Well whilst I am waiting ever so patiently *HONEST* to get my hands on version 1.0. I have decided I would like to talk a little about something that I would like to see in later versions. (I know this has been talked about before, I have talked about it and read posts from numerous other people on this and similar ideas, there is also some new ideas in here (or at least new to me)).
Religion - This has been the defining point of Civ4 to me, OK it is a bit generic in vanilla Civ4, but I fully understand and agree with that given the way the real world works.
I would love to see Religion take on a bigger role in FfH, I think it would be quite cool to make them all start at around the same tech level in the game, so that different religions would have the same amount of time to spread and take hold.
I would like it if each religion had a couple of reformations, i.e. The Christian faith was originally just Chrisitianity, it then split into Catholic and Orthodox, there was then the Methodist Reformation, the Lutherians, the Church of England, the Mormons e.t.c. With this we could have the Way of the Leaf, splitting to The Tree of Life, Natures Gardener e.t.c. Leaf could remain as it is, Tree of life would be a wilderness themed religion wherecould make you destroy farms and create Jungles, forests, swamps, flood plains and be able to gain bonus' from them. The Gardeners could have a managed and controlled approach with a different set of upgrades gaining their production from tree farming rather than mining.
In order to make the reformations work i would make it when an empire creates a new religion that there is a 75% chance that each city will automatically adopt the new religion thus making it very likely the empire will adopt the new religion as the state religion. It would also make sense if there was a 50% chance that any religious buildings would change to the new religion and a 25% that they would be destroyed (25% they stay as they are) with religious wonders I would make it there is an +1% chance per turn that they will be destroyed and a +0.1% per turn that if they are not destroyed that they become the new religions wonder.
To add to this religious chaos I would create a new "preacher" type unit that is dirt cheap to produce say 20 prod, strength 2, movement 2, with the automatic promotion of using enemy roads, and a new skill of being able to ignore ALL borders which has a very low chance of spreading the faith (say 10%, you could alter this depending on the existing religions in the city). I would also make it that this unit could be attacked without starting a war, but that would generate negative relations with the mother nation.
I would also create a new Inqisition tech open to all religions that creates an inqisitor building which gives -1 health (all those burnings and torture are bad for the health) but stabalises the faith of the city, I would say gives a state religion city has a 90% chance of avoiding any new religions taking root (if the city adopts the new faith it then gets this saving chance).
If you could then add in the ability to launch religious crusades (wonder) targeted at a specific religion or empire. Where once the wonder is built you gain an army of whats in the city +1 milita unit (-1 city size). This army should then be able to cross any borders and drain units / citizens from any cities it passes say 10% chance per unit it occupies the same square as becomes part of the crusade, and 1 citizen turns milita (-1 city size) for every city you wander into the borders of. I would also make the army cost the owner 1gold per turn per unit in the crusade.
The Crusade should also have a life span of 20 turns, any upgrades in hostile land that the crusade passes over should automatically be destroyed without giving any cash back, also when capturing cities no gold should be gained, I would also reduce the city size by half and make 50% of its population barbarian, 1% new state and 49% old state. No gold would be gained by city conquest either. Once the crusade is over any non milita units should belong to crusade owner, but any milita units should become barbarians (mixed stacks fight combats). I would have milita as effectively axemen with the the same promotions and upgrades, upgrading milita should stop them from becoming barbarians at the end of the crusade.
I hope that you like some of these ideas, or get some new ones of your own from reading these.
Otherwise I'll keep practicing my modding by tweaking 0.90 more adding more necro stuff and changes to dwarves.
Any estimate on when 1.0 will be released? 
. You could possibly give other benefits from cults as well, such as an increased speed of culture creep or a lowering of the cities defense value against attack from the cults fellow belivers.
