Where do you get the impression that the magic system will end up like that?! Magic isn't even remotely in the beta at the moment and the devs have released distressingly little information about the magic system. Based on the major inspirations for this game, assuming that the magic system in Elemental will be bland before we've been told anything about it is just a *little* premature and pouty.

The existence of magic types in no way precludes significant differentiation between the different elements. As an example:

Fire can still be geared toward offense and damage dealing and some other nifty effects. Fire shields that don't protect from damage but cause damage to attackers, Fire walls that don't stop units from crossing but damage those that do. Someone else's example from another thread was a flare spell that could blind... It could have a 'cauterize' spell which could act as a very minor healing spell that only works on wounds (wouldn't clear things like poison, etc). The existence of a minor healing spell in the fire element wouldn't make Fire the same as Life, because Life would have a large variety of spells covering a much wider spectrum of healing/rejuvination, etc, and its spells in that area would be much more potent.

Meanwhile earth could be more focused on defensive effects, and anti-building effects. You could slow down your opponents by turning the ground to mud, raise walls of earth/stone to shield your troops either from incoming enemies or even missiles. You could immobilize specific units by trapping their feet in the earth... You could cause earthquakes doing significant damage to structures but minimal damage to troops (rather than damage, maybe it'd immobilize troops for the duration or cause a short disorientation). But there could also be a spell to fling a spray of stones at your opponent, doing damage to troops in the area. The existence of an earth spell that causes damage doesn't make Earth the same as fire, though - they serve too very different purposes. If fire contains spells focused towards dealing large amounts of damage to large numbers of enemies, with some characteristic secondary effects like burning and armor weakening, the existence of a limited offensive spell in the Earth element does not make it the same as fire. For one, throwing stones at people wouldn't cause 'earth damage' - it'd cause physical damage. That already is a fairly hefty differentiation - heavily armored troops wouldn't be hurt as badly by your stone flinging, but they still might be as vulnerable to fire as the next guy. 

Damage types have nothing to do with the elements blending together to the point where there may as well not even be separate elements. In fact, they can help prevent that from occurring. But the more fundamental issue is to come up with a wide variety of functionally different spells. Have each element focus on one or two main aspects, but allow for some variation outside of that (otherwise it's just boring). If you allow too much variation or aren't creative with regards to it then you run the risk of having a fireball analog in every element, etc. But the solution is to make, for example, offensive spells in different elements different enough so that having one is not the same as having the other in 90% of the situations you find yourself. Having different damage types is not enough - they must have different damage ranges, costs, range, secondary effects. A fireball might have a consistent area of effect, while a stone-flinging spell might affect a randomized number of troops over a given area (not everyone needs to be hit be a stone, but if you're standing within the radius of a fireball blast you will be affected...).

That needs to be done with or without damage types, but removing damage types is silly (they are very straightforward, there is no learning curve involved...) and it results in very non-intuitive situations - unless you go to convoluted extremes to mimic damage types in significantly more complicated ways (which would be hypocritical).

Agree with both of these paragraphs.

I don't have anything against conventions in general, but am against blindly following conventions when they add little to, or detract from, gameplay.  In the case of different damage types, there doesn't seem to be a compelling gameplay reasonm to keep them around for many of us in this thread, so we argue against them, or at least they are not needed.

If nothing else, blindly following conventions (in general, not specific to elemental) limits the settings of the game.  Certainly, there are some weaknesses and resistances that some people consider "logical" and "realistic" that may not be so, if a different logic, or different examples, are applied.  For example (just for the fun of it) for some typical fantasy game creatures:

Undead weak to holy: Since "death" and "life/holy" magic types tend to be considered "opposites", death magic is highly damaging ot holy beings.  (In gameplay terms as well, It seems senmsible that the weakness should not be one way for balance reasons).  Perhaps undead started as week to holy, but necromancers and such got so sick of getting beaten by priests that they found ways to summon undead that cover this weaknes.  (Or possibly undead never had this weakness at all, but that's boring.)

Tree creatures weak to fire:  If basing this world on how earth works, many trees over the world have adapted ot survive smaller fires (As opposed to raging, full on forest fires), and when the weather gets to cold, trees in general cannot grow, so perhaps treeman type creatures are simply weak to any type of magic (couvgh..softies..cough)

Ice elementals:  See "journal of magical research" volume 24, page 315 

I actually want them because its the most straightforward way to handle things like immunities, but it also adds customization options, yes. There's things that simply can't be done with only one damage type, which have been pointed out already.

What I don't want is Civ 4 style combat.

The thing is that everything is not so black or white, is not "having damage types" or "Civ 4" (even if it's impossible we have Civ 4 combat, Elemental has a combat board).

About damage types, for example, you can have just a magic resistance attribute. Or you can give spells a rank (or use mana cost) and make units inmune to spells with a level (or cost) lower than a certain number. Those are pretty straightforward ways of handling magic.

And yes, those examples can't model someone that only resists fire, but damage types and inmunities can't model someone that only resists low level magic. It's a question of trade-offs.

Resistance scores work better for some things then others. As you mentioned, they don't work well for "X is immune to lightning."

