Ok Tet, I have an idea that I've been brewing for a while, but I've decided to say it in hopes that Conquests allows more civs to be in play at one time. So here it is...
Instead of giving such enormous empires to certain civs from the first turn, why not create one big "uber-civ" called "Barbarians" or "City States" or something, and let it occupy most of the map where historically other civs moved into. Disable all units but defense for the "City States" so they can't wage offensive wars -- only defensive. Then you can give most civs only 1 city to start and allow them to conquer the city states one-by-one, making gameplay more dynamic and different each time, while still keeping it historically dependent. This will also make it take a little bit longer for the big civs like China, Egypt, and India to get so powerful (as they always do in my game).
For example, in one game France might conquer more city states than Germany, in another game Rome might conquer most of them, and all this time China will be conquering cities one-by-one until it finally has a chance to come into conflict with its neighbors. So the big civs still are big civs (keeping your historical balance) it just takes them a little bit longer.
One of the biggest advantages of this, IMO, comes if you can add more civs with the new expansion. Imagine having Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria, Hittites, Israel, Ottomans, Byzantines, and the Arabs all on the map in that little area with just one city each. Certainly most of them wouldn't survive like in real history, but it gives a chance for some more dynamic historical games.
Since the expansion is adding the Portuguese and Dutch to Europe, I think this option greatly improves game balance for Europe -- there is a good chance that individual games might see different civs rising to power, rather than the same ones 80% of the time. Since each European civ had a very major "dominant" time (1500's for the Spanish, 1600's for the Dutch, 1700's for the English), and since the game is not complex enough to allow for this dramatic of a shift in game balance, I think that giving each civ a chance to take a piece of the pie for themselves without going to war with eachother could make the game much more interesting.
Maybe China and India and Egypt start out with a few cities, and lots of City-States to conquer, while the Middle East and Europe have less City-States; they'll need to fight eachother sooner or later while China and India are still expanding with impunity.
Obviously this is only plausible if the expansion allows many more Civs to be in play, but I think that this idea gives a huge new dynamic to the game play while still remaining true to your desire to keep this mod true-to-history.
Let me know what you think!
The city-states were over-burgeoning with the young and able, yet had no access to the wealth of the polis. As a result, such cities as Syrakuse and the eastern Adriatic were opened by these very people. In fact, some go so far as to suggest that such cities as Syrakuse rivalled there founding city (Korinth in this instance). So though I can understand that settlers may not be realistic for ALL civs, there are very good examples of their early use, which roughly coincides with the way the game is presently structured.
It seems i just don`t looked carefully... 
