[Quitti]

About the mods, if you want to try out the "base" game, I'd suggest still enabling worthy heroes, since some nations don't simply have any meaningful heroes (or any heroes at all) made for them in the vanilla, and the mod fixes that.

Usually when people go (plannedly) missing for longer periods of time, it's customary to find a sub (abbreviation of substitute) player for that time period so others don't need to wait for the one guy. On llamaserver this is easily done by changing the email of the turn reciever to the sub and back to the original when the player comes back. On Gandalf's server I suppose the sub needs to know the password for the nation if there is one, which can mess things up since iirc you can't change the password mid-game. But it still works. I'm sure someone might be willing to help out then, and to lessen the impact for the player who's being substituted, the hosting could be turned to 48 or even 72 hours.