[eWIP] Spirit Mage Banshee and Cinder Mage Cindercorpse Sovereigns, new Undead Faction

That. Is. Awesome.

Maybe Dhuran's undead mod would be wanting to make use of it for an alternate sovereign choice?

It looks as though she has an undead horse. Doesn't seem right for a creature that can fly. With her especially powerful resistance to everything, I recommend eliminating the ability to have a mount.

(Original Post moved here)

Sooooo, I have a few things I'm trying to get ready for prime time (2x Strategic Move Mod, Minor Terraform spells, new City Hub Idea, etc., yeah I get distracted easily), and for some reason when I was making a female undead Sov, I decided I wanted more of a Banshee Sov...

Anyways, meet my Banshee Sov!

She is currently functional ingame, and I'm in the middle of working out the finer points.  I'm thinking about creating a special profession, so that said Banshee can choose new powers as she advances in levels.  I discovered that you can pre-set Sov professions, so that's the plan...

I'll probably borrow some concepts from a few other mods for the level upgrade traits, with appropriate balance tweaks.  Something along the lines of a Mage, but the Summons will be more undead-oriented.  This profssion will a little different from a 'regular' Necromancer I think.

Anyways, this will be a 'pre-built' Sov.  The Banshee 'race' Sov ability thing might come along at some point, but for now I'm good with her being a unique leader for the Empire Of The Dead.  The Undead city-building model is an appropriate fit for such a Sov.

Being an Ethereal being, well most weapons and equipment simpy shouldn't be able to be used (she can't pick them up or wear them 'cuz there's no bones or structure...).  I named her model type type Banshee originally, not realizing that Banshee has been assigned to several weapons, clothing, and armor categories, and I then spent several hours trying to figure out how to NOT ALLOW such equipment to be equipped.  Turned out to be real easy (re-named the model type Banshee2, which 'broke' all of the weapons and armor, not allowing them to be equipped, which is what I wanted).

This particular Banshee has just a bit of a bind to the corporeal plane, so it is only 95% resistant to physical damage.  I plan to keep attack power appropriately low, to balance the defensive abilities.  I am also thinking that Banshee's aren't really team players, so I've incorporated a reduction in Army size into her stats (currently -1, may bump to -2).  Also a -10 empire-wide penalty to unrest sounded about right.  Them Banshee B*****s be crazy!

This is a Sov that can actually function pretty well on it's own in the early game, so I'm thinkiing that it would be appropriate to nerf the starting units as well. Since most other units don't fly, but Banshees do, army stacks just slow them down...

Interesting playtesting story: during some testing, my Banshee Sov singlehandedly took on a troll with a 6 regen, and my attacks would max out at 8 damage, averaging 5-6, while my hit points were slowly dwindling.  I finally had to summon another creature to deliver enough additional damage to whittle down and eventually kill the troll.

Anyways, this Sov will likely need to have some unique equipment (spiritual weapons, etc.) created, since most weapons and armor are off limits, and of course it still will still be able to use accessories.  If I could figure out how to make the Banshee Staff transparent, that'd be cool, but I have no idea how to do that... I recolored it at least so it isn't so 'glaring'.

Watching the Banshee float and orbit around ingame is fun!

See what happens when I get sidetracked?

(End Original Post, 2nd Post begins)

I was thinking that, due to a 'normal' Banshee's regular ingame speed (4), that mounts were probably off limits as well.  As mounts are accessories, I might have to figure out how to 'fill' the mount.  I did notice, when looking over the code for 1.6, that some of Heavenfall's background stats seem to have crept into the game (is undead, is immortal, etc.), and I remember Heavenfall having a tag for 'is mounted'.  Where the Banshee2 'model' doesn't exist (the meshes are assigned separately from model type), well mounts aren't assigned to that model currently, so that may solve part of the problem.  At least, with my monster champions (Sirius The Ice Wolf, Ice Golem Zero, etc.), I've not been able to assign mounts to them, and I'd imagine that a Banshee2 would be the same (haven't tried equipping a mount yet, been focused on getting powers working ingame).

