Just discovered the glory that is the nationgen mod. It creates new civilizations by mashing together game mechanics and sprites from the old ones, plus a few extra things. What's kind of hilarious about it is that while it can quite unbalanced, with factions having internally some units which are far better than others, the base game has the same problem. So it actually feels decent compared to the base game, although of course the new factions lack the flavor of the handmade ones. And sometimes it spits out something truly ridiculous, for better or worse.
Some interesting things I found within a set of 20 generated EA races:
A ridiculously powerful sacred fomorian, with both soldier and commander variants. They all dual wield broadswords, one of which is enchanted, have ambidextrous 4, solid armor, are amphibious, have gift of water 50 and sailing 999, and have throwing axes because why not. Oh and almost as much health as a Neifel Giant. Most sacreds in this mod only have like 1 or 2 special features, so these guys won the awesomeness roulette. Said race also includes apes riding giant spiders.
A sacred of normal size and power, that's only unusual quality is a glaive which paralyzes other sacreds on hit.
A race with two pairs of mages, both pairs have blood and then depending on which one you hire either air or death, the more expensive pair is slow to hire but gets some extra stuff and a guaranteed B3. That seems like a cool mechanic for something randomly generated. Also a cheap cap only infantry which is granted a second life as a ghouls when they die. Despite being in the EA, they access have both crossbows and nets.
A "Boring Mage" that randomly gets one of D3, E3, S3, or F3.
A sacred with an exceptional short bow (better damage and accuracy, no special features) and a normal axe, with Berserk +5.
A faction with an innate N4 mage with a 25% chance of N5, a 9 gold 1 resource sacred monkey with "exceptional fists" as well as a bite attack, which throws sticks and stones. Also hawk riders.
All kinds of awesome rider/mount combos. The best has to either humans riding unicorns or hoburgs riding cavemen.
A faction of hoburgs whose mages all autosummon a fire elemental at the start of fights.
And probably a bunch of other stuff I missed. Most of the factions consist of a lot of variations on the same theme combined with a couple standout units or unique mechanics, which feels pretty similar to vanilla.