Third, i play this with a TSL World map, scenario on, and geographical resources, so yes, my game may differ than a random game.
I'm not familiar with that map. If it has its own version of GetMajorStrategicResourceQuantities or GetSmallStrategicResourceQuantities, which many custom maps do, then it won't work with this mod. (So far, I know this happens with the Lakes, Great Plains, Highlands, and the pre-order scenario maps.) The game will still run, but you'll have no deposits of the three future resources on your map. And if "geographical resources" means that resources are placed where you'd find them in the real world, then I can guarantee that that map is incompatible.
The Garden, now adds +1 Happiness.
The Monastery, now adds +1 Unmodded Happiness, but its base Culture has been reduced from 3 to 1.
The Mint, now adds +1 Unmodded Happiness, but its Gold increase has been reduced from +3 per Gold/Silver to +2 per deposit.
The reasons for these three changes all boiled down to the same two issues:
1> There was a bit too much Unhappiness, so I needed to add Happiness somewhere, and these three gave about the right amount when combined. (Especially with the fact that these are not every-city buildings; you need to have a specific local resource or terrain type to unlock them.)
2> Overspecialized buildings are bad, because the AI does NOT prioritize things that well.
The total culture, gold, and happiness created by your empire will be about the same as in the vanilla game. It's just that you'll no longer get those by building a single chain of buildings. So removing 2 culture from the Monastery (and Temple) isn't bad when you realize that the Colosseum, Library, University, etc. each gained 1 point, and the Theater gained 2. A fully-loaded city will be just as good as before (actually, slightly better), but it'll progress very differently along the way.
The older design, where buildings did only one thing, heavily favored the player. You'd build, say, culture buildings in the cities that gained an extra multiplier from certain Policies or the Broadcast Tower, and not bother with them in the cities that didn't. The same goes for the other categories; Happiness was the worst offender, as once you'd built four buildings in a conquered city (Courthouse, Colosseum, Theater, Stadium) you were done, and anything beyond that was pure gain for your empire.
So your best strategy was to build "vertically", specializing each city into a given category and never building "unnecessary" buildings in other cities. But by having more buildings add to multiple areas (research/culture, happiness/culture, happiness/gold, and so on), then the best strategy approaches "horizontal" development, where you build all the cheap stuff first and then move up... which is what the AI does, generally.
(As for why no food for the Garden? It never had food to begin with. If I tacked even more bonuses onto it it'd get overpowered. Remember that to build a Garden your city has to be on a lake or river, which means it's probably already one of your best cities in terms of food and gold.)
Replace wheat for sheep? (wool, milk and food)
I'd thought of that, but which do you see more of in a market: bread, or wool? And sure sheep are edible, but how many people do you know who've eaten sheep and/or goats recently, versus how many have eaten bread? Wheat, Fish, Cow pretty much represent the "common" resources in agriculture/fishing. Bananas, Sheep, and Deer are the rare ones. (And this is supported by the actual tile distributions in the game.) They're abstractions to begin with, with Bananas really representing all tropical fruits, so we shouldn't get into an argument about how good Haggis tastes.
Originally I'd had both Sheep and Wheat boost at the Market, but that then made Bananas and Deer worse by comparison. And I didn't want to boost all six.
The first other reason for it is terrain balance. Sheep primarily spawn on hills, Wheat and Cows are on non-hill plains and grassland, Fish are in water. But remember that this is paired with the Bank increase, giving gold to Gold, Silver, and Gems... all of which skew towards hills. So with six gold increases for these two buildings, I didn't want four of them to be hill-related.
The second other reason is Improvement balance. Sheep and Cows both use Pastures, while Wheat uses the Farm (which gets less of a boost technologically). The math just works a little better this way.
Settlement>Monument>Storytelling>Worship>Temple, that's how i see it.
This isn't a case where the concept is the important part. It's about the game balance. Temples are now a combined Happiness/Culture building, because I needed SOMETHING to do that, and given the Burial Tomb had already set the precedent, the Temple was the obvious choice. Having the Temple require a pure-culture building and be a prerequisite for a pure-culture building, while not being in that category itself, is bad design.
And it's not just me. There are two UB alternatives to the Temple: the Burial Tomb (which was already this combined happiness/culture design) and the Mud Pyramid Mosque. Neither of these require a Monument, and so can be built in new cities without needing anything else. So if you were Egypt, you could build an Opera House without ever building the Monument, because the chain was broken.
