Super Massive Enhanced Gameplay Mod

[AdrienIer]

It's already a tempting choice in the base game to delay getting copper to build cheap MP for later purposes, at the risk of getting rushed of course. But with archery coming sooner it's going to be even more tempting because an axe rush is less likely : you know a warrior defense is less likely because your opponent has a strong incentive to tech archery whatever path he takes, and even by going straight for the rush you can't chop or whip without going for two techs that are away from what used to be deviations from worker techs.

[Krill]

The changes look interesting but honestly, I think you've departed far enough from BTS (or even the current version of RtR) that I don't feel comfortable making speculative balance judgements. I'd really have to try out a few single player games to even get a feel for it all.

I'm interested in joining a pitboss test game (I'm completely soured on PBEM after PBEM59 though, so it'd have to be a pitboss for me) whenever you get the changes implemented.

Being so close to Christmas and the New Year, I hope that we can get Pitboss and PBEM games set up in January for those that want to play in them.

Well, I think you got the "everyone will hate it" reaction down, at least as a gut reaction--I know I certainly was surprised at breaking up BW.

I aim to please. Or Not.

Still, I have some concerns, mainly with the idea that "starting techs are just flavor", since every combo will have strengths and weaknesses, and a pecking order will emerge.

It's worth remembering that the starting techs cost 4 turns of research apiece ie all 5 can be had by T12. There isn't that much importance on them in terms of how they affect starts. I think the best context to consider the changes is this: With capitals being altered to have a minimum yield from teh city tile of 2 food, 2 hammers and 1 commerce, a worker should complete eot T11 at the latest.

Most of the strengths and weakness would, I think, come from the the weird edge cases where rushing the second rank tech gives you an opportunity to snowball effectively. But having run some of the scenarios I don't think any of them are game breaking by any definition of that term.

Things I want to watch for: Why would I ever want Fishing as a starting tech? I guess if your best tile is a 2/0/2 seafood?

Generally: The only time Fishing is wanted as a start tech is if you have a seafood start. It is still necessary to work water tiles. If you have Lake tiles then there is the potential to start ORG and use an early lighthouse to open up more usable tiles without needing to get additional workers to improve the capital, but that is not relevant to Fishing as a start tech. It is one of the two ways to rush to Slavery, more on that next.

However, due to the lowered tech costs it's not a significant punishment to start with Fishing on a landlocked start.

If I'm Fishing/Hunting, I can go Warrior/Scout first, research Archery, grow to size 2, then whip the first Worker--how good is that? Remember, the revolt into Slavery doesn't cost an anarchy turn anymore.

I ran this scenario as a test before posting.

Any civ could go [Fishing or Hunting]>Archery and revolt to Slavery on T13. So long as there is a 3 food tile, can build a warrior or scout, complete eot T7, then spend 5 turns working 3 yield tiles, plus the 4 yield capital for 6 yield/turn. So eot T12, worker is 30/60, then whip on T13 for a worker eot T13.

This compares to just building the worker, which would take 12 turns, complete eot T11. Essentially, for a given start going worker first gives a player a 2 turn head start on improving pasture food resources. Given a 2 food capital, that's anywhere between an additional 8-12 food hammers from hooking food two turns earlier, versus a warrior.

I think either start is viable, food type dependent, and starting with Fishing or Hunting doesn't make this start particularly special except can get Agri prior to working completing.

ie:

• Start with Fishing: can go food tech>Archery, whip and hook any land food resource except deer with whipped worker.
  
• Start with Agri or Hunting: Can go [Other food tech]>Archery and hook any land food, or just Archery if have relevant food tech with whipped worker.
  
• Start Wheel+Mining: Can whip worker and hook food only if 1 pasture food.

BW seems like a very, very bad tech now that it doesn't have its add-ons, since all it does is (hopefully) give Axes and Spears. In addition, now that everyone needs Archery for Slavery, the viability of early war is severely reduced.

Early war is not axe rushes. War is more than building units to take cities, it's about managing expansion in a holistic fashion. As a concept the viability is not altered, only how to manage expansion, aggression and borders.

I feel like it needs something else--one thing that popped into my head is having mines only be +1 hammer to start and having the second hammer come at BW--nothing major, but it means you can't ignore BW until you need Metal Casting

I buy this so much I'm going to implement it. I agree 100%.

