Well got pretty far into a playthrough of the latest version, and I'd like to give my thoughts on it:
Something I'd suggest if you want the game to really simulate our history a bit better, is to create custom regions of your own, such as one covering the areas Chatelperronian and Solutrean spawn in so that you can link it to a decision to adopt those cultures if you are the previous cultural stage (Mousterian and Gravettian respectively) and are in the right time period as to evolve your culture.
Also you might wanna check out Epigravettian spread, while Solutrean has spread to about a quarter of France in the two decades since these two starting showing up, Epigravettian is currently just sitting in the one province it started in and not spreading to its neighboring states. I would also highly encourage the creation of a decision for all AI to manually convert to their neighbors culture, that also converts the AI's close family. As it stands, when the AI converts to the next cultural step, they usually already have grown heirs who retain the old culture and will thus revert each nation back to the previous culture once the head of the tribe dies. This leads to a constant back and forth between cultures that really slows things down, this happens to virtually every culture in the game in fact.
Minor bug, but the AI keeps forming the Duchy of Hamadan, probably because its a titular title and not a dejure one. It's annoying because it leads to a major Neanderthal duchy smack-dab in the middle of Persia that will keep back the Human wave for much longer than it should (seriously at one point they reached from the Caspian to the East Coast of Arabia)
I'm currently 230 years into my current game, and I'm sitting pretty as a Baradostian lord of Mesopotamia, in either the year 30,000 or 20,000 (I forgot which exactly). Mainly just waiting till the last vestiges of the non-human hominids finally bite the dust. A lot of them are surviving thanks to them sitting on over sized armies too massive for any of their neighbors to ever defeat (I think this is due to that create army decision), though by the time the Solutrean's showed up they were virtually all reduced to tiny holds throughout the map except for the very northern most reaches of it.
Two questions however come to mind after getting this far:
1) If the Neanderthal's crush the small grouping of Human provinces in Ethiopia at the start of the game before they cross in Arabia, does that mean the game is forever locked at 70,000 BC? It almost happened in my game, with about half of the starting provinces being assimilated before one of them got lucky enough to spread into Arabia. I was playing at the time as the Neanderthal in Axum, but I tried my best to both avoid fighting the humans and weakening the nearby Neanderthal tribes so they wouldn't due too much damage to the humans.
2) Will there be a/is there a culture for the humans in Arabia/Persia/Eastern Africa to adopt? At the moment those areas still have the starting Human culture long after Mesopotamia/India/Tibet/the Levant started adopting their next step-up.
First off, thanks for the input. Following are my responses to your comments.
a) I have already added lots of custom regions and will probably have to add a bunch more. So far I have custom Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, Levant and Tigris-Euphrates which together are the custom cluster Fertile Crescent. I also have custom Central Europe (one of the start spots for the Gravettians), custom Indian Ocean coast (for faster human migration), custom Doggerland (English and Dutch coasts), and custom Zagros Mountains. At this stage it looks like I will also have to have a custom Baltic States, lots of late Mesolithic cultures seemed to start there (eg Swiderian, Kunda etc).
b) I did have problems with a few spreads, I have gone over all the scripts and they seem to be working fine now. One problem I had was that the custom ice sheets reduced the total playable province count so the late era event changes weren't happening - I reduced the threshold for trigger and they work fine now.
I don't know what to do about the cultural two-step. This is sort of an artifact of the short timeline - IRL all this would take 20,000 years which is mind-blowingly long, but in game this happens over one or two generations. All I can do is make it very attractive to the AI to convert up, they should then stay that way.
c) I'll check out the Duchy of Hamadan. I have noticed that even though it is REALLY hard, the AI will sometimes form a Duchy somewhere. The biggest hurdle is the gold requirement - it's very hard to get 500 gold when all you have is one or two flint knappers working for you ! I do sometimes see characters in the character finder who are loaded though, my only guess is that they got the benefit of some one off insta-gold event of some sort.
Hopefully in the next patch I will have the Duchy decay script working- this will require a certain minimum prestige to maintain any Ducal title with the minimum going down over time as tech and legal precedent improves. In game this will mean that Duchies will act as a gold sink for the AI as they should be too stupid to maintain the necessary prestige but will keep building the titles anyway.
d) Persistent event spawned troops are another bug I am trying to track down. FTR the custom Spawn Warrior spawned troops go away when the war is over, so do the migrant invasion spawned troops. My best guess is the appearance of "XXX's Host" style wars - I keep seeing 150 boats (galleys) off the coast and massive armies inside - I will have to check the event and CB details for that process and see what's going on.
The survivors holding on grimly to the margins is exactly WAI. My reading is that all of the relic cultures survived the longest on the margins, sometimes for ages simply because there was no one around to finish the job on them. The best example are the Australian Aborigines, they kept basically what is a TL = 5 culture all the way to the 1800's because they had no contact with the outside world.
Now to your queries -
1) If the four initial human provinces get wiped out yes you pretty much should get game over. There are however two things that make this VERY unlikely. The first is that of the four starting Human provinces the two outer ones are run by gods. I very often see one or two of the middle provinces fall to the Neanderthals, but the others are VERY hard to break. In the end the best outcome is to slow the human wave for 10-15 years, once isolates start to appear the script goes wild and starts spreading them like a cancer.
The second point is that Neanderthals do like them some Human wimmin ! This is not a certain path to success, but I have seen Neanderthals take Human wives and concubines and then have their kids grow up with Human culture - as soon as they inherit and flip their home province (10x faster in the mod) then the cancer can start all over again.
TL;DR - It IS possible, but very unlikely for the humans to be snuffed out at the start.
2) One of my current projects is adding in more Paleolithic and Mesolithic cultures. I have localized the paleo-Indian and Chinese cultures to Madrasian and Ordosian in keeping with the current literature on this area, I have also added two new Egyptian cultures - Khormusan at TL =2 and Halfan at TL = 4.
I am half way through adding in most of the Meso's and a fraction of the Neolithics to 11,000 BP, the next patch will take players all the way to the start of the Neolithic Revolution and Tribal government types.
