Ok this is going to be super quick and without pictures because I managed to overwrite all my save files after I finished playing  before I could go back and get pictures or review what had happened.

Here is a screenshot I just grabbed from the starting save to help with explanation.
   
I settled Obaca on the first turn and set about building up both worlds.  I opened early research to expand my range for future transports and settled in to await the coming of the AI at UR Thrax.  I left a scout in orbit without thinking about it with the result that an unescorted Psilon colony ship retreated because their initiative was higher than mine and I couldn’t withdraw in time.  The Alkari wound up grabbing it a couple years later in 2352 if memory serves.  I instantly sent transports along with a minimal force of laser fighters that I had built up and grabbed the world.  It turns out that an Ultra Rich size 45 world full of bears can build a missile base in two years even without any factories, so I was pretty safe.  From there I progressed on to take Tao from the Silicoids when Controlled Dead came in literally two years later, and then paused to build up my new holdings.

While that was going on the Silicoids were expanding east along the top of the map.  Once they were established at Radiated Celtsi I took Barren Anraq out from behind them and once they had reached Barren Crypto in the far east I bombed out Radiated Celtsi (which I could never settle) and then invaded Crypto which locked up the northeast corner.

Once that was done and I had a force of Nuke bombers to go along with my NPG fighters (I think I got NPGs from one of my early invasions, probably Tao) I pushed west into Silicoid space eventually exterminating them.  Curving around to the southwest I consumed the Mrrshan homeworld (their second planet was overrun by the Psilons earlier in the game) and exterminated both them and the Alkari, neither of whom ever amounted to anything.  By that time, it was ~2470 and I ran into a brick wall against the extremely advanced technology of the Psilons.  I think that I COULD have beaten them with enough buildup and effort to crack one of their worlds and snag some of their tech, but it would have been a bloody fight.  Instead my population (plus two votes from the Humans who I never met at all in this game) let me take a 2475 election victory.

Shadow Score: 2424        (2474 victory date – 50 for Domination)

As there are a lot of major changes this time, I'm posting it as a beta release.
Please report any problems, or balance issues, especially related to interacting with the other plane, the new Heroic Heart spell, the new Necromancy item power, and AI hostility reevaluations.
Download the file Caster54Beta.zip from the usual location.

Quote:5.4 Beta
-Removed spell : Move Fortress
-New/Returning spell : Plane Shift. Arcane Rare, has the same effect as old Life Uncommon.
-The AI will use Plane Shift more often on higher difficulty levels.
-Heroic Shout is now a Life Uncommon.
-Planar Travel is removed from the game.
-New Arcane spell : Heroic Heart. Costs 18 MP, 440 RP. Heals 3 damage on a hero.
This spell aims at making heroes more playable for non-Life wizards. It's strictly worse than Healing but everyone gets it.
-Heroic Heart shows up as a common, Disenchant Area as an Uncommon, Plane Shift as a Rare in research order.
-Heroic Heart shows up as a common in treasure. Disjunction shows up in treasure as a Rare.
-Plane Shift, Summon Champion, do not show up in treasure. (Create Artifact was already disabled)
-AI prioritizes targeting heroes with healing spells over other units more.
-Fixed bug : Hostility reevaluation timer was broken
-Fixed bug : Hostility reevaluation timer resetting to 0 when Spell of Mastery was broken for nonhuman wizards casting it
-Offering a tribute to a wizard will result in hostility reevaluation at the start of their next turn, if the wizard was hostile.
-Slightly moved up Blood Lust on the AI research order.
-The Plane Shift ability on units (Shadow Demons) can only be used if the other plane has been discovered by opening a tower or researching the Plane Shift spell.
-Removed item power : Planar Travel
-New item power : Necromancy. Cost 1000, required 5 Death books. At end of battle, dead nonhero friendly units raise as undead, up to 140 total cost per hero level. Note that already undead units cannot be raised again.
-Fixed Bug : Plane Shift allows movement onto a tile that contains an uncleared lair, node, or an ungarrisoned city.

