The hills are alive with the sound of muusic. 

Seriously, for a second.  Awesome idea.  Going to check it out.

Well mountains have sure changed in .99 allowed 1 square per turn movement over them and the ai not only moves over them but apparently has taken to constructing cities into the mountainside and roads go over them as well

I think this might be your mod because I haven't seen this behavior.

I'm not so sure about making mountains passable, maybe chains could feature a Mountain Pass as a feature that is crossable.  I actually like having impassable obstructions such as mountains, it helps with strategic decisions such as which cities I need to defend and what cities belonging to my rivals would be good to take for their strategic value because of chokepoints created by impassable terrain.

It looks ok til you zoom in, and that was just from that one example.

The idea of mountains as impassable terrain is almost laughable to me, always has been in any game that makes them impassable. A simple look at a map or a read of military history will tell you that mountains are both lived in and even on as well as passed over/around/through by armies stretching back to the classical period. Maybe if you wanted to classify passability of mountains by size and allow for a few Himilaya type impassable ranges thats fine.

I have a bigger problem with them allowing roads through swamps and deserts to be honest. Granted desert should be classified into high and low desert and high desert might be more passable, but the idea building a road in a medieval period fantasy game through a swamp or low desert environment is nutty let alone taking an army through one.  Has anyone ever been in a real swamp? There is a real chance of a gator eating you and your chance of disease goes up pretty much by the minute you spend wading through it, if you can even wade through it if its shallow enough and the bottom solid enough for you not to sink into, taking a horse into one equals a dead horse. Building a road through one? Thats even crazy in the modern world a swamp is essentially the top of a lake sitting in highly permeable earth.

And desert, anyone ever been to death valley a classic low altitude desert environment? How long could you live there, I would count it by hours not days, moving an army might be easier through a desert than a swamp but it would be a massive logistical challenge. Build a road through low desert sand? Maybe modern era but no way back then, trails would evaporate over night. Take a horse through one? Not happening go get a camel.

I would love to see terrain create interesting strategic opportunities and allow you to make interesting decisions. Would love to see Jungle and arctic (which is in the xml just not turned on) and many other terrain types, hopefully we will. But mountain fences? Ugh. I can just see the fellowship getting to the misty mountains and going "ah crap we gotta go all the way around"!

The whole reason i wasn't really doing any modding was because of the lack of tools, really wish we would have had them in the beta. I will absolutly be making stamps.

Oh any feedback on how the game plays with the different GEM and size settings is appreciated.

Not sure what histories you read, nor what 'mountains'.  'Men on the mountain' are hermits and tend to be ignored.  There's a reason mountain climbing is popular -- it is a dangerous adventure, an adrenaline rush.  Mountain passes -- low points in a mountain range that are the only readily surmountable point -- are renowned chokepoints in the history of conflicts.

Mountains are steep rises in the terrain, often including multiple cliffs -- a rize of tens if not hundreds of feet over a run of virtually zero; no tank nor large military force can magically ascend them.  Not down canyon walls, no gentle canoeing across rapids.  And then there's the thinness of air -- soldiers not specially designed and vehicles not specially engineered alike become anemic the higher you go.

Many settlers in the U.S. west struggled hard to cross the Great Plains, only to be overwhelmed by the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada (Donner party anyone?) and others.

Even today, with the most technologically advanced and among the best-and-hardest-trained troops in the world, our own U.S. military's efforts in Afghanistan were severely limited by the steep, mountainous terrain which limits the mobility of armored vehicles such as tanks and troop carriers.

Your statements dismissing mountains as a serious impediment to military and civil mobility and maneuvers is aghastly ignorant.

I like the work being done here!! 

On the passable/impassable mountains question...

This is a game, not reality.  I happen to think that for gaming purposes mountains SHOULD be a barrier.  It creates strategic choke points and walls to force a fleeing opponent against.  It creates safe zones and, ironically, makes the map play larger rather than smaller by making adjacent zones farther apart. 

That having been said, there probably can and should occasionally be passes through the mountains that are slow and difficult to cross.  With the max speed of units being 2-3 turns per turn, I think you can only slow to 1 move per turn (unless there is a way to force an army to skip their next strategic turn).  This would nullify the additional speed of mounts.  What would also be cool (though I'm not sure if it's possible) would be to mod in some encounter in these passes that results in a 10% chance of losing a unit in the crossing.  Use the pass if you must and face the risk if you dare!!!

For myself, if mountains are made passable, I either won't use the mod or will mod it back to making mountains impassable.

would this work alongside with Storm World rivers? I see both mods contain terraintypes.xml so they could definitely be incompatible :/

I think they work together. Stormworld modifies the installation directory file TerrainTypes.xml while this mod puts it in the /Mods/ directory. This mod can do that because it is modifying old terrains, Stormworld only adds new types.

Installed this last night - big improvement on default. Better locations for cities etc. Of course this means that the enemy is also getting good starting locations too - should make for some titanic struggles.

so will this work with 1.0 ?