[Aezeal]

Ow I can think of a great idea, I like this challange
first of I'm ignoring most of the "background" we might be able to think of wtf this race actually is later.

1. A race of immovable creatures which teleport (not by spell, just mapmove 1 and combatmove 0) from province to province.

2. No recruitable troops, just commanders

3. a commander for each magic type, has 2 power in that magic group.

4. The commanders do not attack in melee, they are immovable. They have an aura that deals damage or a mindblast, or will have to cast spells. So ultimate no melee nation.

5. they need a lot of combat summons, one for each magic level for each path.

6. combat will be through the aura's and mindblasts etc of the characters and their in battle summons.

7. No ritual summons for this race

8. no research, they know all spells, or all spells are in spell level 0 for this race

9. no item slots on our commanders/characters, no need for forging and equiping.

10. use for gems: only to upgrade your characters (empowering)

11. Leaders are 0 gc, just get one each turn from a fort

12. forts would be summons, their price combined with 0 gc leaders would be a major balance thing IMHO

ok that are the basics

what do you end up with. A race of immobile magicians who can only increase their strength by
1. getting more characters
2. empowering characters (which takes a lot of gems, which takes time)

this is equal to normal races in the sense that normal races can obviously get more troops
or make their troops stronger (usually indirectly through items, spell research which takes a lot of time and is not possible from the start

expanding:
move on or more of your immobile characters (which do have a mapmove of 1) onto an enemy province

combat:
your immobile (and completely immobile in combat) characters have several options
1. attack directly
2. summon troops
3. buff troops

obviously the "fun" thing would be to let each type (and type means the magic paths they have) have a different "niche" so let fire and blood have the strongest direct attacks (AoE would be nice)
others the better summons
and others the best buffs
and yet again others the best combat spells.

of course this would get boring and too easy.

So if your characters are UPGRADED (maybe each level, maybe every 2) the "niche" they have would change

So after 2 empowerments maybe blood and earth have the best summons, and air and fire the best buffs etc
(only the attack could not be changed, and, since it would have to be balanced from the start of the game it would probably not be competative anymore later in the game)

So choices for the player in a game are.. do I empower 1 character very high (LOADS of gems) and do I use my other characters as the standard lvl 2 pplz or several a few levels, or all only 1-2 levels?

Obviously the higher level character would be able to summon stronger troops, buff them better etc etc etc but he'd only see chaff and weak spells from the low levels characters....

This could go well with a kill population dominion, but would not be needed, IMHO they should just get no income at all if somehow possible.. or a MAJOR upkeep so you'd loose all cash each turn (no giving away all cash in MP) Pretender would just be a normal leader, but maybe with a lil higher magic level (3) of one of the types but which would cost a huge amount of points and a huge cost for new magic level. (no standard creation since then you'd be able to start with a level 9 who'd already have all major spells the rush would be too easy)

basicly you'd just be able to switch a bit of scales around and get more positive scales if your pretender was not awake.

now to give it some racial background, I'm thinking it could be a race of crystals in each color (not very original) or metals (also not very original) or elementals (again not very original) or (only a bit better but my favorite) monoliths with strange carvings (obviously there is room for improvement here.

IMHO this is the most original race posted yet