Nikas Kunitz
Warlord
I understand clearly that development of the mod largely stopped, regarding addition of new content. So, I won't suggest things like adding new civs, even though I consider RI to miss huge potential in that regard. However, after I pointed to my issues with the city names, and before other smaller tweaks I would describe later, I wanted to atleast state two major things that greatly worsen experience of playing RI for me, and what I see as a potential solutions.
Limit religions
There's a good decade old modmod that limits religions to specific civs, historically-culturally fitting ones, using system of free duplicated techs blocked to civs similarly to the tech that founds Orthodoxy. As routinely seeing religions being founded by completely unrelated civs heavily breaks immersion for me, I used to routinely use it back when I was actively playing and modmodding RI 6 years ago, making it even more restrictive actually. Additional reason was/is playing on world maps, where the location where a religion is founded pretty much determines what part of the world will be dominated by it (something like Buddhism founded by a civ in Europe makes Europe dominated by it. I've seen that much more often than Christianity dominated Europe). In vanilla Civ4 I just use "choose religions" to largely avoid this issue, as religions are pretty much the same in it. But the thing is that in RI religions are fully unique, and aren't replaceable like that. Also, other mods often have dozen of new religions, sometimes with their own founding mechanics, making it lesser of an issue in them as well. But RI has only 7 fully fleshed religions, making every one of them a major part of gameplay.
I remember seeing and I know your stance on this modmod, Walter, you prefer unrestricted religions for more varied gameplay, even at cost of historical immersion. However, as I started to play a bit with RI again recently, I not only again rammed into the issues I stated above, but noticed new ones as well. Civs, especially led by "spiritual" leaders with heavy religion favour, particularly the ones who nominally like later religions, like Isabella for Christianity, or Umar for Islam, not only would found ahistorical religions, usually the early ones (as AI just favours all "religious" techs, without priority for their "preferred" late religions, or avoidance of others), they also often found 2-3 religions! Out of 7 total, that deprives other civs of founding a religion of their own, regardless if it is historical or ahistorical. I think that has major negative impact on gameplay, especially considering that a civ in RI cannot fully use a religion if it isn't its state one. Among other examples, the most notable one I remember is seeing Isabella (who inherited her sole "overwhelming" religion flavour from vanilla) found Judaism, Buddhism and Taoism, and not Christianity, that was founded by another civ and remained a minor religion, as Isabella made sure to spread her religions everywhere, as she also occasionally converted back and forth between the three religions she founded.
So, I suggest implementing restriction on founding religions one way or another. As I understand that freedom of gameplay is a priority, and most other players seem to not have such strong issues with religions as described above, I think it optimally should be made a selectable game option. Implementation of religion restriction by "dummy" techs in the modmod I described above is easy, but my modding experience is not enough to see if it is possible to make it a toggleable game option.
Another suggestion is religion founding system that I want/ed to implement in my own mod. It also uses "dummy" techs (and they also can be restricted as described above) named as religions, that require specific techs in the tree, but cannot be researched manually. Instead, they can be researched only by a great prophet, making them necessary for founding a religion. For it to properly work, all pagan temples also should provide a priest slot, as without it, mostly only wonders can provide great prophet points before temples of religions become available. Considering uniqueness and significance of each religion in RI, I think such system would fit well. As such, this religion founding system combines tech requirement from Civ4 with great prophet requirement from Civ5.
Civ starting plot bias
While implementing restricted religions atleast for my own singleplayer is easy, another problem is much more complex. Of all the reasons why RI hadn't totally become my favourite mod, this one is the greatest. In around 90% cases I abort a newly started game on a random map simply because starting location, terrain, features and resources, do not fit with my civ. In my recent return to RI that led to me starting the game almost always as a random civ, because desire to play a specific civ leads only to rolling unfitting (that is painfully fitting for another civ!) location again and again. This problem applies not only to RI, but to vanilla and others mods as well. As a historian, I would say that in real history civilisation(s) largely arose as an adaptation of a society to specific geographic conditions, so that's the Nile river surrounded by deserts that created Egypt, and Aegean coast and island that created Greece. So seeing a civ in a completely unfitting location destroys any immersion from the start, and even if I eventually will get a fitting location for my own civ (and actually finally start playing), some or many of other civs still would start in wrong geographic conditions.
In RI this problem is much more acute, as practically all civs have strong synergy with specific terrain, features or resources, from unique improvements, buildings and units, to the many or most of regular units having some combat bonus in specific features. What's the point in playing a civ with strong bonuses in jungle or desert, if you start in a tundra? As such, I suggest implementing starting plot bias in one way or another.
The only mod that I played and well know having starting bias, is Civ4 Reimagined. Couple of years ago, I played this mod and even further improved the starting bias. As I'm very interested in implementing starting bias in my own mod, I checked it in Reimagined. The uncompiled gamecore source folder is packed in together with mod itself. In it, I searched and found some blocks of code implementing starting bias. In best scenario, just copying and recompiling it will work in another mod. Anyway, someone with better understanding of modding and code surely will get sense of it better than me.