I'm worried that this is yet another change based around Slavery warping the early game--maybe more stuff around it needs to change? Even with all the civics changes you've been doing (especially in this branch), the labor civics have been barely touched outside of the Slavery nerf and making Serfdom do something. Obviously Caste System is a meaningful alternative (even in BTS), but it can't really be moved up (unless you want to obsolete Creative, among other problems). Serfdom seems too powerful early as well, maybe even in its nerfed form. How much is Emancipation used? Maybe it could get a complete overhaul and move to one of the first couple techs--is that crazy?

The +100% cottage growth is moved to Free Speech, which is moved back to Liberalism. Emancipation now gives commerce to mines, hammer to farms, and +1 commerce to the Non-Town cottage improvement.

The changes to Trade routes (At Writing, not at Currency) and the changes to the MC>Machinery (Serfdom at Machinery) makes me think that rushing to Machinery is a viable option. Long term Slavery is not a viable option IMO, with CoL reasonably accessible and Now Machinery is a jack of all trades tech.

(and on the coding side, is the prettiness of the tree part of the XML? I assume I could change arrow techs and the non-arrow prerequisites, but the tree itself seems hard)

The arrows are drawn in specific directions given the difference in position on the tech tree of the prerequisite tech and the..receiving tech. And it ignores all other techs on the tree so everything has to be in a specific position. I'm amazed by the work Vondrack did in positioning the everything in the tech tree and making it work. I was still changing Industrial era techs due to the changes in the start techs, it was that bad. IMO the above picture is good enough.

[Krill]

tl;dr: Rushing is bad for game balance, but rushing and choking (in more advanced forms) time lines are similar compared to RtR.

It's already a tempting choice in the base game to delay getting copper to build cheap MP for later purposes, at the risk of getting rushed of course.

I'd disagree with this fundamentally, because I don't agree that the risk of being rushed exists due to binary slider...or at least, we've developed past the point of running farmers gambits because people will raze cities that you defend with workers and warriors.

But with archery coming sooner it's going to be even more tempting because an axe rush is less likely

Let me stop you right there. Axe rushes don't work, not in an FFA environment against competent opponents: third parties benefit more from prolonged active conflict than either party in a war does. Demographics and graphs reading causes most ancient era combat based around a true rush ineffective.

Rushing as a default strategy is never something that I'll promote. Rushing should only be necessary if the map has put a player in a position where development and expansion will not be effective compared to a neighbour using the same strategy. ie someone will grow faster than you because they have better and more land than you because you are at the end of a peninsula or in the middle of tundra. Map design has developed to the point where that shouldn't happen, and I'm not going to develop a mod based on peoples incompetence.

you know a warrior defence is less likely because your opponent has a strong incentive to tech archery whatever path he takes, and even by going straight for the rush you can't chop or whip without going for two techs that are away from what used to be deviations from worker techs.

Simply building units in the hope to remove someone from the game is not a strategy that works particularly well at the best of times. In the context of the ancient era though, that's usually caused by the lack of strategic resources ie copper and horse, caused by map issues. Considering that copper and horse are now on techs may increase those issues, but if a player refuses to defend themselves that's their own fault. Archery is more accessible because it is there to provide an option for those that do not have accessible strategic resources, and here it is perhaps slightly more accessible than in RtR.

Tech costs though are something you've not considered. For example, BW on a huge map costs over 200 beakers, for chopping, whipping and copper. Add in Wheel for another 80+ beakers for roads, looking at 25 turns to get both. Masonry, Archery and BW all cost base 60, on a huge map should not cost more than 220 beakers for all three, ie the old cost of the abilities given by BW is about the same as the new cost for the same abilities. On a Standard size map, BW would now cost 74b compared to 165b before hand, Wheel is 46b compared to 90b...basically the turn that you could put a rush together by isn't changed. And with Archery being about as accessible as in RtR, I wouldn't agree with the assertion that rushing is actually any worse off

[Cheater Hater]

Starting techs: I think a lot of this comes from the sum of the changes being really hard to model at this point, like GJ said.

