I generate custom maps using Erebus Continent; it doubles the land size from traditional Civ map scripts, so I double the recommended number of AI players to compensate (besides, I like having neighbors to practice my curbstomping diplomacy). Generally I do Large, with High Cohesion/Low Sea Level for one big landmass, or Medium Cohesion/Medium sea-level for a series of snaking continents reminiscent of a jRPG overworld, with reduced chances of 1-tile islands. I leave the rest at default, unless I want to reduce deserts (using the Great Plains option, under Plains), or tweak something else.
As for gameplay, I turn off Cultural Victory and Epic Destiny (both can lead to dull endings to very long games), and run Flexible Difficulty (using Monarch), No Tech Brokering (you have to have researched a Tech. to trade it), Double Bonuses (increases starting resources to normal Civ amounts), and something flavorful like End of Winter, Last Days, etc. I'd like to use the experimental 3-Unit-Per-Tile rule, but only versus humans since it confuses AI pathfinding and stacking.
For this one I used the above with End of Winter, and a few custom tweaks of my own; all units with the Hero promotion can be resurrected once through spells (instead of just your Civ's designated hero; the Grigori don't have one) and every player starts with an in-game hero that represents their leader. In our case, we have Cassiel (that handsome wingless angel looking at the pigs in the last update).