Since I started playing around with mods I've been "fixing" the game slowly over time to re-balance issues I had with the game here and there, and also threw a few new things in and tested to see if the ai will use those items properly, and nixed them when they didn't.
Things that the ai did wrong I worked to fix in such a way as not to penalize them for making these wrong choices, by making them "correct" choices.
An example might be Soil Enhancement. When the ai researches this tech they immediately upgrade all of their planets, even the ones that haven't built even one factory yet, slowing their production down considerably. To remedy this I made the cost of building soil enhancement extremely low. Since this applies to every civ equally, it doesn't actually make the game easier, it makes it slightly harder because now the ai doesn't cripple itself terribly because it chooses to build those first.
There are other things in there. More emphasis was put on trade and farm improvements through a cost/benefit analysis. I used a spreadsheet to balance out the weapons using size/damage/cost ratios to keep them even. Some of that may be more personal preference, that high end mass drivers be just as good as high end missiles, etc. But the ai tends to stick with their weapon tech choice, and I didn't want them to be penalized for doing so.
Spin Control Center, Galactic Guidebook, Hyperion Shipyard, etc, all that stuff you love to hate, has been fixed to make it useful, or toned down if too powerful.
That's it, most of the basic xml files relating to game values have been tweaked here and there, and there's a lot of documentation within the files hopefully explaining the choices made to your satisfaction.
I was originally just using this mod for my own enjoyment, feeling that if other people had a problem with the game as is, they could mod it themselves just as easily. But a friend pointed out that a lot of the changes I made, others might agree with, and it would save others a lot of the spreadsheet analysis and other such anal things I'm prone to do if I just put my mod up there for other people to play with. So there it is.