As for her hovering, the Banshee animation pack does that.  She bobs about even in the Sov selection, shop, etc. windows, and does the whirling dervish thing on the map.  Pretty cool, huh!

Balancing will be the big thing to consider (lots of physical damage resistance needs to be balanced for, with consideration of not making her TOO weak should other attacks be employed), which is why I'm thinking along the lines of smaller armies, slower production rates, slower growth, etc.

I'm also thinking along the lines of ensuring that more creatures have non-physical damage adders (fire, etc.), so that they aren't as big of pushovers for this particular Banshee.  Such as putting more interesting weapons and armor in the  hands of bandit leaders and such... certainly 1 point of damage a turn is better than 0 damage, but there need to be some 'surprises' out there... Yeah, this won't be a 'simple' mod...

I suppose the 'more interesting creatures/monster enemies' could be it's own mod, as a Bandit Archer packing an Ignys Bow would be a fun new twist for someone looking to spice things up in Elemental!  See, THIS is how I get sidetracked from being sidetracked!

Specifically, if I get as far as creating regular Banshee 'units', I'm figuring that those will use up a LOT of population, so you just don't build them willy nilly.  I could also restrict 'true' Banshees via the Summoning parameter (i.e. you can have one active Banshee summons at a time).  Hmmm, I wonder if you could have the Banshee summons maintenance cost population instead of mana...

I started work on the Banshee Mage profession tree, and I have Necromancy Revamped handy for some ideas.  I'm thinking that some of the Banshee's powers will be similar to the Spectre that is included in the Necromancy mod , although the Banshee tree will be closer to the Mage tree I think (Banshees are ghosts, not liches).  I really liked the 'charge through enemies and steal lifeforce' that is part of the Necromancy mod, but I dialed it down a bit in my testing. I'm planning on this one (Death Flight) to be one of the pickable traits as the Banshee Mage levels up.

This mod will certainly require DLC04, and parts of Necromancy Revamped (wouldn't feel right just 'stealing' from that mod).  I need to look at Improved Undead again to see what's there, and this may be a fun excuse to tie a couple of mods together (with the appropriate credits/mod links, of course!).

I also learned a new thing... [calc] can only handle two paramaters at a time.  I was trying # of shards + caster level + a number in the same line, yeah that didn't work.  It took a few hours of 'change code/reload game/find a battle/nope didn't work' to notice/figure out why calc 1, calc2, and calc3 are used in some spells... it's that only 2 variables at a time thing!  I haven't spent a lot of time making spells up to this pont, so this was new information to me!

Here's an ingame shot, showing an our Banshee Sov in motion as her stack await orders (note that the maximum stack size is only 4):

Quick update:

Plugging away at the Path Of The Banshee tree.  The tree itself a jumble right now, as I hammer away at the .xml, but here is the relevant artwork:

I did these as well for the 'Path Picker', in the interest of completeness, should someone want to 'flesh out' (pun intended) other career options for a Banshee at some point in the future.

The '25% XP bonus' trait pic WILL NOT be part of the Banshee Mage's trait picks.  It will be replaced with some special ability (Death Flight or some such).  She can handle herself pretty well on the battlefield, so the XP bonus is overkill.

I also replaced the Ice Elemental summons with Risen Brood, and am thinking of replacing the Air and Earth Elemental with a 'normal' Banshee and a Spectre.  Not sure what to replace the Grave Elemental with.  His name has Grave in it, so that makes him undead, right?  So he may stay just because.

There area  couple of other Summons to pick from.  Skeletons and Skeleton Hordes are already added, and I'll probably add in the Zombies from Necromancy Revamped as well (makes sense, as they aren't at all overpowering).  I'm thinking that Liches are the Necromancer's baby, not a Banshee thing.  As I envision this, the Banshee Mage was a 'regular' Mage in her former life, so her career path should feel a lot like a regular Mage.

