Mod: Warhammer MA: Empire

[Aezeal]

hmm a mage that would normally cost 400 gold for would be cheap... or just incredibly expensive after a number of turn if the upkeep was high.

The biggest problem I can think of is you have NO recruitment times and/or restrictions by castles. YOu could just recruit TONS of the cheap summoning bastards, send them to a lab on the front, let them all summon a powerfull wizard and then send him out in the fight immediately, so he's consting only a very low upkeep.. and the summoners could then just KEEP on going.. powerfull mages could be used as expendable chaff. The primary investment is what makes a unit valuable and why you need to protect him.

[Aezeal]

and when you've won a war you'd just separate the summoners in one prov + one powerfull firemage and the rest in another and cast a few fires from afar on it to kill all the powerfull mage chaff so you don't have to pay the upkeep

[Sombre]

Well the summons in this mod cost gems (and have upkeep). I was just saying you could have summons which cost no gems, as an example of using summons in a way that isn't supernatural.

[Aezeal]

Then again it's not unreasonable for the most powerfull wizards to cost gems.. they'd need some magical investments to buy all their stuff and components and of course their patron needs to pay that, and they'd only work in a somewhat magically advanced place, wizards have their pride too so SOME research limit needs to be there. I'd say the most powerfull wizards might only come to lands where there was at least research level 6 in the paths they use most .

You'd just need to have some acceptable level of recruitable mages and since you insist on having all paths inboth nations (a topic on which I'm completely neutral there is a lot to be said for both options (more diversity between the nations and smaller recruitmentlines vs lore)) that would mean a line of 9 mages

[Sombre]

The summons are restricted by their gem cost and by research. There is only one recruitable mage, the 3rp 100 gold initiate used to summon College Wizards.

[Aezeal]

hmmm if there is a gem cost that is of course a restriction.. I'm not sure how happy a nation will be if all their research needs to come from summons though and IMHO it will be pretty hard to balance but with your experience it'll probably end up ok anyway

Are you working actively on Empire again btw?

[llamabeast]

I had a thought. How about having the heads of the colleges, whatever they're called, available as pretenders? Them going for godhood would make about as much sense as anyone one else for the Empire (apart from the Emperor of course).

The reason for my thought was this. As we were discussing the other day, saying "I'm going to play Empire and concentrate on Bright Mages" is all very well, but in general you're best to site search for all paths, and so once your research has got fairly advanced you might as well get all the mages from all the colleges.

However, and here's the key bit, you could have the head of college be not especially strong/rather expensive for a pretender but, like the Mother of Rivers in CBM, give gems of the appropriate colour. So if you wanted to really concentrate on Bright Mages you'd take the Bright guy as your pretender and get an extra 6 gems a turn of fire gems, research straight up evocation and dominate with the Bright wizards while having only small numbers of the other colleges. So it would allow more explicit choice in how you play the nation.

What do you reckon?

[Aezeal]

Idea is nice, though I have the feeling Sombre has it all figured out allready and won't be making much changes.

After having said the idea is all right I have to say I think giving 6 gems might be a lil too much

[llamabeast]

Yeah, well 6 was just an arbitrary number, you could use whatever value seemed appropriate. 6 is what the Mother of Rivers gives in CBM though - seemed quite extreme to me!

[Aezeal]

well I don't play much, so certainly no CBM but it still seems a hell of a lot to me