This mod is amazing. I played a full game with it, and I can give a decent report. 0.5 has all the problems listed - weapon smith and armor don't do squat, you can build unique religious buildings everywhere, and the dragon hoard doesn't provide mithril. I understand they've already been fixed. Anyway, now for the review:
Early game:
When you start out, you have to choose between being able to defend yourself and being able to harvest resources - that's just the way this mod works. If you are playing the computer, get the resources. As you expand your borders, the rest of the early research will come easily. If you can't cut down forest, you'll be screwed in the later game as you will never catch up technologically. IN the early game, send out scouts right away - those movement promotions mean you'll have the entire world map before the computer has woken up to go to the washroom. The goody huts will be 90% yours, and it will help a lot in the early game. The scouts can get promoted later, so they'll be good mid-game units.
mid game: try to found a religion and spread it with missionary zeal. Religion is the path to peace, and winning a mid-game war is almost impossible. The enemy will be able to produce much faster than you think, and he'll send his units everywhere - not good. Having said that, the key to victory in any war with this mode is ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK. The upgrades will make your units invincible, and attacking gets you a MUCH higher experience point bonus than defending.
Note that almost any unit worth having requires a building to create - so build those buildings. If you are like me in normal civilization, you chose the path of peace. In this game, treat it like a turn based RTS because that's what it feels like. Build buildings making sure to specialize cities, then churn out special units. Bring wounded units back to specialized cities and BUY UPGRADES (you make a LOT of gold in this game, not like normal civ4) and send them back to pound the enemy into dust. As long as you wait until the late mid-game, you'll be able to wage effective war (but keep diplomacy with the other neighbors - the last thing you need or can survive is a war on two fronts).
Late game:
In the late game, there are many national units - build them, use them. The demon summoner is unbelievably good and the computer has absolutely NO idea how to use it. Demons can be re-spawned as soon as they die, so ignore the advice above and use them as cannon fodder. Once you've pounded a city's defenses with spell casters, in most cities you can send in three demons to die, and your remaining national units can wipe the city flat. Garrison it with golems and move on. Don't worry too much if a city is retaken, Demons move FAST and you can retake a city and re-garrison in a turn. The end-game is about getting one enemy civilization to beg for mercy and then going for the next. HOWEVER, watch the cultural victory condition - you can lose in a heartbeat if the enemy built the correct world wonders. One enemy had a 100,000 culture city before I had my first legendary city. I almost died of stupidity in that game.
Another option - getting 80% religion is almost impossible - totally so once there are more than one religion in the game, but it might be worth a try using the fellowship of leafs religions (which is easy to get very early in the game). I would like to see a religious victory.
The mod is very fun. It requires a lot of test playing to balance out, but that's to be expected in such an early release. I am astonished how much work has been accomplished in a couple of weeks. You've completely changed civ iv from a slow combat chess-like strategy game to an extreme rts feel involving an unbelievable amount of combat. This game is a pleasure to play.
Advice for the mod:
The computer has trouble realizing how important special buildings are - it takes a long time to make things like summoning chambers for instance. It needs to balance out units with buildings more. (but then again, this has been a problem with the computer from civ I - and the main way that I win every game I play)
I can't easily tell what technologies found what religion, and doing so requires searching the whole tech tree to find.
lots and lots of play-testing for balance. I think that a functioning dragon hoard would completely mess up the balance of the game. Several of the world wonders are too powerful from what I can tell.
advice for players:
attack, attack, attack. This mod is NOT for pacifists (although the pacifism civic is good not matter what you do!)
Deethdeeler