I’m playing on a Huge map with Epic speed on a Perfect World mapscript as Hyksos
1. I think removing the option of giving +1 population from nomadic huts would be a good idea. Adding additional population in the Lithic Era seems like a bad idea.
2. Defense on all flat land tiles should be 0, just like grasslands, because there’s a clear line of sight. Hills should have a lower defense than forest, but higher than flat land tiles, say +15. A -15% defense penalty for Marsh seems irrational to me. It’s realistically just as defensible as forest or maybe hills to me.
3. I hated when Civ4 added animals as a concept, so naturally I don’t like seeing them here either. If you want to give unique units to the barbarians, do that, because that’s fine, but seeing a Barbarian Wolf for example, attacking my city is just so silly & completely throws immersion out the window.
4. Hunters are able to explore far too much terrain early on, so I’d recommend dropping the defense from 5 to 1 or 2. They’ll die often then & exploration should be slowed. The only other options I see are either limiting how far from the city a unit can travel (there’s a Civ4 mod that did this, I think the option was called Limited Movement), or implementing some sort of Tile Attrition that damages the units so they absolutely have to return to your territory to heal periodically. Maybe both.
5. Adding the concept of gaining experience by exploring (from Vox Populi) would be nice, I’m missing that. It gives you another reason to go out & explore, instead of going total-turtle in your one city early on, which is too beneficial. It would also go well in combination with #4 above, in that if the Hunter is able to gain enough experience, it could be promoted to the point where it’s defense is enough to survive longer stretches outside of your territory.
6. Getting free Gatherers from nomadic huts also seems like a bad idea, as they can do so little early in the game that they’re likely useless units.
7. Maybe break the Lithic era up into Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic & Chalcolithic eras. This would allow a player to better start where they’d prefer. Also, there should be a direct jump from Paleolithic to later “Lithic” eras, so that those that do start in the Paleolithic can entirely bypass eras, at the cost of massive research costs, of course – in certain start situations, I’d think the cost would be worth it.
8. Shamans should be available a bit earlier
9. Workers should be available a bit later
10. Being able to purchase a portion of buildings/wonders is another feature I’m missing from Vox Populi.
11. Forest Garden doesn’t show a tile graphic after being built.
12. Overall, I’d suggest that every building & wonder have at least one terrain or resource requirement.
13. In the city screen, it says each citizen consumes 2 food, but it’s actually 3
14. I think Civ5 & all it’s mods, usually combine forest/jungle defense bonuses with hills & Saga of Man is apparently not doing that, which seems weird to me.
15. Trade routes should come earlier. These things happened way earlier than most people think.
16. Reduce Archer’s attack radius to 1
17. Reduce the cost of a canoe to that of a scout, as it’s basically a scouting boat, in fact, most early stuff to build seems over priced to me & should all be about 270 gold
18. At this point in my gameplay, I’m thinking you might want to consider making this mod off of Vox Populi. I’ve been playing that mod for so long, as have so many others, that I feel like I’m missing a lot of those elements (as I’m sure others would also feel).
ffs my dumb ass needs instituting in a hospital ward somewhere.
