I got a little side-tracked over the past few days. A number of suggestions and concerns about ritual unit costs have come up over the last few months, so I've been gutting and re-building the ritual unit reactions from the ground up.
I've decided to abandon the material components of ceremonial reactions. Instead, I thought - why not, instead of tying ritual units to limited (and often obscure) resources, there was a better way that I could control their influx which also makes a lot more sense from a lore standpoint. From now on, prayers at the temples will sometimes yield a "symbol of (deity)'s favor," which will be the new reagent for transformation ceremonies. Put simply - the more attention you offer to a deity with prayers, the more of that deity's units will be available. Makes sense, right?
Symbols will only be produced by a set of new prayers, all similarly named, which will do nothing but produce symbols at a rate that approaches a constant predicted by the laws of probability. Therefore, if you want to use the temple for prayers for other items, you will need to allocate time on the workshop that could be used for symbol prayers, or build another temple. This also has the neat little side effect of offering some sort of additional incentive to build multiple temples in order to win favor more quickly.
Thoughts?
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Today has been dedicated to cleanup of the ritual tree and, on a more exciting note, some framework for new dwarven mechanical constructs (that can be pastured/penned). I still have quite a bit to do, including but not limited to a few new b_detail_plans, graphics, finishing the abilities for umbrals, and, of course, testing, but it's going smoothly so far.