I actually respond better to difficult challenges than most. 

I will e-mail you when I need help, but I need to be able to do this. Mater how long it takes. Thanks for the help!

Unfortunately, the same idea cannot be used for items, items don't respect prerequisites for unitstats other than unitlevel. I have a request here for it: https://forums.elementalgame.com/417022/get;3071746

As a modder, you can create custom designs that cannot be altered by the player in-game. The post I linked above was to indicate that the AI would build such units.

Ah ok, that is close enough. I want to restrict it to the player as well, but it is not that important. It is a shame about weapons, hopefully they will see it our way .

I want it where the player cannot design anything in the unit designer. I'll probably be the only person playing the mod so in retrospect there is no reason to really remove it, besides aesthetics.

Although you have a good point, I doubt that a few half finished mods would have improved the modding community. But who knows, maybe someone could use some of it. So if I ever loose interest in any of my (as of yet unstarted) mods, I'll think about releasing them as is, ok?

Well crap. I wrote out a reply to this and somehow I wasn't signed into the forum. 

I intend to release all art assets, useful XML and custom tiles I create. But I won't be releasing all those things combined into the "Jshores uber MasterOfMagicDominions3AgeOfWondersCiv4DarkAgeOfCamelotShadowbaneMagicTheGatheringDungeonsAndDragons mod" that I intend to make.

Basically, I intend to release everything that can be useful to other modders for their mods .

Yeah, that's how I have my stuff planned as well. Keep it modular, revolving around the main game. Then players can pick and choose.

Just another thought for your Gnomes race: why not include halflings and dwarves with the gnomes and make it a littlefolk or something. Since the devs are adding non-champ magic users, you could suit the gnomes for INT, halflings for DEX, and dwarves for STR just as D&D would put them. Just a thought.

Then, obviously, along these lines you could have all the different varieties of elves, too.

I understand that, in D&D they all looked very much different

Today I spent some time building a script to help me with some background stuff. As you know, each faction has a number of unittypes that become available at different times, such as "archer" and "knight". The problem is that these are actually crucial for the AI to function. But they also contain a LOT of data, such as what model to use, what unitstats they have, and how they feel in the morning. In addition, when things change, they change pretty big. For example, when we moved from beta 1 to beta 2, every unit changed its initiative to 20 instead of 10 default. And there were also a myriad of other small changes like that. To make things even worse, I know for a fact that Frogboy is looking to add even more unittypes. As you can imagine by now, the idea of updating a mod based on these pieces of data is starting to sound extremely painful.

So I basically built a script that allows me to select one of the already existing factions, reads in their data, then replaces things that need to change with what I want, then spits it all out again. So rather than having to study miniature changes in every patch, I can just run this script and have a finished setup done in a second.

It also made some funny issues appear. For example, the living stone only have one model for their units, and yet they have different genders (unlike the greenskin that don't have any genders at all). So, that's something that will need adressing since the players should be able to tell a male from a female unit by looking at it.

I think it's something you build up to. I mod because I enjoy bringing "life" to different things. But at some point, I already have a vibrant world to play with. So you start out enjoying modding very much, but playing with it not so much. And when you're done, you don't want to mod more, but play much more.

Here's a 0.1 version of the mod. Only the Angels, Greenskin and the Living Stone are in. It's a massive WIP, but I figure it should be good for a playthrough if anyone's tired of the current beta.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32649007/ExpandedFactions0.1.zip

Factions don't have anything special except their faction bonuses, a couple of unit design traits, and a race mount.

Edit: Just to be clear, the unique units for each faction aren't in.