[atul]

I personally like the theme of Dominions regarding national troops and summons. You start the war relying on your nationals, but things slowly (or not so slowly) escalate to the point where common people have little business being in the battlefield - except as a diversion. Some feeling of apocalyptic grandeur or such.

Anyway, remembering the same complains from threads along the years, I got the impression that the main beef of people was that while the beginning featured a varied group of distict nations, the end-game devolved into armies of identical groups of summons. I dunno whether the increased number of tweaks, new beasts and spells already addresses that thing, but...

...one of the things leading to the identical summons seemed to be the ease of empowerment of magic paths. Get one blood random, start hunting, empower, turn Man into a blood nation. Get a death random, begin site scrying, empower, suddenly Marignon fields Tartarians. And so on.

We already have lists of each nation's favoured magic paths. How about a couple of disfavoured paths for each? Double (or triple) the empowerment cost of disfavoured paths for all nation's mages as the general resentment of the magic in question makes it tough to improve on (hard blood magic for many nations, hard fire magic for mages living in flammable forest cities, I dare you to research air magic underwater, etc), lessen the empowerment cost of favoured paths. Make it harder to get high levels in all of the paths deemed "useful", and not all nations start bringing in an army after army of Tartarians, devils, abominations, wished SCs and tarrasques.

Obviously I haven't thought this one through, the idea just occured to me.