[rdonj]

Having just tried this out today, I think there are a few things I'd change (for a balanced version) that weren't really mentioned.

1. Gem mines are too cheap, gold wise. And while I can imagine them being thought of as sacred, I don't think the miners would be considered sacred. I think they should cost more on the order of 500 gold and be non-sacred.
2. Gem mines are also too powerful, magically. I'm not entirely sure it makes sense for a mine to be able to cast spells at all, really. I would seriously consider removing all magic paths from the gem mines (and probably the research as well).
3. I would also make gem mines immobile, it seems strange to me that a mine can move around at will.
4. Producing 8 gems a turn for each mine also is excessive. I think more than one gem of each type it produces at once is probably excessive. You should probably also reduce the amount of gem crossover per mine. For example, have one mine make 1f 1e 1a, another make 1w 1d 1n, and the other make 3-6 astral. Or perhaps one for elemental gems and one for sorcery.
5. Were you aware that the seductresses are something like 600 years into old age? That's... different.
6. The giant dwarf summons are too cheap for what you get. They should probably be at least 30 gems per summon, maybe as many as 40.
7. The Auger weapons are insane. Did you make the aoe for the fire attack more than one square? Because it seems when they attack that they hit everything around them on all sides, and I wouldn't think it would do that normally.
8. Likewise with gem mines, gem fountains should probably lose research, mobility, spell paths, and should probably have their income lessened. Halving the income would probably reasonably suffice. As it is, gem fountains and mines are less of an investment and more of an insane explosion of magical power.
9. It probably also isn't terribly fair having the 50% enhancement spell discount as it makes it just too easy to dominate globals and ramp up gem production.
10. Ok, onto the PD. There is too much of it, especially the giant dwarves. Those need to be reduced to probably a quarter their current number. The demons can be reduced by less. Maybe not at all if all or most of the other changes I mentioned are implemented.
11. I also noticed a few units with blood magic. One of them was a recruitable commander which I don't recall the name of and the other was an earth fountain. There might possibly have been more but I wasn't looking that closely. Anyway, thematically speaking I'm pretty sure those blood paths are supposed to not exist.

The paths on the gem mines being axed is very important because there honestly is really no reason to ever recruit any other commander at the moment.

I wanted to do a bulleted list but couldn't figure out how. Maybe I should have gone with hyphens.