech you need to increase the trade route cap... The game relies a lot on trade routes and my experience led me to believe that the mod is not very well adjusted to that yet. Another issue a player may have is with early game civs, where trade routes are either non-existant or provide a very low income. I came to a point where I was building units just to kill them right after, otherwise the science income would drop to zero... On a run with Persia I spent all my resources to research calendar so I would build the plantations to have the cities harvest the gold, which stalled the game (and the histroical experience) by some 1000 years. Maybe one way to go arround this is to have more CS spawning earlier in the game (Elam, Kush, Syracusa, Tamils, etc.) or to have a higher base gold from trade routes. Or a higher modifier from markets, caravansaries and all of that. Maybe Currency could be placed earlier in the tech tree?
Civil Wars are amazing! Still, I had a couple of runs (Carthage and Persia), where I was "Colapsing" for several hundred years and nothing happened... I could easily piece the empire back together (the rebels are too easy to manage... they have no units...), and then my stability stalled on Economic = 0 and Territorial = 0 for the rest of the game. The biggest issue concerning a civil war is really the complete destruction of all the infrastructure... It does not seem very coheren historically speaking. A civil war that does not destroy all the buildings right away but that is able to really put a dirty fight before you manage to put all the empire (or whatever you can) back into your hands may provide a better feeling. Still, super cool system.
City State System is a dream come true. Superb! It would be cool to be able to give some cities to CS as well, but that may not be possible... There are also some situations where I conquer the previous capital of a multiple-city-minor-civ and I am not given the possibility to annex, raze, liberate or puppet the city. I just annexed it by default. It would also be nice to put embassies on CS. Maybe by paying some coins? Is it possible?
Map Size is (and I never though I would say this, I love the map!) too big! The AI can't handle an expansion into Africa, for instance. In some cases I got the Huns rampaging all central Europe. The european civs were Vikings, England (me) and Portugal. No City States. A lot of free land. No one needed to expand overseas. Even in regular games the european civs do not want to expand so much. They settle late and in poor locations, and then they just destroy each other so basically no city stands still for over 100 years... The only exception is the Dutch CS... Don't get me wrong, the map is not too big, it's the perfect balance between local intrigue and worldwide politics. The AI just needs a boost to go overseas (UHV...). Perhaps reducing the cost of settlers could increase the ammount of new cities. Even if some empires collapse by overexpanding, some cities will merge into CS groups and populate parts of the map.
The rest of the game feels super nice. Religion struggle is interesting in the mid-game, CS alliances and all that jazz makes the political scene super nice, and no one overexpands to much in the old world. It is super cool to see the civs collapse and spawn and collapse again. Really good mod!
Just a final opinion of a fan, I would like to see some local intrigue on the early game of, at least, medieval european civs (if not all civs...). I know their gamplay would be focused on the renaissance and later eras. Still, the early game is a moment of economic struggle, and it should be one of military struggle as well. Ideally not between major civs but between these civs and some independent CS. For instance, Spain could begin with either Barcelona or Granada as an independent CS. They could get -1 settler but +3 units to try to conquer one of those cities, while using the other as a potential ally. But maybe France would want to conquer Barcelona as well, and Catalonia/Aragon would be an area of political volatility within the game, one where you don't know who will win. The same can go for Scotland/Ireland, which would be werstled between england and vikingland. Hunagry might be another simmilar case.
I hope this is usefull.
Thank you very much!
BTW, I was not using any other mods.
