I tried playing a game and I still think we have a ways to go. The terrain graphics are pretty great (although I wish we could somehow convey a sense of deep dust for the dust seas), but the techs.. Oy Vey 8). Half of them are dead ends, quite a few don't do anything, the tech trees a shambles... Also we have a lot of tweaking to do. I know we don't have enough unit models, but I'd rather see 18 models of the Lunar Scout then chariots on the moon 8). The barbarians seemed rather weird to me, but I suppose that's my responsibility to change. You aught to change the image for the goody hut to.. a glowing impact crater site, or a wrecked space craft. We can have more then one kind of goody you know, and arbitrary results from them. As long as we avoid anything too fancy the AI will deal with them just as well.
I'm not going to worry about the economics of the game, yet, as we have a lot of features yet to implement which will impact that quite a bit. However, we should look at our promotion tree. It's very lifeless. One of the nicest things about some of the other mods are the promotion options they allow for. Our mod seems to have gone the other route. Worse, some of our promotions don't work. For instance, the mobility promotion. The moves rules for Civ4 are a bit arcane, I know. Personally, I don't fully understand them myself. But I know that that promotion doesn't work 8). We should switch it over to a bonus movement point type system in the interim. I have a crazy idea for a few techs, civics and buildings along the lines of a modshop to capture some of the free wheeling independent spirited resourceful engineering you might see under the right conditions if a group of highly educated/knowledgable and motivated individuals were left to fend for themselves on the Moon 8).
Units need tweaking. I'm not sure why every last rover is good at exploring huts. Military Engineers have no strength, which I think is wrong. Personally, I think even regular engineers should have a strength of 1. The pioneer Engineers of the moon strike me as resourceful. Food caravans. We should make food caravans to allow the transport of food from colony to colony. I haven't learned the new resources yet, but I hope we have some real to die for resources there. Also, I haven't read the details of the moon_map.py file, but you should use their trick of using the fractal generators to create resource runs of materials that run in veins, like He3 and our miraculous "Frozen Water" resources. We need some buildings that simply generate food. Not terrain improvements, but buildings. Make them tiered so they can be improved upon. Ignoring the idea that we already use a lot of these terms, we could have a chain like... Nutrition Synthesis Plant->Algae Farm->Hydroponics Gardens->Biodomes. Each building requiring the one before it, acting as an upgrade and being generated from increasingly higher tech.
Also, I have personally never played Civ4 into the era where all the power features are used, so perhaps they just suck, but I'm surprised we arn't using them. It's a pity that the computer is so hard to teach to use fuel type restrictions, because really we aught to limit vehicles by fuel and/or oxygen based on their type. We might want to make a distinction in our UnitCombat types between units which contain people, and those that don't.
I can definitely envision a lot of events and features that will make our config come to life. Once I get these baseline features squared away, I will begin to explore those.
For everyone else, please remember, this is only the barest, early alpha. The game you see now will bare little resemblence (except our terrain 8) ), to the one to come.
. I've put in big hours over the last 2 days on features, and I'm still just on my initial list. I'm getting a lot faster at dealing with the Civ Engine and Python, but it really is quirky and finicky :/. Speaking of which, I think I'm going to go to sleep, and leave the Great People for tomorrow.
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