QBeamus,
Thanks very much for the carefully considered feedback (and welcome to the forums!).
1. Multiplayer bugged is a known issue, largely to due some of the modcomps that Dune Wars uses. Deliverator and Keldath are looking at trying to extract the parts of these we want and rebuild the mod with just this code, but its a very tricky business.
2. Yes, rapid expansion is favored, particularly compared to vanilla.
I don't see this as such a design problem.
The AI does rapid expansion, and does it fairly well now that we've rewritten the AI's city settlement algorithm.
And the game is pretty boring until the empty space is taken up and civs are butting up against each other.
So I don't think its such a problem to breeze through the early settlement phase - this part of the game is pretty boring.
3. The water-boosting techs are fairly early compared to vanilla, though they're much later than they used to be and early game tile yields are way down from what they were.
Yes the human player can go for these early, though the boosts for the different improvements are on somewhat different tech lines.
The AI player also goes for them fairly early, so I'm not sure the AI gets hurt too badly by this.
I'm kinda against rewriting the tech tree again. If we wanted to change things, then the candidates for change are:
a) Increase the costs of yield-increasing techs and/or
b) Change AI tech flavor values to encourage them to research these techs
I think the biggest weakness of the AI in the early game is its tendency to use slavery rather than serfdom, and so it whips away its population (which hurts its long-run growth) and doesn't build improvements (and harvesters) fast enough. We're looking at making slavery Harkonnen only, and then boosting the yields from slavery (they're not big enough now to justify sacrificing the population).
4. I do think that the mod works best at Epic.
This isn't anything to do with a grognard feel or a preference for long games, its simply related to the movement speeds vs tech speeds.
On a standard or large map, civs are a LONG way apart, and it takes many turns to get to even a neighbor, let alone a non-neighbor, even using suspensors or thopters.
The lack of roads and railroads means that it takes a long time to get around and to attack enemies. On normal speed, you can set off with a stack of bladesmen only to find that your enemy has research maula guardsmen by the time your bladesmen get to their cities and thus your attack is stymied. You can send off an invasion force or a relief force for an ally only to find that the war is over by the time you get there.
Hence, I favor epic speed over normal, because this increases movement speed relative to tech speed and construction speed.
An alternative to this would be to increase movement speeds across the board, but this has other problems. It would tend to:
a) Reduce the value of vehicle as fast mobile support, because even infantry could move quickly.
b) Allow for all kinds of early game move-pillage-move (start in desert, move onto land, pillage, return to desert where the AI can't attack you with land units) exploits by the human player (that the AI doesn't understand) with thopters, suspensors and Fremen sandriders.
We could remove pillage ability from these units I guess - or at least the tier1 versions of them.
Or maybe we could somehow force pillaging to take up all a units remaining movement?
Then we could significantly increase thopter and suspensor movement without having these kinds of exploits happen.
c) Reduce the ability to see attacks coming and plan for them; AI stacks will tend to appear about out of the fog and attack your units without you getting a chance to respond.
This used to happen with the barbarian units on highways in David's Fury Road mod, and it wasn't very popular.
Another alternative would be to add the homeland promotion to suspensors and thopters, and in the culture of anyoen with whom you have open borders.
But I'm not wild about any of these.
