The old corpses I want to insta-kill when I get around it. They spawn, die, and you butcher the corpse.
The dark crystals/Pylons that control undead are powered by warlocks. If all warlocks die, the pylons dont control the undead anymore. No worries, I got that exploit covered.
I will write this today, I really like the idea. I will make them use a radius that goes through solid rock as well, so pasture a pylon and get a 25-tile radius of control, regardless of line of sight.
Skeleton and Warlock skill learning in workshops will be added as well.
there are not many copied workshops, only basics. The 4 crafters, the pottery, the sawmill, the slaughterhouse. Thats it. All just for crafts and furniture, wood and meat.
I cant do the "tear out soul" thing, but I can certainly remove the soul by using itemcorpses/destroying the corpse. If you cant bring it to the butchers, you wont get any souls. Using fire magic already does that. And something you might not have considered: Reanimating corpses to fight for you also makes their corpses/souls unavailable. So you have to decide between getting free meat shields running around, OR the resources in terms of souls, bones and meat.
mahrgell: Balancing and no-bloat is not on the list, because thats something I do anyway.
Dox: Lovecraft it is.
EDIT: Oh, and about the traps: Warlocks only have the bare mininum. One pump mechanism, one spike, one sawblade. So you can build screw pumps, upright spears/spikes, and sawmills. Thats all they are used for.
In theory I could take the entire mechanic skill set away from them. No siege engines, no mechanisms, no traps. But that would also mean no pumps, no wells, no screw pump, no levers, nothing that requires mechanisms. Thats overkill. If I could only remove traps I would even do it,but I can only remove the entire group of labors.
And my idea of creep-spawning doesnt work. I wanted to cover entire areas with contaminants that help warlocks and hinder invaders, but the damn civ-members and their hardcoded AI... of course they want to clean it. -.-