Kinda-sorta reintroducing themes, via Pretenders
 

With "holy" power being available only to Sacred units, how about another ability that varies, depending on the nature of your Pretender, and either activates, or increases/decreases, depending on that Pretender's Dominion/Scales?

Like, a tag you can add to certain units that grants, for instance, a morale boost if their Pretender is the Lord of War and you have Order scales. Or one for the Son of the Sun that gives your units Awe if his Dom is or gets to 10. Maybe, if you're being led by the Vampire Queen, a tag that transforms all light militia (the designated unit) you recruit into Thralls, and your Prophet into a Vampire Count, providing he's a: male, and b: human, if your starting scales are Death and Turmoil, and you're playing a human race. This would make quite a few relatively "useless" Pretenders quite useful in certain circumstances, but keep them balanced, since you'd have to keep within predetermined specifications to make use of them.

Ideas for Pretenders:

Lord of War-+1 morale per Order scale to designated units.
Son of the Sun-if the Son has Dom 10, designated units gain awe 0
Freaklord-scales growth, luck=Prophet becomes an Ettin.
scales death, misfortune=Freaklord gains the ability to produce Corpse Men from corpses.
Vampire Queen-death, turmoil=designated units become Thralls upon recruitment, and prophet becomes Vampire Count.
Scorpion King-scales heat 3, growth 3, produces 1 scorpion beast per turn. scales heat 3, death 3, produces 1 scorpion man per year. Regardless of scales: if prophet is human, turns into scorpion man.
Lord of the Desert Sun-cold scales, gradually turns the climate warmer, but also increases death. Heat 3: grants all designated units +25% fire resistance.
Phoenix-scales growth 3, magic 3, prophet becomes immortal.
Sphinx-all designated units gain +1 to natural armor per Order scale.
Manticore-no scales needed-if prophet is a designated type, prophet becomes female Manticore, and then 1 additional Manticore is produced every year by the Prophet.
Solar Disc. Heat 3-increases Death, Cold 3-increases growth.

It also reintroduces a "Themes-esque" element to the game.

Re: Kinda-sorta reintroducing themes, via Pretenders
 

This doesn't look feasible to me.

There are similar features in the game now - more maenads for turmoil, for example - which are mostly hard-coded for an individual scale/unit combo. So they might hardcode each of the bonuses you propose, but a mod script to add bonuses of those kinds is pretty well impossible.

I particularly like the phoenix making the prophet immortal.

If they were going to do a dominions 4, it would be nice if the various data structures were handled more dynamically so that this kind of thing were easier to do. But that's highly unlikely and would require a rewrite more or less from the ground up.

Re: Kinda-sorta reintroducing themes, via Pretenders
 

I like the way you think HoneyBadger. I also miss the themes of DOM2. This would be alot of fun to play, but I am afraid we wont see any changes like this until DOM4,Bogus willing.

You want to play a one on one game HoneyBadger? I have a feeling you have some very unorthodox tactics.

Re: Kinda-sorta reintroducing themes, via Pretenders
 

Might be, might be, when I have some time off. I'll get back to you on that. So far, I've managed to lose in a variety of unorthodox ways, in MP games, but I only got to play a bare handful before my computer broke. Now that I'm up and running, I'll try to find the time.