[galica]

I spent a huge amount of time(more than 10 hours) testing this mod. I started a tower game, 1000 provinces, 10 nations, hard AI, forbidden magic mod(more magic) max sites, everything normal, with rainbow druid(mage character with a lot of paths).dom 10, s3,o3, md2, luck-3. Expansion with the immortal chaff wasn't bad, but I can expand faster with pretty much any other race you can name. The "free" chaff has a 10 or 15 Gp cost for maint., and the majority of the game I spent 80% of my income just paying my troops. With sloth, I recruited the max number of troops at every castle but their numbers were trivial the entire game. With a long thin map, I encountered Ulm on top and Jotemheim on the bottom-4 provence front on each side. Both sides were flinging 150-250 soldier stacks every turn at me. If you fight in your dominion, your chaff respawns in your capitol(15-25 provinces away from the front). fighting in your own dominion tends to erode your territory over time, so going on the offence tends to have you facing dominion 8-10, at least 9 provinces deep with enemy temples in 1/4. Even a solid wall of temples(which I paid for by alchemizing gems.) takes a LONG time to wear down. I usually lose 100-200% of the enemy units in chaff-even in battles where I had an advantage. The seducers, which are recruited at old age and have 1 hp, die most of the time from age checks. I suppose you could counter this by keeping them in human form during winter months. I had had more than 100 provinces fully searched, fever fetish farms, clam and earth stone production lines. 75 mound fiends(with 2 types of resource producers) cranking out long dead. The national summons, which don't heal weren't worth the cost, so I was using generic summons. My summoners were enslaving enemy giants and troops-these were good units-but ultimately not enough. During the later stages, I started thugging the hermits, I also used them for fetish farms. The only reason I went so long was because I was having so much fun with the forbidden magic mod. When I realized that the only thing keeping me alive was this huge magic economy I had built, using generic summons I stopped the game.

Hermits are probably your best end game unit, for thugs. Any of your ethereal commanders aren't going to be usable during the winter(when age checks come in)-these guys need to be reduced in cost being immortal is not much value mid-late game when your fighting mostly in enemy dominion(if you're fighting in your dominion, you're losing anyway). The dominator armor is a 1-2 battle wonder-there's really no time to ferry your entire unit back to a lab for repairs. I probably would have done better by taking a high productivity and ignoring the summoners entirely in mid-late game-I tried to swarm with chaff and the maint. crippled me, they also suffered 80% casualties in every large battle.

Overall pretty thematic, high quality graphics and spells(as always). Definitely needs to have the cost of spawns greatly reduced. Not sure what to do with the commanders, avoiding winter deployment to avoid the game-breaking old age casualties seems hokey. Difficult but not impossible to get your magic going without national mages-as long as your pretender is designed for it. Let me know what you decide to do with the spawns, plus then next round of changes and I'll give it another run.