Maybe you should use SO's new Option "Nightmare Mod" if you don't feel challenged?
It does sound interesting. But I still have a mild idea that the game should not have to be played on the hardest setting for it not to be 'easy'.
And Leave Rev Off and BarbCiv Off to stop generating many weak nations and barbs. Don't use Adv Economy as it is really very broken. Strip it down to a base play and see how it goes.
Yeah, Rev does nothing atm, not with as many buildings that increase stability. I have it on and I completely ignore it.
Hmm, I think BarbCiv is off. I know Aggressive Barbs needs to be turned off, they kill the AI more then they kill me. They destroy their economy producing a million units and then can never progress.
And ... WHAAT? Adv Economy is broken? . . . I always have that on. . .
If you don't like the buildings in a city, you can demolish any of them (of course only normal buildings, not wonders or autobuilds) at any time using Ctrl-A in the city screen. You can also abandon any city at any time, I think this is also through Ctrl-A but I've only done it once so I'm not sure.
Whaaat? When did this happen. Last time I looked, (it was years ago) we could not delete buildings. It was for some convoluted reason I already forgot. But, if that is true, awesome.
@Jo:
Since we pretty much got completely off topic. I will try to be clear about my reason for this thread.
I would like the option to have the range between building to be set to 2 or 3, depending upon the Users preferences. I personally play on Huge, Marathon, and it gets REALLY tedious dealing with the AI putting a city every 2 spaces on the map. Having an option to select 3 at world creation would be awesome. It would, in my opinion, make the Huge+ maps less crazy. And it would, as you said, allow the PC to dictate that he/she wants the AI to either 'have a lot of small cities, or a few big ones'.
And, as previously said, simply changing the xml file to say 3 instead of 2 would cause problems. So, I would really like a modmod that would do it without and problems. And I do not know enough xml to do it myself.