If you need more factions, I can offer you 14 not-so-new ( ) factions for Pandora. The ones of you who played a certain game which was released in 1999 will know them.
So if you want to host multiplayer-games with this, as a workaround you could install the Mod only for the Beta-Version in "Pandora Beta". This way you won't run the risk of harming anyone elses' multiplayer-experience.
There were way fewer technologies and buildings in SMAC than in Pandora, so disabling Pandora's techs and buildings and only using the SMAC ones results in a quite... empty game. This looked really not quite enjoyable. So my current idea is to pick some special buildings and their techs out of SMAC's pool and bring only them to Pandora (just like the Recycling Tanks).
I just finished the update to version 2.4 which contains changes from the last beta patch for Pandora from 2015-12-21. There are some minor additional graphical fixes which probably nobody will notice.
By changes of the last patch do you mean that the Mechs have the "Heavy"-strategies?
I would argue that they in the mod maybe also should have the Waterbourne-Strategy as the inclusion of the Heavy-Strategy should lead to fewer mechs being build but their ability makes them more useful on maps with lots of water.
My first test showed that it works fine.
After analyzing the changed files of patch 1.6.5, I didn't find any changes which would interfere with the mod. Everything is ok!