For 1st round, ancient start, I pick Mali for novelty.

Here we go again. To cull the herd I made a quick and dirty Excel.

   

The Dislike column is self explanatory. I said my piece about Australia, I also think Zulu´s ability could be quite overpowered, but it irks me somehow.
There is a Scythia column, a played before (with some very strong choices). This leaves

Arabia
Aztec
China
Cree
Inca
Indonesia
Japan
Korea
Nubia
Persia

Aztec I have lurked and with continents and not pangea, meh. Indonesia and Japan is sea dependant and thus too inflexible compared to the others. Korea I actually played before in a duel. (Just remembered now). Arabia just does not seem strong enough. China goes out because I am not a big wonder builder fan, especially in a duel.

So

Cree
Inca
Nubia
Persia

The Inca lend themselves to a medieval start. So they are a locked in for game #2.

All the others are more for an ancient start. Persia´s ability is nullified by an immediate dow, so Cree or Nubia. Nubia´s archers are expensive, the abilities however are strong, especially the boost to mining. The Cree lend themselves to a trade and builder game with the housing bonus. Nubia or Cree. I will mull this over a bit.

Back with the game again after a longish pause. Just wanted to shout out appreciation for the continual improvements. Great job with the +hit and +def in particular! Also like them swamps.

Taking a shot at sorcery barbarians with a touch of life at expert now...

If there's any old Freelancer or Wing Commander Privateer fans here, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw has gotta be the closest thing I've seen to these games yet!!! Gorgeous planet landings FTW!

I'm a huuuuuuuuuuuge Freelancer fan (so much so I run a fb fan group haha). Fans still mod it to this day creating cool stuff but somehow this great old game never got a sequel. This new game is by far the closest I've ever seen to Freelancer.

Sadly it’s an Epic store exclusive for now but that’s okay, I'll just wait for it to come to steam as I’m in no hurry due to my endless gaming to do list lol.

This guy has done a good video review of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abmolH6sSy4



Here's some sexy screens I found around the net:

Now that every other source of invisible units are unavailable in the very early part of the game in the next version, it's time to consider invisible Air Elementals again.

There are three parts to consider.

1. Where do you obtain them. As Rampaging Monsters, they can appear as early as turn 40-50 unless the difficulty is very low. In lairs themselves, they are available from the beginning. Converting them to Undead can be done fairly easily using the Syphon Life spell, or if their resistance is lowered, Life Drain as well. Ghouls can also do so, albeit probably need many to be able to deal enough damage, or need focus magic. Zombies are extremely unlikely to be able to convert one. Nonetheless, both the availability of the monster and the spells to raise them exists in the early game.

2. How bad is it. Unlike invisbile heroes, an Air Elemental is super fragile, can't shoot and generally takes damage in melee at least enough of it to die in a few battles. If the other player has any way to detect the Air Elemental, they'll be able to use Fire Bolt,  Star Fires, AEther Sparks, Psionic Blast maybe Life Drain to damage it in the early game. Nature is out of luck here as it has no invisibility detection and the undead are immune to the cold spells. So Nature wizards pretty much lose to as many as one Air Elemental - you can use combat spells to kill everything, through multiple battles if needed - while  other realms can deal with it. However, lairs or nodes can't deal with it, so having as few as one invisible unit opens up the possibility to clear out otherwise very difficult lairs such as storm giants, efreets, water elementals, stone giants, or pretty much anything ranged. It also helps a little against larger groups of melee monsters where losing a spearmen on turn 2-3 of combat is guaranteed otherwise. Sure saving the lives of spearmen is no big deal but producing them and transporting them to the lair can take a while and the elemental can do it instantly. Furthermore, the elemenal moves 5 on the overland map, so it can reach and clear out lairs extremely quickly.
Overall I think this is a big enough risk to game balance, although not critical (4 out of 5 realms are barely affected, but neutrals affected extremely heavily.)

3. Possible solutions. Adding Death Immunity is likely a bad idea. Both because it's bad for consistency (other elementals don't have it), but even more so because then Death would have no way to deal with them. Sure, they'll have plenty of ways to reveal the elemental, but neither Life Drain, Syphon Life, nor Reaper Slash could damage it, Gate of Hades is too slow to kill one, it's a combat summon so any additional turns allows the enemy to summon another. Wave of Despair could still kill it easily, but it's a super expensive spell and the Sorcery player will be ahead in casting skill so that's not very good either. I'm worried the immunity would make Death even worse against Sorcery and it's already not very good against it at rare or later.
Disabling the raising of the creature in the early game by adding Supernatural has no other downsides (guaranteed damage will not trigger on such a weak unit), but it would look weird and out of place.
Disabling the raising of combat creatures across the board, like the original game, also works but might be excessive - it makes undead Boars, Fire Elementals and Earth Elementals also impossible. They aren't all that great units but at least Earth Elementals can be useful.
Disabling the raising of the Air Elemental only, without any further explanations is also possible. Not a fan of the idea but it does make sense : Air doesn't have a "dead body" left behind to raise so it's at least somewhat intuitive. Except, by that logic, Fire makes no sense to raise either. The final possibility is disabling the raising of the 3 elementals only.

Amplitude (Endless Space, Endless Legend) has announced a new historical 4X. Not that I hold out great hope for deep strategy, but it can't be bad for Civ to have a direct competitor.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/08...humankind/

Hey, I posted this the other day in the PBEM 65 tech thread, but it doesn't look like anyone's seen it:

(August 15th, 2019, 19:29)TheHumanHydra Wrote: Hey, I feel I need to say that I received advice during this game from a lurker who said he suspected he might have seen the map. I am not sure at what point I was told this (whether I received further advice or not), and I can't find the message to check (I hope this doesn't mean that I deleted it purposefully). Now that I am thinking about it, I think I did receive further advice, the lurker saying he would restrict himself to non-map-dependant advice. If that is the case, I am sorry, and I am sorry that I did not announce this at the time.