Early Slavery: See above, and I was writing this post when I should have been sleeping

Fishing: I keep forgetting how much the Pier changes things--if you have a water resource and a 1F/2H tile (or maybe a 3H tile), you could build the Pier for 5 turns (or 4), then switch to the seafood until growth, then whip the worker? When would that complete the worker?

BW: Glad to see I have some good input
With regard to early wars, I'm not the one to ask--I have a natural bias against Archery (since it's a dead-end tech), and you know all about my prisoner's dilemma digressions.

Labor Civics: I didn't realize Serfdom got moved (and buffed more) and Emancipation got buffed--Democracy still seems way too far out of the way to be relevant though. I also don't know much of a buff the non-town cottage commerce boost is versus the quicker-growing cottages when you consider Printing Press (not to mention Universal Suffrage)
Machinery is interesting, though I don't know how good it is, since it does a lot of average things--Windmills/Watermills (have these been used that much in RB/RtR games?), the new Lumber mill (though you haven't been clear on whether it's going to be available at Machinery or Metal Casting), Serfdom, Crossbows (which haven't changed in either RtR or AGM, right?) and half of Maces (which is a little worse now thanks to the Bureaucracy nerf deprioritizing Civil Service).

Coding the Tree: Why not just make Mysticism a second-row tech, and move everything up a row? You can do that without changing the tech costs right? There's a bunch of empty space there between Priesthood/Monotheism and Theology. (And why do we call them second-row techs when the tech tree is almost always presented sideways? )

I think I'll try doing some more coding today--you keep adding more stuff and I need to keep up somewhat, especially if we're going to try for a test game in January

[Krill]

Starting techs: I think a lot of this comes from the sum of the changes being really hard to model at this point, like GJ said.

Early Slavery: See above, and I was writing this post when I should have been sleeping

Yeah, want to get a stable version of hte mod out sooner rather than later.

Fishing: I keep forgetting how much the Pier changes things--if you have a water resource and a 1F/2H tile (or maybe a 3H tile), you could build the Pier for 5 turns (or 4), then switch to the seafood until growth, then whip the worker? When would that complete the worker?

For a 3H tile, the timings are; Workboat eot T3, net T7 or T8 (assume T8), pier eot T7, growth to 2 eot T12. At that point if it's a double see food start the second net should be done between T11-T14, so growth to size 3 eot T15, but with a variance of up to 7 food saved. Worker would be whipped T19.

Starts that have both seafood and land based food are harder to work out, because depending on the tiles worker or work boat first both make sense. Whipping at size 2 can be done T17 with pier and work boat first, maybe earlier. I just would question why to go that way. Worker first and growing on a pier is possible, and if there are lake tiles and ORG a lighthouse can make a lot of sense. Pier>Worker has some level of strength with a 3 hammer tile, Pier eot T3, worker eot T13 (1 turn later than standard worker first) and then potentially Work boat eot T17, grow on newly hooked land food whilst seafood is hooked, or growth to 2 eot T18-19 with 1 food hooked and 4/0/x semi-improved seafood.

BW: Glad to see I have some good input
With regard to early wars, I'm not the one to ask--I have a natural bias against Archery (since it's a dead-end tech), and you know all about my prisoner's dilemma digressions.

Input is always welcome.

Labor Civics: I didn't realize Serfdom got moved (and buffed more) and Emancipation got buffed--Democracy still seems way too far out of the way to be relevant though. I also don't know much of a buff the non-town cottage commerce boost is versus the quicker-growing cottages when you consider Printing Press (not to mention Universal Suffrage)
Machinery is interesting, though I don't know how good it is, since it does a lot of average things--Windmills/Watermills (have these been used that much in RB/RtR games?), the new Lumber mill (though you haven't been clear on whether it's going to be available at Machinery or Metal Casting), Serfdom, Crossbows (which haven't changed in either RtR or AGM, right?) and half of Maces (which is a little worse now thanks to the Bureaucracy nerf deprioritizing Civil Service).

The Emancipation commerce change basically acts as a small buff if a player decides to do a mass tile improvement swap to cottages late game. After 15 turns a cottage is a 0/0/5 tile improvement if also running Free Speech. Towns pre-PP are 0/0/4 for comparison.

