Well, the common "curse" in Death is Mana Leak, uncommon is Drain Power, both following the them of mana draining.
There are no common city curses mainly because at common tier, players often cannot afford to deal with it. The solution to curses is either eliminating that wizard who casts them which is very hard because Death is strong in the early game, or diplomacy which is not that easy either unless you are specialized in it - you won't have gold to spend on it, and tributing spells is difficult due to the limited research available. The other problem is, even if you solve the problem by eliminating the wizard, you have likely lost enough momentum to lose the game after 10-15 hours of struggling which results in a horrible game experience and one where it's fairly hard to spot the reason for losing the game. So no, curses are not a game mechanic suitable for common tier, even less so because that means a wizard with only 1 Death book has a high chance of being able to cast them.
Chaos common "curses" are basically spells that do low enough damage that they can be safely ignored in 95% of the cases - disabling only one out of the 21 tiles that belong to one of the player's cities is not relevant, and disabling ores are not a real "curse", merely an equalizer mechanic that reduces the chance of good starts. Most players don't have mithril and adamantium so losing any doesn't make you weaker than if you started without them in the first place.
Death does have curses at rare : Drought, Evil presence, Warp Node and now also Drain Power are rares. Chaos only has Chaos Rift at rare. (Magic Vortex is a combat spell. It's not a city curse although it can destroy buildings as a side effect.)
Quote:The problem with reapers favor is that actually make Weakness spell useless. If I can kill the unit why should I cast weakness on it?
I don't think this is any more applicable to Reaper's Favor than to Black Sleep.
Well, I guess the "you cast weakness because it only costs half as much" no longer applies as Reaper is basically free..if it works. But over a 100% chance of disabling a unit, would you pick the 40-70% chance to kill it for free and 30-60% chance of failure and losing 2 Weakness's worth of casting skill?
But I admit I have doubts about Reaper's Favor too.
Let's try something else entirely... the good part in Reaper's Favor is that it hurts normal units, and through that encourages using spells that turn a unit fantastic, similarly to Possession and Blood Lust.
So how about a combat global :
All normal units lose <stats>.
...ok this would be possibly bad if stacked with Black Prayer as it leads to all units having too low attack or defense, becoming useless. So some other way to penalize normal untis?
Amplify Pain
Whenever a normal unit takes damage, it takes 1 more damage. (2 if we add this as an uncommon)
Doesn't sound like a big deal but it adds up significantly if many lesser units fight each other. Death's undead units, skeletons, zombies, etc would be unaffected. Of course it has to be once per "fight" not once per figure or attack type on the unit. Or, it could be 1 damage, but per enemy attack and figure. Attacks successfully blocked by shields wouldn't trigger the effect so on average a 6 figure unit will still deal 4-5 more damage which might be too much?
Mortality
Whenever a normal unit takes damage, it has a 5% chance to die instantly for each point of damage taken, unless it saves at +0.
A variation of the previous idea. Unlike the first, this does allow Life and Sorcery to have their own answer - Resist Magic or Bless, as they both cannot convert units to fantastic and don't have good summons. Nature is fine as it has good summons.
Probably needs to be uncommon - lower tier units have too little health for the spell to be relevant and would die most of the time anyway. However a halberdier tier unit has to go through 12 damage before it dies which is, assuming only the first half is really relevant, a 6*5 = 30% chance to kill the unit unless it resists the spell. Compared to Blood Lust it actually isn't that great - doubled attack strength is way more effective and requires no saves - but that isn't available in battle, and this is, assuming you did have summoned or undead units available. It also works on ranged attacks (Ghouls, shadow demons, undead bowmen) which Blood Lust cannot do but there is a downside of killing your own units if you also had normal units.
A logical flaw is that damage, even if it's a critical hit, should really only kill one figure, not a whole unit, but that would make the spell useless.
Mortality also has combo potential with Wrack, maybe too much, even.
Dull Senses
Whenever a normal unit is attacks or is attacked by a fantastic unit, the Fantastic unit has First Strike and Negate First Strike.
This is probably not that great as it has zero relevance if the units are not melee, and the AI is bad at positioning which is a necessity to be able to take advantage of (or avoid) the first strike effect.
I can't say I'm satisfied with any of these, really. Also, maybe Blood Lust+Possession are already enough to cover the "hurts normal units" theme and a third spell of that kind might be overkill.
The only thing Death has very little of and probably could use more is unit buffs in my opinion, but it's hard to design one for a realm that's so heavily "anti-buffing" at its core that it is all about using lots of weaker, low cost units, and has none of the themes that would work for buffing (defense, offense, mobility, etc.) so then what would the buff do? If we could do something like Chaos, a buff that makes Death more capable of protecting its heroes or just units in general... but Mana Leak covers defense from magic ranged, Fear covers melee, and missile is not really a threat to heroes. Spells would be but spell immunity is Sorcery and also too good for uncommon.
...Do we even need that? Death heroes are fairly capable if equipped with a weapon that has Life Drain charges...