Hk overhaul and quick battle. I recommend these 2 mods. It fixes the less appealing things about HK. Hope these keep getting updated.

Thanks for pointing me to the quick battle mod. This seems to be doing what I suggested in another thread to make retreats a more viable option. Very nice.

What do you like most about the overhaul mod? How do you think it compares to the Vanilla Improvement Mod? I'm still pretty early in the game and will likely give the vanilla version a few more tries but my experience with community balance mods has been positive in the past. So I'll likely play with some mod like that in the future.

After playing the base game for a long time and welcome many of the updates. There are some balancing issues that were never addressed in some cultures. The mod changes civics, improvements that make more sense. One example is the taxes building, in the mod it increases gold based on population. Something I suggested a long time ago but was lost in the forum somewhere. Cultures that were not very fun to play with are more interesting as well, also has some fan made cultures that feel good. Not op. 

Thanks, that makes sense. I'll give them a spin once I am more familiar with the game system and balance. From the change log, a lot of the changes seem very sensible and exciting.

Both the Vanilla Improvement Project and HK Overhaul set out to do the same thing: rebalance the game and make more options viable. Both are very big mods that change a lot of things, but I'd say that the Vanilla Improvement Project is closer to the vanilla experience and HK Overhaul is more ambitious. Also, HK Overhaul is primarly focused on multiplayer, and the AI is certainly more challenging with the Vanilla Improvement Project.