Hello,
let me start by saying that version 9 and onward has been a real pleasure to play!
Techs and policies are very well thought out and fairly balanced. The improvments to barbarians in 9.4 are awesome, really makes you struggle in the beginning.
The biggest flaw with the mod is that it gets too easy about halfway through, after you "win" (meaning the AI has no real chance of beating you in combat anymore) you still have to play 100 turns or more to actually get a victory. This is of course a problem in vanilla civ too.
A few bugs and things that might be too overpowered, imo: (in a 9.5 game, Continents, Standard size, Immortal, Standard speed)
- I still got the Logistics promotion for free in my capital. Possibly from the wonder that add a free Black Market? (forgot name of the wonder) - This bug alone made the game a bit too easy, two chariot archers could conquer cities easily.
- Somewhere around 100-150 turns in you get too much gold, probably it's when you get up a few Markets. When you get 500+ GPT you can easily buy yourself out of problems, ie buying Walls in a city that gets attacked, buying units. Or buying a Harbor, Docks and a couple of fishish boats in a newly settled coastal town, and it goes from nothing to powerful in 1 turn. Also you can of course pay all CS to ally, meaning more food/culture/happiness.
- It's too easy to get a really high Happiness. The AI might struggle, since it usually builds alot of units, but I can always win with as little as 3-5 units, even in the endgame. (One of the reasons Alpacas old PWM was so fun, with NO healing to units it really changed how you build units).
- AI gives up war a bit too easy, and gives way too much in their peace offerings. This could be different for different leaders i suppose, but in my game i was fighting Japan, and when i had the upper hand (had taken two of his cities) he gave me all his 6 remaining cities except the capital. It would have taken me more than 10 turns to conquer those 6 cities, and after the 10 turns of peace i attacked his capital, so he just speeded up his demise.
- Too easy taking cities, i guess since the defence upgrades are quite costly now, the AI doesn't build alot (or he doesnt research the techs needed). Even in endgame cities often had 20-30, sometimes 40 strength. With just one cannon (with logistics, the gamebreaker...) i reduce that to zero in one, max two turns. In the first 150-200 turns i didnt even need siege, just the two chariot archers and a swordsman and/or knight.
- I had +100% Golden Age length, not sure why. 50% came from the Sphinx (which by the way might also be overpowered, i never researched Divine Right, easy to skip that one since it's a dead end.) but the other 50% i dont know. Maybe from the Chichen Itza? Tooltip doesn't say, it's just a guess since it's in vanilla. The 100% bonus meant i was in a constant GA the last ~100 turns of the game, since i could just keep it up with specialists (first specialist 16 turns of GA, next 14 etc).
- Might need to up the cost of some mid- to endgame wonders. My first playthrough (on 9.0 and 9.2) was with Catherine, and the +50% made it a bit too easy (good change there!). This last game was with Bismarck, i figured i could use the defence bonus at start vs the new Barbs, but still wanted a wonder trait of course! Anyway, i could still build wonders a bit too fast towards the end.
- Like others have mentioned, Monarchy is too good, no other is even close. The only reason i picked something else twice during my last game was that my capital didnt become the Origin city of the revolution (is this random?), but my second city did, which was a city with horrible production. This forced me to pick something else, i took the "free policy" once and "75% lower upgrade cost" once (since i was about to research rifleman and cannon, so knew i had some upgrading soon)
But like i said, i enjoyed it alot! Just trying to help improve it even more
Also i really like the change to tile improvements, that you always get +3. That was one of the biggest flaws in vanilla civ imo, since it didn't matter much when you placed cities. Well done!
I see that you have released new versions, so i guess it's time to fire up a new game! Hmm... which civ to play this time?
ps. I attached my endsave if you wanted to check anything, it's on the turn where i win by Diplomacy (standard win for me, since it's always the fastest, and the game has been sorta boring for 100 turns, but i still want to finish... stupid game has that influence on me, hehe)