[Agrajag]

HoneyBadger said:
No need to make threats, I'm well aware of forum rules, and I'm not your enemy.

No threats were made, I wouldn't threaten anyone that I will call the moderators and ask them to ban someone.
However, in this forum the moderators tend to enforce justice swiftly and strongly, so I was just saying you should be careful not to piss them off

I have 4 cousins who are Jewish.*snip rest of paragraph*

You completely missed the point.
What you said was that:
1) You're suggestion could be confusing to newbies (which was my arguement)
2) You are a newbie, and you are still suggesting your idea
Conclusion: The idea will not be confusing.
What I said was that by same token I could have said:
1) Killing jews will be a bad thing for jewish people
2) I am jewish, and I am suggesting all jews be killed
Conclusion: My idea is a good idea, all jews should be killed.
Which is obviously not true.
I was just using an analogy to show why I think your specific point wasn't very valid.

As for magic paths, you don't need to be more or less aware of them than you do the units in the game, because the units and the spells are both integral parts of strategic planning. Sure, you don't have to be aware of every single unit in the game, but the same can be said of every single spell. Their are 50 (and growing) nations in the game, plus independents, and when you decide what kind of strategy you want to play (or what flavor you want), you decide what nation you want to play, and you do your homework on that nation. You don't have to use every single spell or path in the game, plenty of people play nations which don't use blood at all, for instance. I personally don't like to use air magic, that's just my preference. It's no easier or more difficult with a similar number of magic paths, it just requires thinking about them in a similar manner.

But what you call "doing your homework" would be much much more complicated if you will have to take 10 different paths that your nation has access to into consideration.
An extra unit somewhere however, will be much less influential, especially since when considering a certain path of magic you have to look at all of the spells available and see what you think is worthy, while a troop is usually obviously good or bad.

If you don't like my ideas, and you seem to be acknowledging that the game does need to grow, then why not suggest some of your own?

I have suggested several ideas for dominions, just not in this thread.
The Dominions 3 Wishlist thread, and the Modding commands wishlist (both from the dom2 forum) are two such examples.

I think their are reasons, and my reasons are 1: flavor,

Which is just that, flavor. Flavor does not a game make Nor fun gameplay

and 2: because astral and nature are not life.

Check out the spell "Healing Light", this one is the reason I said Nature+Astral=Life, more or less.

Astral and nature imply star nature or alien nature, combining the natural environment with the essence of the stars, or something along the lines of Illithid life, maybe: illithid dogs, illithid cats, little illithid bunnyrabbits, illithid bees making illithid honey, etc. Ofcourse, there's lots of things you could take from the concept of a combined astral and nature magic, but I don't think you'd get the very essence of Life Itself, all life in the universe, out of astral and nature. What about plants? nature and earth? fish? nature and water? instead of simplifying things, dual paths instead actually add complications and render things much more ambiguous and confusing in many cases because they more intensely involve personal opinion. This thread is becoming an example of that point.
3: because throwing new ideas and new concepts and new paths of magic leads people to think ALONG those paths, to think in new ways and come up with new spell ideas/strategy ideas/things we can mod into the game or the designers can add down the road. Multi-path spells don't do this job nearly as well, because they require people to think in unobvious ways, new ways, to come up with creative ideas, and it's harder to get people to do that. New paths mean new directions, the word "path" nicely implies this. Now I'm not saying that you're not a creative person with good, exciting ideas, but you are a fine example of my point here.

I agree that your idea is fun, my point here is more along the lines of "should it be implemented?", which is where I think your idea kind of fails.
While we can't be sure of how long it will take to add support of those new paths you suggest, we can be sure that tripling the amount of paths available will mean atleast doubling the amount of spells available, which will take a whole lot of developer time to just come up with all that stuff.
In my opinion, a much better solution would be to add more modding commands, like:
#NewPath <number>
#PathName <name>
#PathIcon <path to icon>
And
#NewSchool <number>
#SchoolName <name>
If in addition we would also get a few more spell modding commands, and maybe even some new interesting effects, then we could still have everything you suggest in a mod (probably one that you will make) and we'd get some more really cool modding commands for everybody to use!

Can't we all just get along?

Not everyone can get along, but hopefuly we will