Lastly, there are some major new gameplay rules buried in the 4.2 raw notes. They will end up in the "Stuff to Know" sticky at release, but are worth mentioning explicitly here:
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1) Animals that are "Can Only Defend" and have a Withdrawal chance, can now perform a second type of Defensive Withdrawal: they can retreat to an empty adjacent tile (that matches their Native settings) when they would otherwise die in combat. This rule ONLY applies to ANIMAL units, and only to ones that are defensive-only.
It is designed to simulate prey animal herds taking flight on the Great African Plains when predators attack.
It mainly applies to the new prey animal types I've added (Zebra, Wildebeest, Giraffe, Penguin, Caribou, and Musk Ox), but it can affect some of the big ones (like the new Hippopotamus), and some of the existing ones (like the Gorilla and Orangutan). The prey animals have been given Gold-When-Killed values to make them worth pursuing (simulating the value of their meat without having to resort to an ACTUAL kill-animals-to-grow-your-cities setup like Avain did), and the apes have been given the new Research-When-Killed stat instead.
This does NOT affect the Sandworm, since it's classified as a Monster and not an Animal.
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2) I haven't implemented this yet, but it's on my docket for today: I'm going to add a "bAquatic" tag that will extend the forced-Native system for animals to also require them to stay next to rivers, lakes, or coast, unless moving in Marsh terrain. There are several animals that need this and it's actually pretty simple to do.
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3) I have added the long-overdue Cotton resource from the vanilla mod content which makes things even worse, but even without that, there was a really-fairly-serious gameplay issue with the large number of Luxury and Health resources in MongooseMod compared to vanilla. In the past I had partially compensated for this by using a different setup for cities' starting happiness/health values plus how much you could get and lose directly on the tech tree,
but it was still fairly common for cities to balloon in size around the end of the Classical era with a large number of resources harvested or traded-for. This, in turn, put extra stress on the research costs of Medieval and Renaissance techs. But since I love all the additional Resources and the variety that comes with them, I wanted to find a better solution than removing things. So, WITH ALL THAT IN MIND, here's my brilliant new idea:
Buildings that double the happiness/health values of resources have had caps put in place. They are not currently reflected in-game since there was no easy way to explain this, so I'm putting it here instead. The caps are a bit complicated, but they make perfect sense and are definitely the right solution to the problem. I've divided certain Resources into subgroups.
A building cannot double the last/final Resource in any given subgroup. Here is the full list:
Forge: "Silver Gems Gold"
Market: "Silk Furs" / "Ivory Pearls" / "Hemp Cotton" / "Walrus Whales"
Broadcast Tower (and American Mall): "Dramas Singles Movies"
Granary: "Corn Wheat Rice"
Grocer: "Apples Bananas" / "Barley Wine"
Supermarket: "Bison Cows" / "Pigs Sheep Deer"
Harbor: "Fish Shrimp Clams Crabs"
Resources THEMSELVES are 100% identical to how they've always been. This change ONLY affects buildings. So, for example, if you have a Forge and ONE of its resources, you get +2 happiness. If you have a Forge and TWO of its resources, you get +4 happiness. But if you have a Forge and ALL THREE of its resources, you only get +5 happiness.
The Market is the hardest-hit of any single building by this change since it can lose UP TO -4 happiness versus what it did before, but given the long list of resources it doubles, that was really an insane amount of power for a single building to have anyway.
The MAXIMUM effect, if you're near the end of the tech tree and have collected all resources, would thus be -6 happiness and -6 health versus what was possible before (except for Cotton not existing before, heh). But players with fewer resources will be largely unaffected throughout the game.