Sentience
Sentience (with CBM in mind)
This little mod is a simple attempt to introduce a new aspect that will hopefully change some of the standard pretender choices and game strategies. My idea to achieve this is the introduction of a national Gift of Reason spell called Sentience. The image in my mind is that our powerful demi gods would seek to utilize all resources available to achieve dominance and that would include promoting outstanding subjects for greater service.
This new spell gives pretender designers a new decision to make; the magic path for it is not native to any nations mages, so it is a pretender skill that must be paid for at build time, further competing for the precious points that generally go into good scales or a bless.
Because it is created as fundamentally a pretender skill, its use has all the attendant opportunity costs for the pretenders time per turn. So it is not inherently unbalancing, just another arrow in the quiver so to speak.
The Sentience spell is available at Ench 0 and on average has 3 levels of a particular magic path and cost 5 gems a pop. It is there to encourage further diversification and availability of potential thugs, which provide further custom options for ones armies. It is not meant to supplant the standard thug complement, merely enhance it, but it does mean that all nations have the opportunity to build thugs from early on in the game.
I have arbitrarily assigned a magic path to the spell for each MA nation based loosely on each nation’s natural mage access. (Mictlan was tough!) This could be further tweaked as they may line up with classic favored bless paths for a nation – incurring little relative costs, so any input would be very welcome.
The gem costs could be altered depending on the perceived strength of each nation for a further balance.
Nation Path
Arco A3
Ermor A4
Pythium N4
Man E2
Ulm N2
Marignon N3
Mictlan D4
Tien Chi D3
Machaka B2
Agartha B2
Abysia D3
Caelum E3
Ctis E3
Pangaea S3
Vanheim N3
Jotunheim A4
Bandar log A3
Shinuyama B3
Ashdod A5
Atlantis N3
R'leyh N3
Oceania S2
Eriu S3
The idea of this mod is to just mix the pot a bit in terms of summons and thug usage and to expand the potential thug pool open to players, inherently opening up new avenues for strategy and scheming.
Hopefully someone will give it a shot and provide some discussion.
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