I'm not planning on going overboard with the Mage Tree (i.e. lots and lots of traits), as this is a 'specialty' Sov to begin with.  Plus, I don't want a Banshee Mage overshadowing a regular Mage or a Necromancer... the innate abilities make her pretty cool and useful to begin with.

Hey, you should check out the Shadows in Children of Storm. I've included transparent textures and models for almost all the armor pieces in the game. You could use those to allow this lady to wear armor.

Really interesting that you're putting together a 'path of the Banshee' tree. However, will it be generic enough such that any hero could take it?

Food for thought...

I am not one for unit mods, etc.  I have just moved to trying Children of Storm and am impressed with that, but still have my old reluctance.  Things like this make me seriously rethink that reluctance. This is really great looking art work.  It is not the kind of sovereign I would normally play, but this would tempt me greatly.  Wow, what a look and concept.

Thanks Heavenfall!

I did look through CoS, but wasn't thinking about transparent textures at the time.

If I get as far as creating more 'spirit professions', I'll keep those in mind.

Still looking for transparent weapons, though... was creating transparent meshes for your mod an easy thing to do?

GFirefly,

I've tied the BansheeMage profession to the Banshee trait, via a prereq.  So it won't appear unless you have chosen said trait.  Note: currently I haven't made that trait available for Sovereign customization, but that could be done at some point.  Lots of balance issues to work out first. Currently this Sov has her profession choice 'hardcoded', so she doesn't get the option to pick a profession in the first place, but of course that could change at some point.

The other issue would be how to 'disable' the normal professions in the picker, so that there aren't a bunch of 'duplicate' professions cluttering up the window.  Also, in keeping with the 'ethereal' theme, well physical attack bonuses aren't as appropriate.  In my mind, Banshees launch cold based attacks, not attack_pierce based ones.  Which reminds me, I'll need to look at the General trait(s) that adds to attack_pierce, and see if I can substitute something else for it...

However, BansheeMage is too long word wise for the profession button, so I'll need to give it a different shown name...

Hmmm... restricting and replacing traits.  That's an interesting concept!  You could theoretically redo an entire profession tree using that method if it worked!  The profession panel artwork would remain the same though...

Also, I did a quick search of the 'vanilla' undead included in E:LH, and came up with a few cool and interesting types to summon.  For example, a Cindercorpse, which perhaps could have it's summong level tied to both the number of death shards and the number of fire shards...  This would be another way to make a Banshee Mage somewhat unique from other Mages, Summoners, etc..

When I get far enough along, I'll be hitting you up for some balance tweaks btw!  You seem to have a good feel for such things.

erischild,

Thank you for complementing my photochop skills.  Most of the other profession mods do this as well (create artwork to the same standard as the game art), which they also deserve Kudos for.  In fact, I did it the 'easy way' via cut and paste, while say Path Of The Ranger created appropriately E:LH themed artwork.  Necromancy Revamped has artwork along these same lines as well, with Green icons for the Necromancer Profession.

I've already decided to make sure this can be a 'standalone' as well as something to be included in other mods (such as Necromancy Revamped!), so if someone just wants to play a Banshee Mage, with no other significant changes to their game experience, they can.

tjashen, I did the transparent files with a couple of php scripts. Here they are if you're interested:

1: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8BxYVMez

2: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=sFufHrfe 

3: http://pastebin.com/E9G0NvAQ 

4: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=pqRUzQQM 

The broad strokes are to use havok content tools in batch. Export the relevant .hkb files (based on gameitemtype.xml information?) to XML. Set up havok config files (.hko). Open the XML files and replace all textures to "trans". Import the XML back to .hkb using havok content tools and the config file set up earlier.

There are probably quite a lot of details in that ugly mess, but in my defense I did make them to run only once.

Thanks Heavenfall!  Might be above my ability to figure that out, but when the time comes, I'll be glad to give it a shot.

