First of all: Welcome to the forum! The game can be played almost without hotkeys. When I started I knew only shift and ctrl as modifiers to mouse actions (holding shift or ctrl while clicking with the left or right mouse key). this is certainly not efficient but it does work.  Also, If you prefer different set of hotkeys, there is a way to edit your preferred assignments from within the main menu: Open "Settings" - "Hotkeys" and double click on the setting you want to change. There will be an input box where you can define the key for that action. Hope this helps a bit!

It’s also fixed to this specific alpha. Snowballing has been around for a long time. This thread is evidence of that. There are underlying factors that contribute to that, which have nothing to do with cav/champs being too strong.  It would be wise to listen to some of the old heads that have been around for a longer time that have learned the (often painful) lessons of previous alphas 

I definintly agree with the idea of unit-specific upgrades (which would also contribute to civ-specific tech trees). Then you can also counter the tactics of your enemy (possibly nullifying their snowballing). For example, say the snowballer has tons of cav, research better spears, train spearmen, snowballer loses most cav. Then, as the now weakened player (who spent most of his resources on cav), figures out his opponent's tactics, he can counter (tons of archers an swordsman). Defensive buildings are a little too strong in some ways and too weak in others. They have too little life and resistance, and way too much damage (especially when garrisoned). This should be slightly reversed, so that towers can shoot less arrows, but take longer to destroy or capture. Fortresses are also very OP, though maybe that is a good thing. I think that the biggest thing involving CS is their lore and reason for existing. The idea is that they are everyday people who take up arms, not professional soldiers. But, professional soldiers are all champions which, A: doesn't make sense (champions, not professionals), and B: makes all actual soldiers too expensive and OP. For loot, I think the entire lootsystem should be done away with, and replaced with a treasure dropping system. I have two reasons for this. The first is that, in reality, in the middle of a battle how are soldiers carrying suits of armor and other looted items from the dead bodies, while still fighting unimpaired, and two, when I lose most of my army, it would be nice to have a way to get it back, by sending people to collect the treasure that both armies have dropped.

Okay. For your two unremovable objects, open the .xml file in a text editor, search for their names, and delete them. Second, I noticed that in the same .xml file that the players are garbled. The problem might stem from the fact that some players are pre-selected and other players aren't. If resizing the map fixes the problem, it might be too large, and need to be resized permanently.  Yeah, I just tried, and the map crashed 0 A.D. strange thing, it did something that I have only seen it do once before, when I did something the engine coudn't have... Anyway, try out what I said and see if it works then. Let me know how it goes.

You're welcome. I just did some searching, if you want to make multiple players have the same color, there are two ways: A: Make or edit a Scenario map, making the team members have the same color. B: Edit PlayerColor.js. Not sure what exactly you would change, but it is doable. C: Do both, which would fix all maps to be how you want them. D: Do what @Gurken Khan said above: toggle diplomacy colors (which can be changed in Settings).