I think there needs to be a 9th magical path: "Life"
We got a "death" magic path that includes demons, a "blood" path that includes un-dead, now we need a "life" path that includes angels & archangels, who would be summoned from the conjuration school. "Life" would be a strong healing type magic path with little/no offence (since we have plenty of that already) and include upper level spells for removing curses & horror-marks, spells for healing specific type inflictions (and poison damage), and spells to remove curses from artifacts would be great too. There would be a need for a new type of magic gem, say something like "water of life" that could be made by "life" priests in a similar mechanic to how blood magic/priests works [minus the sacrificing
].
It would be a kool mechanic if archangels had an "aura of healing" power that could increase health (remove damage) from units in battle withing a certain radius, similar to how the "cold" and "heat" specialized units do heat damage in a radius, since there's a precedent for this it shouldn't be too difficult to script. Maybe angels can do this too but within a smaller radius.
Personally, I'd like to see levels increase also. Spells that are more powerful, say up to 15th level with corresponding more powerful (and more expensive) artifacts/armor would be great. A piece of armor that costs 100 gems to make but was incredibly strong would increase options for players (bangs per buck most wouldn't buy it, but it would be great to have the option nonetheless).
I think there's a huge room for more & varied magical weapons as well as more unique items. A fourth version of the game should included at minimum a thousand more items/armor/swords/artifacts. Odd combinations such as fire/water, water/blood, and nature/death/blood could provide a lot of additional variety that is possible for this game.
Having a larger "mod" space would be great for really big mods too, or more than 4 at once, say 8 or 10.
At the new 15th level, have spells available such as "summon/resurrect god", which would be a unique highly powerful unit for each nationality. It would be great if some of the god's abilities (or even the whole enchilada) could be defined by the player before game, in a manner similar to pretender design. Or even, a "resurrect the Pantokrator" (whatever the hell that is) would be huge. This would also be a unique unit that could only be summoned once in the game by any nation that met the spell reqs.
Of course, most games would not last this long, perhaps only on large maps. But, this would be great for players who like large maps and long games and not the 1,2,3 and it's over small game. It could also turn the tide if the game happened to be evenly matched this far into the game.
I'd love to be able to mod these things into the game but it can't be done without a game re-design (at least the additional levels & ninth magic path).