Wait a minute, how has it been almost
a year since anyone has introduced themselves on this thread?
Anyway, I joined in 2017 after lurking for a few years, and yet I never noticed this thread until now. My first Civ game was Civ II, but it was Civ IV that got me both hooked on the game and interested in modding, and I've been following the series ever since.
Civ IV was when I discovered map scripts, and other map types besides the normal stuff that you get with Shuffle. Lakes in particular blew my mind, once I realized that I could normalize the map size and play with a ridiculous amount of land. I also hacked the shuffle map script to roll Lakes half of the time so that whenever I started a game, I had no idea what I was going to find.
But I didn't
publish any mods until Civ V BNW. I loved the game, but I missed my hacked Civ IV Lakes map shuffle so much that I wrote a shuffle-style map script to include Lakes plus all the other vanilla map types. Then over time I noticed other things that I could fix, and the map script evolved along with my understanding of Lua and the Civ V map generator.
Then Civ VI came along, and after a few months I decided to port my map script. I'm glad I did, because terrain has a huge impact on gameplay: rivers for housing, terrain and resource adjacencies for various districts, mountains for science, canals, volcanoes, ice that melts, civs starting in water...
So if anyone needs help with a map script, I'd be happy to answer questions or give advice. Otherwise, I think I'm finally finished with the map script that I started back in 2015, so now I might actually play the game again