[llamabeast]

I had a thought. How about having the heads of the colleges, whatever they're called, available as pretenders? Them going for godhood would make about as much sense as anyone one else for the Empire (apart from the Emperor of course).

The reason for my thought was this. As we were discussing the other day, saying "I'm going to play Empire and concentrate on Bright Mages" is all very well, but in general you're best to site search for all paths, and so once your research has got fairly advanced you might as well get all the mages from all the colleges.

However, and here's the key bit, you could have the head of college be not especially strong/rather expensive for a pretender but, like the Mother of Rivers in CBM, give gems of the appropriate colour. So if you wanted to really concentrate on Bright Mages you'd take the Bright guy as your pretender and get an extra 6 gems a turn of fire gems, research straight up evocation and dominate with the Bright wizards while having only small numbers of the other colleges. So it would allow more explicit choice in how you play the nation.

What do you reckon?