I checked this mod out along with a couple of others, so here's some feedback from a semi-newbie that hasn't played anything FfH'ish since before FfH's final release - in other words, it's been a while.
The first mod I checked out with my Civ4 re-install was Dune Wars, and I was able to finish a game that was enjoyable from start to finish, so it's my reference mod for now.
Also, it's a fairly long post, for which I apologize - but hey, it's feedback.
Finally, being a new player and all, I played on Warlord, which explains some of the stuff I struggled with, I guess. You pros playing on Immortal where the AI gets major production boni have some stuff differently, I have no doubt, but imo you should be balancing the game on Noble at most, where the AI is as close to even to the player as possible in Civ4.
(Note that my observations below are a result of three games played up to the mid-game.)
Very early game:
Very early on, tech balance feels solid - you can get some starting techs researched quickly and despite not having much research income.
The world feels abandoned, especially compared with RfE, which is exactly the opposite currently (there are far too many barbs around early on that are too powerful), early exploration is a bit dull.
Very early building times feel too long, and it seems to take ages (as in Civ5ish ages) to get anything done.
Early game:
Tech costs quicky raise and it takes a little long to research anything. It's still bearable, though.
Scripts spawn animals and barbarians, which sometimes feels a little odd - you can explore a peninsula in the very early game and suddenly, it's full of monsters and lairs.
Anyway, a lot of the spawns are a little bit too powerful until you can roll out some hunters - which takes quite a while.
I'm not sure what's causing it, but building costs seem to be wildly fluctuating. I suspect the new global resources play a role, but why exactly (a) is buildable in no time and (b) takes ages isn't made clear enough. A very problematic unit are settlers - I had no idea why, but building times were wildly fluctuating, and generally growing quickly.
Early mid-game:
Tech costs are clearly too high at this point, imo, because it takes far, far too long to research more advanced stuff. Having only crap that takes 3 turns to research and stuff that is only semi-useful but takes 30 turns to research sucks.
The AIs are pursuing an aggressive expansion strategy, which makes the exploding settler costs painful, because I was unable to compete with them. For a while, I wondered how they even managed to pump out so many settlers.
As soon as you get the tech that allows open borders, you can still roam the world, and the constant spawn rates make sure there's usually still animals and barbs in yet unpopulated areas. I liked that one.
However, too many forts litter the landscape that are protected by lizardmen, a unit that you cannot dislodge with the first tier of offensive units that become available.
Warfare with actual AI players is more rewarding, however at this point it becomes clear how the AI can pump out so many settlers - it's neglecting everything else.
It builds basically no wonders and appearantly very little in terms of other city improvements. It doesn't even bother to connect resources to it's cities in most cases. Thus, warfare vs. an AI player usually means slaughtering vast numbers of warriors assisted by a couple of religious units (str3).
As for city building, construction times of buildings are a tad erratic and generally take too long for buildings that aren't really useful enough considering how long a city takes to finish them. If you want to get ANYTHING done, wonders are off-limits.
But that doesn't really hurt too much, practically all wonders suck and are too weak for the price of admission.
By this time, the cost of settlers is completely out of hand, I had cities being able to finish my best military unit in 2 turns and settlers taking 47 turns. That's no fun.
Also, unless you can find a varied collection of resources, health is a BIG issue at this stage of the game. Some additional buildings to remedy this would be nice.
Not-so-early mid-game
The research situation continues to deteriorate, to the point that research means waiting ages for a tech that's usually only a stepstone to something truly useful.
AI players seem to be able to at least pursue certain goals with their research - they found religions and appearently go for useful units, only often fail to construct the buildings required to actually train them later. Even if they do, they appearently are discouraged to build some units - one AI I fought a war against had archer ranges in every city, but it never built a single archer. I guess it figured: These guys are far too expensive compared to Warriors. Having lots of lumber will possibly speed up construction of archers enough, but the AI never bothers with lumber, and in general, when, how and why to use the global resources is a mystery not only to the AI.
(For example, the tooltip for Mines makes you think building a mine would make Stone available to it's city, but for me, the only way to acquire stone was to build a stonemaker - mines on hills just had no effect for a reason unknown to me.)
What the AI player still does is to aggressively pursue it's ICS strategy. It plops down cities EVERYWHERE (except in jungles, appearently).
If only the AI had to properly pay maintenance and could go bankrupt otherwise.
I noticed that, in the "no mans land" that results in the shrunk cultural radius of freshly conquered cities, there seemed to be a far too high spawning percentage at this point. I had eight Axemen spawn in a area of maybe 3x5 tiles in a single turn.
Settler costs remain at their high costs, but other buildings at this point become buildable, and there's finally some decent stuff to chose from.
Mid-game
Fuelled by the first round of science-fueling buildings, research times become bearable again. Well, mostly.
The world is fully ICS'ed and warfare is the only option to expand by now.
However, cities acquired by conquest take FAR too long to get on their feet.
A size 7 city with a decent amount of production should have some basic stuff to build to help it become useful, but there's too little of that. Even the frigging monument usually takes >10 turns. I'm not sure what specifically made that possible, but conquered cities in Dune Wars could get useful fairly quickly - Master of Mana's conquered cities are a major drain on the treasury, and that's it.
On the positive side, the AI players at this point are finally able to field some advanced troops (which means >Warrior) and conduct proper warfare.
Some units are appearently excluded from that, though - I don't think I ever saw archers, nor a navy of any kind.
Last but not least, a few words about the new magic system.
Problem is, I don't really know what to write here.
It takes too long to even get magic started by building a guild and some Adepts, and even then those are utterly useless.
Spell research is a nice idea, but right now, it seems completely borked.
Selecting spells to research has no effect - the research just randomly selects "something" by itself, and for the longest time it's best ignored, because you don't have mages to do anything with it anyway.
After a long time, I accidentally entered the new screens for casting global spells and summoning, but they contained nothing that was actually interesting and/or useful for me. (Around turn 350 of that game)
On the positive side, in hindsight, it's nice that the AI appearently knows these features are there and is using them.
This concludes this wall of text, maybe it's interesting to you devs to see how a total newbie approached the mod without any knowledge or research about it beforehand.
Then again, maybe it's not - in that case you can always ignore the post.
Oh, and that I bothered to write that all down should show you that I don't think the mod by itself sucks etc., it just needs some work, imo. Still, great job so far.
_____
rezaf