[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Endoperez:
Pretenderes PRETEND, so how are they supposed to believe they are the god? I'm not counting in Wyrm or Ettin, or Hydra, or other multi-headed things... But sacred units should become blessed when they fight with their god, and the death of the army's god should affect it too.

This is a cool idea, and at least the first part wouldn't be too hard to implement - all pretenders get the ability "at the start of battle, this spell casts automatically: Divine Blessing". There are lots of items that already have start-with-spell-X effects (Staff of Storms, Unquenched Sword, Banner of the Northern Star, Thunder Plate, Pendant of Luck, etc., etc.)

As for the second part: I think that any army that sees their god die before their eyes should automatically rout, unless the god is immortal in friendly dominion. Or at least they should take a MAJOR morale loss (like having Terror cast on every single unit on the battlefield). But this would require extra work to code.

I don't think it's necessary to add any extra penalty to the nation during the turns where the god is dead. You already lose your god's dominion effect and can't use him for whatever you wanted to use him for (research, rituals, forging, searching, fighting, anything else I left out). But if you wanted to add an extra penalty, any of the following would be appropriate (doing ALL of them would be pretty harsh though):
* can't create prophet (I've always wondered why a person doesn't have to see his god face to face, i.e. be in the same province, to become a prophet.)
* can't preach/sacrifice
* temples/prophet radiate at half strength (of course the god doesn't radiate at all while dead)

Note that if you couldn't create a prophet while your god was dead, if you lost your god, your prophet and all your priests and temples all at once, it would be very very difficult to get them back (you'd have to summon an Archangel or something else with priest powers - which would probably require multiple empowerments/items even aside from the research - have it build a temple, and then hire priests to call your god - you might even need a fortress too if the province doesn't have any indy priests).

But I don't think you'd have much of a chance of coming back even if you could create a prophet, in that situation.