Still plugging away.  It's the load/test thing to make sure I have everything right that takes up a lot of time...

Note the Grave Chill ability above.  This is one of several reworks of a Necromancy Revamped trait, to make it more appropriate to this Sovereign.  The Banshee's abilities need to be balanced/have downsides, so in this case I replaced the Mana requirement with a Hit Point requirement.  As the Banshee gains HP through leveling, this will add to the attack power, but it also becomes less powerful as the Banshee is damaged...  Of course, cooldown on this will be at least 5-8 turns...

Since this Banshee retains hit points fairly well in normal (physical combat) situations, I'm thinking that investing physically into some of her abilities will help whittle down those hit points a little faster.

So far the only 'life drain to heal' trait I've assigned to her is Death Flight.  I've noticed that the AI has gotten better at not conveniently lining up units, and I also reduced the range to 4 (Necromancy Revamped has a range of 7 for a similar ability).

I'm also looking at disabling/reducing normal healing, so that the Banshee doesn't recover her hit points too quickly.  Specifically, if I can work out how to disallow (life) healing magic to be used on this Sov (other mods have done this), that makes sense to me.  Feeding off of allies and such I'm thinking is still a valid approach to hit point recovery, of course!  THIS is why armies/units shy away from a Banshee Sov - they might become lunch someday!

I'm also DEFINITELY planning on nixing the other starting units.  This will 'force' the starting city to build a defender rather than having one readily available at game start.  This will mean that this Banshee Sov is on her own at game start, which actually works out rather well.

Looks cool so far! I struggled a lot with making Banshee units balanced when I had them as one of the trainable units in NR. Ultimately I ended up scrapping them and replacing them with the Spectre units. That also gave me the opportunity to sprinkle in some of those unique abilities they have.

Having her not start with guard units is an interesting concept. The main complaint that I got was that the damage resistance was too much, and that the slow travel speed ended up just being frustrating.

Maybe you could make a 'materialize' spell or ability. Since she's a Sovereign, she could materialize, which would allow her to use some of her abilities, but also make her (more) vulnerable to physical attacks.

Feel free to borrow stuff from NR if you need to (like the death flight ability)! I'm okay with sharing as long as credit is given (not that I could really stop anything anyways, but this community is awesome so I never worry about it)! Also if you have any suggestions for NR since you're going through it in detail, please let me know! My latest update has been lagging because I can't get a spell concept to work that I wanted to add, and that always saps my motivation. I've also been meaning to add some custom heroes that have the Necromancer class.

Dhuran!

I was planning on asking if you'd want to include her as a Sov choice in your mod, once I wrapped things up.  And DAMN STRAIGHT I'm crediting you!  Necromancy Revamped was the first place I went looking for ideas, once I was majorly sidetracked down this path.  Someday I'll get my other mods done...

I KNOW what you mean on how hard a unit like this would be to balance.  Really, one on a battlefield is enough, any more is overkill!

I'm finding the 'using HP to invoke a few special abilities' thing is a good plan, and since those abilities encourage close-quarter combat, well it makes for some interesting battles.  HP management is interesting...

The 'good'(?) news is that if you get cocky, you can still lose.  In my playtesting of the abilities I've assigned to her just now, I made the mistake of having the Banshee Sov take on a couple of fire shrills and an earth shrill on her own.  Well, 'stock' Banshees (and this Sov) don't initially have fire defense, so I died to the three shrills in short order!  Limiting Death Flight to 4 keeps her within striking distance of her foes, so it's a short lived thrill... those 1  HP (occasionally more, note it is a 95% resistance) hits can add up fairly quickly...

This is where sprinkling low powered magic weapons amongst the starting monsters will help keep things challenging.

I just assigned a 25% XP penalty, as the early game can be somewhat of cakewalk for the Banshee, along with a -1 to Mana Regen, and a 1 HP/Turn heal rate.  The interesting challenge will be to adequately balance the early game, without making the Banshee too weak to compete in the later game, yet still leaving her feeling like the Banshee we all know and hate...

