Hi Tet--
This was my second time through your mod. The first time I played Arabia/monarch straight from the PTW disk version, and this time I played Rome/monarch in the version that just preceeded 1.90. I thought I should give you some feedback.
I don't know if any of my problems have been addressed in 1.9x, but testing it out is pretty time-consuming.
First of all, I want to say that my game as Arabia was awesome. For a long time, I was stretching my resources to the breaking point, trying desperately to conquer more land. I conquered most of Europe with bowmen, which was hard, because back then many of the Hungarian cities in the Transylvanian Alps were built on mountains and sometimes 20 bowmen would die in city battle. But later wars required Knights (Ansar Warriors, actually), which call for a totally different battle strategy. By the time I conquered North America, the strategy was again very different, with flamethrowers shuttled in Mech Infantry. Overall, it was my best Civ experience ever.
My recent game on 1.8x sucked in comparison. I chose to play Rome because I wanted the upper hand of their Leigeonaries. They turned out to be far too cheap and too powerful. I had conquered all of Europe, Arabia, Persia (where I built a Forbidden Palace) as well as India (!) before the Ancient era was over! I had built the Great Library, but my enemies were falling so fast that world science research was minimal. With India and Turkistan dead, only China was left doing any research, and they got overrun with 200+ leigeonaries just as they started building Pikemen (around 350BC).
What sucked about this game is that was its incredible monotony. I had overrun all of Africa + Eurasia in the same way: running leigeonaries. It's terribly boring, because they were slow and didn't offer many alternative strategies besides the standard "march in several big stacks." Though I was killing my people as fast as I could, conquering the world as fast as I could walk, I was still producing a surplus of leigeonaries, to the point that by 300BC, after the defeat of China, I had more than 1000 veteran + elite units leigeonaries. Basically, world history was over before anybody even discovered education. I was pretty disappointed!
Here is my diagnosis of what went wrong. I hope you consider fixing some of these things.
1. Leigeonaries are way to cheap for their power. Crucially, they become buildable very early in the game, and though they cost the same as a warrior they are more powerful than swordsmes (who cost 3X as much). Because Italy has many initial trading partners, they get Iron Working very quickly and basically for free (through intelligent buying and selling of advances). And an iron source is sitting right there in northern Italy. It's a recipie for disaster! Only a few turns later, all of Europe was mine, and most European cities were making a Leigeonary every single turn.
2. I understand conceptually why settlers must be so expensive, but the AI is really stupid about buillding them. The only practical way to make them is through rush building, and I don't think I saw the AI do that, ever. It means that their most productive cities spent most of their time making the 300 shields necessary to make settlers, instead of building troops or civil improvements. What's worse, once they did build the settlers, they just walked them around aimlessly, because very few squares in the game actually let you plop down a settler. The 300-shield settlers basically make AI civs ********, so they're not much fun to conquer.
3. The slowness of the science research guarantees a monotonous game which is 100% decided in the ancient era. That defeats one of the neatest features of Civ3. All your work about fancy troops that come later on is wasted. For example, elephants are neat units, but sadly, everybody died before Chilavlry was even discovered! I spent a week of leigeonaries killing spearmen. Not so great!
4. Nations were very reluctant to fight each other, at least in the ancient times. In my earlier game as Arabia, China had taken over a big chunk of Asia, built lots of cities, and in general, made a powerful rival. This is all in a game in which the only realistic way to increase your power is through conquest, because settling lots of new territory is out of the question.
OK, that's enough to get started. I appreciate all the hard work behind this mod, and if it hadn't been made, I would have quit Civ3 a long time ago. I understand the motivation behind the changes, but I think they actually detract from gameplay. Sure, I probably should have been playing on Deity instead of Monarch. That would have made the science go faster and nations would have been somewhat harder to overrun. But it seems like there should be a simpler way of finding balance!
I think the most important fix: make Roman Leigeonaries cost more. 20 shields would still leave them incredibly powerful, since swordsmen are weaker and cost 30. At 10, they are just the world's vermin.
. Thanks in advance.
That is the main reason you are seeing a number of updates in such a short span of time - just correcting some over written files.
