X-men510,
Thanks for the offer! I'm not sure what being on the team entails so it is a little hard to know if I should. My ability to commit time will be very variable. I'll help however I can either way. Anyway, I like the pay.
Before I make a formal list of recommendations, though, I want to scour through the other threads in the mod. That is, it is hard to talk about buildings without seeing how the whole mod fits together. As an example, I may say that there aren't enough health buildings, but if the design intent is intentionally to limit city growth, then there should be limited happiness buildings.
Your comment about culture is a good point. If you disallow culture flipping, it changes the way we look at culture. I do agree that in dealing with the different races, disallowing culture flipping seems to make sense in a LoTR world.
I think if Sauron had captured Lothlorian during the War of the Ring, you wouldn't have had a city with a tremendous amount of elven culture occupied by orcs; rather, you would probably have had a lot of dead elves. This would leave me to recommend either: 1. Eliminate culture flipping, the orcs settling the city aren't moving out and they aren't asking to join the Noldor. or 2. Have the AI 'know' it should burn the city. (At least for Sauron/Morgoth, it may make sense to have a rule where units/orcs can be turned into city population. I can see the orcs burning a city, and quickly setlling it with thousands. ) The reason I say perhaps they should burn them is that with the Civ system, there will be 'elves' in the city for happiness purposes which probably makes little sense.
Two warnings of not having culture buildings, though -- even without culture flipping, the few culture buildings may make it hard for a conqueror to hold territory if another race has established culture. With few culture buildings, the wonders may be establishing a lot of culture that will be hard to contest. So, the conquerer may find itself holding only the city square and having trouble competing for surrounding squares. Will culture bombing be allowed? If so, the impacts of somebody else culture bombing will be hard to offset.
You also will have to make sure that the great artists (sorry, I forgot what they will be called) can be balanced and that there isn't an artist war.
Btw, can Sauron and Morgoth get 'artists'? I would think the shadow itself promotes some sort of 'culture' in Civ terms but I don't really see an orc or troll version of Raphael.
Anyway, these are some of my random thoughts.
Best wishes,
Breunor