The library of Alexandria was the first true library (a place for the preservation and study of literary and scientific texts), as opposed to an archive (a place for storing administrative records). Ptolemy probably got the idea from hearing of Aristotle's large book collection. The Ptolemies spent enormous sums on their library and it quickly got fame throughout the ancient world, and made Alexandria to the centre of scholarship and literary activity in the Hellenistic period.
Many other cities founded libraries modelled after it. The one founded in Pergamon by the Attalids became quite considerable as well, which prompted the Ptolemies to issue an export ban on papyrus (paper); the Pergamites simply adopted vellum (parchment; the word is derived from Pergamon) as a writing material.
Much smaller libraries gradually become quite common in Roman times, but none came close to the size and prestige of the library of Alexandria, which stood out with head and shoulders above the rest.
This patch makes the following changes:
- It disables the mace and sele libraries, keeping it exclusively for ptol, per the above, further differentiating the civ.
- The “Hellenistic Metropolis” is moved from the library to the civic centre, which is appropiate, because what the technology does is doubling the health, capture points, and default arrow count of the civic centre. (For comparison, technologies affecting towers are researched at towers.)
- The crannog and military colonies no longer benefit from the “Hellenistic Metropolis” technology. This may have been simply an oversight: the technology was introduced in rP12753, the military colony in rP14411. With the technology military colonies have 40% the costs but 133% the health of civic centres of other civs.
- While theatre emerged in classical Athens, it quickly became a hallmark of Hellenistic culture, and every self-respecting city had one (as well as an agora, gymnasion, and hippodrome, but that's a different discussion). It thus makes little sense spart and mace have them in 0 A.D., but ptol and sele do not. Therefore, ptol and sele get theatres too, using the mace actor as a placeholder.
- Now that the gaul theatre has been renamed to assembly and all (now five) civs that have theatres can build them, it's added to the generic template_unit_* build lists, to save unnecessary duplicate lines in the specific units/ files.
- The theatre's resource costs are changed to more appropiate values (the total remains the same).
- Because of their large size and high costs, theatres have their health increased.
- The lighthouse revealing all shores everywhere on the map is more something for a cheat or a fantasy game (see also this forum thread), and is thus removed. To compensate, its vision range is increased by c. 11% (i.e. a 23% larger area).
- The lighthouse is postponed to the city phase, to make the city phase even more interesting; its very high vision can especially make a difference on small maps.
- The cart super dock is postponed to the city phase as well, due to its very large territory influence radius.
- [EDIT]: The library aura now gives a 15% discount on technologies, instead of 10%, but it is no longer stackable.