Mage Commanders

OK, for those of us that feel that the current magical content of the game is a bit lacking, i have the following suggestion: Mage type commanders, with their own spellschool: Evocation (doesn't cast from the city, only mages use these)

First off, Mage units would need tech research to be enabled, you'd have a limit of 5 mages (like the commanders), you'd be limited to 1 mage per army (so 5 armies each with a mage, but not 5 mages in an army). Mages would not have conventional attacks/defence like other troops/commanders, but he would have spells to sling around.

This is where the Evocation spellschool comes in. You get fireballs, lightning bolts, you know that kind of stuff, and the Mage slings those around. At LvL 0 the mage would get 3 spells to sling around, incresing this to 1 spell per 2 skill levels (you get a trainable skill for the mage to increase this, like attack or speed or HP for other commanders) for a total of 8 spells slingable at the opposing army. If the opposing attacking/defending also has a Mage, the 2 take turns slinging, and not to make the mages all offensive, there would be Another tech to research for this unit: Counterspelling. Each time a mage casts a spell, the opposing mages gets a chance to Counterspell (could have 5 tiers of researches here, each one increasing the chance of countering) and if he succeeds he cancels out the spell and/or suffers ome sort of minor backlash from a hasty and ill executd counter (small chance)

Now, to make things interesting, make the first 3 spells in a mages arsenal the above mentioned Evocation, but the remaining 1-5 might well be random offensive spells from spellschools in the city he comes from (like necromancy which summons undead to fight against the army, combat magic to affect a small number of enemy troops negatively, possibly even a fear-type rune spell to scare off a portionof the enemy army)

Now, i see a problem with Level 0 mages being able to kill off a good portion of the enemy with one evocation, so limit the spells he can cast to his own personal level, so he would need to level himself up and gain XP in order to throw around destructive forces(NPCs would also have random-leveld mage units, relevant in level to the specific army size)

Any other suggestions?

Don't forget Diplomatic commanders and Trade commanders!

Isn't that allready planned for futur development?  I like the idea, but I think magic should be well separated from the rest (which it wouldn't be in your proposition since they would need to be in an army)... I cann't think of a way to do that, but I think it would be great if a player could focus entirely on magic instead of standard millitary (like find some way to cloack a city, invoque foul demon to defend your city).

It would prob take place just before the actual combat, as the armies move toward each other on the field of combat, and you'd get a separate MSG with the results, like when you run into a Rune when attacking a city.

and maybe we dont need another scool we could shust update blights or make adv.blights