[Jurri]

I'm definitely down for this! As for mods, Worthy Heroes is a nice mod, although I think it has some problems with the latest patch so it's maybe better to leave it out. The Conceptual Balance mod (by quantum_mechani, not Zen, nowadays) is a good mod, sure. But it also changes a large number of things: don't you want to experience the baseline vanilla game first?

I'll pick a nation once the settings are confirmed... The default settings are pretty functional, although magic sites can use the bump to 50. Lowering the gold makes castles and temples and labs even harder to build, and they are hard to build en masse already on default settings. Standard research is indeed the old difficult, but it's factually harder than that in the early game, since castles and labs are more expensive, and easier than that in the later stages, since there's more gold. I'm kind of partial for easy research, but I'm sure standard will be fun too.