So I finally had some time to sit down and play through a whole game, well two actually but that's a funny story that I'll save for later
Overall it's fun, it's not very different from Civ4 so it was pretty easy to pick up and get rolling, I still haven't read the pedia entry for concepts so the fact that I was able to hop in and win two games without reading anything beyond the advisor pop-ups means it's definately easier to grasp than something like Fall From Heaven. In a way this is both good and bad, it's good in that it made the transition easy but it's bad in that it's really just more of the same with some nice graphics and a few interesting mechanics added, but little that really jumps out at me. The stability is very good though and that deserves a pat on the back, I didn't have any crashes or random oddities normally associated with mods, in fact I don't even recall seeing any TXT_KEY errors
I was a bit suprised the first time I fired it up and was greeted by a world that was not only populated but actually teaming with life. I had expected more of a 'desolate wasteland' feeling and having many other civs and what seemed like hundreds of barbarians at any given time killed any sense I had of struggling to survive. Aside from some fallout getting in the way I never felt as though the harsh environment had any impact on the game. Perhaps I mislead myself after skimming the forum threads (and not reading the pedia
) but I expected more of a struggle to get things up and running. I think the addition of some hazards to the world, perhaps through events, could go a long way towards improving the overall atmosphere of the mod. Even something as simple as significantly more fallout (maybe even move it around) and the requirement to decontaminate (worker action) before farming would help. I also found the presence of so many different health resources (cows, pigs, fish, wheat, corn, etc) to be odd, I would rather see more bonuses to health earned through buildings and techs personally.
Incidentally, this is what convinced me to whip up some map scripts as I though that a larger map with more detail and fewer civs would help. And this brought me to my first victory, a conquest win at turn 217 on epic speed, huge map, raging barbarians and 6 total civs. With these settings the AI doesn't stand a chance against the hoards of Barbarians, I had made no contact with any of them until about 150 turns in when I found a city with two injured defenders surrounded by about 20 barbarians. I put the last civ out of it's misery since their city was on a hill and the barbarians couldn't seem to take it but at the same time they couldn't do anything except build replacements. So for my second game I went back to a standard map with 7 civs and no raging barbarians. For the record, all of my observations are based on the second game and not the first since I quickly realized I was doing something not intended to be done.
Before this looks like a complete bash-fest, let me say that several elements of the mod are very good. The pre-placed ruins and partial highways are a very nice touch and the changes to the 'goody hut' rewards were a pleasant suprise. The hidden effects of the ruins is also very cool and I think I actually like the way things are simply randomly spawned much better than having to run around and interact with them. Getting the guy who built a radar tower in my city was cool and completely unexpected, nice touch with those guys. The 'hero' units are also nice, I managed to get Tank Girl and suddenly barbarians, death claws, etc were no longer an issure... at all
The fuel mechanic on vehicles is also a really cool addition, I was actually disappointed when I realized that it didn't affect my Utes and Tank Girl. It adds a much needed level of logistics to the mod and sweating the 1/4 tank dilema during a massive assault against another civ while trying to bring up fuel trucks to keep the war going is very cool indeed. I think adding a similar 'supply' mechanic to other units would be a great addition, I know you were discussing adding ammo in another thread which could work as well but I think even just general 'supplies' would work since you could imobilize (or at least slow down) units and reduce their strength gradually as they ran low on supplies. Also having the ability to possibly discover some fuel when going through ruins would be nice, as would losing the free fuel trucks from the goody huts and replacing them with something that simply added some fuel to the current vehicle since the fuel trucks are unlikely to survive if you don't just use them right away anyway, or drag them along with you.
The only technical issue I encountered was a MASSIVE slowdown around turn 100 playing on epic speed. It appears to be caused by the extremely high number of barbarian and animal units even with 'raging barbarians' turned off. It's not much of a problem as the civs are growing and filling up the open land, but during my rampage where I was simply razing every city I came accross the delay between turns was increasing exponentially and the barbarians started pouring out of the newly open spaces. The problem was solved by hoping into the world builder every once in a while and deleting a bunch of wandering barbarians and animals that weren't doing much. I tried an aggressive push into the wilderness to slaughter them in game but I really couldn't keep up considering how far I had to go to get to where most of them were.
I could go on more but I think that's enough. You already have discussions going on regarding expanding the tech tree and adding some more uniqueness to the civs so there's no need for me to bring those up. All things considered I think this is a very good mod with a lot of potential. It's filling a niche that is all but forgotten and it makes for a nice change from throwing fireballs at dragons.
but nothing happens afterwards; I couldn't see any indication of a religion nor did I have the ability to build Advocates.
Thus sReldesc winds up also being "Guild Of Steel" and so iRel winds up being set to -1, skipping the religion-founding part of the function.
