Thanks for the feedback!
As others have said the Fremen are very easy to play.
Fremen are certainly very strong, Part of it is certainly because, as you say, they are easy to play. Their strengths are straightforward. There are definitely counters to them (using hornets and vehicles and anti-melee promotions) but the AI isn't so good at that.
Also, they can start to struggle in the late game where their lack of aircraft/vehicle access shows up.
Fremen are designed to be the most powerful in the early game, but they're weaker later on.
They're not the only one that can get Shai Hulad or Mahdi, so those benefits don't just work for them. On higher difficulty levels where expansion is more costly the early game advantage isn't as large; the economy or diplomatic advantages of other religions start to become significant.
The spice monopoly victory. I've read the "Some concerns" thread and agree it's extremely difficult to pull off on a Standard or larger sized map. However I've tried for some quick games on Tiny maps and they were extremely quick indeed
The game isn't really balanced for a tiny map. Not sure that we could do that very well, but we could probably make some improvements; in particular maybe we should tweak the minimum spice requirement up more?
I don't think the game would ever work *well* on tiny though.
I would imagine that on a tiny map there is probably very little "inland"?
Can anything be done to improve AI city placement?
AI city placement has already been completely rewritten. It isn't perfect, but it is pretty damn good IMO, especially relative to vanilla. The biggest change over vanilla is that it ignores tiles that are already within the BFC of an existing city owned by that player. The Dune Wars city placement code code assigns a value to various tile types (mostly groundwater, the water-yielding health resources and mesa, and then a little bit on other strategic/health resources and a very small amount on graben; polar tiles are also rated quite high), and then picks out the sites with the highest value within their BFC. There is a bias towards cities that are near the capital.
The settlement pattern is very different from vanilla, where the AI will tend to bunch up cities very tightly and settle like crazy; this is a very bad strategy in Dune Wars, where the value of a city is determined almost entirely by its water access.
We had a huge increase in AI performance when we changed their settlement logic.
I can't think of any obvious further changes that would improve placement, though it might be that the AI favors the pole too much given how much polar cities have been weakened.
In all my games when the AI controls the Bene Gesserit they're usually in last place. Any idea why that is?
Basically, I would say: the Bene Gesserit favor culture and diplomacy and espionage, and the AI isn't very good at using any of these. Espionage is probably also a bit underpowered, there are a few abilities that are very strong but they might be too expensive.
The Bene Gesserit also require careful use of their Kwizatz units, and the AI isn't so good at that.
The BGs are basically a late-game power, once you have large stacks and have had time to really start using their espionage to set up some stable allies.
In the hands of a human player, the BGs are probably one of the strongest.
I have observed the BG do well, usually when they found Shai Hulad and it gets adopted by several others.