Priest Spells: Prayers & Rites

[Rasorow]

I would love to see some kind of Holy/Unholy powers and progression. I hate that I have to advance/empower a priest as a magic user to gain power and that my priests cannot advance in holy/unholiness. A priest's power flows from their faith in their God, not magic. As their faith is tested it gets stronger.. unrelated to their magical ability if any.

I do not think that the resource additions are over-powered especially if you can only recruit lvl 1-3 holiness units. Think about the Riches from Beneath the Earth (If I remember the name correctly) spell and the resources it perpetually creates in all provinces. Both of these would create extra resources for 1 turn. If you monthly cast them you are losing a preacher/caster/leader of mid (H2) to high lvl (H5) which at least I never have enough high-levels. Your calculations on cost also need to keep in mind the cost creating the char to cast it. Massed Industry actually requires 950 gold (assuming H2 recruit) to cast. 850 gold to get the H5 char then 100 gold to cast and is only effective in one province 1 turn. Again Riches From Beneath the Earth has about the same additional resources, is perpetual - once cast always in effect (unless dispelled), affects all provinces, and no maintenance (where the prayers would have a cost each month cast).

Some tweaking does need to be done and some balancing, but I dont think his suggestions are unreasonable when considered with what currently exists in the game.

Rasorow

[Taqwus]

Dislike.

- Magic must be researched. Holy spells are available from the beginning. This adds a considerable cost to the use of magic, as you need to pay to recruit the mages and then to maintain them, plus it stops you from recruiting another commander that turn in that province.

- Mages are generally more expensive than your basic H2 priest. Mages that can cast the interesting globals certainly are, because they frequently require 5+ levels of power.

- The more useful globals also cost one heck of a lot more than their list cost because others will dispell them.

- ANY nation can get an H3 priest from the start by assigning a prophet, most can get at least H4 through a prophet, and some can get H4 recruitable and H5 through prophet. Two get native-H5 heroes!

- What does holiness have to do with poison? Or production, for that matter, unless the god cares about Productivity? You want resources from religion, spend the 40/80/120 points.

I don't think you really want to see Ulm/Iron Faith or Abysia (in particular, with the gold income from alchemy) using priests to crank out lots of high-resource heavy infantry,do you?

[Endoperez]

Rites using gold as the pay might be usable, though. Maybe not these ones, but something along these lines would add even more interest for priests. If these were to be added they should be used to spice up some spesific nations/themes and maybe come with spesific scale/magic levels with high Dominion, not given freely to everyone.

I don't think Holy 2 priests should be able to do much of anything. Compare them to level 1 mages. Should Sage with random in Earth be able to duplicate Riches from Beneath locally, for ~5 gems?

About holy/arcane magic combinations, I would like to see Tien Chi's Celestial Summon needing eg. FHHH or WHHH, so that only Celestial Masters could summon them. And *every* one of them would be able to do this, too! Unfortunately, that can't be modded. I don't think the game would allow that at all, though.

And remember that gold is almost always more common than gems, and that using gold instead of gems could unbalance the game quite severely unless lots of work and testing was put into it.

I do like quite amny of your ideas, though. It would be interesting to see them in the game.