Add me to the legion of people who are not a fan of this idea.

If you want to give the player a 'get out of Sovereign death free card' don't make it random.

There is good random (Map generation) and bad random (Do you loose the game or not).

If you want players to be able to spend character creation points to avoid thier Sovereigns death, let them buy a Contingency spell. 

Contingency: A spell for emergencies, Contingency will teleport the Sovereign, should he die, become stunned, or disabled, to the location chosen when the spell is cast with full health and no active debuffs. Casting cost: 5 Essence.

Sammual

I'm hugely in favor of the Sovereign dies = game over idea. It's very thematic, it makes me the Sovereign, and I don't have to worry about strange questions like why I can pass my worldshakingly mighty and rare powers which are part of my being to some schmuck of a great great grandson whose most impressive quality was previously being married to a rich merchant's daughter or something. As you might guess, I am not the biggest fan of the "descendent = successor" business.

I mean, maybe that can work in the sense that it's game over for you, but your descendents rule little AI splinter kingdoms sans-Sovereignpower, but not as a game-continuing mechanic.

So, how to avoid death?

Hide is a cool option, actually. I don't see it as a mechanic forced in to get around death. It seems to me more like an option to transition between a MoM style of play and an Age of Wonders style, which I like.

Relying on Evade as a primary mode of death-avoidance, though, is a disaster waiting to happen.

Reading through this thread, I saw a lot of good ideas. They can easily be combined.

The Sovereign is a powerful being, almost a force of nature. Even on his luckiest day, Jerry the Serf shouldn't be able to end a Sovereign. Sovereigns should be game-over killed only by high-end spells, powerfully enchanted end-game weapons, and megabeasts like dragons. However, if anything else defeats them in battle, they should be wounded or possibly discorporated in a Sauron-esque manner. Wounds need to be healed, a discorporation would require even more time and also probably mana to come back from. Wound drawbacks probably seem obvious, but discorporations would be even more serious. No siring additional descendents, your ability to research might be impacted (it'd have to be conducted through proxies), and maybe even costs of all magical activities are raises because it'd harder to focus those things when you're also worried about maintaining the integrity of your spirit. That's just me spitballing, though.

However, here's where the evade stuff comes in. Evade can govern whether or not you escape unharmed rather than are wounded, or are wounded instead of discorporated. It might also give you a chance of being discorporated instead of game-over killed. That last bit would just be a "oh please christ please please" because if you've put your sovereign unprotected in the path of that kind of stuff, you've probably already made your game-losing error.

It also could mean that early in the game, there is no feasible way of killing an enemy Sovereign short of tricking him into flipping off a dragon. This also seems rather thematic: people have to gather their power becafore they can remove their enemies.

I don't think anyone wants option (1). The option I'd like is to have a sovereign, if he dies, then you lose him but can keep playing controlling the empire he's built. So it's exactly like (3) except you don't lose for losing one unit.

The main point about hiding/killing the sovereign is AI. If you can target enemy sovereigns better than the ai, then the game will be too easy. If you can't kill them at all becasue they hide and flee to the next city after each city you conquer, then you removed one strategic option from the game, which imo essentially makes the whole killing the sovereign thing useless. The system should be devised in such a way that any player should be able to kill another sovereign if they use enough resources/skills for that, without having to take out their whole kingdom. Evade/hide options don't seem to fit the bill in my opinion.

One of the least forgiving games I've played, Nethack, still has a 100% guaranteed way to avoid death (which in Nethack also deletes your save files and forces you to start over from scratch, so most of the game is about not dying).  It's called the Amulet of Life Saving.  If you're wearing one when you die, the amulet is destroyed and you're returned to perfect health.

A couple points to note:

1. These amulets are really rare.  There's a single one that's guaranteed to appear in the same place (far down in the dungeon) each game; other than that, each item that spawns has a chance of about 0.07% of being an Amulet of Life Saving (or 0.28% in the later dungeon).  To put it another way: the two times I won the game, I don't think I saw more than two or three in the entire game (it's been a while, but I believe it took at least twenty hours of gameplay for me to ascend).  You can also wish for them, but the number of wishes you get is extremely limited, so wishing for more than one is generally wasting wishes you could "spend" on a more powerful item.
   
2. You can only wear one amulet, and amulets in Nethack are some of the most powerful equipment in the game.  As noted in the link above, some players think that it's not worth giving up the amulet slot.  Even if you are willing to do so, it's not uncommon to temporarily switch to another amulet (for instance, a Water Breathing amulet to grab an underwater item), during which time you're not protected from death.
3. Many things in the dungeon will steal or destroy your amulet (as the link above points out, nymphs are a particular nuisance).
4. When the amulet goes off, you are now healthy ... and facing whatever just killed you.  If you died because of some ridiculous bad luck (or a moment of stupidity, like walking into an instadeath trap), then you'll be OK ... but if you died because you were fighting a monster that's stronger than you, you're still fighting a monster that's stronger than you and you'll probably die again!
   

I think that a guaranteed way to save your soverign that was one-shot, ridiculously hard to get, vulnerable to being destroyed or countered, took a valuable item slot, and that didn't actually remove the sovereign from the area would at least potentially work out OK.  It would make death hurt (you just lost the artifact that you put a lot of time, mana, money, and/or essence into) and it wouldn't make it possible to send out the sovereign without thinking (if it teleported home, you'd be able to charge huge armies without worrying about anything besides the cost of the resurrection item ... this way the army could attack you back the next turn).