Serfdom simply sits there as better alternative to Slavery IMO, IF you have the MFG to keep up in power without slaving so you don't need the emergency whip to save cities. but with those tile improvements you should be able to plan to have that.

Lumber Mill: Metal Casting.

Coding the Tree: Why not just make Mysticism a second-row tech, and move everything up a row? You can do that without changing the tech costs right? There's a bunch of empty space there between Priesthood/Monotheism and Theology. (And why do we call them second-row techs when the tech tree is almost always presented sideways? )

Every tech that has an optional prerequisite needs the optional prerequisite tech to be in a column to the left of the tech. So Myst has to be the left of meditation, which is to the left of Priesthood, which has to be to the left of Writing. If the Relgious techs are moved on to the right, then the entire tech tree, every single tech, has to be moved one place to the right.

It's just easier to make Mysticism a Mandatory prerequisite and to rebalance the tech costs in line with the new changes.

[Cheater Hater]

Fishing: Wait, does the Pier require that the seafood be improved to give it a bonus? That wasn't really clear from the patch notes. My thought was to just go Pier-first--is that stupid?

Emancipation: I'm confused--is the commerce bonus to non-town cottages in addition to the 100% faster growth? If it is that makes Emancipation look a lot better.
Edit: I see the growth moved to Free Speech--I missed that

Tech Tree: You wouldn't need to push up anything past Theology, right? Oh wait--looking at the picture more closely, there's an arrow from Priesthood to Writing that looks like you added it--that's new, right? Why was that added--just to make the religious techs better? If that's the case, then you obviously can't move up the religious techs.

[SevenSpirits]

So...thoughts?

I like some of what you're doing here. Spreading the goodies out over more techs is interesting. Making the early techs cheap enough that you don't get screwed by your civ's starting techs is good too. However, here are some problems I see with it.

1) Creation of "shot-in-the-dark" techs. In base BTS, AH and BW are strong techs regardless of whether you find horses/copper. You research them primarily for their other effects and then you also gain knowledge of strategic resources and get a variable extra benefit based on their locations. Because they have this default strength, they are good techs to research early and therefore you research them and end up finding out where the resources are.

In your version, (except in the case of AH if you have furs/deer, which is rare) the ONLY benefit of those techs is now based on the hidden resources. If you research BW and don't have copper, not only does it suck that you don't have copper, but all those beakers you invested have no effect. Ditto with AH. On top of that, because the benefits are minimal (when you could research archery instead and get guaranteed units and slavery), correct strategy will more often be to delay BW and/or AH until they're really needed. And that means that when the resource placement is unlucky for a player, the unluckiness is going to hit them harder because they don't know about it as early.

My recommendation is that techs that reveal hidden resources should also have other, definite value, so that the benefit you get from researching them doesn't vary all the way down to zero.

One option that occurs to me, by the way, is to take a page back from FFH's book and split up the reveal and the usage portions. E.g. mining allows mines and reveals copper, while BW unlocks copper units and does something else; Hunting reveals horses and allows pastures, while AH is required for chariots and does something else. Normally this option would be a bad plan because you don't want some civilizations starting with knowledge of the strategic resource locations, that's kind of the point. But like you said, starting techs are kind of interchangeable/flavor only now. So you could just say OK, everyone starts with just agriculture. Or whatever.


2) Sea workers. Man, I just don't think that this is going to work well. The problem is it makes balancing starts really difficult. A corn is a corn, and the fact that you have to research agriculture and build a worker to improve it aren't a big deal. The corn is good, Agriculture is cheap, and you were going to build the worker anyway. That's the key. If you ahve a fish instead, you weren't going to build the sea worker without it. You only build the sea worker if you have a seafood. And now the sea worker can improve ALL your seafood - in other words, the marginal cost of improving additional seafood beyond the first is practically zero. That's insane. It means that if you want seafood to be balanced overall (so that 2+ seafood starts aren't overpowered), that 1 seafood starts will SUCK.