But they do work really well for other types of effects, things like magical sleep and mind control.  You can "fake" damage types by using attributes on spells and units and resistences, rather then actual damage types. (Like if fireball is tagged "fire", you could give a dragon an ability "immune to things tagged fire", and achieve the same effect we're looking for without actually having a damage type. Stuff without any abilities altering it would just use their standard resistence score for all magical attacks.)

Its effectively pretty similar for what those of us who want damage types are trying to be able to do, but since there isn't really a damage type most units would just treat it like normal damage.

But you still do actually have a damage type there - the information is just encoded elsewhere. If a fireball is tagged "fire" then it does fire damage. That damage would only be differentiated from any other form of damage if used against something with an ability that provides immunity/resistance to things tagged "fire," which is exactly the same case as if you just use resistances. Against something with no resistances to anything, it doesn't matter what type of damage you do because it all has the same effect (only quantity of damage matters in this case). The moment any of those resistances change from 0 to anything else, damage types are differentiated.

There are two kinds of people arguing against different types of magic resistances: some seem to be arguing against it because they don't want any more than a few basic unit stats. My response: if 5 or 6 magic resistance stats (among the simplest stats possible) are going to overwhelm you, get a new brain - you got cheated at birth. The other kind is of the opinion that the effects of different types of magic damage/resistance would negatively affect the combat/spell mechanics (and as such any mechanic that will achieve the same effect, even if through some other implementation, is bound to be just as unacceptable)... To them I have no response because I blatantly cannot see where they're coming from. I see no starting points to their logic (none that don't require a number of silly assumptions, anyway), so all that's left is a cloud of disconnected thoughts.

Back to your suggestion: having abilities provide resistances/immunities and such is merely another method of implementing the same thing. It might actually be better than just having resistance stats - if there are no resistances there is nothing to display, and it also allows for even more specific resistances/immunities than the elemental resistance types (for example specific spells, types of spells that might cross elemental lines - ie mind spells, etc). But the overall effect is ~the same without much more complexity (it is, actually, more complex than just having resistance stats), and really that's all I want! 

Depends on what you mean by damage type, I guess.   The game under that scheme is only interpreting one type of damage, it just has modifiers in some case. That's not a bad way to handle it, since its relatively striaghtforward and easy for modders to start changing things around.

An apple wrapped in an orange peel is still an apple . The game only interprets one damage type, until it needs to differentiate between them. The "fire" tag on the fireball spell is ignored until it can't be ignored. Just like the fire damage type of a fireball is irrelevant up until it's cast on something vulnerable/resistant to fire damage. Sure the technical coding details behind it are different but the function is pretty much identical

I do agree though that it's a good way of handling it. 

Then which version of DnD are you talking about?

I don't understand why people dislike several damage/resistance types - correct. They are not difficult to understand and result in a much more versatile magic system (and magic is central to the game...).

There has only been one suggestion of a mechanic that would achieve similar effects that wasn't also absurdly convoluted - and that was Tridus's. It is effectively the same mechanic but represented in a different way; his suggestion was both somewhat more complex but also a little more powerful.

All other suggestions that have been made in this thread would either result in "magic is magic is magic," fire elements are no more vulnerable to water than they are to fire, and no more resistant to fire than they are to water, etc - with no way around it; or they would achieve similar effects but in bizarre, convoluted ways that would achieve similar effects but in extremely non-intuitive ways and with a huge amount of overhead (and they would all be extremely mod-unfriendly).

Why? I literally have no idea why that would have to be the case. Give me one good reason why resistance types would require that each element have equivalent spells, such as equally powerful attack spells. That is completely and utterly nonsensical. That has often been done in games in the past, but that's a serious design flaw and it does not stem from the existence of resistances or lack thereof.

What about magical resistances forbids me from having a fireball that does high damage to a relative large area of effect, a lightning spell that does extreme damage to very small region or single unit, a rock spray that does mediocre damage to a randomized number of units in a wide area, and an ice bolt that does minimal damage but significantly weakens victims? How does it prevent the earth element from focusing largely on defense, the fire element largely on damage and deterrence? Etc?

What's to stop me from not even having an attack spell in one or more of the elements to begin with? In short - what the heck do magical resistances have to do with forcing the magical elements to become generic? The answer is nothing.

AD&D 2e doesn't have the concept of damage types and resistances for example (it uses an universal magic resistance, saving throws and weapons inmunities, damage types and resistances are weird and badly defined when they are) and healing spells don't affect in any way undead (they don't affect non-living beings).

And I think you said you didn't play 4e: there you have damage types and resistances (they are totally game centric) but again, healing doesn't harm undead (it's the Radiant damage type and it's totally separated from Healing mechanics).

Probably the only DnD that has those concepts is 3e (there damage types are pretty well defined and healing harms undead). So it's pretty important to know which DnD you are talking about because every DnD works in a really different way regarding this subject.

If you have one spell-type that doesn't produce the same kind of damage output as others it means that the BEST strategy defensively is to only build resistances to the type of damage that deals the most damage, it's simply not worth the expenditure of whatever resource you have, be they ability slots or skill points or money or even essence on other types of resistances.  The only way to counter that is to make sure that each element deals an equal amount of damage otherwise there is no decision to be making.

I'm all for rare and powerful creatures having some elemental resistances, and even super rare equipment for heroes to allow for some resistances.  But making them common and a statistic necessarily leads to a flattening of elemental variety.  Look at every game that has had them.