Hello. I'm a big fan of the mod. I wanted to make a list of suggestions that I think would make it better (I am a semi-professional game-balance tester):
Listed in order of my perceived importance and/or difficulty to implement
1) I hear you don't do a lot of 3d modeling, but consider asking one of the fall from heaven2/fall further/ashes of erebus/ (there have been a lot of remakes of this mod) if you can use some of their assets. The community is generally open to sharing, and this would open up a lot of design space for you (they have ents too, fun!)
2) with the current build there is a big problem with the strength of the "mini great person" effects of the missionaries they are all significantly *more* efficient than normal production, with the mobility benefit. For example an engineer produces 240 hammers (on epic speed), but only costs 60 to make, meaning a city's ability to build wonders is more based on how many neighbors can send engineers, than on it's own production, and in fact late game in general is *very* dependent on exploiting engineers to get everything produced. the science and cultural ones are similarly problematic. I have been completely unable to get the power one to work as a little general.
3) assuming engineers get a nerf, wonders are a little too expensive There are in general a lot of buildings in this mod, and until I can exploit engineers the wonders mostly feel like traps that aren't worth building
4) there needs to be a few buildings to build early. the first few tech levels have nothing, and so too much of the early game you can only really build warriors (or scouts) if you want your city growing
5) I'd love to see an extra tier of units. right now you get the axe/sword/light cavalry guys really early, and then there's very little military tech for most of the game. I would suggest lowering the first tier closer to warriors. axemen=3, archers=2, marksmen=1, swords=4, spears=3, light cavalry 3 or 4. then you could add a middle tier that was in the 5-7 range, before the endgame with the 7-10 range. this would make technological advancement more meaningful for war, because as of right now the only windows you can really leverage a tech advantage into combat advantage are near the beginning and end of the game.
6) Material based promotions! look at the way fall from heaven does weapons, and consider something like that for weapons and/or armor. obviously this might throw other stuff out of balance, but I think it'd be really cool. it would also make the 1 mithril on the entire map worth going after, without adding a unit that requires it. I think something as simple as "bronze arms and armor" +10%, "iron arms and armor" +25%, "Mithril arms and armor " +50%, that are automatically given to units built in a city with the right resource and tech (although weapon and armor pro,motions are a very cool rabbit hole you can dive really far down and do some neat things with)
7) it might be very difficult to program, but another win condition would be really good. with the map size as it is, domination is pretty tough, and conquest is literally impossible (unless domination is turned off). this mostly leaves the win condition as "culture" or "time" which isn't exactly exciting. You could make a science victory similar to the spaceship, but have the components be about finding the ring. you'd probably need to make 2 versions (good and evil) for it to make sense, but spaceship components could be like "send riders to search for ring (4)" vs "move hobbits stealthily (4)".
8) I think it'd be cool if there was a system that encouraged the natural alliances from the lore. for a more passive system you could just give a small relationship boost to the right faction. a more interesting (and difficult) option would be messing with random events, so that certain + relationship events only happened between certain factions, and same for certain -relationship ones. this would make alliances more variable, but not random.
