Okay, I've finally decided to get back to finishing this mod up... Granted I HAVE created/added a few new units this year, but that's all I've done, mainly due to external events (house-hunting, girlfriend, etc) and somewhat lack of interest.
I've been messing around with the Playground 2.0 mod, however, and still regularly playing Civ III, so I'm not as rusty as you might think (as a matter of fact, there are a few things I've discovered while customizing the Playground mod that I'm going to be incorporating into the finished Final Fantasy mod)....
For Starters, here are the main changes that I'm definitely going to make to the gameplay:
First of all, only workers, scouts, airships and chocobo units will be able to traverse Mountains, Ancient Forests and Swamps without roads. The purpose for this is two-fold: first to make the gameplay experience more like the original Final Fantasy Games (i.e. there are cities in the mountains, but you need to travel along a pre-made road to get to them unless you have airships or Chocobos)
Secondly, due to epic levels of AI stupidity, I'm getting rid of all the "Palace" type small wonders used for generating settlers, and just have the normal Palace do that... deleting the associated buildings and re-arraning the graphics files will no doubt be a pain in the butt, but nothing too major. This won't mean an end to unique settlers, however: I'm going to make the various settler units buildable by the various factions when Industrialization is researched, which should help fill out the territory a bit better on larger maps. In addition, the Dwarf Engineers generated by the Dwarf Engineers' Guild small wonder will now only be useable as super-fast workers (2 movement and work twice as fast).
Finally, I'm going to be cranking out a bunch of units soon... Easiest for me to make (due to having recently made similar ones) are: Black Mage (use my staff-chick animations), Red Mage (use some of my Captain Jack Sparrow animations and add a magic attack), re-do the Shinra Soldier (due to having more and better parts available and better two-handed sword animations) and Cloud Strife (again, due to having better props, textures and animations). I'm also going to be releasing a few more King Unit packs (one will be called "Killer Queens," and will feature Queen Reina (or Lenna for those who prefer the re-make), Queen Hilda, Edea and The Star Sibyl... The other one will consist of some of the guys, namely Squall, Paramekia, Karst, and Trion I.
Finally, I've also been inspired to start work on another project, a massive-multiplayer crossover mod: The Lord of the Final Fantasy scenario... Basically, you'll have all the Third-Age LoTR factions from the Lord of the Mods (with one or two possible exceptions) on a slightly enlarged and modified Middle Earth map (I've widened it to include Tol Fuin and Menaltarma), with the remaining empty spots being filled by random Final Fantasy faction start points. This won't be a mere "Final Fantasy Mod ported to Middle Earth" scenario, either, but one that tries to fully combine aspects of both settings (i.e. Resources will be combined, which means that Mythril = Mithril, there will be NO chocobos or Chocobo units, but horse units instead, some bonus resources, like Taters and mushrooms will be carried over from LoTM, etc).
Thanks to all who have supported me over the years. I'm sorry I haven't been as consistent with work on this project as I should have been.
EDIT: here's a preview of all the faction leaders:
Final Fantasy Mod Faction Leaders by
Hikaro Takayama, on Flickr
btw ,the look reminds me on the older "Colors N Chrome Interface Modpack". 
(either that or a Dwarf Engineer squad).
)
