Im also a big fan of Rhye's mod and have thought many times about coming up with UHV's for FfH2. But part of the reason UHV's work for Rhye is that he has a fixed map, so he is more able to balance and tweak individual win conditions. Not many would work in a random map sort of environment.
We may have unuusal victory conditions in the scneario. But because our main game is random map, we probably won't be able to implement Rhye sort of UHV's in FfH.
Well, achieving goals doesn't necessarily have to mean they are actually victory conditions, right? I haven't played Rhye's often, but I don't think it'd be very fun (especially in multiplayer) if you lost because another civilization achieved its goals - after all, these wouldn't necessarily be exclusive (in contrast to things like Domination, Conquest, Tower of Mastery, etc. - in the cases of all normal victory conditions (except for Time, maybe), it makes sense that nobody else can win if anybody reaches any of these first).
On the other hand, it's a problem if each civilization (even led by the AI) can reach its own unique victory conditions, meaning you'd have to control basically all other civilizations, which is nearly impossible on huge maps. As far as I can remember, the UHVs didn't actually make you lose the game if an AI achieved them, right? In that case, something like this would probably not be fitting for FFH, and it would make AIs even less competetive.
On the other hand, one could make "softer" civilization goals - i.e. the Runes of Kilmorph religion has the goal X, say, own the Holy Shrine, have X gold in your treasury, and own a certain amount of mineral ressources. It could be like a quest, prerequisites for a wonder, or something else, or it might simply unlock a third religious tech or something like that (i.e. the third religious tech becomes unlocked after you have cleared all the conditions).
In code, I guess this could be accomplished by creating a single tech that has unique units/buildings for each civilization, (and then moving certain units to this tech from other parts of the tech tree). If you can complete the goals, this tech becomes either researchable or you receive it immediately.
For example, tying the Mithril Golem and Meshabber of Dis on the one hand and special heroes on the other hand (Abashi, Eurabatres, maybe others) to these sorts of conditions would make more sense in my opinion than simply teching for them.
These unique goals could differ between leaders of the same civilization, or a single leader/civ might have mutually exclusive goals. Simply giving some/all civs and religions a goal and a reward for achieving said goal would probably mainly require ideas and not that much actual coding (although I might be wrong about that).
It would also help increase the atmosphere of the game, and differentiate leaders a bit more. Right now, to me Perpentach seems to be one of the few truly
unique leaders in that his insanity actually affects my gameplay (in comparison, Keelyn sounds equally interesting in her civilopedia entry, but her personality has basically zero impact on gameplay).
It would also make a lot of sense for some of the neutral civs which right now sometimes don't really find their niche in the available victory conditions. Also, these goals wouldn't necessarily have to be huge - if there was enough feedback, one could make several small goals throughout the game, like with the Kilmorph example above. AV goals would obviously be tied in with the AC/corrupting the world, etc.
Another example where these might be useful would be to actually reward resolving some of the conflicts in the FFH universe, e.g. the war between the Svartalfar and the Ljosalfar or between the Clan and the Bannor. Right now, you basically have to roleplay stuff like that. If you were actually rewarded for defeating your archrival, it would probably feel like achieving this might be worth it.
