Thal, I first wanted to say that the mod continues to get better and better! Thank you very much for all of your hard work, this mod is one of the main reasons I still play Civ 5.
I'll continue to comment in the individual threads, but I just wanted to summarize my feelings on the current issues still present in Civ 5. You are likely to agree with me on some, and disagree on others, but I felt it was worth the time to lay down some ideas.
1) Villages are not attractive. In my experience, food and hammers are worth more than gold, and that's especially true when civil service can bag me 2 food. There just doesn't seem to be enough incentive to build villages, especially in the early game.
2) Puppet states are a crunch in the game. For all of Civ V's flaws, I really like most of the new concepts it introduced. 1 UPT/policies/embarkation...I think they all bring a lot of new flavor and strategy to the game. The exception is the puppet system. The puppet system takes control away from the player...and penalizes him if he wants it back. Which in a game like civ where its all about control, its just a bad idea.
I wrote an article a while back detailing my thoughts and fixes on this, feel free to have a read if you are interested....
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=415531.
3) I shouldn't be able to get military units when certain other baseline tech isn't researched. Such as chariot archers without archery, infantry without rifling, etc. This is much more a flavor issue than a balance one, but I put it here none the less.
4) I can never get the computer to deal with me on my terms. I can't count the number of times I have asked the computer to be my friend and they refuse...and then the next turn they ask me to be their friend.
The computer will ask me to go to war for them all the time...but will never go to war for me.
Basically, the computer should show a little more give and take...right now I have literally given up on many aspects of diplomacy...and I simply wait for the computer to grace me with their presence and give me an offer.
5) Policies that simply exist for the cultural victory. The piety tree is a big example of this. Mandate of Heaven is much more useful with your changes...but I'm still spending culture simply to gain culture faster later. At least with the freedom tree I am generating culture in my cities so they can expand borders faster, but for the most part those policies are pretty boring ones.
6) Policy Imbalances: I know you are working to address these now. In my opinion, the weakest tree is Autocracy, mainly becomes freedom is so good (in fact I think freedom might be a bit OP, mainly because you have added so many specialist slots that late game freedom gives me a huge power). Second weakest is Commerce, order is probably third.
7) Strategic Resources are too plentiful on small maps, too sparse on large maps. This is just a general theme I'm hearing on the boards, but I don't have any formulas to back it up. I can say from my experience on small maps (my default), I generally have more horses than I know what to do with, and generally enough iron to handle what I need.
8) The very beginning of the game is a bit slow. I was wondering if it was possible to give a chunk of hammers to the first unit built in the game. Mainly just to get that first worker or building out a bit faster, instead of have to click end turn for 10 turns before anything actually happens. I can say the rest of the early game picks up much quicker due to some of your other changes.
That's all I have right now, hope it helps.
and no 
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and 
costs.
these will be my first games with ottoman, americans, england and arabs.. they simply seemed too boring on vanilla 