If I'm in a game and lose my sovereign on a rare percentage I am going to be super pissed off.

On the other hand if I do the opposite to an opponent I'm pretty sure I'll only be feeling a hollow victory. Psychologically, both ways are pretty bad.

If there were an evasion skill it does seem like the idea would be to not buy it so you would be powerful enough not to need it. I'm also kind of wary about the concept of having to feed your sovereign monsters to level him up. It just reminds me of things like Warcraft 3 where your hero's level practically is all that determines victory over another player..Cultivating a hero by feeding him small easy monsters has always seemed pretty gamey and unheroic to me.

If this evade skill does go in I can imagine there will be lots of players in multiplayer that will get tons of it and rush their sovereign in as soon as possible. If it takes out another player or does a lot of damage and wins you can bet you'll probably beat that player, and if you die you don't care since it's so early in the game. I know you can do the same strategy regardless, but this would probably make it worse.

I agree with this.

Likely not hard at all. Every game I've ever seen where death is hardcoded the modders simply have the script intercept the unit before death even happens. So if he went to 0 HP in combat the script would just look immediately fill his health or prevent the damage and then teleport him somewhere.

And why not a trait you could choose at the sovereign creation ? After recieving a fatal blow, your sovereign becomes a ghost. And you need to "call it" lik ein dom 3. Being a ghost you can still cast spells, are immune to physical damages, but your people start being angry about being ruled by a .. ghost.

My quick two cents:

I like the sovereign death = game over concept.

That being said, killing an enemy sovereign (or having mine killed) should probably be as difficult as defeating another player by other means, e.g. a trap or assassination should have a corresponding resources used to percentage success chance (determined by skill, plain old luck, turns and resources used, not as much RNG) as building a large army in order to wipe out his empire. (Though I would guess that there would be fewer resources and more dumb luck involved in a trap attempt)

There also ought to be corresponding ways to discover if an enemy is planning a trap and similar resource-cost counters.

The tough part, I guess, is finding the correct balance and lore-friendly mechanisms for this, but that's what we're paying stardock for

I love the idea of sovereign dead = game loss, Frogboy, but it will be a disaster if there is no contingency or backup plan other than a random evasion roll.  I personally think there should be succession with penalties upon the death of the sovereign if there is a successor available.  It would give so much more depth and character to your children and family tree.  I understand that, by making the sovereign the primary focus that you add a certain level of personal immersion to the game rather than simply being a sort of omnipotent force, but it complicates the balance of the game terribly.

If sovereign death = game over, it will greatly benefit the player and severely penalize the AI.  Essentially what you will have is a moral hazard in which the character will be motivated to use his sovereign more carelessly and level up/ gain rewards faster than the AI's.  When faced with throwing away hours of work upon defeat of their sovereign, the player will invariably decide to load their game.  With this on their mind, the player, conciously or unconciously, will adjust their behavior to take into account this safety net and thereby behave more boldly with their sovereign than the AI (after all, the player gets the rewards without the risk that the AI must face.)  The end effect is that the player's sovereign will be more powerful per average game than the AI's.

On the other hand, if sovereign death = not-game-over-unless-you-have-no-heirs, the player is not forced into a re-load. 

Whining? Not at all. We are discussing about a very important gameplay element in a civilized manner. Having different options in cases like this is a very good thing. Especially if the other option looks decent. [In our case the dynasty/heir/successor system for example.]

What is sure is that Frogboy will keep updating the AI according to players tactics to improve the AI. Some people will never find the AI good enough as to play with another player but some != everybody.

Yeah Tormy, that was a really unfair thing to be called.  Offering feedback to improve a game (feedback that the developers are enlightened enough to ask for) is nowhere even close to whinning.  I've found that people who use the "W" word are generally not imaginative enough to generate a more constructive critique of a person's arguments.  It's just a weak pejorative like "ur geh!" or "socialist." 

^ wow...just wow! Denryu, according to your profile you are 46 years old....I am speechless. That was totally uncalled for. You don't understand what we are saying at all. NON-NEGOTIABLE or not....doesn't matter. We are talking about an alternative system as an additional gameplay option. No one said, that the CORE concept should be changed. You are flaming like a 11y old WoW player to be honest.

And I say anyone that designs a game around the fear that OMG the player might save/load and that is unfair to the AI is going to end up with with shitty game on their hands. And OMG I see in reply #90 that our enlightened friend Demiansky even goes so far as to say with no heirs and sovereign death = game over that players are "forced into a reload." Um no, this is the thinking of someone whose mom wouldn't let them keep score in little league soccer because losing might hurt their little psyche. I agree that losing should not come down to a bad roll on the RNG, however, if you do something stupid with your sovereing and gamble where you shouldn't have, this is what grown ups call a learning experience. Now of those with delicate psyche's being able to accept that they lost may just be too tramatic, and that is what we have the save/load button for, so they can just pretend that never happened and they can merrily play their game. This whole concept of "OMG I LOST ALL THOSE HOURS OF GAMEPLAY WAAAAAH! Where's my MOMMY?" Umm, this is a game. If you played a two hour game of chess and lost would you say OMG I LOST THOSE TWO HOURS OF GAMEPLAY!??? I hope not. See for some of us losing is as valuable as winning because we can evaluate what went wrong and hopefully play a better game next time. The hours weren't lost because we learned something "Hopefully" that will make the next game better (for our side!) I think I have said enough on the issue I am sure everyone is going to boo hoo about how mean spirited I am, I am just tired of all the ghey, socialilst whiners.