What I will say here (I did not dare say over at RB as it is not my "home" so I try to just be respectful and mostly keep silent) is that all these arguments about the settings and the Mods are really besides the point. Everyone is playing by the same settings, no matter what they are, so everyone is playing on an equal playing field.
Plus in a game with diplomacy, the game will be won and lost on the diplomatic front, no matter how good your micro or tactics are. A very good question was posed at RB, which to paraphrase was "Would you have fun playing a game (with influence civic/religion espy mission allowed) where we were throwing each other into anarchy every 5 turns?"
I had to think about that, because TBH, I never thought about it that way... In other words, who cares what tactics the game allows or does not allow, what counters to the tactic are available or not available, if some tactic is so powerful that it is the ONLY way to win if used properly, then the game suffers and becomes not fun, but just a chore of using this same overpowered tactic over and over.
I found this argument to be compelling, but as I thought more about it, it was only good, because I accepted the premise... ie, that if the mission is allowed, it will be so powerful that all teams will have no choice but to run espionage heavy enough to keep influencing everyone's civics and religion. But when I really think about it, this does not seem correct
Pinning M&M down into despotism in BTS MTDG II was EXPENSIVE. We basically had to devote our entire economy to it. We could not tech at all while doing this, let alone steal a tech. If EVERYONE in the game was doing this, NO ONE would be teching anything. This seems so far fetched I can't even imagine it.
Plus there was another major false premise I accepted in this argument... The idea that my opponent will keep foolishly trying to switch back into the civics or religion I switched him out of. I know if I faced this tactic, I would just stay in the civic he switched me to, and deal with it. Now he is denied that tactic and his whole strategy falls. I'm sure there is more to it, but I will research the RB threads and do the research so that when the time for debate on the settings comes, I will be talking good sense with good reasoning and information, not just spouting out my beliefs based on my jealous love of the Espionage system.
2metra made an excellent point over there, that if you are one of those who say "We must play this way or I ain't playing" or "My way is best and any other way is unthinkable" then we probably don't want you in the game to begin with. In my experience, it is always these rigid, fanatical ones who insist on this and that, and then a few days, weeks, months into the game, declare that the game bores them, or that some OTHER issue is hopelessly unbalanced and quit...
The main point is that setting don't matter as much as players. With dedicated no-quitter players we will have a fun game. Without, the game is doomed no matter the settings. That being said, I also am hopeful we get to use the Spanish Mod, for novelty's sake if nothing else