Limit religions
There's a good decade old modmod that limits religions to specific civs, historically-culturally fitting ones, using system of free duplicated techs blocked to civs similarly to the tech that founds Orthodoxy. As routinely seeing religions being founded by completely unrelated civs heavily breaks immersion for me, I used to routinely use it back when I was actively playing and modmodding RI 6 years ago, making it even more restrictive actually. Additional reason was/is playing on world maps, where the location where a religion is founded pretty much determines what part of the world will be dominated by it (something like Buddhism founded by a civ in Europe makes Europe dominated by it. I've seen that much more often than Christianity dominated Europe). In vanilla Civ4 I just use "choose religions" to largely avoid this issue, as religions are pretty much the same in it. But the thing is that in RI religions are fully unique, and aren't replaceable like that. Also, other mods often have dozen of new religions, sometimes with their own founding mechanics, making it lesser of an issue in them as well. But RI has only 7 fully fleshed religions, making every one of them a major part of gameplay.
I remember seeing and I know your stance on this modmod, Walter, you prefer unrestricted religions for more varied gameplay, even at cost of historical immersion. However, as I started to play a bit with RI again recently, I not only again rammed into the issues I stated above, but noticed new ones as well. Civs, especially led by "spiritual" leaders with heavy religion favour, particularly the ones who nominally like later religions, like Isabella for Christianity, or Umar for Islam, not only would found ahistorical religions, usually the early ones (as AI just favours all "religious" techs, without priority for their "preferred" late religions, or avoidance of others), they also often found 2-3 religions! Out of 7 total, that deprives other civs of founding a religion of their own, regardless if it is historical or ahistorical. I think that has major negative impact on gameplay, especially considering that a civ in RI cannot fully use a religion if it isn't its state one. Among other examples, the most notable one I remember is seeing Isabella (who inherited her sole "overwhelming" religion flavour from vanilla) found Judaism, Buddhism and Taoism, and not Christianity, that was founded by another civ and remained a minor religion, as Isabella made sure to spread her religions everywhere, as she also occasionally converted back and forth between the three religions she founded.
So, I suggest implementing restriction on founding religions one way or another. As I understand that freedom of gameplay is a priority, and most other players seem to not have such strong issues with religions as described above, I think it optimally should be made a selectable game option. Implementation of religion restriction by "dummy" techs in the modmod I described above is easy, but my modding experience is not enough to see if it is possible to make it a toggleable game option.
Another suggestion is religion founding system that I want/ed to implement in my own mod. It also uses "dummy" techs (and they also can be restricted as described above) named as religions, that require specific techs in the tree, but cannot be researched manually. Instead, they can be researched only by a great prophet, making them necessary for founding a religion. For it to properly work, all pagan temples also should provide a priest slot, as without it, mostly only wonders can provide great prophet points before temples of religions become available. Considering uniqueness and significance of each religion in RI, I think such system would fit well. As such, this religion founding system combines tech requirement from Civ4 with great prophet requirement from Civ5.
Civ starting plot bias
While implementing restricted religions atleast for my own singleplayer is easy, another problem is much more complex. Of all the reasons why RI hadn't totally become my favourite mod, this one is the greatest. In around 90% cases I abort a newly started game on a random map simply because starting location, terrain, features and resources, do not fit with my civ. In my recent return to RI that led to me starting the game almost always as a random civ, because desire to play a specific civ leads only to rolling unfitting (that is painfully fitting for another civ!) location again and again. This problem applies not only to RI, but to vanilla and others mods as well. As a historian, I would say that in real history civilisation(s) largely arose as an adaptation of a society to specific geographic conditions, so that's the Nile river surrounded by deserts that created Egypt, and Aegean coast and island that created Greece. So seeing a civ in a completely unfitting location destroys any immersion from the start, and even if I eventually will get a fitting location for my own civ (and actually finally start playing), some or many of other civs still would start in wrong geographic conditions.
In RI this problem is much more acute, as practically all civs have strong synergy with specific terrain, features or resources, from unique improvements, buildings and units, to the many or most of regular units having some combat bonus in specific features. What's the point in playing a civ with strong bonuses in jungle or desert, if you start in a tundra? As such, I suggest implementing starting plot bias in one way or another.
The only mod that I played and well know having starting bias, is Civ4 Reimagined. Couple of years ago, I played this mod and even further improved the starting bias. As I'm very interested in implementing starting bias in my own mod, I checked it in Reimagined. The uncompiled gamecore source folder is packed in together with mod itself. In it, I searched and found some blocks of code implementing starting bias. In best scenario, just copying and recompiling it will work in another mod. Anyway, someone with better understanding of modding and code surely will get sense of it better than me.
