I'm right now playing a Moscowan game and wan't to point some things out even some already mentioned ones
First the starting situation is weird, there are many cities flipping and u got 3 settlers. But u only receiving 3 workers wich will need till the end of game to set up a infrastructure.
Either some flipping cities are removed or an simple infrastructure is set up already or some more workers.
Actually I'm not sure and i got not much knowledge about Moscowian history, but i bet they didn't had instantly a big area like this. So to cover that historic part we should reduce the amount of flipping cities. Also there should be 1 worker for every city at startup even for the flipping ones.
Building up 1 worker in every city right after start helps u to build up a small infrastructure and claim the resources pretty fast (free labour is a big help there). But technology-wise I'm far behind and unsure if it's possible to catch up.
Second point, the first UHV (the "loose no city to barbs till 1500") is just ridiculous, although i saw some barbs it was vice versa. I captured three barb cities and of course checked that UHV. If I hadn't scouted I never saw one single barbarian. This UHV must be reworked and since I have no clue about the Russian history I stay clueless about this :/
Controling 12 cities is easy as the first UHV, after capturing the three barb/indipendence cities (Astrakhan, Minsk and Riga) u've done. There is imho no way u can loose them again, if ur not running into a war with every neighbour
Since the game is about 1450 right now the last two UHVs are untouched, but the culture one looks pretty hard, wich I'm looking forward to