[Edratman]

I think Meglobob has gotten it pretty much on the money for recruiting troops when a capitol is conquered. I was thinking some probability between 10 and 25%, but that difference is just a detail. He is exactly right in his statement that sacreds should not be recruitable and his reasoning is irrefutable.

After all, one of the primary features of the game is recruiting independents, so national troops should not be excepted. By excluding sacred troops, the vast majority of the units will not be a significent alteration in the strategy or balence of the game. The foremost benefit that I can see is access to magic paths or levels that are only achievable via empowerment. And by assigning a probability to the recruitment of the units, a player will not be guaranteed anything. By the way, I would program, if possible, a player only getting one swing at the recruitable unit probabilty to forestall handing the capitol back multiple times until a desired unit is deemed recruitable. It wouldn't even be out of the question if there was a cap put on the number of units that can pass the dice roll election process. You might end up getting scout and slinger as your recruitable units. C'est la vie.

This limited choice of other national troops would not limit replayablity but actually enhance it in my opinion. Every time you conquer a capitol new units are entirely up to chance. No different than cool, low probabilty magic sites.

As for the looting of the gem and gold treasury, many of you pointed out the errors in the initial proposal. But I still hold to the concept that a significent portion of the treasury, say 10 to 30% should be up for grabs as dropped battlefield loot. There is little or no historic precedent for a nation to remove 100% of its valuables from the capitol just prior to the crumbling of its walls. A player should be penalized finacially as well as physically when he manages to lose his capitol.

The major downside to this is that comeback eforts would be severly hindered by the gem and gold losses. But then again, I have never come back after a capitol loss anyway. No doubt many have, but I would think almost all of those were instances where the opponent snuck a stealthy army into a poorly defended capitol. And if that is the case, how would the nation have the time to successfully sneak all its treasury away? And wouldn't a primary objective of this sneak attack be looting?