[Sandman]

My wishes:

Reworked Pretenders

I've never been that happy with the various pretenders available. A lot of them are really pretty useless, and could be easily removed from the game - the various Egyptian-style pretenders, especially, and some of the mages as well. A lot of the pretenders are rather ugly and drab, as well.

Let's dump the seldom-used pretenders, give the good ones a graphical sprucing up, and create more genuinely useful new pretenders. More immobiles would be nice, for starters, like a Yggdrasil 'World Tree' with nature-3.

Another thing about the pretenders is how, well, secular they are. Apart from the bless effects, they don't interact that much with the priests and the sacred units of a nation. The pretenders need to be more, well, holy. There are lots of potential ways to do this. What if bless effects applied to the pretenders as well? Overpowered at the moment, yes, but it does make sense thematically.
Or what if the magical choices of a pretender gave priests extra spells? Say, holy fire to priests of a strong fire pretender, or holy armour to priests of an earth deity. These would generally be somewhat weak, but also very low fatigue, like all priest spells.
How about if pretenders (and maybe prophets) could derive extra power from bringing their priests into the battle? Maybe there could a special buff that priests could cast to help their deity, or a communionish effect that only worked between priest and god.

Reworked Fortresses

The fortresses could use a shot in the arm as well. Many of them are worthless or nearly worthless, and the others are quite boring. My ideas to make fortresses cooler include:

Make fortresses dependant on terrain. It seems obvious that a mountain citadel should not be buildable on farmland.

Create many more nation specific fortresses.

Give fortresses extra abilities. For example, a wizard's tower gives +1 research to all units within. A holy city increases dominion spread and gets a defence bonus based on dominion. A dark citadel weakens besieging enemy morale. A forest citadel can't be seen from adjacent provinces, and regrows quickly. A tribal encampment can be disbanded to yield 80% of the gold it took to set up, and is always destroyed when captured. A maritime city allows sea travel to units stationed there. And so on.

Indie units built at a fortress you own should wear your colours, within reason. Maybe not amazons, but longbowmen and knights, for example.