Well, since I posted in the Design a Winder Poll thread, I guess I might as well give some feedback...
Before I upgraded to 0.13d (I think I was playing 0.12b or something, but I can't remember clearly), I played a game with the Lanun (Falamar) and got Octopus Overlords as my state religion. The game went fine, but I should mention that I was a bit dissapointed to find little synergy between the OO and my sea domination strategy. Drowns may give some sort of a head start towards conquering nearby isles, but they quickly get outdated by tier 3 units (which I feel become available a bit too early, but then again the tech tree has been modified since, so I guess this criticism is no more relevant). And I never got a chance to try invoking that Kraken thing, because I could never get a cultist become a high priest (partly my fault, it took me a while before I could lay my tentaculous hands on some incense, and by that time I was already on a good way towards domination and I kept burning cultists + disciples to make newly conquered cities working fast... damn, this technique is really effective for fast conquests !). In the end, playing Overlords was greatly satisfying for itself, and I sure made great use of Lunatics, slavery and all, but I was hoping for a better experience when playing it with the Lanun... in fact, it was even partly counter-productive because I actually ended up with two Water Mana ressources (one for the palace, and one for the OO shrine) which I could only trade for money since no AI would have spare Mana Ressources of any type...
Anyway, this said, the Lalun clearly rock ! I loved those unique pirate ships, and boarding parties are very nice gameplay-wise. I felt the Raider trait maybe was a bit powerful, but it seems that it has been slightly softened in 0.13d (or will be in 0.14, I'm not sure I remember well, and anyway you should know better than me) so I guess this is not an issue. And OO is great too, although I feel it is not as water-oriented as its description and place in the tech tree would suggest (unless I'm missing something).
On a side note, I poudered this a lot, and finally didn't dare build any of their "special temples", or whatever you name them. It wasn't clear from reading the pedia what benefits they would give me if I did, and losing trade routes clearly sounds bad to me, especially in large cities. Besides, one of the buildings' description mentionned something like -1 trade route for each costal cities... which makes me wonder : "what if I build several of these ? Do they add up ? Hey, I'm a Seafaring civ... I actually have A LOT of coastal cities, and I'm not sure I want to penalize them !"
Now, I've upgraded to 0.13d last week and began a new game with the Balseraph. I was actively trying to go for the Veil, but the map configuration really made me go for fishing and sailing, so I ended up founding OO again... later on I founded the Veil too (most AIs in this game are going neutral of good... even Alexis appears to have turned Neutral when he was converted to Leaves
), but I found that I was relunctant to shift because I had already began expanding OO to my cities, and doing it all again for the Veil would have a huge cost (worse yet, the Order has began spreading to some of my cities, so I'm afraid I'll have trouble spreading the Veil there). It seems right to make the choice of state religion important, but then again shifting to another religion may become really hard once you have began to invest on it. I know you are already aware of this, and maybe it's all just the way the mod should work, but thought I should just mention that I actually ran into it...
Oh, by the way, I love the new tech tree... it will take a while for me to get used to it and build up effective strategies, but I really like the orientation it takes. Splitting up a lot makes each decision more important, and this is what makes Civ interesting in my opinion (that was already what made me like Civ4 a lot more than its predecessors).
Anyway, congratulations for this mod... the result is awesome, and I keep getting impressed with each release. Thanks to the team, I'm sure you should be really proud of yourselves.