Well, I made a run at modding 1.09 despite the impending 1.1 beta. Here's the changes I made, I like them, maybe other modders will want to use them to.
1. More than one Summonable of a kind at a time
I tried two ways. If you change it from duration: indefinite to duration:instant, you can whistle up as big a horde as you want. Fun for a few minutes, but not real challenging, and takes away the importance of your "civilized" units. It's a simple -1 to a 0 in the xml.
The second way is more work intensive, but probably better. Make copies of the spell, to the number of the critters you want as the max summonable of that critter. For me, as a base, I did 3. So, I had Summon Imp 1, 2, and 3. I had them all in the same spell level, but you could make the spells different from each other this way, as in it gets easier to cast at a higher level or something.
2. Rebalanced the spells towards later game power
Simple changing of the spell levels. I put the big guns no sooner than tech 5, stretched most summons to after lvl 5 and some after level 10. To compensate, you start with one ranged attack spell.
3. More area attack spells
I don't feel I did this well, as I didn't figure out how to portray multiple shots fired at once of the spell, but whatever. This is just changing the radius of spells from 0 to some other integer. I think my favorite is "Fire Storm"-which is Inferno with 1.5 times the base damage and a radius of 3(!). "What a lovely parade of units you have... Let's see how well they burn..." lol.
4. Beefed up farms
4 food is nice and all, but 10 is nicer. Makes it so you can have your one big city or several smaller towns, instead of one small town or several villages.
5. Spellbooks are more expensive and summoning is available
Instead of cost 3 for most or cost 5 for enchant, I made it a cost 12 across the board. I also put the summoning spellbook back in, which is another simple 0 to a 1 change.
6. Some stuff I couldn't tell if it worked
I changed the city bonus spells from plus resources to resource multipliers. Instead of +1 food, you get 1.1 times(10%) as much.
7. Stuff that didn't work
I couldn't make it possible to choose any weapon within the game for your sovereign's starting equipment. I thought this was too bad, since King Arthur was just a squire with a fancy sword.
I also tried changing the resource frequency of appearance by changing the "rarity" in the xml. I never could decide if low numbers meant more frequent or high numbers, but as Heavenfall said, it looks like we can't mod this right now anyway.
8. Stuff I got ready to do, but decided not to.
Make more spells. I wanted to get it up to 15 spells per book, not including summoning repeats. Making summon spells looks simple anyway, but I could be mistaken.
Make more weapons. You don't NEED a new graphic for every weapon, as long as the idea is there. Some more nechanted swords and such would be nice, but... meh. I'd rather see what they're doing to them rebalance-wise.
I'll mess with it some more once the beta is out(in a few hours, I hope.)
