My biggest is that I ALWAYS remove engineers from the universal city recruitment list and make them exclusive to forts, factories, labs and starports while cutting their production time in half. This one I've been doing for 25 years. Makes the game a bit slower but also makes more sense to me (and stops the AI from going insane and spreading like a virus due to how they produce units for free, which was especially important back in the day).

Besides that, I make a combat-capable copy of the clergy unit exclusive to the church called the theurge. It's an EXTREMELY fragile unit with only a very weak psychic attack (well below the dervish in both strength and accuracy) and 4 movement points. Costs 10 gems & biochems, 2 turns to produce, 20 firebird upkeep and is locked, naturally, behind the theurgy tech. Also move the fanatic infantry unit from the fort to the church. And add inquisitors as an expensive clergy/theurge upgrade that requires holy warriors, fusion rifles and combat drugs tech. They cost 30 metal, 20 biochems, 20 electronics, 10 ceramsteel and 10 gems. And I bump their movement up a point to 6 (just because the 5 bugs me).

I also edit all psychic units to have a gem cost (10 points for church units, 5 points for the rest.).

Lastly I reimplement the scientist, clergy & peasant units. I create multiple peasant entries with a 200 point food cost, assign them to farms, wells and mines and give them a small negative upkeep cost (usually around -25). Scientists get assigned to labs and have a larger negative upkeep cost (-50) but cost 100 food, 40 chems & 20 biochems. Clergy go to the church, cost 50 food & 10 gems and get a slight negative upkeep (-10). I also reduce all of of them all to a 2-point movement speed since they're supposed to be a bunch of settled-in civilians; not mobile infantry. All 1-turn to produce.

As for buildings, I double the resource costs & output of electronics & chemicals cities and increase the electronic & gem costs of monopols & singularities, respectively, to a flat 10. I also add 1 point of gem production to mountain tiles for mines to account for how much more usage they see with my edits. With wells I decrease the energy output on most non-water terrain while raising it for water, jungle and desert tiles.

Naturally I play around with things more than this--adding & modifying units, changing movement costs, etc--but these are the changes I always make.

- I also change the engineers, but i increase their build time to 10 turns, their cost to 1000 metal and 1000 food and make then buildable only on the Palace.

- I like the Nova mod changes to the 3 basic units (Artillery, Howitzer and AA) to move 0 so you can only use them defensively, but i also reduce their costs by half and double their build times. I also double the militia build time but without reducing the cost.

- I normally increase all units move rate by about 50%, so troop movements are more fast.

- For all infantry units i create a second unit with the same costs and stats, with a reduced build time, but that needs a militia unit as input - it allows the militia unit to be useful even on late game, as a "feeder" unit to get other infantries quicker.

- Finally, i make the high tech cities (Cyclotron, Wetware, Biochem and Ceramsteel) non-buildable so high-tech resources are harder to come by - you either need to capture one of the few existing cities or buy the resources from the league. So high-tech units do not simply overshadow low-tech ones. Late game you will have a core of high-tech units that you use for first wave planetary invasions and lots of low-tech units for following waves and garrisioning.

Is there a good tutorial out there anywhere for this sort of thing? I looked through the unit.dat file and I understand how it works in principle, but actually getting the right numbers in the right place eludes me.

1.5 is great so far but city spam is still a huge problem on faction capital worlds, especially considering that the AI still apparently doesn't need resources to produce units (which does beg the question of why so much of those cities that it spams are resource production sites)

My approach to dealing with ai city spamming is to limit engineer production to a city type that the ai does not spam. I've most recently tried farms. I'd like to try producing engineers at several but not all city types but I am too stupid to figure out how to do it (hint hint).

To change where the engineers can be built you need to change the UNIT.DAT file. The engineer is unit number 53. You need to find the column "Bldgs". By default it is set to 99, that means it can be built everywhere. You need to change this number to a corresponding number of the cities listed on the file STRBUILD.DAT, remembering that the city numbers start from 0. As an example, if i change the "Bldgs" number to 0, then the engineers can only be built on the Palace.

To make the unit buildable on more cities you need to make a copy of the entire line and add to the UNIT.DAT file in the same unit number, just changing the "Bldgs" number to another city type. In version 1.4 you were limited to 4 entries for each unit, not sure of the limits on the new version.

I wonder if there is a good balance between building engineers at logical/convenient places and not places the computer player likes to spam.

Where brings me to another question, can you mod the AI?

Thanks for the tip, I did this for my latest game and it's much more manageable

Thank you so much for this! Having a little trouble with it though. I've inserted 3 additional engineer lines with the BLDGS set to 00, 17, 24, 25 (palace, shield, farm, arb). This part seems to work fine, as I am able to build engineers only at these cities.

However, the .bins that units use seem to be shifted 3 places down in the dat list. This only occurs for the units that are below 'engineer' in the list. So, for example, officer still looks like an officer. But anti-aircraft looks like a plague bomb.

Is there something else I need to modify? Or what am I doing wrong? (or have they modified the way this table loads in 1.5?)

They changed how the icons are loaded on 1.5, now, at the end of the line of the unit you will notice that they call "efsunit.bin", you should keep this name on the first engineer unit, but change the other tree lines to "same" so the game keeps the previous ordering of the icon loading and uses the same icon as the first unit.

Thanks, buddy!

Man, it's going to be "fun" relearning something I've been doing since I was a little kid 25 years ago.