Just throwing this concept out here

[HoneyBadger]

I agree, epic and simple are not mutually exclusive, but "epic" does atleast imply complexity. And I would also like more, many more, spells. One of the advantages of more paths would be more ways in which you could bless your troops. This would give you more options when building your pretender and strategy, which is one of my reasons for more paths.

[UninspiredName]

Time bless... Now there's an interesting thought...

[HoneyBadger]

mmmmhmmmm...I thought you might come around.

[HoneyBadger]

Just for starters, maybe sacred time-blessed units don't suffer from old age, or maybe they just grow old a lot slower and live a lot longer, like Aragorn, from the Lord of the Rings. This could be a percentage bonus, like air shield, and the big bless could be that your unit gets a second chance to resist any instakill spell.

[Endoperez]

HoneyBadger said:
Just for starters, maybe sacred time-blessed units don't suffer from old age, or maybe they just grow old a lot slower and live a lot longer, like Aragorn, from the Lord of the Rings. This could be a percentage bonus, like air shield, and the big bless could be that your unit gets a second chance to resist any instakill spell.

Bless effects can't be modded, currently, but some kind of Time magic thing could be worked in. There aren't that many suitable spells, but Quickness line of spells, Haste, perhaps Etherealness, Decay, an AoE version of Decay, some damage spells with strange descriptions, perhaps Arcane Bolt modded into few different anti-magic (creature) spells, perhaps Claws of Cocytos as a "send them back in time" spell... Teleport/army travel type of spell would fit as well. Twist Fate and AoE versions would fit. The spell for summoning Unfrozen could be changed into Time/Death or Time/Water or Water/Time. Paralyze, and/or Petrify.

This would be based off Nature, of course, to give that nifty bonus to maxage.

Items using Nature/Time would be items with one of the above effects (Elf Bane, Moon Blade, Boots of Quickness etc).

The only thing preventing you from modding this is, currently, the fact that paths' names and icons can't be changed. And the fact that we don't have a good, precise, filterable list of all magic sites, so changing all the unsuitable Nature spells into other paths would take time. In some cases, modding items' descriptions would be nice, but for a proof-of-concept version that isn't required.

Magic path modding, so that the secondary abilities are moddable, would probably beinsanely hard to do, and I can't imagine more than few modders actually completing any major mods using it. Changing all the spells and sites and mages takes insane amount of time.

There are only 8 Schools of research, but most spells could be changed into other schools easily enough to empty one school completely. I've considered changing Thaumaturgy into Holy school, where new Holy spells and Astral/Holy summons would be researhed, but I had to give it up due to few problems. Mainly, I wanted Astral and Holy levels of all priests to be equal. I couldn't use Astral instead of Holy magic because that'd make my "priests" unable to preach, and I couldn't use Holy instead of Astral because I needed gems, and because Magic Duel targets Astral mages.

[Agrajag]

HoneyBadger,
It is in fact harder to add from a designer point of view, because the code already supports dual-path spells, so "my idea" is already implemented and therefore requiers 0 work.
Beyond that, I don't see a point in adding new schools that are just subsets of existing schools. It will add flavour, but also much confusion (especially for newbies), and doesn't sound even remotely worthwhile to code...