A note from Beam when I asked him to make a map for a PBEM game based on RAR at CDZ.
the original thread is here:
http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2302
He wrote:
"To get a feel for the game and essential points for making the map I've played the entire Ancient & Classical age (comparable with standard Ancient Age). This age alone has a whopping 48 techs (I may have miscounted) and completed in 450 BC. My initial fair it would take until 1000AD was taken away, basically most of these techs are rather cheap.
The game is esthetically beautiful, all units fully animated and very detailed. The Civilopedia a marvel by itself. Both must have been a lot of work and taken a lot of time.
Played the game on 1.03 and there weren't any technical issues. Some ingame issues however, nothing to serious:
Time for worker actions is a bit unpredictable. Acquired workers sometimes are as fast as built workers, sometimes halfspeed.
Without barracks units produced sometimes are conscript, sometimes regular.
It seems that units heal hitpoints even if they've moved.
C3C plays entirely different with this mod. Mining grassland for example isn't possible but forests can. Just the first age already offers 3 improvements to enhance shield output and at least 2 improvements to enhance beaker output. The list of available resources is loooooooooooooong.
What's odd is that the A&C age offers units superior to units available in the Medieval & Renaissance age. A&C age 4.2.2 Heavy Horsemen being the prime example. Something else is that the makers of this mod apparently did not like suicide galleys. For each naval unit I've examined it was explicitely stated that they can't enter Ocean squares. Something to consider for Moff and Nikox with respect to continent distance!
This mod is about sheer abundance and apparently every feature in the editor has been used, there even are improvements like Slave Market that cause unhappiness. Now it isn't bad to explore features in the editor, it is the sheer abundance of about everything that's really putting me off. Only in the first couple of turns where contact has to be made and the first two settlers have to go out I felt pressure and satisfaction. After that those feelings making gameplaying so nice and rewarding were gone. Scarcity and dealing with it is a very important part of gameplay!
Maybe I'm a bit negative here and maybe Emperor is to easy for me, I just played it to get a feel and make a nice map for Moff and Nikox. Which brings me to the issue of balance, not so much for Bonus and Lux resources but very much for Strategic resources. Question: which are the killer resources in this mod, the ones I really should make sure are balanced?"