I, too, support Rhye. He understands what makes a game playable. Hundreds of mods have been made here, but few mod creators even come close to his attention to detail.
I've been playing with his mod for quite a long time on Conquests. In fact, of my Conquests games, I think that I've probably played more Rhyes of Civilization games than all other scenarios, mods, and regular games combined.
Unlike most other modders, he spends a huge amount of time on balance. He updates his work frequently until it is perfected, and many of the changes involve tuning the strength for each civ. The balance is nearly perfect, but he won't hesitate to make miniscule adjustments. Often in his updates, in addition to more substantial changes, he will change the strength of a civ by adding or subtracting a single shield. That is how much he pays attention to detail.
Rhye also understands that a mod needs to be playable. Some people think that the best mods are the ones that add hundreds of units, of which several are overpowered, several are underpowered, and the majority are redundant. It might be expansive and impressive, but ultimately to the player it is just more confusing. For the same reason of playability, Rhye doesn't put his mod on a ridiculously large map. It might look nice, and it might allow for hundreds of cities in perfect historically accurate places, but the truth is that nobody wants to have to care of 60 cities and wait half an hour in between turns. In contrast, Rhye makes a huge effort to keep loading times down. He carefully notes the AI and Barbarian behaviors that lead to increased loading times, and does his best to discourage them. His mod is on a huge sized world map, but it feels like it's standard size.
Rhye knows the editor inside and out, and makes substantial use of all the features it has to offer. However, he does so carefully, and he makes sure to add features in a balanced and restrained manner. For example, the civ-specific techs in C3C have been used in the Rhyes of Civilization Expansion in order to create religions. Each civ has one early religion (like Greek Polytheism) and one later religion (like Islam). Some civs share religions. However, the religions with more followers will have more wonders in order to make things fair. So Christianity, the religion of all the European nations, allows four Christian wonders. But Judaism, which is the religion of Israel and Israel alone, allows for only one wonder. Again, Rhye displayed careful attention to detail and balance when he made a change.
Rhye pays attention to the limitations of the AI as well. When I played my first game of Rhyes of Civilization, I reached the Americas fairly early and began colonizing. Only a few turns after my first colony was built, I was surprised to see that France, too, had made a colony in South America. The next turn, there was a second French city, and within a hundred years the Americas were a melting pot of French, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and indigenous cities. I have never seen such an accurate colonization model in civ before.
Rhyes of Civilization is the best made scenario for Civilization III right now.