I would be happy to include this in NR, if that's what you want to do (in which case you would be getting full credit)!

Looks like you're putting a lot of hard work into this. If you need someone to bounce ideas off of, or want to brainstorm, I'm here! 

Dhuran,

I'm somewhat close to getting this ready for beta testing.  I just need to finish up the Banshee Mage tree and do some .xml cleanup.  Then I plan to hit both you and GFireflyE up for some testing, to see if we can fine tune this adequately.

On another note, I have another one of my very simple mods that I hadn't gotten around to posting yet (I've been playing around with some increased move values).  It's time to put that one out into the wild...

What prereq tag are you using, I never could manage to hide a Path choice ?

For hardcoding a Path to a specific trait (in this case, PathOfTheBanshee), I simply added this to the PathOfTheBanshee ability code, in the usual spot for prereqs.

Note that Blood_Banshee is Ability I created to define what abilities all Banshees should have.  You could do Blood_Tarth or whatever, or I'd imagine any other ability could theoretically be a prereq I'm sure.  Note that I haven't tried to have the BansheeMage tree appear in the Path chooser window as of yet.  As I have BansheeMage hardcoded into my Sov's unit file, this hasn't been an issue.  I could run a quick experiment and get back with you...

I did manage (finally) to at least 'gray out' Medic, making it not available for selection, after a lot of experimentation.  I wasn't able/haven't figured out how to hide that trait completely though in the 'General Trait picker' window, however...

Funny that you should ask about that... I've been trying for a while now to create Path Picker for the Custom Sovereign Creation Window...

My Custom Sovereign Creation Path Picker Mod and Related Info thread.

Hey Again Abob!

So, since you distracted me from my task, I tried restricting Mage using the tag above.  No dice.

I also 'inserted' BansheeMage into the CoreAbilities.xml, and placed it before other Path listings (so it would appear first).  The Blood prereq is not functioning in that window, so 'regular' people can still pick it.

Also, the 'lack of a scroll wheel' reared it's ugly head again, so in order to see more than 5 classes I'd need to change the appropriate .dxpack (mentioned in the Ranger Mod, and also Primal has something for this).  My mouse has up and down buttons, but no scroll wheel, so I'm S.O.L.

However, I was able to insert the BansheeMage into the mod I just mentioned above, and it appears there.  Doesn't gray out the other Mage choice in that window, however.

SOOOOO, it looks like I'll have to stay with hardcoding, and or look at throwing a bunch of prereqs on the existing Mage tree, so that Regular Mages see trait A while Spirit Mages see trait B.  The General trait tree is notoriously stubborn about 'removing' things - I haven't tried this with the Path trees yet.  But this is sidedtracking me.

The short form: I'll be posting the files for the above mentioned Sov Path Picker mod once I clean some things up and move the relevant code to a 'clean' CoreAbilities file (I'm using the 2xMove file currently), then I can get back to this.  It looks like this will be a hardcoded profession for this one Sov for now (I'm good with that, that was the original intent).  I'll leave the 'substituting paths' question (short of swapping out the CoreAbilities file path code constantly) to more experienced modders for now...

Yeah I found pretty much the same thing when I tried this ages ago hence my curiosity.

I was looking at creating something like a "Henchmen" path, that would only be availability to Henchmen.  Easy enough to hard code the Henchmen to only get that path (as you have done with the Banshee) but unfortuantely it makes the Henchmen path avaialble to everyone, which is what I was trying to avoid... never could find a way to hide it unfortunately.

Hey Again Abob!

OK, so I checked to see if my Path was appearing.  I deleted Assassin temporarily, and sure enough, Spirit Mage showed up in the #5 slot.

I tried a few things (delete Unit_Level, delete Unit_Level_Path, etc.), but nothing seemed to work.

