I have to take issue with the comparison to Rise of Mankind. I realize that since this mod was released after RoM, people are going to make the comparison. But it isn't acurate, for starters I've never played RoM. I took one look at it and thought Overkill. Second these mods have two very different aproaches in design.
Zappara's design phillosophy is to incorporate anything and everything that has historical underpinnings. He has designed RoM for himself and released it to the community. Overall RoM is a composite mod that is very large and expansive with a grand vision, but it is also equally unwieldy. If you play RoM you will need to increase your difficulty level because the AI, even with better AI is unable to keep up with the overall complexity and new concepts it doesn't understand like pre req buildings. Further there is a serious lack of balance in RoM, certain units like Mailed knights just dominate, and there are mulitple periods where you have rapid succesion obsalecence with only one or two actually useful units. While humans can figure things like this out, the AI simply cannot.
My design phillosophy is to maintain the default game wherever possible and only incorporate new things that improve gameplay. The mod has been designed for the community following the style of what I think an official expansion pack would look like. Everything in LoR is concise and the change in gameplay is equivalent from vannila civ to Beyond the Sword. Further because all the concepts are simple and have a gameplay rather then historical design, the AI is able to use them all, and with better AI to great effect. And the game is balanced. When playing LoR you will need to drop your difficulty level.
And we haven't even gotten into proffessional apearance. LoR actually has unique buttons for everything in it. It has an installer and allows for the option to use Blue Marble. LoR also has decent sized poly units and has pretty equivalent system demands as default BtS. RoM has no such checks, it is a grab bag and 10,000 poly models with repeated buttons from other units are common. So overall I just don't think the comparison to RoM is really fair to LoR. I realize RoM is more popular (far more so, RoM has over 100,000 downloads), many people want 100s of new techs and units and don't mind if it's disoraganized. But the thing is RoM is only really playable for a certain subset of Civilization 4 players. LoR on the other hand would be enjoyed by any Civ player who liked the BtS expansion, as it plays like something that could have come out of Firaxi's kitchen.
![[to_xp]Gekko](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/74/74677.jpg?1475248346){kind=avatar}
) , and it does so while keeping the general feel and flow of the game intact. but I see how it would probably clash with your design philosophy. for the record, I don't even play what I call vanilla Civ anymore, ever since I've discovered FFH 
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