Been held up with other things for a bit. I am updating the pretender choices now following the rubric ano suggested earlier and upon which I agreed and there seemed to be no objections.
1. All 10 magic path rainbows will be removed.
2. All pretenders restricted to taking no more than level 3 on non-native paths (native paths = the ones your pretender comes with standard)
3. Pretenders who native path conflicts with the primary path of any team and/or the merc will be/remain excluded.
4. Restrictions on Ashdod pretender revert to max of level 6 on Earth and Nature.
5. No further changes will be made to the pretender choices unless all captains agree.
Regarding the Usurpers, though R'lyeh is the "Cannonical" Usurper, Mictlan has good Astral access (though not as much initial native astral gem income as any of the others), so they would likely be a good choice if R'lyeh is replaced and Chris, Squirel, or someone else wants to captain them. I wouldn't mind.
Mictlan has a reasonable nature/forest bias both in terms of theme and path (more so than T'ien Chi'), so I probably wouldn't change the secondary path to air due to the conflict with the AI team's primary air dominance. I'd just need to change the team pic (showing an Illithid)
, but that is a minor change. The theme of mental/temporal magic still applies to any astral based team and the thaumaturgy school.
If R'lyeh stays in, ahh no problem as well. I might connect their underwater cap with the nearest corner sea province which would at least allow them to move their aquatic only units around a bit.
Adding more underground lake cavern/water provinces is a bit tougher since I want to do it without any image editing, want to limit the obstructions to the land game (and AI), and keep them evenly and stragetically dispersed. This is the reason they are located in the corners where their disruption is minimal. Adding 4 more cavern type sea provinces to the north/south/east/west center edges of the map remains a distant possibility, but I likely won't bother if R'leyh is out.
Sea provinces were more of an afterthought on this map, and the merc is something a test, but should be fun. Altantis and R'lyeh were chosen as they both have a good number of amphibious units.
I am opening up the Deva's den and merc hq to all players. A single player on each team will still remain the contact person in regard to retaining the merc's services (either captain or advisor) to prevent confusion or conflicting requests for services from different members of the same team.
Will post another message when the teams&themes have been updated.
Lets try to get the last few people in the game, and an advisor or two or some alternates would'nt be bad either.