[HoneyBadger]

DrPraetorious, I have to disagree that an aging system such as I have proposed would disenfranchise humans. Humans age quickly, it's true, but they also breed quickly, learn quickly, and in their relatively(and relative to a dragon perhaps, but not relative to almost every other animal on earth) "short" lifespans (approaching 75 years life expectancy, up from around 55 at the turn of the century, and maybe 25 in Dom 3), are able to increase in skills, knowledge, and power quite efficiently, and to pass those things on to their children, so that those children might live longer and better lives. If they weren't able to adapt and grow over time, then yes, the other races eventually would overrun them. But that's not what happened on Planet Earth, and a clever player backed up with good balancing shouldn't let it happen in a game, providing his or her opponent isn't more clever still. And noone who was unable to protect and nurture his or her growing units over time should be picking such a long-lived race to play.

Very large games with very large maps might last a very long time. I've seen people talking about games already lasting 1000 turns. That's over 80 game years already, and Dom 3 hasn't been out for 2 whole months. Rather than a gigantic, epic game becoming boring over time, I'd like to know that I have the opportunity to play a game which will still be interesting a year or even 10 years from now, without creating a new game with a new nation every time I want to see something different. I'm just asking for a relatively simple solution (programming wise) which might possibly require the addition of several hundred new creatures, but has that ever been a bad thing? Certainly not for the Dominions franchise. And while it would require a lot of work indeed, I'm not asking that the burden be put on the designers, or anyone, for that matter. If you didn't want to put that work in, then you certainly wouldn't have to. I'm just asking for the option, the choice to use or not to use a function which can just as easily sit there and gather dust, or that could, with a great deal of time and effort, transform a game as we currently play it into something a lot more dynamic. And it would make the aging system (which I personally think is a wonderful idea, as is, but which I read a lot of gripes about) a lot more fun.

By the way, thank you for pointing out the .dm files available here. I really just needed a point to start off from, since I've badly misplaced my manual, and I can't get a mod to work just from reading the mod doc.