The motivation for my suggested changes were to keep the Dead from becoming too powerful. It has been widely suggested that one might create an 'OP' custom Dead faction by selecting the 'Death Worship' trait like you suggest. My findings have been, however, that a such faction actually isn't that powerful: The Dead still suffer from the problem of mana starvation, even with 'Corruption' costing just 50 mana instead of my proposed 200. Moreover, a such Dead faction with access to incredible growth rates from a large number of corrupted shards (10+ growth in all cities) in fact isn't that useful simply because you can't develop city infrastructure fast enough to keep up with such growth - both the Catacomb and especially the Necropolis are very expensive structures. so if you focus on building them first in cities to support the massive growth rate you'll miss out on all the more basic improvements which makes a such strategy less powerful than it might seem at first.

That the Dead aren't badly overpowered but in fact still tend towards the slightly weak side even when given the ability to corrupt shards just goes to show how poorly they're balanced currently. So yes, as a temporary personal fix I've replaced the default Dead faction with one that also has Death Worship. That still doesn't mean the DLC faction - which should be playable out of the box - shouldn't be changed, however.

I agree.  Stardock has said that they do update DLC, and the Dead World DLC could use some tweaks as suggested here to really make it shine (er... or really moldy as the Dead like it ).

The problem with that is it still doesn't make them playable on large maps. The Dead's problem is they currently [barely] work only when placed in close proximity to other factions where they can start warring immediately. If you want to introduce a concept like souls they'd at least have to also gain souls from [some] monsters kills. I agree that it would be a shame to have them become similar to the other factions; my solution was simply in trying to find a working system that would require minimal development time from StarDock's side.

Still, even when the Dead can convert shards they still have to play differently than the other factions because even if they can potentially build up an enormous growth rate it can't happen until lots of turns have elapsed. Even with Corruption, they're still a highly aggressive faction that thrives on war.

Since they already get some pop from killing human monsters I was thinking that they would get Souls for that too. Indeed this is not possible to add in by modding, and thus would require more work from Stardock then they usually put into DLC.  [e digicons]:'([/e]

They could have another line of buildings that are unique to their faction that provides mana at easier rates....

Even a simple A_CoreManaRegeneration buff could do the job for the dead.

The issue is not human players - it's more an issue of the AI not playing the Dead well.

having all of the extra pop go to your capitol, means that when it gets full you stop getting any advantage from being aggressive.  having extra pop (growth beyond what the city has room for) go to the rest of your cities would open up more options for playing them.

having the undead settlers cost the same pop as they provide in a new city (3) might help with early expansion (at least for land grabbing), it would also make it easier to use consulates to boost the growth of a town.

having the viable town locations not take into account the presence of food can allow you to colonize a wasteland.  while the enemy can still sack your cities, he can't use them against you (and hopefully has to use resources to take them).  that should help save mana on terraforming spells as well.

having them retain their undead specific assets (such as not using food, or wageless units) when using them for a custom faction would allow you to make a kingdom custom undead (for the life spell that boosts growth).  didn't notice new scroll bar in unit traits window, maybe 2 points is a bit high for the ability though.

if these things were implemented it would make them easier to play, and the under the hood stuff to make these work would make it easier to implement other unique DLC factions.

edit:  well i missed the scroll bar, so the only suggestions left are ones that help the AI as much or more than the player.

I've made a thread on the AI too. Yithril, the Gilden, and sometimes the Altar are generally the best performing factions.

<--- THAT!

doing cheap consulate tricks is a) REALLY boring and constrains your initial tactics, the AI can't do this trick so the dead can be swallowed quite easily. 

the big frustration part of this is that the dead race is a DLC (!!!) which means you have paid extra cash for ONE faction which seems early to mid severely underpowered or severely linear to play and the AI can't handle it, which is a real shame. i hope stardock does some work on that or i will restrain myself from buying future dlc / addons from them if all i get are some features which don't actually work.