[Finalgenesis]

Nation balancing: LA ryleh

Some more suggestions for discussion:

LA Ryleh has sustainability problems, in any reasonable sized game they hit a point rather soon where they can no longer recruit mages or priest as your population dwindle to nothing, which you need to wring any use out of the chaff. On paper the various ways to help with their income is:

1) Luck - a) inconsistent. b) luck income is hit by your maintenance cost before you can spend them, making most of the smaller luck income event meaningless.

2) Fire gem - Even with alchemy stone if you manage to forge it, thats 13F per mage, 19F without. If you can make this feastible in a clamless game, I salute you.

3) Summon mage - your V spectre cost 25S, has only 4S path with none of the utility you can get out of mage. Their cost reflect their purpose: to make things go insane rather then replace your mages as buffer, battle mage, researchers ...etc. Honestly, it's almost the cost of a golem, or an elemental royalty if you consider wish conversion rate.

Finally, their freespawn chaff have a gold cost of 1, meaning every 15 of them have a 1 gold upkeep. Why do they take upkeep? Maenads don't require upkeep, why are my junkies and crazies asking for gold?

Some suggestions:

1. No upkeep for chaff, hell if it was moddable I'd suggest -2 gold cost for that matter to generate gold and require decision on using them or saving them for gold income.

2. national mage/priest summonable, though I can see various problems and abuse for this. Perhaps a spell to change 10S into 500 gold? So you can actually switch to a gem economy (as LA ryleh certain don't have the choice of gold economy). Your "spell" income would still get hit by maintenance so you want to do multiple casting in one go, the upper limit imposed by gold economy is still there since your spell income gets hit by maintenance before you get a chance to spent it. You'd still be disadvantaged since others get gold + gem economy (or blood+gem), while you can only run on gem economy with "free" chaff to "compensate".

3. Dom summoned cultist can have higher/random paths, currently they can possibly get 1S and abit crazy to boot. I can frankly imagine hedge wizards and witches getting the dreams and turning to your cult, god knows my summoned casters and mermage slaves go bonkers fast enough. With high insanity on them it is already a heavy enough penalty and make marching armies in formation diffioooOOOO shinyyyy!

4. LA National summon spell to call a small batch of random void monsters, more for flavor then anything else. The power of the void grows and the star spawns can now open the gate anywhere given preparation (lab).

LA ryleh strikes me as dripping with theme and oppurtunity to enhance their gameplay (not more powerful, but more different / weird / thought out). The void takes a small role in MA, and supposedly in LA the void has become much more significant, Spawns receive great dream powers (dream of ryleh), their void spectres can be called back and the voice influence sleepers around the world. I could easily see global spell (In the vein of soul gate for LA Ermor and carrion woods for Pan) for ryleh and greater access to void creatures, and other unusual mechanic to make goldless Ryleh work.