Well, it's definitely a rough. I'm super amateur at even coming up with balance, so this might be considered a butchering. I took some inspiration form Starcraft 2 in terms of like how responsive units are. I went into this always having the problem with this game having super bad path finding ai and just feeling like I was sending everyone in to get blow up instantly. I wanted it to be a little more like C&C where I could rely on some of my armies or buildings to last, at least a little while. I think what I did at least made it easier in a way to command large groups, but the game still kind of just devolves into chaos at a certain point.
Things I changed
Speeds
-all infantry are slower
-different infantry have slightly different movement speeds (i.e rocket launcher, flamethrower, snipers guys are 2.75 speed vs 3.0 for normal infantry.
-all vehicles are slower
-all units turn faster
-increased firing rate of most infantry (I think)
-sandbikes, dust scouts, and buzzsaws are much slower too but still the fastest ground units
-carryalls are much slower
-worms and storms are much slower and less frequent (almost non existent really most units can outrun them, but barely)
Health
-doubled and nearly tripled all units and buildings
Damage
-changed all continuous damage weapons like gas and flamethrowers to shooting out in bursts (took inspiration from firebats in Starcraft)
-made infantry able to do a little more damage to vehicles and buildings
-made vehicles tank/missile/laser type vehicles able to do a little more damage to infantry
-disabled friendly fire for flame and gas weapons, and minotaurus
Other stuff
-gave assault tanks one more attack range
-gave Harkonnen and Atreides one more attack range because I was sick of them blowing themselves up on barrels.
-reduced scout viewing range a bit.
-made refineries able to hold less spice (though thinking about it now, I'm not sure if that actually worked, probably didn't have a full grasp on how those settings work)
-made refinery addons half the price and cheaper to addon because now they don't give you a harvester, which also means you don't get a carryall and have to build those up separate
-made harvester able to harvest less spice, but also unload spice faster.
-left on an option for carryalls to be selectable and you and move them, but you can't really issue them to pick up a harvester or move once they've picked one up, so I'm not sure if it's even useful. Maybe just to get them out of harm's way.
One other thing, I probably didn't put as much thought into air units as I should because I don't really use them that often, but they at least got health increase.
I think that's it. I didn't touch the build times or prices beyond what I mentioned. I didn't alter super weapons because I haven't really fully tested a campaign yet. About halfway through a normal one on two houses. The cool thing about turning all the speeds down is it let me set the game speed from 6 to 7 and it's smoother looking while not being to overly fast to play, which is what I recommend. I'm open to any ideas of changes. Really I'm just trying to address my own personal issues with this game. I was looking at the forum earlier and saw this awesome looking mod Emperor Remake mod, but there wasn't any link and it's like 7 years old, so I don't think I'm finding that. It looked like they did some AI work, which would be nice. Anyway, if anyone's interested in my weird take on rebalancing the game I attached the rules.txt. You have to put it under Westwood/Emperor/DATA/model (and make the model folder of course).
TL;DR, I changed a bunch of crap, I wish there was more modding for this game. Always wanted to tweak it, this is what I came up with. Recommend playing it on 7 speed.
Rules.txt