With a full set figured I'd give my opinion on this as a Dom5 player who does a bit of modding and is still researching, slowly, how to actually make nation mods and stuff.
Actually that seques pretty easy into a question regarding the griffon troops of every age, how are you statting these? Size 3 HP blobs with high strength are going to get compared to Enkidu, and while it looks like at least they'll have hats and thus avoid the worst mistake of the Enkidu(head hits suck and size 3 is nowhere near big enough to get away with not having a hat in melee), the other mistake is attack density and these guys abandoning the use of claws and beaks implies that they are going to lose the attack density that makes units like the Zhayedan so scary. If the closest to dual wielding these guys get is having a lance and sword they're probably never going to be your primary units, and with the res tax on size 3 armor and weapons they'll probably be priced out of being your mainline anyway.
I also don't think you could do the "Only Lead with specific commanders" from MA in any elegant way. You'd either have to use Magic Being and Undead/Demon tags to divide the nation, opening up weird interactions, or you'd have to do weird stuff with size, AFAIK anyway. The devs COULD probably do it though, and with a lot less work than the no path rituals. The unreliable MA Mages though are interesting, they'd have to be absurdly unreliable to be recruitable without a lab but unreliable insane mages can work, as demo'd by Erytheia, but with every mage being insane I'm not sure how functional they'd actually be, unreliable research amounts, not being able to count on having important spells even with multiple casters, kind of awkward in mid and late game. That said, crossbows are kind of stonkers in MA and joining that exclusive club does clearly warrant some pretty hefty weakness in mages(three nations in vanilla Dom5 have crossbows in MA, Tien'chi, with their 20 res and rec point hard to mass cbows have arguably the best mage in the game[and honestly, read "best" as "efficient" here] but their Cbows are VERY costly, MA Ulm has Arbalesters as their 10 gold 20 res[20 res for Ulm basically does not matter] option for Cbow stuff but Arbalests are 1 out of 3 rounds for attacks and Ulm's normal crossbow is also paying for a Siege Bonus and is 20 gold a piece, Master Smiths are good at what they do but they don't exactly do much variety, MA Mari has the cheapest and most massable cbows of the bunch and their out of cap mages are 185 gold for F2S1H1 or 45 gold for F1 and they are left with arguably the worst mages in the game in exchange for those massable cbows, well, and rec anyfort sacred heavy cav.) that said, the cbows are gonna have to be VERY massable to actually help make up for the unreliability of the mages for the nation to be competitive with vanilla nations. Not sure how you'd tie the insanity to the paths, probably need a bunch of events that go off based on a wide array of triggers to insanify a mage. +1 blood slave from cap is genuinely meaningless, only nations with Blood Sacrifice ever get blood slave income in cap and it's supposed to represent religious significance to blood magic because of what blood slaves actually are, probably cut this. The very low chance to recruit especially powerful mages from any lab is also something you'd have to do via event rather than using the randoms, since scales don't influence randoms at all. Sacred Berserkers from any unforted " Mountains or Highlands is actually a really weird set up and you'd have to be pretty careful with pricing to make these ever useful, unforted temples are a huge risk and sticking them in res heavy provinces when they wear woad paint means that if they have the sort of rec point value flying sacreds tend to they are unlikely to actually get used.
EDIT: pressed the button to post before doing the EA one, lol.
Being able to pick paths is pretty cool, that said, EA is kind of defined by super mages, even the rainbow ones tend to be really stonkers, I think this mod would tend to either make mages totally busted or really hard to compete, not sure which. And I'm honestly not sure you even could have cap sites shift all your dudes, if it is possible it'd be via some complisticated event coding. That said, you'd also super flood the spell list if you were actually doing one site spell for every possible path combo variation. And I really don't think it'd be possible to set it up any other way if you wanted to use just one site to cover everything, since you'd need a different spell for every prior site and possible combo unless you were ok with cutting people out of stuff. That said, it'd be much easier if you compressed the other two cap sites and then gave the player five transforming sites to work with. Otherwise you basically have three slots AVAILABLE if you make the spells site making and then transforming, if the sites are just transforming you have one slot and you need to make seperate spells for each possible permutation, at least, to my understanding, site requiring spells cannot be made to use any of a number of sites, they have to require one specific site. So if you transform your starting site to give you Death magic and you want to then add in Nature and then Blood, you need a spell to give you the Nature that works from the Death site, and then a spell to give you Blood that works from the Death and Nature site, and if instead of Nature and then Blood you want Blood and then Nature you need a spell that gives you the Blood path that can be cast from the Death Site, and then Nature from the Death and Blood site, and then if you want to get Discord on side with Air magic you need a spell that gives you Air from the Death Nature Blood site, and this holds true if you START by getting Earth and then go for Nature into Air, and so on and so on. Like, the mod would need 8+7+56 spells minimum just to get any triple path combo. I'm genuinely not sure there's enough spell storage to actually make this mod work without cutting out a bunch of the vanilla spell list for everyone. Like, custom mages is a pretty neat idea but doing it off one site location would be insanely hard. If you do it with five you can basically just cut the crosspath sites entirely because access to five paths is already far more than is normal, and with three sites you could group paths and while it would prolly have permutations that locked people out of certain paths, at least you'd need fewer spells, and if you paired the paths having access to 6 paths is still doing REALLY good. But yeah, practically speaking, doing custom mages off one site would be silly given how modding actually works. Also, if you did do the one site method and had enough room for it, you'd prolly break any hope of compatibility, and with the LA national spells you probably could not have them in the same mod without stuff breaking. Also, I'm assuming you are not doing one site per path level because that way lies utter madness even if you cap how many path levels you can get in any one path(especialy for the one site version, I don't even want to start doing that math)
Also, this "relying on Pretender God for Mages" means locking yourself into an awake or at most, dormant, god, that's a big restriction on pretender design and largely cuts out the sort of designs that would theoretically make the most out of the custom mages.
