oh yes. we never intended to limit the amount of spend influence. You can spend as much or less as you want. As in this case spending more influence actually feels right, because you will get a much higher rate of success. Than compared to the 4 hits in the standard version. And for people who dont have much influence they can still try to get a neutral cheaper unit. All the unpaid units (e.g 3 neutral, spend 2 influence) will first get an auto- fail, starting with giants. And that single biggies still "hurt" a bit to get, we put the +2 ratio. So mostly people spend like 4++ influence if they try to get a single giant or dragon..

I like your idea. As i am also trying to change the in-game diplomacy rule. Specially in the fate-deck there are only 4 success-diplomacy cards. I am not quite sure what the aim was with that, but this makes diplomacy pretty uninteresting, as an oportunity, it feels more like buying a lottery ticket. I am not sure if the aim is to not get a lot of allied units, and therefore you have to fight more against neutral units. We however, prefer to have those units allied with us and battle with them. So we changed it as following: Diplomacy symbol: gold / silver = success; red = fail (all together 12 / 16) 1. draw fate cards according to your spent influence; 2. now you have to distribute all drawn cards to the neutral units; therefore we had two methods: a) freely, but the amount of cards have to be balanced as much as possible; so u couldnt just give A 3 fate cards and B 1 fate card; they both have to be 2 /2 b) distribute according to their order as printed on the neutral units sheet; where "success" is distributed to sorcerers first and than up; and "fail" is distribute to giants first, and than downwards so u might get sth like this: drawn 4 cards, 3 neutral units, sorcerer, beastman, dragon order: sorcerer, beastman, dragon cards: s sf f 3. Outcome: a) if s > f; unit allies b) if s = f; neutral unit retreats c) if f > s, you have to retreat or fight d) if there is no fate card applied to a unit, it counts as fail; this fail has to be applied first, before any other cards; e.g 2 sorcerers, 2 beastman, dragon; but u can only spend 4 influence; so the dragon will get an auto fail; the other 4 cards will be distributed as stated above. e) we also had a variant for this outcome; dragons & giants need a +2 fail / ratio in order to succeed. e.g ss sssf etc; whereas ssf will still be enough to ally with other units, but not for dragons & giants >> if you have to retreat / fight; allied untis will go / fight with you >> if neutral units retreat; allied units will stay with you >> as for the example above: you ally with the sorcerer the beastman will retreat the dragon forces you + sorcerer to either fight or retreat