I tried playing the Great Options mod which includes this mod. I didn't actually want this mod in the game (I just don't like the idea), but currently there's no way to disable it from the GOM. So I just left it in but didn't build any of the buildings.
I think that the AI did, however, and this crippled them severly. I noticed towards the end of the game that the 'helpful' nag screens came up telling me that such and such a city had a treasury full of gold, and that I should build a military base in order to increase output. Of course, the military bases are supposed to increase city upkeep costs, but it looks like the nagging advisor thought that they increased gold production.
I suspect that the AI players also acted on this mistaken belief, and it looks like it severly crippled Cyrus, and possibly also Victoria. Cyrus seemed to stop growing at around the same time that he would have got the techs required for these buildings. When I say stop growing, I mean he never built any more cities. He had 5 total, eventually 1 flipped to me, there was enough empty land to build at least another 5 cities right below his core 4, but he never did, not once. He also never advanced very far in technology - when I won the game in 1940 or so with a cultural victory, he was still using axemen in his cities. No joke.
Looking at the gold revenue graph at the end of the game was rather interesting. I had killed the Mongols early on, so they had a flat line at 0 for most of history. The interesting thing is, Persia's line was well below 0, at least -50 to -80, since about 100 AD or so, generally declining. I've never seen anything like that before, and I suspect it stems directly from the AI building these bases thinking they would work like banks to increase their money, but then they'd drain their income even further, so they'd build more to compensate. Lather, rinse, repeat. England also had negative income for the vast majority of the game, but I didn't really keep track of her cities because she was on a different continent to me. The other AIs seemed to be playing fairly poorly also, being quite a bit behind me in techs, which I hadn't seen to that extent before - usually they are only a few behind, or neck-and-neck with me. I handily won my cultural victory in the 1940's, using only 3 great artists in the entire game, with the enemy AIs only just getting up to industrial-era techs when I won.
This is mainly all just speculation, but the behaviour I saw in Persia was definately abnormal, and I think these bases are a fairly likely culprit.