[Gateway103]

Here is a spin-off thought,

How about a random or annual event where you can host an tournament for your own people?

Here is how it might work.
- you get a notice about the possibility of hosting such a tournament.

- the catch is that you need to pay gold & gem. You may also get to choose how big a tournament and what kind of tournament to host, which affects how much gold & gem you need to pay, perhaps even the type of participants allowed.

- the participants will mostly be your own leaders, the Pretender can't participate. You can send up to 4 of them (or some other number depending on the size of tournament you decided to pay for)

- in addition to your participants, up to 4 other independent leaders (not to be confused with Bogus and other scripted ones) of types that are recruitable anyway on the map will also participate (again, depend on how much resources you pay to "invite" them.) Their skill level will also depends on the type and size of tournament (can't really expect a powerful mage to come to your little "show" in your backyard)

- the participants don't fight each other, but against generated "target" (one of the reasons you pay gold & gem) that may or may not retaliate and/or rout. In the case of non-retaliating target, they may have such high HPs (and non-routabl) that failure to destroy them in 40 turns will result in participant routing and thus lose.

- Alternate thought, to prevent your units from dying, could make all targets non-routable, non-retaliating constructs, but may force the kind of weapons/attacks allowed (e.g. "Archery" section may allow all leaders to participate, but they are momentarily given a kind of bow and have the "Fire" override command assainged to them)

- winning participants are cycled to next "battle" where they face harder targets. do this for a number of times depending on the event you choose to host.

- Alternate thought 2, instead of losing and be disqualified, perhaps leaders can be assigned winning points on the # of targets they destroyed in battle round. But this would require a bit mroe extra coding work. So you tally all the points to determine the final winner.

- any participants suriving all the rounds are declared winners, and gain extra exps. (different scheme than Alternate thought 2)

- regardless of winning or losing, all participants gain extra exp just for participating.

- the best part, you may get to keep some or all of the participating independent leaders. The chance may depend on how well your leaders performed (a "wow! I sure can learn something from them" inspiration effect perhaps), the type of events you hosted (how big/impressive it is, which also mostly affect the quantity & quality of independent participants), and some other things. Should an independent participant be willing to join, he/she/it will ask for a price depending on their qualities and if they won or not. If you opt to pay, the paid leaders became yours permanently and appear in your capitol the next turn.

Anyway, this is a very rough idea to creates a spin-off event that more players may find interesting/fun/useful (getting a mage not in your national path and not recruitable can be really beneficial).

Hope you guys like the idea.

-Gateway103