Yes I agree with you, population groth reduction, some adjustment of events that is all to make it nice with a different scalingtime :)

I usually even lower Building times, because the way they are made when they queue up it takes 20+ turns all together for a single settlement to evolve...its what I find long in the series...not the fact that it can last many turns, but rather the fact that it takes many turns before one can devellop settlements, be able to have something new in terms of units.

I like develloping faster, accessing some units of a specific era and creating more balanced and complete armies and then spend lots of time using them and fighting with em, learn lessons from each battle and adjust the next army. :)