Complete Stranger here, but I feel compelled to give my advice here.
How to Make Players Love you:
One Word: Customizability. Make it easy for players to customize your features. Whether they be toggable (via a BUG-esque menu), gameoptions, or via an installer system, your mod should be very configurable. Users want to mess with the settings without learning XML. Make it easy for them, and they will come.
Customizability is a nice thing, but not so easy without the WoC system, which Orbis does not have. Also, at this point it would pretty much take a complete redesign of the mod to become customizable as yours is.
Personally, I tend to prefer more in-game choices, fewer game options... And designing everything to be modular puts a rather large hamper on what you can do when civilizations are as unique as they are in FfH.
Of course, I still add game options. I just remove others that are not appropriate to the mod (Unlocked Leaders, for example... Bad one for RifE).
How to Ruin a Good Feature:
If the AI doesn't understand how to use a particular feature, it's worse than having that feature at all. Player-Oriented features are non-features, and many will consider them cheating, or just plain bugs. You can design the coolest combat system ever, but if the AI can't handle it, you should opt for one the AI can handle, or write AI code so they can handle yours. The general rule of thumb is that if the AI can't deal with your feature, and you can't fix the AI, cut the feature.
The AI doesn't understand magic (Yeah, Wild Mana does it. It also hard codes to accomplish it, which is also against a rule of thumb
) and never has; Yet it's still here. Some features are simply too engaging to be cut, even if the AI does not understand it.
I agree that new features should be taught to the AI, though, and that we need to try and develop a better AI for existing features.
You may disagree with me, but I have more downloads than Orbis + Rife + Wildmana together.
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I'm not too sure of that one; Your download shows around 8500, while RifE has 10541 (WePlayCiv mirror; Actually the 4th most popular file, which just shows they have less visitors.
).
Or do you have a mirror elsewhere?