Initial thoughts

I'm not in the mod scene, but changing mods but keeping the same game seems to make no sense for a 4X game with lots of inter-dependencies.

 

New game, rolled Norway and a pretty amazing start - very productive city, with a good settlement spot next to Yosemite. Things were going well until Brazil and America joined forces to declare war on me, taking what I suspect are the full resources of all three civs - they seem able to spam anything and, while the AI can't fight well, it can keep its units alive due to the change to movement rules, with the result that the war's a long slog with no one making progress. Quite impressively, while Brazil was somewhat passive, its units were coordinated with the American ones. But the big tell that something is wrong AI-wise - other than its complete refusal to build ranged units, something I saw on my last playthrough - was that the American army was accompanied throughout by a settler with its warrior escort; I wonder if the AI just sees the warrior and doesn't recognise the attached unit? In any case the war revolved around me trying to get at the settler for a while, until it was finally captured by Kabul.

Peace deals seem to follow the same logic as Civ V - if the AI's closer to your territory than you are to its own, it doesn't recognise that it has any motive to make peace.

 

Game is boring, buggy, and imbalanced. I still don't get some of the game systems, and like most people, find the production to science ration absurd.

I'm sure they'll fix this up with a few patches though, like they did with Civ V. So I'm not giving up hope - just putting it out there that I'm shelving this game until a major patch or two.

 

There are rare edge cases where it is possible that adding/removing mods midgame could cause issues, but they are few and far between. For example, Civ 4 had no such restrictions and worked just fine.