The workboat mechanic in BTS is good. It's not perfectly balanced, but it makes sense. If you want to improve a land resource you have to pay a fixed cost of a few worker turns (a worker being something you will have anyway), and if you want to improve a sea resource you have to pay a fixed cost of 30h (hammers being something you will have anyway). In BTS, there are three big problems with how it's set up. First, the workboat is too expensive for improving clam/crab at your capital at the start. Second, your ability to build the workboat is dependent on being able to output enough hammers from forests. Third, it's tied to a tech that some civs start with but others don't. WB cost in BTS is such that it's only mildly positive to go WB first, and only with fish + fishing + hammers. If you reduce the cost of a WB to make the cost of improving clams/crabs more reasonable and don't make any other changes, it makes a fish + fishing + hammers start too strong. So I like the initiatives to make it a foodhammer unit (less reliance on hammers), make it buildable without fishing (less reliance on civ), and balance the output of fish vs other sea resources. However I don't think that allowing one sea worker to improve 100% of your sea resources can be balanced.

For this mod, something I might consider is making no civs start with fishing, and requiring fishing for WBs, and having WBs be 20fh instead of 30h, and balancing the sea resources better with each other. If you can have no civs start with fishing then you can make sea resources stronger because people will still realistically have to go worker first.


3) I'm still not a fan of the thematically arbitrary stuff, like pastures with hunting, camps with AH, chopping with masonry, fishing leading to archery... I think one of the big strengths of civilization is you have such a universally understood theme to inform people about the meaning of things in what's a very complicated spreadsheet-y game. When you have these arbitrarily assigned things it screws up that thematic connection and makes it harder for people to understand the game.

In a mod this extensive, I would definitely take the opportunity to make things line up thematically. For example, you could make AH a first row tech that unlocks pastures, instead of giving that ability to hunting.

[Cheater Hater]

Okay, I've committed some more changes to my fork of the mod--I set all the starting tech costs to 40 beakers and I fixed the easy civics (Serfdom, Emancipation, State Property, Mercantilism, Free Speech). Notes from looking at the patch notes for civics:
Police State: Adding the bonuses for production seems like it needs more than XML--maybe the same stuff needed for ADM? I know you can add happy/health (like Nationhood and the Barracks), but I don't know if you can add yield boosts and/or raw yield. Also, is the 20% supposed to be flat production?
Vassalage: I don't know where the Free Unit knob is (though it shouldn't be hard), and again adding raw yield seems to be a problem.
Bureaucracy: Adding the bonus to all capitals doesn't seem trivial
Nationhood: I don't know if I can add a siege production bonus specifically, and the draft anger knobs aren't here either
Free Market: Did this actually change? It doesn't look like it
Free Speech: I changed this, but the iImprovementUpgradeRateModifier might apply to the new lumbermills as well--is that okay? If not, I'm sure it can be fixed.
Religious Civics: Raw yield problems again, and the state religion trigger appears to be binary.

[Krill]

Well, this is going to be a long post...

I like some of what you're doing here. Spreading the goodies out over more techs is interesting. Making the early techs cheap enough that you don't get screwed by your civ's starting techs is good too. However, here are some problems I see with it.

Under no circumstances do I think this change log/mod would be perfectly balanced on the first attempt, so thanks in advance for the help with sorting things out.

1) Creation of "shot-in-the-dark" techs. In base BTS, AH and BW are strong techs regardless of whether you find horses/copper. You research them primarily for their other effects and then you also gain knowledge of strategic resources and get a variable extra benefit based on their locations. Because they have this default strength, they are good techs to research early and therefore you research them and end up finding out where the resources are.

In your version, (except in the case of AH if you have furs/deer, which is rare) the ONLY benefit of those techs is now based on the hidden resources. If you research BW and don't have copper, not only does it suck that you don't have copper, but all those beakers you invested have no effect. Ditto with AH. On top of that, because the benefits are minimal (when you could research archery instead and get guaranteed units and slavery), correct strategy will more often be to delay BW and/or AH until they're really needed. And that means that when the resource placement is unlucky for a player, the unluckiness is going to hit them harder because they don't know about it as early.

My recommendation is that techs that reveal hidden resources should also have other, definite value, so that the benefit you get from researching them doesn't vary all the way down to zero.

This all makes sense, and I agree that AH and BW need additional benefits.

