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Bug Report: If you cast Raise Noble Army when you already have one around, the message box telling you that the old army is dissolved doesn't go away.  Saving and reloading does work.

Trip report comments: 

There is no way for lightbringers to actively fight an undead lord besides delay.  They pose no almost threat other than that they won't civil war as much.  Granted... delay CAN work, and in fact, did work on me (I forgot about the time limit)... but dying slower than I'd like seems less threatening than the lightbringers of the normal Dark Lord who can get rid of your thralls and purge shadow from the land.

Investigators are ONLY good news to the undead.  It just makes me say "Yay! More wars!"  Never "I hope they don't find me...".  There needs to be something for them to find that's scary to me.

Once you DO have enough corpses, there is no reason not to cast Necropolis on every city you destroy.  It's just a pain to have to do it every time.  Why not make this automatic if there's no reason to ever NOT do it? 

There should be a way to change a corpseheart back into a corpseroot, so that you can move your "front line".

I have an undead noble and a normal undead army that are in lockstep with each other, presumably since they share the same AI and will thus never separate.  Why not let the normal undead just join the noble?

What's the point of making a lord dislike their allies? This doesn't seem to cause actual civil wars or anything...

I think the best way to handle the "too many plots, is too complex" problem is to add stuff back in a tiny bit at a time, and see where the line lies.  I think the world feels a LITTLE sterile with only you having plots, but I can DEFINITELY see that if everyone had plots, there'd be no game left underneath all the madness.  However... what if you added a random personality type, a "schemer", who does have plots just like you do.  They'd be rare, and they could be noticeable-- a special border on their portrait, for instance.  Furthermore, they could have more than one kind of scheme... so some might want the highest throne in the empire, but others might want to push a particular policy, or spread a belief.  You could hitch a ride with some plots that way, but have to fight against others.  Their plots should be visible in their information screen, and if you "watch" them, you can see what efforts they are taking to further that plot.  And if you really wanted, you could always just enthrall the schemer, removing any REALLY inconvenient plots from the game!

Regarding entourages... I like the idea of bonuses and penalties based on who you have in your staff.  (Of course, you should be allowed to fire staff... but there's a risk of doing so if they have any of your secrets)  There may also be a reason yo enthrall a staff member... if you do, you could get some extra "world actions", like subdue populace (or the reverse, cause peasant uprising) for captains, or aid in stone rituals for priests/priestesses, or aid in contagious disease for physicians.  Bolster your area, or weaken an opponent's.  The effects can be strong, because enthralling is so darn expensive in power expended.

Perhaps there should be a mortal incarnation of this Dark One... a necromancer or lich king of some sort that the Lightbringers could expressly find and target, instead of accusing each other of being enthralled?  You'd need to keep him or her hidden for that reason.  Actually, being a lich king/queen could be especially interesting, in that you'd need to make and hide phylacteries that the lightbringers would want to hunt down.

Or, if you want to keep the lose condition simply being a turn-counter, you could make it so that raising undead armies requires a focus of some sort that the lightbringers could find and destroy to destroy your whole army at once.  That'd be a major setback, after all, making the timer a threat.