ok, will scale it by 0.5 or 0.25, I'll see. I could exchange even more ao space for little more geometry: The ground floor is one big quad face, where only the sides are visible. I could spare the unvisible part inside, but this would mean 4 quads instead, so 2 tris -> 8 tris. I think that's worth it.

Nah that's actually pretty common in games to have a smaller second floor.  Something we don't depict though is buildings usually had small doors because they kept the heat better that way.

No text sounds like it's failing to find a font for your locale. Do you know which one it is ? See    Gpu skinning is a new option that was enabled by default. You should try to switch from opengl to vulkan first then if that doens't fix it disable gpu skinning. That will fix the issues.

You should yes Hopefully the added triangles won't be too bad.

Romans if you play with my bugfix mod. Being able to produce Civilians from Houses from the start of a match is crazy strong. Ptolemies also feels very strong due to cheaper buildings. I have read that most top-rated players judge Macedonians to be among the strongest Civs, but I don't fully understand why.