One option that occurs to me, by the way, is to take a page back from FFH's book and split up the reveal and the usage portions. E.g. mining allows mines and reveals copper, while BW unlocks copper units and does something else; Hunting reveals horses and allows pastures, while AH is required for chariots and does something else. Normally this option would be a bad plan because you don't want some civilizations starting with knowledge of the strategic resource locations, that's kind of the point. But like you said, starting techs are kind of interchangeable/flavor only now. So you could just say OK, everyone starts with just agriculture. Or whatever.

I think splitting the reveal and usage would be fine but the reveal can't be on a first rank tech, which makes things harder to work out using this technique. The idea of someone settling on horse and chariot rushing on T15 is...well, that occurred when CIV was first released and was what caused the horse reveal to be moved back to AH in the first place.

I was considering removing 1 food from all pastures, and giving it back to them at AH, like removing 1 hammer from mines and giving it back at BW. This would mean that horse pastures need changing slightly, likely just changing the horse pasture to give +1 food, +2 hammers and remove the commerce so it becomes a more hammer centric version of a cow. This gives an interesting comparison to sea food, but more on that below.

2) Sea workers. Man, I just don't think that this is going to work well. The problem is it makes balancing starts really difficult. A corn is a corn, and the fact that you have to research agriculture and build a worker to improve it aren't a big deal. The corn is good, Agriculture is cheap, and you were going to build the worker anyway. That's the key. If you have a fish instead, you weren't going to build the sea worker without it. You only build the sea worker if you have a seafood. And now the sea worker can improve ALL your seafood - in other words, the marginal cost of improving additional seafood beyond the first is practically zero. That's insane. It means that if you want seafood to be balanced overall (so that 2+ seafood starts aren't overpowered), that 1 seafood starts will SUCK.

I don't think it does make balancing the starts particularly difficult, not considering the addition of the pier. Part of this is that there is still the additional cost in each city so seafood are not binary 2 yield or 6 yield, and that as wb would only give +1f, +1h to the tile it's not necessarily worth going wb first. I'm also not entirely sure the analogy of comparing a work boat to a worker is that accurate.. It doesn't take into account various map topologies either.

The workboat mechanic in BTS is good. It's not perfectly balanced, but it makes sense. If you want to improve a land resource you have to pay a fixed cost of a few worker turns (a worker being something you will have anyway), and if you want to improve a sea resource you have to pay a fixed cost of 30h (hammers being something you will have anyway). In BTS, there are three big problems with how it's set up. First, the workboat is too expensive for improving clam/crab at your capital at the start. Second, your ability to build the workboat is dependent on being able to output enough hammers from forests. Third, it's tied to a tech that some civs start with but others don't. WB cost in BTS is such that it's only mildly positive to go WB first, and only with fish + fishing + hammers. If you reduce the cost of a WB to make the cost of improving clams/crabs more reasonable and don't make any other changes, it makes a fish + fishing + hammers start too strong. So I like the initiatives to make it a foodhammer unit (less reliance on hammers), make it buildable without fishing (less reliance on civ), and balance the output of fish vs other sea resources. However I don't think that allowing one sea worker to improve 100% of your sea resources can be balanced.

Quick test: In the first 50 turns of a game, how many food resources get hooked by the same worker? In all honesty, I think that when compared to workers, I don't see the issue of not needing to build many work boats as a huge issue. I do feel that on different maps multiple work boats will be needed, such as Archi maps, and lake variants like Torus world will definitely need multiple work boats.

For this mod, something I might consider is making no civs start with fishing, and requiring fishing for WBs, and having WBs be 20fh instead of 30h, and balancing the sea resources better with each other. If you can have no civs start with fishing then you can make sea resources stronger because people will still realistically have to go worker first.

I can see issues with that, namely to do with the timeline of researching techs and when to build the work boat, especially in split land/food.

In the 20 foodhammers and pier implementation, the three basic food starts of double seafood, double land food and split food generally work out the same by around T20, give or take the variance due to tile yield.

Double land food goes worker>warrior>whatever at size 2.

Double seafood goes workboat>pier>worker at 2 or slave worker at 3.

Split seafood is the most difficult, but pier>worker is viable with either growth to 2 whilst building the pier and then whipping the worker is viable, as is using a hammer tile to just fast build it, then building the worker with a 3/1/x tile.

