I wondered that as well.

When I first read about the essence system, I thought it was supposed to be a kind of limited resource that does not follow the standard exponential growth of power (with that standard I mean that when you expand you gain power which allows you to expand even faster and so on) and that how you spread it would determine what your strengths and weaknesses are and allow for replayability.

Yet if you imbue heroes with essence and they get more essence from it with each level then as you write you get exponential growth once more.

There are some things that might help though. A limited number of heroes restricts the exponential growth but then you would imbue every single hero which I think is against the thought that it is a hard decision.

What I assume though is that while you can imbue things, your heroes cannot. All they get from the essence in that case is casting ability which grows per level. If your heroes' spell casting ability is as great as yours though, then keeping the essence is not a good option either. Quite hard to balance in total but if the spells you have access to are more powerful than what your heroes get, then it works.

I imagine that there will be benefits to all strategies.

The trade off here is short / long term.

In the short term if you imbue a hero with essence the sovereign is weaker, and has a weak hero who needs protection because they hold an incredibly valuable resource. In the long term you get the benefit of a higher essence income, and a strong hero with magical power. However you still have the slight weakness of having a sovereign who is a little less power than they could have been.

I mentioned this idea before, but it applies here. How is mana from shards accumulated?

Since having less essence seems to also give you less mana, what if mana from the shards was accumulated per channeler? If you have a fire shard and one channeler, they get *all* the mana from that shard for themselves (up to what their essence allows). If you have 10 channelers, that mana is split 10 ways.

So yes, you have lots of channelers, but none of them have enough fire mana to do anything truly powerful. One channeler hoarding all the essence and mana is alone, but when he casts he has a whole lot more power to unleash (and his mana recharges faster so he can do it again).

That's compared to a more standard model of a global mana pool, where all your fire mana goes into one pool and any channeler can use it. I think my suggestion would alleviate some of the balance issue.

It's been alluded to in an earlier post here, but there is a cost to imbuing heroes with essence other than essence itself: risk. Spreading it out across various heroes, who will all be weaker than a sovereign who hoards his essence, means if you lose those weaker heroes, you lose that essence investment. And you're far more likely to lose those heroes than you are your sovereign (at which point you probably lose, anyway).

That combined with the many other ideas combined in this thread could definitely keep this from becoming exploitative or the only long-term strategy. Denryu's point regarding world-wrecking spells is especially relevant. I'm sure this will be tweaked to hell and back during the beta to make sure the balancing is right, but I'm confident that it can be balanced pretty easily.

This is hilarious. I think maybe if you keep your essence in your channeler your channelers growth rate is higher than if you give it to your underlings. I don't know that for sure but if true that would certainly solve the balance issue...

He did.

After the fall of Morgoth (Sauron's old boss... a being that makes Sauron look like a Girl Scout...), Sauron was set upon by the Men of Numenor and allied Elves.  Seeing an opportunity, he fakes repentance and over the course of years gains a position of trust and ultimately serves as advisor to the King of Men.  Who (of course) folds under Sauron's subtle manipulations and wages war against Valinor.  Pretty much the analogue of waging war against Heaven.  Guess who wins?  Not Men.

Anyway, part of that mess was to guide his enemies (Elves, Men, Dwarves) to forge the Rings of Power, while secretly forging the One Ring to bind them all to his will.

Playing nice has it's advantages.  It's really just a matter of timing.

Anyway, more on-topic, I'm confused by the concept of Essence as described.  I look forward to seeing it for myself.