I definately agree with this, and hope that this is the design direction of the game.

However, even if they decide that anybody can create any unit or research any magic at any time, it will be much harder to have duplicate factions when you take into account the streaming, user-created, content.

I would imagine that when the modding community gets rolling, within months of release, games will have literally hundreds, if not thousands of race choices, spell paths, and unit types.  Players will probably resort to choosing a "favorite" game style, because there will be so many options.  It's unlikely any one player will duplicate what another player has, given all of the choices he will have in front of him.

I think if the designers of Dominions had allowed a nation to produce a conquered enemies' units it would have radically altered the feel of the game despite the huge number of nations and units available.  For example, nations would probably race to conquer Niefelheim or Pythium to get access to frost giants and hydras, respectively and then produce those units exclusively.  So I think they did great on how they handled units since you can never produce anything but your own troops (or indies).  

But since all magic research paths are available, and magic eventually overshadows any national troops, the Dominions endgame is not as interesting as it could have been.  Even with the tons of spells, in the end everyone goes for Tartarians. It is mitigated a little bit by access to magic paths (some nations may not have access to death magic at first).  But eventually any nation can get the pre-requisites to summon Tarts.

Civ felt like that for me as well. Interesting at first, but with an endgame that was undifferentiated and boring.

I think it depends on how it is handled but I'm not in favor of national units only

why ?

because if it follows a little MoM heritage then what will happen

you conquer a dwarven city with your dark elves magician armies and then can produce dark elf units in this dwarven city

bad idea in my book...

what I see possible is that high level units might be restricted by your "home" race, since the dwarf hates dark elves you wouldn't have access to the best dwarf units or you could perhaps raze the city and build a dark elf one

You know, throughout history, conquering armies always absorbed the tech from the defeated foe.  The attempt to assimilate foreign fighters into the conquering army often proved difficult due to difference in language, culture, etc.  This meant that you almost never saw a barbaric warrior fight as a native barbaric warrior in the Roman army for example. It was also difficult to train that barbaric warrior into a modern Roman solder.

What does this all mean?  Armies evolved and changed based in the tech they "earned" by conquering specific enemy armies.  Not sure if it would even be possible but I would like to create new units on the fly based on this principle.  If I play as a mounted elf and I conquer an Ogre horde (or what ever) it would be nice if I could create a new unit from the conquered city that blended aspects of the two cultures.  Just imagine a mounted Ogre Melee unit with an elf crossbow!!

I just realized what the online modding aspect reminds me of, a customizable card game.  Out of the many many cards in one's library, to make a competative deck they had to choose a select few that worked well with each other.  I'm not sure how I feel bout selecting a "deck" before the game begins (although some robust filters will always be nice, maybe favorite lists?).  We'll see what is in mind as time goes on.

This is definately the kind of style I'm wishing for. If you cannot build anything but your national troops, you do get a feeling of strangeness, but if you can build everything your unique style will go to waste and be a meaningless decision. It would certainly be a lot of work to code, I'd think, since there might be a large variety of different races and if all of them get different troops from conquering others, it quickly accumulates to a very high amount. Unless you just make generic troops for conquered races, like "Ogre slave-trooper" that everyone who conquers them gets. Which would be an acceptable compromise to me at least.

I think one should be able to make or take none native units to one level below their max native units without any magic or random benefits in general. Consequently if the unit gets to the max native unit level there should be some negative tradeoffs.

Great point, one I had not put my finger on but I think is part of why I really enjoy games that use branching exlcusive decision paths.  Replayability becomes almost infinite when you have lots of exclusive decisions since there are so many permutations and it will take a long time to figure out what works best, and even then, what works best may just be circumstantial.

But having access to all units and all spells at the end of a game leaves less desire to go back and try something different since all paths lead to the same destination.

I thought that each race had their own unique spellbook. I don't seehow everybody can have access to all spells by the end of the game.

Unless I am mistaken?

In today's thread on the 12 civilizations, Brad said "Each of these factions has its own technology tree and own spell book to make each faction play very very differently."

I suppose there might be some "tech theft" functions, but I'd be surprised if there aren't some things you just can't get unless you're playing a particular faction. Capturing an ogre town and being able to recruit ogre units makes sense to me, but it also makes sense that the channeler from a Land of Sweetness and Light would not be able to even touch a necromancer's spell book, much less learn from it.

I concur wholeheartedly.