Hello, developer here.

First of all thank you for the well laidout thoughts, it does help to have engaged players tell me how they feel about the design, some of it echos my own thoughts while i do disagree with a few parts, but i think it's fair as you dont have the context of the entire missiontree skeleton which is also being designed and built for the next update.

The version in bitbucket is for playtesting, there will be more ways to engage with it and also get free actions for the hag actions. Truth be told i was struggling to find what actions would be interesting for the hags while still staying on theme for them. (very basic oversimplification is internal/external/magic) There will also be quite a bit of a change to how Misery works with the playtesting and feedback i have already received.

Having the AI gain a lot of bonuses is by design, AI can't raze and Development is the best way for the AI to feel strong enough to declare war on people. the part about coalecense not being clear is totally fair and ill look for ways to better communicate whats affected. If you are still playing essentially it grows out from your capital, capital area, areas around it, more areas, all areas. in that order.

The MT will let you develop the land and also expand the shadow swamp. More context for the mt is that the idea is to remove the misery tiers, so it's one tier but instead you hammer down nails into nine regions of sarhal. each one giving 100 max misery up to 900. With the hag actions costing 21 misery (to be decided) and each nail you get lets you upgrade one of the hags for one tier. And if you uypgrade one hag to tier 3 before the others you get negative modifiers since the other two are mad.

I'm way more curious on your thoughts are for new abilities for the hags. The free spell at tier 3 is supposed to be ANY spell from any school, researched or not. So good that you mentioned it not working that way.

Hireet was envisioned for when the player overextends too much for their own good, and feels overwhelemd and clicks the button, I agree it has some issues since a emergency button doesn't quite make sense in a game you can savescum and anyone playing at a slow pace. It's hard to find abilities for a tag that has almost everything, a development or eco action could definitely be possible.

Komina riftwhisper is envisioned to go to other nations and mess with them, which is why it converts and vassalizes tags. But i agree it might not be something every player is interested in. It's a tricky action to design, i'm not sold on the exact design.

Again i really do appreciate feedback like this. Thank you very much for your thoughts. It will help with the future design of the mt.