Some of the advice I received was important to the game's outcome. I don't know that the most important advice benefitted from that map knowledge, but I shouldn't have received it in the first place. Please feel free to revise this game's entry in the spreadsheet of game results, and please accept again my apology.

Because the current spell is not very fun.

Phylosopher's Stone
Whenever another player casts an overland spell costing less than 500, gain 1.25*(500-cost) gold, or 5*cost gold if the spell costs below 100.

Mana tax
Whenever another player casts an overland spell costing less than 500, gain 1.25*(500-cost) mana crystals, or 5*cost mana crystals if the spell costs below 100.

Mana Link
Whenever another player casts an overland spell costing less than 500, gain 0.25*(500-cost) casting skill, or skill equal to the cost if the spell costs below 100 temporarily for the next turn.

(gained amount can be adjusted if 0-500 / 0-100 is too little or too much, post your suggested amounts.)

So in the past few years some of my friends and I had been working on a balance mod that flowed out of our gameplay. I felt it'd be nice to share how we (very naively) edited the game. Also, purely out of self-serving interest, I want to record the changes we made in an organized fashion. The largest changes we made were heavily enhancing the trade route economy, large changes to renaissance combat, and a complete rebalance of workshops and tile improvements. Most of the other changes aren't very interesting and can be skipped. Here goes:

Traits

I really like this game! I've just gotten started with the campaign, but here are some first impressions.

The tactical combat is still the star of the show, of course. With the change to a science fiction setting, guns are more important. Many units now have an overwatch mode like in XCOM. This can be countered by staggering weapons like grenades or sniper rifles. They knock enemies out of overwatch and also drain movement points for the next turn. One thing that I like a little less about Planetfall is that it went with a hit-chance system. In AoW3, cover, range penalties etc. reduced the amount of damage, but your basic attacks always hit. (Yes, halflings were an exception. They also were annoying.) I liked that because it made combat less random than in AoW2. So I'm a bit disappointed that Planetfall changed it back. Still, it's not that bad: if you have a reasonable hit chance, most misses will become grazing shots that still do half the normal damage. Another thing I was skeptical about were the unit mods. There's now a wide variety of ways to customize your units. I thought I was going to encounter lots of units with surprise abilities that I didn't expect, or forget which of my identical looking soldiers has what upgrade. But on the tactical map, every unit has a little marker to indicate what kind of upgrade it has, so it's all good!

The biggest change to AoW3 (besides the whole science fiction business) is that there are a lot more city management options. On the one hand, that means more fiddly stuff: every city now has workers to assign to different resources -- food, energy (= money), production and science, the usual -- like every other 4X game. I really didn't miss that in AoW3... On the other hand, the new sector system is really interesting!

The map is chopped into sectors, consisting of multiple hex tiles each. There can be only one city per sector and only in a fixed location. At certain population milestones, a colony can annex a new sector. That gives it access to any special structures in there, like an old biodome for additional food or a power plant for energy. You then choose how to exploit that sector by selecting one of the four resources. An exploited sector has a level between 1 and 5. At low levels, it increases your income per turn by a small amount and gives you additional worker slots: at the start, a colony has only four worker slots for each resource, and sectors are a way to increase this cap and specialize the city. On higher levels, sectors increase the income produced by each worker.

To level up sectors, you need to research and build certain improvements in your colonies. For example, one gives a boost to all the city's production sectors. Some are terrain-dependent: "Mountain Exploitation" gives one level to energy and production sectors in mountain regions, for example. Getting sectors to level 3 is fairly easy with the right terrain, but you have to choose to specialize in that type of sector at the expense of other types. Getting a sector all the way to 5 requires enormous amounts of research and production, and perfect terrain for that type of sector.

On top of that, every sector can have up to one special improvement whose effect scales with the sector level: For example, a food sector can have a building that makes its colony grow faster, or a building that lets it export food to other cities more efficiently. A research district can be specialized towards military or civilian research.

Planetfall has a classical tech tree, unlike its predecessors. Or rather, a collection of tech trees. Some parts are determined by your faction or your Secret Technology (like class in AoW3), other parts are common to all, like the Economy tree. That's where you find all the sector upgrades, and it has a pretty interesting structure which allows you to skip many technologies. It's actually like a deterministic version of MOO1's "tech ladders" where researching a technology on one tier unlocks all techs on the next tier. There are lots of ways to approach this depending on how far you want to specialize in what sector type, and what terrain you have available. Maybe it'll turn out that there's one right way to do things, I don't know. But I'm having fun playing around with it.

In my previous game, I went all-in on research sectors in city ruins. In my current game (with the Kir'ko space bugs), I'm gearing up my starting colony to be a huge food exporter to quickly build up further cities.

The "fluffier" parts of the game are also great! Graphics are neat, and I love the soundtrack, especially the battle themes. The setting is very interesting: you're rebuilding on top of the ruins of the Star Union, a fallen galactic empire. Ancient precursor aliens are a pretty stale concept by now, but in Planetfall, the precursors are human, and the empire is still in living memory for those who spend a lot of time in cryo pods or otherwise have an extended lifespan. The ruling class of the Star Union is still around, as a minor faction of cybernetic zombies that terrorize the countryside with demands for tribute and style themselves as the last guardians of civilization.