I recently started listening to this, and I figured a bunch of RB people would be interested too: The Upper Memory Block (trigger warning: extreme Canadianity). Joe in the podcast takes on games from the DOS and Win95/98 eras and not only reviews them but does a deep and excellent delve into the development stories. He's not hit Civilization yet for fear of overwhelm reasons but he has hit other RB loves. It's a great nostalgia trip for me and I know you guys are in this demo too. After all, Civ4 is how old?

During the initial discussion of the concept for this Imperium, I posted:

(June 26th, 2018, 20:23)haphazard1 Wrote: I think the starting colony ship would be needed, or else the start rolled needs to have a close neighbor or two so conquest can begin early. An isolated start would mean the player is stuck at one (or two) planets for some time while the AIs expand out to mulitple worlds; not sure that big a starting deficit could be overcome on impossible.

I recently got sucked into a "Long Turn" game, which is basically FreeCiv's answer to PitBoss games, but with their own homebrew ruleset.

Initially I went on the FreeCiv forums hoping to find a utility that could convert some of Civ2's old scenarios to be playable in FreeCiv.  I had had an urge to play them but was bothered by my knowledge of how fundamentally broken Civ2's AI is, so I thought I'd see if their AI could provide some improvement.  I failed in this quest, but in discussion on the forums, I got invited to join one of their "LongTurn" games that was just starting up.

LongTurn is a "Turn-a-day" multiplayer game using the highly flexible FreeCiv client.  Whatever FreeCiv lacks in approachability or aesthetics, it more than makes up for in it's modularity and flexibility.  Entire rulesets can be swapped out and replaced with the flick of a wrist.  And that's what LongTurn uses.  Over the years they've refined a ruleset that is a bastard offspring of Civilization 2 and 3, and adjusted to for multiplayer.  It was quite interesting to try to learn the game all over again.

Everybody started with 5 Settlers, 5 Workers, and 2 Explorers, and all movement points were Tripled.  Explorers ran around the map at 9 squares per turn seeing with a 3 square radius.  Settlers founded cities that encompassed 45 tiles (7x7 with corners missing, as produced by a sqrt(13) radius), workers worked at 3x normal speed (as befitted the accelerated pace), and cities were founded with a "Free Granary" effect that lasted until size 5.  This was a ruleset designed to skip the bullshit and get straight to the action.

For this game they were attempting a Two-Team game, and if you know anything about the snowballing nature of Civ, it is not surprising that this ended up being its undoing.  But I was oblivious to any imbalances at first, since there wasn't a lot of communication between Blue and Red teams.  Besides, what did I care?  We had a whole world to explore!  182x182 squares on an X/Y wrapping world.  Two stripes of 18 players each across a weird snaky continent.

Also, I ended up making my own set of terrain graphics, because the existing ones either showed too little of the map (tiles too big), distorted the view (isometric perspective on a rectangular map? Maybe that works out fine with X/Y wrapping, but I didn't want to wrap my head around it), or were just too ugly.  So I took an ugly tileset, and made it 43% less ugly!
Here's are Before/After pictures:

Here you can see the lands of the Hanseatic League (get it?) with the LT ruleset's large city-radii and my workers wandering about the countryside making improvements.  You can also witness my smoother, more distinct terrain, and the pip-based tile yield graphics.  Your retinas will appreciate the reduced visual clutter.

Bronswiek is displaying enhanced tile-yields, because it was where I built the Pyramids(+1 production/tile) and Colossus(+1 trade/tile), both of which are Small Wonders that are available for each nation.  Pyramids also lift the penalty to tile yields of 3+ for the governments of both Despotism and Tribalism, basically launching you into an early Monarchy (but without the reduced corruption)  Did I mention this is a custom ruleset? 

