A couple of questions about mods

I'm new to Civ V. I just played my first real game. I have some questions about mods. First I'd like to know what people's favourite mods are, and why. I don't care if they are popular are not, the only thing I care about is that they work well. I'm also a huge fan of Fall from Heaven and it's derivatives. I love good fantasy mods, but I'm not just looking for full conversion mods, I'm also interested in mods that make small changes.

I'd also like to know whether I should be downloading them here on Civ Fanatics, or whether I should download them and install them from the Steam list of mods?

Thanks in advance.

It doesn't really matter whether you get them from Steam or here, I do it here because
I don't trust Steam.....but, there are mods like R.E.D for Civ 5, Gedemon also has a cool R.E.D. version of WWII. If you like cheating the game, then the In-Game Editor would be good. Those are just four mods in a sea of hundreds, but if you search for a topic you like it should come up . Krajzen's buffs are good small tweakers. You can also download the SDK from Steam and Microsoft's Isolated Redistributionary Shell for ModBuddy to make your own mods.

Mods i would consider essential would be infoaddict and trade opportunities as they just provide so much information that should already be in the game and make working out a lot of things so much easier.

In Game Editor is also nice although depending on the type of person using it you may need so self restraint as it is basically a god mode mod as it allows you to see and change almost everything. I mainly use it these days to fix some upgrade lines.e.g.keshiks which gain ranged promotions but upgrade to a melee unit and thus all that experience is wasted but it is also good for experimenting and testing...i have worked out many mechanics with it in the past such as what provides local and global happiness which isn't always made clear with in the game.

Generally it is easier to find and install mods from steam although it can be unreliable as you 'subscribe' to the mod and if it is removed or a miscommunication is happening between your game and steam workshop they can get deleted as has happened a couple of times in the past.
You can just keep a back up copy of all mods though anyway.

Thanks for the suggestions. If anyone else has more, I'm all "ears".

Well, just thought I'd add my two cents. The Steam mods option for getting mods appears to be extremely unreliable. At least half of the mods I subscribed to I ended up having to download and install manually from this site.