[Sombre]

I just had a crazy idea regarding the Warhammer nations. Modders often start with the idea that they will create a nation in all 3 ages - a version for EA, a version for MA and a version for LA, each with major differences, units, spells etc. This is a great way to tell a story and it's worked really well for many vanilla nations like Agartha, Abysia, Ermor and even 2 era ones like Pythium. But it's very rare for a modder to go through with this grand plan, because of the work involved and the fact that after you complete one era you're much more likely to be attracted to a different concept entirely for your next project.

So my thought is to package EA and LA versions of my 3 warhammer nations in with the main MA version, but to make the differences between them, in terms of work, extremely minor. In terms of gameplay though,... well there can be a much much bigger impact. For example a summon might become a recruitable unit, a spell might change research levels entirely, the costs and stats of certain units might change. This doesn't equate to a lot of work but you get to tell a story (changes to description), people get to use them in different ages and you can represent different facets of the nation that might be lost in the sheer variety of the MA version.

An example would probably be useful here. Let's take the Skaven. In their history Clan Pestilens was removed from Skavenblight for a looong time, only returning relatively recently. So an EA version might lack all Pestilens spells and recruits, with the other clans (particularly Skryre) holding more power and their units thus having altered stats/costs. Meanwhile in LA the opposite could be true, with Pestilens eclipsing the other clans, leading to cheaper, more numerous pestilens troops, grey seers replaced by Plague Priests as the religious power, eshin assassins switching their warpstone poisons for weapons using the disease magic of Pestilens, moulder rats and rat ogres becoming disease carriers... you get the idea. Once again the work I'd have to do would be far less than you might expect, but the gameplay impact would be pretty huge.

The bottom line is the MA version would remain the 'main' one and contain pretty much everything, while EA and LA would be different primarily through omission of content and quite heavy handed tweaking. They would also conform to the idea that magic is stronger in EA and weaker in LA.