Oh good, someone else likes the idea of having a unique thug commander to start with.
I was thinking making the witch king something like the following:
Code:
HP 30 Str 15
size 3 Att 15 = 14 + (1 weapon), ambidex 3
Prot 1 Def 18 = 14 + (3 mounted) + (1 weapon)
Mor 30 Prec 12
MR 18 Move 3 / 20
Enc 0 Good Leader/Undeadleader
S3D4H3
Sacred, Undead, NNE, Glamour (and stealthy +25), Coldres 100, Fireres -50
Darkpower 5, Fear +9 (4 from D4), Immortal, Ethereal, Darkvision 100
Weapon: Pale Blade (not sure what to make of this yet)
Armor: Crown
I could see him being the nation's only access to astral, and certainly the strongest access to death. Having him at the beginning would let the expansion go very well (especially if you could quickly forge armor for him), giving you more territory than others. However, I intend to make units somewhat less cost efficient for Angmar than what other nations enjoy, requiring those extra resources to have forces on par. This would result in ritual/forging goodness (because sites are based on number of provinces and gem costs independent of who's using them) and more strategic tension (since with more territory you need to be more wary of stretching yourself thin).
Other mages would probably include some sort of cap-only orc shamen, with passable death and fire access, as well as recruit-everywhere wildmen shamen with weak water and death magic. With only average researchers at the capitol and definitely sub-par ones elsewhere, Angmar will need more castles to keep up in research, which they can manage because of the extra SC to begin with. It should feel like a different dynamic than playing other nations.
With regards to encouraging the player to take an imprisoned pretender, it seems like the best ways of doing that are to give them good sacreds to encourage a huge bless (not doing this, there will be no non-commander sacreds), or to make it so they really need fantastic scales. Not sure how to do that. Of course, it shouldn't be necessary that any pretender the player takes should be imprisoned, but only that specific chasses encourage such activities. In fact, there could be multiple chasses representing Sauron in different stages:
Lord of the Rings : most powerful; titan-like SC who should be imprisoned.
The Lidless Eye : immobile, perfectly feasible awake or sleeping.
The Necromancer : research-based pretender that makes sense if it's awake (sort of).
Annatar : forging pretender, makes sense awake, due to timeline in the world.
Feedback would be appreciated.