The artifact was decent in the first version. The map itself seems a bit too large, in my opinion. I started playing, disabled autosave, went to get the artifact, captured two cities, and then I kind of lost interest, and the game crashed, so I didn't feel like replaying. Also, it would probably be better to define the factions right away so that the terrain locations correspond to them.

The terrain changes in such a way that no faction has a particular advantage. If you fix the factions for 5 players, it turns out that 3 factions will remain unused. That's a drawback. Also, what if players want to play in an alliance and choose the same faction? And you could place Haven in the desert and Necropolis on scorched earth, so that both have approximately the same movement penalty.

Could you provide more details about the difficulty level of the game? How many opponents were there? Was it against AI or a human player? Do you have an AI mod installed?