But the real issue of the game balance is that the core of the Balance mod is the change in base Happiness. Instead of 2+pop, it's 4+1.2*pop. Seems straightforward, right? So what happens when you play it? You found a new city, and decide you need to make up for that extra -2 happiness. But the building designed to do so, the Temple, is locked away behind another building, the Monument. Okay, the player knows to do that, build a monument ASAP and then do the same for the Temple. It'll finish in a reasonable amount of time, and everyone's happy.
But the AI doesn't know how to do this.
The AI in this game just can't think two moves ahead. It evaluates every situation as-is, based on Flavor ratings and the needs of the moment. So it'll only build the Monument if it thinks it needs Culture at that moment; it won't know that it leads to the Happiness that the city REALLY needs. If it thinks it really needs Happiness, what'll it to? Yep, it'll build a Colosseum. An expensive, time-consuming building that adds more Happiness than you can handle in a small city (since it's population-capped). Or worse, it'll pay the extra to rush the thing, bankrupting itself when there was a better alternative that it couldn't see for itself because of how primitive its logic really is.
So the solution was to pull the Temple out of that chain entirely, and make it a first-tier building that can be built as the very first construction of a new city. (Or second in a conquered city, after the Courthouse.) The AI will handle this far better than it does now, which'll make it harder for the player to pull far ahead of the AIs.
(Besides, if you're arguing concept, then how exactly does a Temple lead to an Opera House?)
And that would bring balance in the game?
Yes. The balance of this mod is centered around one concept: making the way the AI already plays into something more closely approaching an optimal strategy. That way, no massive reworking of the AI is necessary. Without this sort of balancing, the game would NEVER last long enough for you to reach the custom content, because the existing game can easily be won by the end of the Industrial simply by abusing strategies the AI has no idea about (like ICS was).
Ask yourself this: in the Industrial era, why build Tanks? After all, you already have Infantry, Artillery, and so on. So why bother with Tanks at all? Well, because they're just the best unit for warfare. High mobility, can hit and run, high damage. They're the core offensive unit, the best all-around tool you have; they won't be the only thing you build, but they will be the core of an attacking army.
In the earlier eras, the knights/lancers fill that same role; churn out a good number and you can sweep through your foes' armies without needing other types for anything other than city conquest. Cavalry are even better, technically, but they're actually weaker relative to the other units and cities of the time.
In your highly fictional example, if you didn't have horses and couldn't trade or bribe a city-state for some, then you'd use swordsmen, crossbowmen, and eventually musketmen and riflemen. And catapults/cannons for support. And naval vessels. You can still do just fine that way; I've done so many times.
But if you're willing to spend the resources, you go for the best units you can. And that too often leads to an all-Tank force, which is just boring. So I changed it. The same pattern goes up the line; Tanks, Modern Armor, and Gravtanks are all 2-resource units now, while many of the units around them only need one resource. This encourages the player to use a mix of unit types, instead of just loading up on all Tanks or all Knights and rolling over his opponents.
It could be me, not seeing the whole Alpha Centauri picture/idea/game/universe.
Is it me?, yeah, i am sure it's me, am i?
If you're not reaching the future eras, then of course you're not seeing the new content. And as you said, you've never played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, so of course you're not seeing the connection. As I said in the first post of this thread, and quite a few times since, this is NOT a total conversion of that earlier game. It takes place on Earth, and simply uses the techs, buildings, wonders, and some of the units from the Alpha Centauri game as inspiration for adding future eras to the existing Civ game. All 48 new techs are named after techs in SMAC (well, 45 are directly named, and three are slightly modified names), and every Wonder and National Wonder I added was the name of a Wonder in SMAC or its expansion.
I could have called it "Spatz's Future Mod" and just made up names for things. It would have worked out about the same, really, but I'd have found it far less interesting.
Besides, this is why I have two mods. The Content mod has all of the new sci-fi stuff. The Balance mod has all of the balance changes that I think are necessary to make sure the game is still competitive by the time you reach those new eras if you'd started in the Ancient Era. So if you really hate the balance changes but want to see the new content, just use the Content mod without the Balance one. That's what it's there for.
Prevented me from building some much needed nukes to deal with the French forces on my opposite border. 
)
