Here are a few of my favourite ideas for balance & co, which this thread reminded me of

I included the links to the threads, so people can answer in the appropriate place.
There has been extensive discussion on Malakims, and the best solution by far IMHO was this one:
(link)
shepherds:
- Introduce a new specialist for the Malakim, the Shepherd.
- A shepherd produces 3
and 2
.
- Number of assignable shepherds is based on the number of unproductive desert tiles in the city radius. (desert tiles - oasis tiles - flood plain tiles)
- One assignable shepherd for every 5 (or maybe 4?) unproductive desert tiles in the BFC.
- Shepherds are not bonus specialists, they are assigned from the normal population pool.
Assuming a city is settled in the middle of a vast desert with the entire BFC filled with empty desert and you get 1 shepherd for every 5 tiles, that would allow you to grow a city to size 7 in a completely desolate waste land and still have 3 of that population working zero food tiles. Not too shabby. You can still terraform for better results, but you at least have the option of having a usefully sized city with some decent production potential. This is of course a worst case scenario, most cities would probably only have half that amount of empty desert.
Thematically it works well too. You essentially have a single population spread out over a vast landscape scraping what they can out of the desert and concentrating it. The shepherd's common appearance in judeo-christian mythology would seem to fit well with FFH's mythological influences as well.
- I agree that Tsunami is overpowered. I think it should be the second Water III spell, in an ideal world where we'd get
additional lvl III spells. But even then it would probably have to be toned down a bit and work only from ocean coasts.
Then Cultists could cast Mutation, and Chaos II could be reverted to Summon Chaos Marauder or something...
Here are the ideas I found best:
(link)
- Can't say about pillar of flames, really: I haven't tried it. But I
hear it's overpowered

I had it as a lvl3
- I agree that Amurites should start with an adept instead of a scout. It would help them survive their weak early game, and feels really flavorful. The floating eye will allow quicker exploration, but the Amurite player probably won't get any goody huts, for fear that they might lose the adept. It should start without the initial free promo, though, so you can't use a floating eye on turn 1 and get a disproportionate advantage.
- Doviellos
definitely need to be able to steal the weapons from their fallen ennemies.
- I really like my idea to allow the Doviellos to get the War Machine in a more Doviello-ish way than researching Machinery, so I'm going to post it here again

:
(link)
Have the guy who builds the War Machine be the Doviello hero, unlocked at construction or something...
And then he upgrades to War Machine at 100xp. The tricky part is that he doesn't have the Hero promotion before that, so he has to gain that xp on the field (gathering parts

)
That way the War Machine is hard to get, but it doesn't require the Doviello to be a high-tech civ. It doesn't really make sense for the entire Civilization to need to understand machinery for the War Machine to appear, anyway...