Hi, I posted this in another thread, but I think it is more appropriate here.
I know that RifE is not meant to be perfectly balanced for multi player, in fact, one of the reasons I came to prefer it over Orbis is that everything is a bit more extreme (!!! ) than in RifE. However, there are a couple of civs that I feel could use a slight nerf for multi player purposes. Also, I know that much of this may have been mentioned in other posts, but this is primarly from MP games, so I thought you might wanna know.
1) Mazatl: in mid- to endgame they sky-rocket because of Lost Lands combined with 5 jungle tiles. new cities begin with +20 and +20 because of trade routes, and as opposed to Raitlor (Illian leader) or Malakim who have similar mechanics, they got a bunch of trade-improving buildings. Yes, I know they must give up foreign trade, but I had nonetheless cities with 40+ pop at around turn 200 even with the new unhealth mechanics. Maybe it could be scaled down a bit, I mean, they already get ridiculous amounts of from the jungles, maybe just give them a bonus from trade and no additional . Oh, and the wyverns are a bit imba, maybe not give them 9 of them.
Before I move on to the next OP civ I would like to say that I like that workers improve the land so slow in this version. It might be a little bit too slow (speed it up 25% perhaps), but all in all it's a great improvement to the game.
2) Mekara Order: With workers taking 20+ turns to improve the terrain, mekara's early horde of familiars and a little later horde of Sluga gives them a lot, I mean a lot, of momentum in the early game. A momentum I have abused every time to expand like a madman early on, which their economy can handle because they got free militia units. Unless you get attacked by Mazatl (which I did once and lost, damn you Mazatl wyverns and damn you Mekara's Lack Of Rangers), you pretty much own the game. However, I feel that if the normal worker speed is increased then Mekara will lose some of it's edge and actually become balanced Awesome civ design btw.
I will of course mention the new unhealth system. I think everything has been said: it often it does not even pay off to let your cities grow, the AI handle the system like a scared goose in a violin shop (weird analogy) and unless you're expansive your early growth is non-existent. Hopefully this will be changed a bit, like upping the inherent health-bonus in new cities or perhaps let cities bellow 12 pop only give one per pop. I dunno. I'm confident you'll think of something. Which brings me to the most OP civ in MP RifE...
3) Legion of D'Tesh: They were underpowered in the last patch, yes, and the changes to them are fitting and fun, however, they are the only civ unaffected by the new unhealth system (except Infernal and Frozen), so now they grow just as fast as everyone else in the early game (faster with a bit of luck and some watchers/hunters). They get a ridiculous tile-yield from pyres, catacombs and what-not, and their tech explode early on. They can take vast chunks of the worldmap very early with their new mausoleums, and they can turn this land into Infused Ash (extra tech) and pop (extra everything). The most OP feature is that they get both powerful military units (Binders/Chosen) and huge economical upgrades from the same tech-line. There really is no reason to beeline anything other than arcane lore, while this make them one-dimentional it is also very unfair to the rest of the world that has to chose between economy/intfrastructure techs, magic techs, religion techs and military techs. They get it all from one line of tech and that makes them very powerful, very fast. In MP we have reached a point where none of us plays as the Legion, because it feels like cheating. Maybe spread their tile-yield upgrades to other parts of the tech-tree.
Other balance issues: FotL is useless to all races except the elves and Lanun, ancient forests removing one from a tile and blocking all improvements other than than a camp is not a good trade-off for 2. Not that I think that FotL being favorable for elves necessarily is a very bad thing, FotL was OP all races before, but maybe other civs should be allowed build lumbermills in ancient forests, so that ancient forest can compete with normal forests.
Other than that I really like the new patch, and look forward to the next one. Awesome mod you have created here guys.
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Yeah, not a good idea they have enough work with promos and tools as is.
Yeah, but they are shafted in the areas of recon, melee, and ranged units. They're mage units are good for a reason and can still be pounded by a well-balanced force. Not as op as alfar, lizardmen, or even alot of base civ improvements. Windmills, lumbermills, and watermills are giving apparently op
yields if you use them also. They are also much more vulnerable to barbs and animals early game which can limit their development early on with only defensive units(i.e. watchers, sentinels who only have 1 or 2
and 
. I hope I don'ts gets a scary ancient forest, I might get additional yields.
