Since the song uses a double negative, you can take that as me instating that the civic category be brought back at once
I do wish the were more categories, so you could try more combinations of different civic. However, the way they are currently organized does see to make more sense that the old way.
I see you took my advice on adding happiness per military unit to Social Order.
So, when you said that any evil civ can use slavery, does that mean that neutral OO civs now can't? I agree that good civs shouldn't be able to use it, but it seems fitting enough for neutral ones. I didn't see an alignment requirement on the civic screen.
I too noticed that you didn't say what founds the Council of Esus. It has been strongly implied that it is Deception, which would make sense.
What is the giant statue sticking out of the ground in the first pic?
"It can only be joined by Neutral or Evil players, and although they don’t have to worship the Council of Esus to join, they can’t be members of the Overcouncil." - what does this mean? Do you mean that it works just like the AP, where you need the state religion to be a full member but can still vote if you are neutral? Or do you man that No One can be a member unless he founds it (making founding it a lot more important). I'll assume you mean the first one if not corrected.
I hope that both the Empyrean and Council of Esus (we need to decide on the new religions' abbreviations so I don't have to write so much) icons get changed I actually don't mind the council icon on the cities as much, but the icon by the leader's name just doesn't fit (empyrean was worse in both places). Of course, since the Council is hidden religion, I guess this really doesn't matter much!
Oh, is the only thing hidden about it that rival without your religion don't know you've adopted it, or can they not tell if its in a city either. The latter would be much more interesting, but probably to difficult to implement (and it would make it hard to know if you should convert!) Speaking of converting, can Esus civs ask others to convert to their religion? It seems like that would blow their cover.
I was thinking that it could be interesting if each Esus civ/council member got espionage points per turn per non-Esus-civ city with Esus in it against the cities owners (which would work better if they couldn't tell if the religion was present), but you have probably written a better espionage system than that anyway. I was also thinking that giving Empyrean clerics the ability to see though the hidden nature of the religion would be good (preforming counter-espionage, detecting "spies", determining if a city has the religion, and possibly even discovering the true state religion of those following Esus.
Hmm... saying "true state religion" just made me think how great it would be if other civs could be convinced that you followed a
different religion, instead of no state religion, especially if that is
their real state religion. This would make most sense if you switched from say, FoL to Esus, and other FoL civs though you stayed FoL (although perhaps civs with other religions might still think you were "no state religion"). Perhaps another ability of the council would be to let its members "pass for" followers of other state religions. It would also be great if it could mask their true alignment; thus there could be an Evil Council of Esus civ that appeared to everyone not on the council to still be a Good Order civ. If possible, this would be an amazing ability, and would fit very well thematically. It could also explain what happened to the corrupt Bannor/Order Empire latter on in their existence, when Valin had abandoned them and they were hunting him down (and Valin would abandon them, because they weren't really of his state religion!)
All in all the Council looks very interesting. It will certainly be a much different experience. It hardly seems like a religion at all, more like a secret criminal guild/cult. Of course, I was kinda confused on how it could be implemented as a real religion anyway, so I think it fits.