It is not easy to make an improvement buildable everywhere for just one civ and restricted to bonuses for other. I am not sure if it is even possible...
How about quarries geting bonus food from arete, too?
ad 2.
I changed AI so elves & dwarves will race to Fol or RoK only after they get ancient chants or tracking(FoL)/mining(RoK) to let them get some usefull techs first. They still race for religions, just a bit later and are not so much handicapped by this.
ad 3. Flavoured start do not create new starting locations, just redistribute them according to flavor, plus cuts some normalization. Also, Illians get +1 food & hammer, so they treat snow as plains. Not too bad...
ad 4. I was always annoyed by the AI: just building more cities with no regards for upkeep/defense. I have added xienwolf's tweak to make them defend better, nothing more.
ad. 5. I added agriculture prerequisite to pottery as it was reported that AI never discovers it. Now I think that it just prefers better techs. I will remove agricult req from pottery and maybe drop the cost of wheel a bit. How do you like it?
6. I am not sure if I want any guild to compete. Guild bonuses scale to map size, but I may drop food bonus a little. Note that all bonuses & upkeep are lower than in BtS.
@arkham4269
I have updated my files to h, just need some more time to decide what to with some changes. I do not like adding unique just to do not have training yard requirement. I will probable add doviello unique cheap training yard (bear totem...)
Also, I want to move ogres from mounted techs without removing higher tier orcs. Anyway, I will try to post patch a soon.