Honestly, I think I'd probably argue for just cutting this EA version entirely, moving the MA and LA ones down a peg in the Age rung and just having the EA version be something from some nebulous past like the Partholonians and the Uncursed Fomorians. Actually, given Nazca and the like you could prolly just cut EA and leave MA and LA where they are.
Most everything else in your Dom5 Griffonia ideas would actually be moddable, this one is very much not. This one I'm not even sure could be done by the actual devs without an absolutely absurd amount of reworking of how magic works. You could do something fairly similar I think... I'm pretty sure you could set up a spell that could be cast by mages but that doesn't actually do anything without at least one Inventor. It might be a bit clunky because I'm pretty sure you'd need to be using events, the spell would proc an event that would then create the summon IF you have at least one Inventor
This one would be somewhat challenging to mod, probably use an event that makes a site that gives the increased resources since trying to do this normally would restrict it to a cave only bonus to income and res or a resource bonus to all forts.
Depending on how this is costed would either be absurdly OP or never touched, also depends on just how much research they give and if they have the "normal" non mage research thing of being 1 CP. Also depends a bit on if these Masons are enabling Grand Citadels or normal Citadels, if it's Citadels then you have to use them because 3 CP is insanely valuable but if it's Grand Citadels then while you might stick them on Thrones you probably don't bother with them because +10 admin and some wall integrity is fairly rarely worth the cash.
I'm not sure you could actually do this, possibly if you had events that WEREN'T the standard Hero stuff that gave you Hero's because AFAIK the only way to influence this is Luck Scales, which caps at 6% chance at L3 and is minimized at 0% if you go Misfortune 3. That said, I'm pretty sure every hero available has their own roll so you might be able to get this effect anyway just by having a whole bunch of distinct multi-heroes even if a bunch of them are effectively identical just using a different ID to have an extra roll.
A. are these cap only? B. unpathed sacred but not priestly "thugs" are actually kind of a hard sell, especially in vanilla, in DE it can work better if you have good forge bonus but still pretty hard sell often enough. Also that they don't have path's means their value as thugs is fairly limited since no magic phase movement means they are basically purely offensive or army support.
Actually that seques pretty easy into a question regarding the griffon troops of every age, how are you statting these? Size 3 HP blobs with high strength are going to get compared to Enkidu, and while it looks like at least they'll have hats and thus avoid the worst mistake of the Enkidu(head hits suck and size 3 is nowhere near big enough to get away with not having a hat in melee), the other mistake is attack density and these guys abandoning the use of claws and beaks implies that they are going to lose the attack density that makes units like the Zhayedan so scary. If the closest to dual wielding these guys get is having a lance and sword they're probably never going to be your primary units, and with the res tax on size 3 armor and weapons they'll probably be priced out of being your mainline anyway.