So, for the last month and a half, I've been playing away at this game, one turn a day (technically a 23 hour clock so as not to show time-zone favoritism), and enjoying chatting with my team on our own Discord server.  Arguing over research policies, discussing city placement patterns, coordinating military efforts on our 3 fronts (Russian Front, Foothold, and Panama), and delegating control of nations when players have to go on vacation.  As happens in any large long-term commitment, a number of players dropped out, and we ended up with about 20 players controlling 36 nations.  I'm currently controlling the Hansa, the Kashmiri (neighbors to the NE), and the Ottomans (who control a strategically vital isthmus).

It was only last week though that I realized "Hey, this is the sort of thing that the PitBoss players on the RB forums are interested in.  Wait a minute, I joined a PitBoss game without realizing it!", so I thought I'd come share some of my adventures with another strange and different Civ-Playing community.  If anybody has accused RealmsBeyond of being stuck in the past, they've got nothing on the FreeCiv people!

FreeCiv: Still trying to answer the question "What if Civilization 2 had a sequel?"

So, with the removal of Planar Travel, we'll be gaining a Life Uncommon spell slot.

We can use it in several different ways :

1. As a temporal solution until we decide on something better, Heroic Shout is now in the slot, and the new "Heroic Heart" spell that heals a hero for 3 is in the Arcane Slot that freed up that way. However there is no guarantee Heroic Heart works well for game balance, in which case we might need to undo this, also Heroic Shout is probably not particularly suitable as a Life uncommon (would rather see it as common since it's an effect designed for early game, and it's direct damage in life...) so we should consider other options before making this one final.
2. We could add a new unit buff, as we removed one. I don't think Life needs a new unit buff, but if you have an idea, this is the time for it.
3. We could separate Endurance into two spells, one for +1 To Def and one for movement. However Life relies heavily on Endurance for their early game to stack defense, so that would be the common effect, meaning the new uncommon would be movement, so it likely needs to be 2 instead of 1 to be worth an uncommon slot. Definitely dislike this solution either way but it's one possibility.
4. We could make Disenchant Area a Life spell. Life already has city curse removal (Consecration) at a higher tier and it suits the realm. However this implies non-Life wizards will no longer be able to remove curses.
That means curses will be more viable for use by human players - the AI can't dispel them. Unfortunately the human not being able to dispel is very unfun, even though dispelling is not economically viable in most scenarios anyway. If we pick this option, we might need to tone down some of the city curses to less crippling levels, but I'm not 100% sure about that either. Needless to say this option affects the Death realm the most, as Chaos Rift is the only non-death, dispellable city curse.
5. We could move another spell into the Life realm from some other realm, and give that realm a new unit buff. Again, I don't think I can name a spell that would need moving.

Booted up Civ 6 tonight and wondered why everything was so pretty all of a sudden. Turns out a CQUI update dropped last night, including the much anticipated R&F compatibility. Mine auto-updated and enabled itself, but for folks who don't have it yet: Steam Workshop

I look forward to the return of district pins in PBEM screenshots  

I eventually want to go back and update my website to list the complete variant descriptions. A big bottleneck is I have no idea where the list of games is. Can someone point me to that link?

A slightly abbreviated version of Baba Yetu was performed the other day on America's Got Talent. This is really not that high on the list of accolades this song has deservedly racked up, but I still thought it was neat to see it on TV 13 years later. Easily the best video game song of all time.

So Heroic Shout is our spell to make early hero use more popular, and it's fairly good for that, allowing heroes to kill the typical weak multifigure units. However it is redundant with Chaos magic and gets obsolete quickly - as soon as your hero has an acceptable defense stat, it can kill those multifigure units in melee safely.

So I've been wondering if maybe we need something else that actually helps non-hero realms use heroes more :

Heroic Heart
Cost 12
Target hero unit is healed for 3 damage.

Simple, straightforward. Strictly worse than Healing in Life but still good enough to be worth using in all other realms, who have no way to keep heroes alive in combat. Life is still better at it, and also has defensive buffs which the other realms don't. I've been hoping Shamans can do this job but they can't - their movement is too slow to go with heroes and they die in battle.