HOWEVER, I did hit on something, in my quest to remove the choice of First Aid for Banshees.  Using the Ability Prereq, and the Allegiance Prereq, I knocked First Aid off of the General tree for Empire.  I tried creating a 'Banshee' Allegiance but the game just laughed at me.  So right now Empire doesn't get the First Aid choice (for the purpose of my testing), and only Banshees get the 'special banshee choice' on the trait tree; Kingdom and Empire won't even see the Banshee's choices.  (I'll give Empire first aid back, don't worry...)

SOOOOOO, one thing you could do is to wipe one trait tree clean, by that I mean assigning prereq tags to all of the traits on that tree, that everyone BUT your henchman would have.  You could go through the units file and add the tag to every other unit in there EXCEPT your henchmen.  Since Generic Sovereign is used as the template for custom Sovereign creation, that tag <selectedabilitybonusoption>NotHenchman</selectedabilitybonusoption>, anyone creating custom Sovs after they've installed your mod would automatically have the tag 'embedded', and the Vanilla Sovs would have the tag too, assuming that you included a coreunits file in your mod...

This would mean that, say if you chose the Warrior Tree, that when everyone else sees the Warrior tree, they would see the normal Warrior Tree, but your Henchmen would see a completely different tree structure, as they have the special Henchman tag but don't have the NotHenchman tag.

RestrictedAbilityBonusOption will 'grey out' tree choices for your henchmen, but they aren't removed from the tree.  So if anything is placed on top of them, well they shift to another location on the tree.  So that could look messy...

Short of adding a tag to every other champion or Sov, I'm not seeing an easy way to do that.  Tech_Henchman or something like that as your prereq for your henchmen abilities will ensure that only henchmen see those abilities.

The 'easier but clunky' option would be to create a 'barren' profession with no bonuses, with some big note on the window saying 'DON'T PICK ME!  However, that would be the Path that your henchmen use, and since they have Tech_Henchman or Blood_Henchman or whatever you want to use as the prereq, that particular tree would populate just for them!

Hopefully she looks intimidating enough to prevent people from picking this option...

I suppose if a player accidentally picked the 'blank' window, that they could always load the last autosave...

You could also assign massive negative penalties for picking this window (say -100% to experience), and then assign a full offset to another trait that your henchmen just happen to have.  Said trait contains all of their usual bonuses plus the offset.

The window could change to this if you clicked on it...

At this point, if they click 'choose this path', well they deserve the -100% experience!

Of course, it would be better if we could just hide the profession in the first place!  Ahhh, the joys of workarounds in Elemental!

I dont' think you can prevent someone from getting experience. I tried it with Children of Storm but they kept getting experience. We have the experience multiplier stat, but if that is set to negative numbers it roofs it to 0. So you can prevent someone from gaining bonus experience, but not from gaining any experience. I may be wrong though.

Yep this.

And some dang buttons so something so we can see the paths beyond 5 without using the mouse wheel.

Or at least a scroll bar!  I've beaten up Stardock a few times about the lack of a mouse wheel workaround.  Specifically, it's a friggin' pain for me to design tiles, 'cuz i can't zoom in to see if I have 'gaps' in my structure.  I've been 'asking' for a keyboard button option (page up/down, or whatever) since EWOM.  My marble mouse is highly useful, great for painting in photoshop, and most importantly doesn't cause pain to my wrists after mousing for hours.  I don't miss dragging a mouse across the table AT ALL!

And it has a scroll up and scroll down button that USUALLY works in browsers and such, so it isn't like I don't have scroll functionality

But I digress...

The Sythe of the Void has a -100% to experience.  That works, right?

        <GameModifier>
            <ModType>Unit</ModType>
            <Attribute>AdjustUnitStat</Attribute>
            <StrVal>UnitStat_ExpBonus</StrVal>
            <Value>-100</Value>
        </GameModifier>

THAT's the modifier I was thinking of when I put together that little warning label in my last post.  The POINT was to deter people from clicking it, so even if they had bonuses to offset the -100 to experience penalty, well they'd STILL see a blank trait tree... and would just end up picking General traits instead.  Or just load an earlier game state (autosave, etc). to correct their mistake.