I also don't think you could do the "Only Lead with specific commanders" from MA in any elegant way. You'd either have to use Magic Being and Undead/Demon tags to divide the nation, opening up weird interactions, or you'd have to do weird stuff with size, AFAIK anyway. The devs COULD probably do it though, and with a lot less work than the no path rituals. The unreliable MA Mages though are interesting, they'd have to be absurdly unreliable to be recruitable without a lab but unreliable insane mages can work, as demo'd by Erytheia, but with every mage being insane I'm not sure how functional they'd actually be, unreliable research amounts, not being able to count on having important spells even with multiple casters, kind of awkward in mid and late game. That said, crossbows are kind of stonkers in MA and joining that exclusive club does clearly warrant some pretty hefty weakness in mages(three nations in vanilla Dom5 have crossbows in MA, Tien'chi, with their 20 res and rec point hard to mass cbows have arguably the best mage in the game[and honestly, read "best" as "efficient" here] but their Cbows are VERY costly, MA Ulm has Arbalesters as their 10 gold 20 res[20 res for Ulm basically does not matter] option for Cbow stuff but Arbalests are 1 out of 3 rounds for attacks and Ulm's normal crossbow is also paying for a Siege Bonus and is 20 gold a piece, Master Smiths are good at what they do but they don't exactly do much variety, MA Mari has the cheapest and most massable cbows of the bunch and their out of cap mages are 185 gold for F2S1H1 or 45 gold for F1 and they are left with arguably the worst mages in the game in exchange for those massable cbows, well, and rec anyfort sacred heavy cav.) that said, the cbows are gonna have to be VERY massable to actually help make up for the unreliability of the mages for the nation to be competitive with vanilla nations. Not sure how you'd tie the insanity to the paths, probably need a bunch of events that go off based on a wide array of triggers to insanify a mage. +1 blood slave from cap is genuinely meaningless, only nations with Blood Sacrifice ever get blood slave income in cap and it's supposed to represent religious significance to blood magic because of what blood slaves actually are, probably cut this. The very low chance to recruit especially powerful mages from any lab is also something you'd have to do via event rather than using the randoms, since scales don't influence randoms at all. Sacred Berserkers from any unforted " Mountains or Highlands is actually a really weird set up and you'd have to be pretty careful with pricing to make these ever useful, unforted temples are a huge risk and sticking them in res heavy provinces when they wear woad paint means that if they have the sort of rec point value flying sacreds tend to they are unlikely to actually get used.
EDIT: pressed the button to post before doing the EA one, lol.
Being able to pick paths is pretty cool, that said, EA is kind of defined by super mages, even the rainbow ones tend to be really stonkers, I think this mod would tend to either make mages totally busted or really hard to compete, not sure which. And I'm honestly not sure you even could have cap sites shift all your dudes, if it is possible it'd be via some complisticated event coding. That said, you'd also super flood the spell list if you were actually doing one site spell for every possible path combo variation. And I really don't think it'd be possible to set it up any other way if you wanted to use just one site to cover everything, since you'd need a different spell for every prior site and possible combo unless you were ok with cutting people out of stuff. That said, it'd be much easier if you compressed the other two cap sites and then gave the player five transforming sites to work with. Otherwise you basically have three slots AVAILABLE if you make the spells site making and then transforming, if the sites are just transforming you have one slot and you need to make seperate spells for each possible permutation, at least, to my understanding, site requiring spells cannot be made to use any of a number of sites, they have to require one specific site. So if you transform your starting site to give you Death magic and you want to then add in Nature and then Blood, you need a spell to give you the Nature that works from the Death site, and then a spell to give you Blood that works from the Death and Nature site, and if instead of Nature and then Blood you want Blood and then Nature you need a spell that gives you the Blood path that can be cast from the Death Site, and then Nature from the Death and Blood site, and then if you want to get Discord on side with Air magic you need a spell that gives you Air from the Death Nature Blood site, and this holds true if you START by getting Earth and then go for Nature into Air, and so on and so on. Like, the mod would need 8+7+56 spells minimum just to get any triple path combo. I'm genuinely not sure there's enough spell storage to actually make this mod work without cutting out a bunch of the vanilla spell list for everyone. Like, custom mages is a pretty neat idea but doing it off one site location would be insanely hard. If you do it with five you can basically just cut the crosspath sites entirely because access to five paths is already far more than is normal, and with three sites you could group paths and while it would prolly have permutations that locked people out of certain paths, at least you'd need fewer spells, and if you paired the paths having access to 6 paths is still doing REALLY good. But yeah, practically speaking, doing custom mages off one site would be silly given how modding actually works. Also, if you did do the one site method and had enough room for it, you'd prolly break any hope of compatibility, and with the LA national spells you probably could not have them in the same mod without stuff breaking. Also, I'm assuming you are not doing one site per path level because that way lies utter madness even if you cap how many path levels you can get in any one path(especialy for the one site version, I don't even want to start doing that math)
Also, this "relying on Pretender God for Mages" means locking yourself into an awake or at most, dormant, god, that's a big restriction on pretender design and largely cuts out the sort of designs that would theoretically make the most out of the custom mages.
Honestly, I think I'd probably argue for just cutting this EA version entirely, moving the MA and LA ones down a peg in the Age rung and just having the EA version be something from some nebulous past like the Partholonians and the Uncursed Fomorians. Actually, given Nazca and the like you could prolly just cut EA and leave MA and LA where they are.
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