Dragon rebuild

This is more of a war thought for dragons, and I admit it would need some trial and error math on cost and health to be done.

You have just released a giant fire breathing viscous man eating snarling beast onto the battle field, that could and probably would bite both sides.

So I was thinking making them more like a ritual, where you only have so long to launch it and it eventually gets bored and wanders off.

Instead of the dragon just having a flat effect like -10% BE, it could have an on tick effect, like attacking a random army which is currently not home either from or against the affected kingdom. Like a ritual the amount of resources put into the dragon could make the effect better for the person funding the dragon. Not funding it at all would have the kingdom you sent it against with a small, like 25% chance to have one of their armies attacked and a 75% chance to attack the army of the sending kingdom but with a fully funded dragon having the reverse of a 75% chance of attacking a target kingdom army and a 25% chance of "accidentally" attacking an army of the sending kingdom. It would kill a % of the army and the dragon would then lose health based on the army it attacked.

I also had the thought of diversifying the cost to include food or soldiers to launch it but that is another thought entirely.

Friendly-fire dragons are a nontstarter.

Your other points are interesting:

1. Scaling effects based on funding level. Cool in concept depending on how it is scaled.

2. Diversifying cost to include soldiers, food, etc. I've always liked this idea. I would favor requiring some minimum of each resource, at least gold and food. Knock down the gold cost 10-20% and require some insane amount of food, like 500 bushels per KD acre or something.

3. Even further refinement: have DURATION depend on food donated, with minimum donation of 100 bushels/KD acre for 48 hours and max duration of the current 120 ticks for, say, 1k bushels/KD acre. Then have STRENGTH scale the same way, with a half strength dragon starting at around 75% of current costs scaling up like rituals to max strength and beyond (and with severely diminished returns on over-funding).

I like this idea, too - I think the friendly fire thing is interesting, but I enjoy chaos and I don't think that would fly with the rest of Utopia.

That being said, I like the idea of diversifying the resources put up to pay for a dragon. You could even make it so that, instead of a color of dragon being predetermined, what you feed it determines its effects - so, for example, more GC results in a steeper income penalty, more soldiers reduces draft/ME, more food eats up food and so forth. I also think it would make food more useful, since it's pretty much a non-factor at most levels nowadays.