I think the best test for this is to check a couple of different starts and then figure out how each start should be played out and then recalibrate any numbers. I fully admit that the numbers could be wrong, but the graduated approach to increasing the tile yields of the seafood should limit the issues with double seafood being overpowered.

tl;dr: The balance will change, and with it the strategies and tactics for growing new cities and dot map rules of thumb, but I'm not sure I could go so far as to say it will be unbalanced at the end.

3) I'm still not a fan of the thematically arbitrary stuff, like pastures with hunting, camps with AH, chopping with masonry, fishing leading to archery... I think one of the big strengths of civilization is you have such a universally understood theme to inform people about the meaning of things in what's a very complicated spreadsheet-y game. When you have these arbitrarily assigned things it screws up that thematic connection and makes it harder for people to understand the game.

In a mod this extensive, I would definitely take the opportunity to make things line up thematically. For example, you could make AH a first row tech that unlocks pastures, instead of giving that ability to hunting.

Thematic changes? No problem with changing tech names or anything along those lanes. Changing the position of other such techs to make stuff fit better is fine as well.

[Cheater Hater]

I'm back to this again--I did a couple easy religious civic changes (Free Religion to Divine Right, the Pacifism cost changes), but my biggest attempted change was removing the anarchy from civics changes. I changed the anarchy length of each civic to 0, but it appears the game is enforcing a 1 turn minimum anarchy regardless. It appears my changes made it so the anarchy will only be 1 turn regardless of how many civics are being changed at once/the game speed, but I need to search the XML for the minimum anarchy length (which will hopefully lead me to the minimum time between civics changes and/or the anarchy for changing religion).

Also, Seven's massive post (and Krill's response) appears to have overshadowed a couple of my posts--I'm reposting them to make sure they don't get missed:

Fishing: Wait, does the Pier require that the seafood be improved to give it a bonus? That wasn't really clear from the patch notes. My thought was to just go Pier-first--is that stupid?

Tech Tree: You wouldn't need to push up anything past Theology, right? Oh wait--looking at the picture more closely, there's an arrow from Priesthood to Writing that looks like you added it--that's new, right? Why was that added--just to make the religious techs better? If that's the case, then you obviously can't move up the religious techs.

Okay, I've committed some more changes to my fork of the mod--I set all the starting tech costs to 40 beakers and I fixed the easy civics (Serfdom, Emancipation, State Property, Mercantilism, Free Speech). Notes from looking at the patch notes for civics:
Police State: Adding the bonuses for production seems like it needs more than XML--maybe the same stuff needed for ADM? I know you can add happy/health (like Nationhood and the Barracks), but I don't know if you can add yield boosts and/or raw yield. Also, is the 20% supposed to be flat production?
Vassalage: I don't know where the Free Unit knob is (though it shouldn't be hard), and again adding raw yield seems to be a problem.
Bureaucracy: Adding the bonus to all capitals doesn't seem trivial
Nationhood: I don't know if I can add a siege production bonus specifically, and the draft anger knobs aren't here either
Free Market: Did this actually change? It doesn't look like it
Free Speech: I changed this, but the iImprovementUpgradeRateModifier might apply to the new lumbermills as well--is that okay? If not, I'm sure it can be fixed.
Religious Civics: Raw yield problems again, and the state religion trigger appears to be binary.

Edit: I found another place where anarchy was mentioned and zeroed it out--and that didn't work either
I also added the ReligionInfoXML and changed the number of missionaries for the later religions.
Edit2: Found it! It was in GlobalDefines--obvious now, but there are so many files, and that one's really big
Now that this change has been implemented, the shell for a basic test has been implemented--obviously we're missing a bunch of features, but the anarchy change is one of the biggest "philosophy" changes.
Edit3: Yes, GlobalDefines is big, and has a lot of stuff in it--for example, I found the drafting anger/duration values, so I changed those and committed. I swear, I didn't plan for this to become an incremental log of changes, but I'm getting stuff done at least
Edit4: I started the long list of UU/UB changes--I got to India, but got stuck with the new Fast Worker implementation--I tried just making it available at Machinery, but that locked out the normal worker (as expected, following the Ziggurat example). Reading it again you want it to be an upgrade? I don't think this is able to be done easily
I think I might be done for tonight--that UU/UB list is going to be long and tedious