Did some more playing. so far I have noticed that:
- the dark empire and the dark are hostile to one another, BUT dark combat support from heroes joining the DE applies to both the dark (tentacles) and the dark empire, while the dark empire is forced to battle the tentacles (despite being allied)
- the tentacles can only raze and drive back, since they cannot move and you need a movement point to attack
- you can just stack inordinate amounts of evidence via level 1 blood magic. if you are extra spicy, go up to blood 2 and thus double the effect of the disruption power
- in fact, talking about blood and evidence, if you make a single deep one city you can then begin converting minor settlements into deep ones after getting a special item from it, which you can mask via just using something like the web of hate or lies or whatever you wish, which then causes that to have more menace than the actual deep ones have, so they always succeed
- heroes do not know what to do if the nearby universities are raided and thus non functional, so everyone keeps investigating evidence but not reasearching it
- heroes joining the DE at 100% darkness is honestly kinda neat, especially after you kick start the magical arms race
- web of hate and web of guilt allow you to basically any evidence anywhere you want with barely any consequence, as well as directly creating the things that will make them active (since they drop evidence at their own location, thus making people either enshadowed or giving them a reason to hate them)
- the charity blood effect should either make the ruler give you 50% of the gold or scale with the blood level. 20 for that amount of menace is not really a good trade
- orcs are still incredibly hard to actually capture without either leveling up your warlord or giving them items and minions
- universities barely if ever get repaired, since they have a flat 50 motivation that is then divided by turns needed to do it, making no one really care
- messengers still appear from aware locations even if they are enshadowed. they should either stop spawning or have some sort of subversive effect like increasing shadow or like for shadow at the same time as spreading awareness (since awareness can be a boon for say, joining the dark empire)
- I have yet to see a single defensive mechanism vs blood magic, as researching magic related stuff does not actually seem to create any kind of thing like wards or inquisitors etc.
- slaughtering inquisitors creates neither menace nor evidence
- it does not appear as if being a deep one or liking deep ones does anything except somewhat reduce likelyhood of going against deep ones; aside from making them more likely to join the dark empire
- deep one rulers die when their city gets drowned via 100% maturation, making me question why I turn them into deep ones in the first place
- there is no way to scroll down if you have armies crowding everything else out
- messengers are in the recruit able units list. trying to recruit them does nothing except take away your recruitment point (they are recruit able due to being fully enshadowed, stemming from enshadowed locations)
- messengers have family trees and clog up the relations trees, even after they die
- the "final battle has begun" or "can begin" message appears every single turn
those are the things that come to mind right now. I am gonna attach a screenshot to show some of the absurdity (not derogatory, more like it is funny, though it definitely needs to be fixed). I am playing on version 2 as a side note (aka the one that was updated less than 24 hours ago)