Alright, 4.2a is finally done! Sorry for the repeated delays. I just need to update a couple of the documentation files and zip it up, which I will do when I get up since I'm too tired right now, heh.
I'm having HUGE FUN playing mongoosemod these days. Thank you A LOT, Lunar Mongoose!
Always great to hear! Thanks for giving it a chance, and for all your feedback.
I don't know anything about XML things but I want to try when I have time.
It honestly couldn't be easier. An XML file is just a text file - open it in any text editor, change the numbers, and hit Save.
(Just be sure you ONLY change the actual number values; the other stuff has to be the way it is.)
The main problem you'll run into with this particular thing, is that the way Civ4 does date progression is a series of blocks like "A turns at B-years-per-turn", then "X turns at Y-years-per-turn", etc. You kinda need the TOTAL number of turns to stay the same, and ideally you also want the end date to stay the same as well. Like I said before though, if you're willing to be flexible on the end date you can tweak the sequence much more easily.
1. Please add a column for Commerce
in Domestic Advisor.-Surely that icon was changed in your mod and I prefer the new icon. The vanilla one is sometimes confusing me with the happiness icon
. Oh wait a second, what's the blank column between religion and population? I've just recognized that.
Is it originally the Commerce column?
The column after Religions is Corporations, which does stay empty til late-game but nevertheless does need to be there, heh.
There is no Commerce column in the original vanilla Domestic Advisor, and I never felt like it was critical to add b/c you can see the Trade Route commerce, and also the final Gold/Research/Culture/Espionage values, so the base Commerce was pretty well-represented already I thought, and there wasn't any room left for more columns on smaller screen resolutions either which was a big deterrent.
Fortunately once I got going working on the Domestic Advisor again, I wound up improving lots of things with the layout, heh. For example I was able to reclaim enough horizontal space for a new column at low res by scaling the table's side margins, so Commerce is now in 4.2a, and I'm really happy with the results; thanks for prompting me to work on this window!
2. Domestic adviser is too long in vertical direction. It hides city's current production pane. So the players cannot change city's production directly on Domestic Advisor screen and have to enter the city screen.
Gah. Yeah this was bad, heh. I never noticed the problem before b/c I run the game at 2560x1600 personally, and while I did add column-width scaling a while back, it had some room left for improvement - and I never looked at window position and size as a whole at all. Domestic Advisor is now setup much better at ALL resolutions in 4.2a.
3. I've already suggested random order of leader change. It was just for fun then. But I have found that some leader's favorite civic can be useless. For example, Washington's favorite is free speech but he will be replaced before he can research Liberalism. Shaka's Military School, Cyrus' Free Religion, Lincoln's Emancipation and so on.
I was aware of this when I first put in the leader cycling system, and there's no easy answer to the problem. However, this IS one of the main reasons I also gave each leader a second Favorite Civic, so they'd have enough variety to get by. Additionally, they CAN use them if they get the Wonders that unlock specific Civic Categories, and they can ALSO use their Favorite Civics as the basis for "Adopt this Civic" request/demand diplomacy messages if other players are far enough ahead or behind them. So I'm okay with the system as it is, even if it's not perfect.
4. Sometimes leader change is not followed by the name change.
The first screenshot : Brennus has changed to Boudica but her name is still Brennus.(other leaders' names have properly changed.)
The second : The leaderhead is Napoleon's but his name is still Louis.
It's just the name problem. Leaderheads and Traits are properly changing.
I tried a few test games, and couldn't reproduce this bug at all. I'm not doubting that it's happening since you've got screenshots clearly showing it is lol, but I couldn't find anything wrong in the code either so I'm just going to have to let this one slide for now. Sorry I couldn't fix it right away, but I AM glad it's just visual and their stats are still changing correctly.
5. How do the pirates work? They don't attack anybody, just move into other unit's tile(even into a city), while privateers can attack vessels, pillage improvements and bombard cities. They only attack when the war is declared.
There is no vanilla AI code for handling/moving/using LAND-based "attack-without-declaring-war" units, and the AI mods never wrote any that I'm aware of, so I didn't give the Pirate unit this stat. One of my primary design goals is to never add any major features or abilities that humans can use but AI players won't be able to take full advantage of (or in this case any advantage of at all).
So the Pirate unit works just like all other land military units, except that it can be carried as a Special Cargo type in the Corsair and Privateer. (And if it DID have "land-privateer" ability, then I would've given it weaker combat stats to compensate, heh.)