Sounds good! We've played a couple more games since the one on the screenshot and every time the situation has been pretty much the same: one or two religions - depending on old world/everywhere start - and pretty much just one religon. Today's game actually started out with two, but the Malinese abandoned their false gods pretty fast
which meant that roughly half of the world was converted to the Olympic Pantheon before Medieval Age.
That has happened in most of my games too (which are usually No-New-World on HugeMongoose, or more recently PlanetaryMongoose, playing cooperatively with the friend I usually play with trying to survive against DarkMongoose AIs, which is very difficult btw
). I just assumed it was normal for one or two religions to gain dominance, and never took much note of whether they were early ones or not...
Having played some games with India (spiritual -> espionage bonus) means I've had the chance to closely observe the AI play. However, I'm not sure if it's any use to point out some of the flaws I've noticed - I'm not sure how much you can realistically do about it.
There's a lot of new code from the K-Mod and C2C SDKs I am planning to merge in, though I'm doing it dead last b/c I'm dreading it, heh. To save time and get 4.1 done faster I am probably going to focus on incorporating just their new AI code and leave the rest, if applicable at all, for a future version.
I did take a quick look at their CvPlayerAI.cpp files the other day in preparation for writing the AI support for my new civic exclusion rules. The good news is they have some terrain-damage-related code that may help THAT situation out significantly, so there's probably a lot more in there too (which is, afterall, exactly what AIAndy said in the "Omg!" thread
).
The bad news is, for AI civic evaluation alone, the K-Mod and C2C SDKs both have good, useful, potentially-relevant code in them, and they're COMPLETELY DIFFERENT b/c Karadoc rewrote the whole function himself, whereas C2C uses Fuyu's vacuum system that I've also been using since he first wrote it (but which I may have found a giant, game-breaking bug with), but adds more code too. So I have to figure out what K-Mod code, if any, I want to merge, how to merge it, and also see if I'm right about the big bug or not (after having verified to myself the other day that the vacuum system is, indeed, worth keeping), while double-checking C2C's extra code as I go (since it's more of a safe bet that I'll be using
that, but I still want to look it over).
Programming is very annoying work when it's this complicated.
The track is great. The instruments sound a bit synthetic, but in general it's awesome
Edit: How'd you create it btw? Do you have a musical background?
Sort of. I've never played any instruments, but I got interested in music composition in late high school. I took enough classes in college to minor in it, except that a music minor also had a performance requirement which I obviously didn't meet, so I just used it as my required "Humanities Focus" instead. (MIT is obsessed with ensuring "well-roundedness" to an excessive degree. I would've MUCH preferred being able to take most of my classes in my major, then maybe I would've been able to find an actual JOB... sigh.
I hate my life.)
Anyway, I wrote a lot of tracks in the past, all synthesizer-based like that one, most really good imo. Everyone always "liked" them, thought they were "really interesting" or whatever, but I never found many people who really LOVED them, nor any way to make any actual money off them, so I kinda lost interest a while back.
I've been meaning to get back into it at some point, but I haven't had time. As for the actual process of creating it, I have some hardware synthesizer modules I bought a long time ago, then I wrote my own composition software to replace a really-old, obsolete, no-longer-supported program that I loved.
Apparently "loops" are all the rage now, as in GarageBand, or Logic for a professional solution. I've never tried using them, the concept seems foreign to me and I don't understand it at all. I will always focus on straight MIDI-style composition, seeing as how it was old Nintendo and Super Nintendo era music that first deeply inspired me.
Some of my favorite soundtracks OF ALL TIME remain Final Fantasy 4, Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears, though I have hundreds of video game soundtracks at this point (and a lot of movie and anime ones too, to a much lesser degree).
On a related topic - What happened to the song "El Grillo" in the soundtrack? It was one of my favorites and I just realized I haven't heard it for a long time.
Uhh, nothing... The public release versions of MM always use the vanilla soundtrack settings exactly as-is. (Except more recently I had the brilliant idea of adding the 3 Vanilla/Warlords/BTS titlescreen tracks to certain eras, since you can't ever hear them up front any more with the mod locking the titlescreen and providing its own music.)
I just double-checked, and "Desprez el Grillo" is still included in the Medieval track list in the official 4.0.1 zip. So either you haven't spent much time in the Medieval Era lately, you've been distracted when it WAS playing and didn't notice (happens to me a lot), or you've just been unlucky, heh.
Also, to continue the discussion from the other thread:
Wewt, I love combining discussions!
(Now I just need to get a response on my Burnt Forest and Bamboo graphics, hehe.)
To be honest, I didn't even know tech had health penalties. Gotta look that up.
Globalization does, as does the Market building (which KINDA counts as Currency having it, lol). I also added it to the Trade and Corporations techs already in 4.1 (along with corresponding increases in Medicine and Sanitation), and I'm planning to double the penalty ones here shortly.
What are you planning to do with Industrial?
+1 or +2 free hammers per city. It'll be analogous to the +1 gold per city I added to Financial in 4.0, with the same purpose: to prop it up early on, while adding very little to its mid-game and late-game strength.