Civil Engineers proposal

[geniemalin]

I find Civil Engineers incredibly important in the mid-game in producing a large but effective empire. They allow peripheral cities to produce the 'basic' cultural/happiness/growth improvements without either waiting hundreds of turns or gold-rushing them. Even in a militaristic game producing walls/barracks in all your peripheral cities before declaring war can make a big difference....

Replacable Parts already gives Infantry (which if I understand correctly may well be made stronger - at least relative to Cavalry - in the AU Mod,) Artillery, double-speed workers and reveals Rubber. To give it Civil Engineers as well makes it a no-brainer.

My proposal therefore is to associate Civil Engineers with Steel. It makes sense on a realism level (how do you build large Civil Engineering projects without steel girders?) but also gives Steel a useful benefit. As it stands, maybe I'm alone but I always research the other tree branches before the Combustion branch, and always leave Steel until after Refining, which at least reveals a new resource. It might also enhance the usefulness of Policemen, who are generally overshadowed by Civil Engineers (and in my games obtained after them anyway...)

[Strollen]

Great proposal... We do want to make the top half of the industrial age more useful. This will help.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Hmm, sounds good at first, but let's think about why we want to make that part of the tree more attractive. You have to research it anyway to get to the next era, but the reason for thinking of changes is to make it more attractive for earlier so it's not always the case of lower-branch-first-then-upper. Who would seriously divert their time away from Hoovers that benefits all your productive cities enormously; for CEs, that benefit only corrupt cities, and then are only useful for basic improvements and no units?

This change is a step in the right direction by adding useful traits to the upper branch, but this is, IMO, too small to do much, and thus perhaps a little bit of a needless change, at least for AU purposes.