[Graeme Dice]

There's a few other issues with the scales as set up that I've thought of just recently. While large supply and income reductions for mismatched temperatures might be workable as long as you only use the default theme, it makes the themes that require temperature changes far weaker that the default. Miasma, Niefelheim, Fires of the Faith, etc. all take a 20% hit in every province, which makes it pretty hard to justify the themes at all.

The other is that while DOM2 might allow a 33% income bonus with the default scales, that bonus requires you to spend 360 nation points on your scales, while order in your Version requires only 120 points.

The productivity scale also seems to give too large of a bonus. Currently sloth 3 lets you produce about half as many troops as prod 3. With sloth 3 under your scales you've reduced troops production to 5% of what a prod 3 nation gets. (190% vs. 10% of base resources) If there's some way to overcome that with a SC pretender, I can't see it.

A death scale of 3 means that after 20 turns your capital will be reduced to 20,000 people, while the population under growth 3 will be 45,000. The resources and income boost the growth 3 nation will get when combined with a 45% boost to gold and a 90% boost to resources will be awfully hard to overcome by pretender design.

I can't comment on the luck scale because of the difficulty in calculating its effects. However, it seems fairly obvious that the most efficient way to spend your points are on order 3, prod 3, growth 3 (Even if Abysia to avoid self destruction within 20 turns). Drain 3 should be fairly easy to overcome through spending on large amounts of researchers, and luck 3 also seems like a good idea since the order scale doesn't hurt it, and it ensures that you will mostly get good events. You'll also need to spend a bunch to improve your dominion to the point where it won't be overwhelmed by the people that aren't bothering to give magic skills to their pretender.

That leaves you a maximum of 140 points to spend on your pretender, which hardly gives you a lot of options to make them magically powerful. You'd have to seriously improve the pretenders, especially their starting magic skills, to make spending any more than that worthwhile. After all, they are only one unit, and will have a very hard time overcoming the massive economies that can be produced in short order under your systen.