Hmm neat idea, the biggest issue I see is the delay in effect application in the early game. You effectively have to build the 4th heritage building if you want any class / non heritage units to get the effects which is a fair bit of potential extra build time to get the effects on some core units.

Still, I'm not saying I don't like the idea, and making the spells empire wide instead of city cast would bring in some interesting gameplay options. Trying to disjunct it to turn off the buffs before a major battle would be a nice option.

I'm not sure about Scales of Fortune though, I really love the crit effect but I'm not sure what else you could do to balance out not needing to maintain neutral for it. Would it be possible to make Dedicated to Neutral an army wide aura maybe? That way if you leave neutral all Hero/Chtonic led armys get the moral hit.

I'm not sure I quite understand.

You plan to change spiritual freedom/embrace darkness into empire upgrades.

Doing so, however, would mean all produced units can only ever get 'dedicated to' by building your final heritage building? This isn't practical - the spells are meant to come out earlier than that.

If so, i really don't like where this is going as the as the poster above says, it would take way too long to get anything 'dedicated to'.

I am not a fan of directly changing anything in the base game as part of an additional content mod, which you want to do. (scales of fortune change confuses me as well - you're completely removing dedicated to neutral? except from 2 unit types)

I sugguest the following:

Remove the application of 'dedicated to' from all of your new traits.
Make the new trait instead mimic the morale penalties for not being the proper alightment.

Allow dedicated to from scales of fortune/embrace darkness/spiritual freedom to negate the morale penalties effect of your new traits.

If the above penalty negation is not possibe to do, then I would honestly prefer it if you only went to the mimicking morale part - no overwritings, so only evil players could use occultists/hags etc without morale penalty, and only good players could use glade maidens, etc (or neturals, with slight morale penalty) - with no possibility to overwrite alightment via spell. I consider this the lesser evil than completely changing the keeper/grey guard/shadowborn spells themselves.

I've got one more thought regarding the alignment issue:

Right now, the dedicated to XXX trait comes from the wolfkin/occultist/dark elf heritage trait, and therefore the entire heritage trait gets overwritten when you cast an alignment spell.

Have you tried separating the two? IE, say the sons of fenrir, spider queen, and other dark side units have dedicated to evil not as a result of the heritage trait, but inherently, so that an alignment overwrite would only affect the 'dedicated to' trait (like with archon dwellings), rather than the entire heritage trait.

The final building in the heritage line could then provide both the heritage trait to all racial units, and dedicated to XXX, but separately, so the alignment spell could overwrite it.

Ok, thank you both for your opinions on this idea, it clearly shows me that this could be a very controversial topic. Luckily I tried another idea that I thought wouldn't work (:P), but it turns out it does in fact, so now I can actually make the mod compatible with the alignment spells without having to touch the original content (and everything will work normal, so you will be able to build dedicated to good dark elves e.g.).