Back on topic, creating a normally 'blank' Path pick is easy.  The problem creeps in when people want to use their own artwork for their own particular 'hidden' class, which is OK until the second unique Path mod comes along that also has it's own unique artwork.  The path artwork tag doesn't call out a separate path for a button. The game adds button and highlight to the base filename in the background, hence why the four images for a class all have almost the same names, with highlight and button added for three of the four images.

So, while it's more work, I still think that finding some universal tags for MOST applications, yet that can be renamed for unique classes, is the way to go.  This way, You can have say Warrior Tree Kingdom, Warrior Tree Empire, and Warrior Tree (Unique Name).

The tags I see that are assigned to a LOT of things are creature tags, Allegiance, Race, Alignment, and Faction.  As for which of those can be used for prereqs, Allegiance is used, other tags I've not noticed any instances of as of yet.  I may need to go back into the EWOM code and do some quick research, to see if there were more subcategories back then, and if any of them might still be working in the current code.

Oh, and Tech Trees.  We used to have multiple tech trees, and theoretically we could still create new ones if we wanted to.  Tech Trees aren't normally assigned to units, though... just races.  Prereq: Tech Tree Amarian would cover all the races currently, but if you could assign Tech Tree Amarian2 to Henchmen and other unique creatures... Not sure if that works as a prereq tag though...

Afaik no.

OK, in my quest to eliminate Medic/First Aid for Banshee Sovs, but not from other factions, I DID manage to get the Allegiance: Banshee prereq to work!  This also has the side effect of creating a new Allegiance category, in case you wanted to create some Specific champions for that new Allegiance category.

Other champions will appear if the game can't find enough champs sharing your allegience, but at that point it's a random mix between Kingdom & Empire.

Not sure how this'll affect diplomacy yet, but assuming no major issues, this opens the door for 'clearing' existing Paths and rebuilding that path with specific traits for your new faction!

Besides, being tormented souls, Banshees hate everyone...  Diplomacy? Yeah right!

This might also be a good excuse to differentiate the Kingdom Mage Tree and the Empire Mage Tree a bit further, as well as other Path trees if someone is feeling the need.  So far, there are only minor summoning differerences, eg. Wisps and Lightbringers vs Skellies, and perhaps one or two others that I saw.

The reason I bring the 'modifying/repurposing existing Path trees' is twofold.  One, if I assign the Mage tree to my Banshee, instead of creating a new path, well that's less clutter (I'll miss the pretty path button artwork, though!).  Two, this might give Abob another way to implement his henchman tree.  He could assign his Henchman abilities to say the Warrior tree, replacing a few of the Warrior traits with Henchman traits as appropriate.  Then assign Allegiance: Henchman to his henchman champions.

Of course, I still need to test to see if Champion Allegiance defaults to the Sov's allegiance or not.  If it does, that could complicate things r.e. trying to isolate/repurpose a path (not in my case, but food for though).

The good news is that you can assign Prereq>Allegiance>Kingdom (Empire) without having to modify the CoreAbilities.xml file in the core folder.  Here's an example of what I did to 'Flag' Medic, this is included in one of the .xml files in my Mods folder:

Note that this means that I'll need to create a MedicFallen ability, with the 'Fallen' Prereq...

I'm also planning on modifying general trait that adds +3 to attack for my Banshee (I want to convert that to attack_cold).

HOWEVER, you'd probably want to create similar abilities for the other side of the equation, once you've assigned an ability to Kingdom or Empire, hence taking it away from the 'other side'.

The Scythe of the Void works as intended. I have a sovereign which I use for playtesting purposes that has the sword equipped and I can guarantee that he never gains any experience, unlike the other units in his army.