Boy, a lot of whining about the wording of mystical versus arcane or lightning versus electric.  People, pull the focus back a little bit. We're interested in game mechanics, not exercising the thesaurus. They could call the damage types "ouch, painful, and boo boo" for all it matters at this point.

True. I am pretty sure, that the tactical AI will be decent enough. I am also pretty sure, that the tactical combat BETA period will be the longest.

You're blunt response and equally poor tone certainly didn't aim to reduce any potential flame fest, but point taken.

A rose by any other name is still a rose. Names don't define mechanics. A mechanic exists outside of whatever name is chosen. Once chosen, a name provides flavor and something for the user to latch onto as a way to get some instinctive understanding. One of the common things I run into in software engineering is once someone "names" an approach, thinking becomes limited and funneled by the context of the name.

I've lost count of the number of times a coworker keeps saying "I need this real contact in our customer acceptance test database". I say, "OK, I'll put it into the mock database we expose to customers for that." He goes "No, it can't be mock, it has to be a real person."

*palm forehead* He's stuck on the word Mock, his thinking is thrown off by the context of that word.

You call something "lightning" and you've reduce your scope of what can be done with that mechanic. Debating "lightning" versus "electricity" at this point is losing sight of the design goal, which appears to be some sort of elemental (e.g. semi-natural)  damage mechanic.

A big goal, I'd guess, is the feasibility of the game mechanics? 5 elements, 10, 20? What does that imply for game logic and micromanagment. Some placeholder names are sufficient for now as general ideas to grasp the scope of the work.

When the game gets published, you want nice instinctive names. Debating that detail now is missing the point.

I can't help but necro-post this thread for Frogboy to consider.  Maybe something good can come out of it.

Now that you have mentioned it...the mystical dmg type should be split into holy & unholy dmg types perhaps? I think it's a good idea.

I like the direction. I really like the idea of the kits to enhance weapons or defenses. It will be VERY nice if these can be equipped by experienced units rather than creating units specifically to have the certain attack type/defense. I could see it working either way though, it is all going to depend on implementation.

I agree that the mystical magic type needs renamed, but I also agree that is probably a quibble at this point, as long as it is designed to work well gameply wise we have many months to come up with a better name.

I would really like to see earth magic, and it could be the only magic type that deals regular physical damage (rather than having it's own damage type) This could be kind of the strength/weakness and unique thing about the earth element (i.e. aggressive spells would do things like toss stalagmites at your enemies. Defensive spells would harden armor and defend against regular physical damage (with possibly a psell or two to "ground" lightning.

This would leave you only four damage types and might present some balance challenges. It could work though. In fact there really isn't a need that all magic works in opposition to another. We have fire vs ice and life vs death (or the light and dark side of light magic if you wish) so why not have lightning and earth just neutral rather than opposed to each other? they just do their own thing.

I concur Raven X, other than I would say flood is definitely water based and rain more water than air too imho (or perhaps a hybrid if there is such a thing.)

You know, now that I think about it, it would make a lot more sense just to have the names of the damage "Types" (I.E. Ice,Fire,Lightning,Mystical) to coincide with the names of the "Types" of Elemental nodes on the map. I.E. Water, Fire, Earth, Air, and Mystical/Magic.

Sorry for the double post.

Hm... I really don't think Air and Earth should be considered as 'damage type'.   When there is a Storm, Hurricane or earthquake spell, the damage they cause is really physical.     When you are wearing an armor providing high physical resistance, you suffer less physical damage when someone cast a Storm spell to you.   The tree that is going to fall into you just do less damage to you as your armor absorb some of the damage.

As damage type, fire/ice/lightning/physical is good enough.  There should be more types down the road, an obcious one is poison damage type.

The magic system of MOM is great, the dev should copy a lot of aspects from MOM.  While amage type is related to magic system, it is also a separate enitity.  They are not mutually exclusive.

Could go with "void" as the fifth element type. That's the fifth element in the orient (some areas have "metal" as the fifth element).

Only if void magicians are voiced by Rie Kugimiya!

...as for "mystical" damage, it seems fine to me.  It could be named something else, but I don't see that it matters much; however, "ensorcelled" sounds nice to me, for weapons dealing damage through raw sorcery rather than elementally.

I very much hope there will be support for additional damage types - particularly, additional mundane damage types - via modding.  Also, poison damage seems to be missing, though that might be handled another way.

I think we are starting to read way to much into the fact that they added some damage types.   Assuming more will not be added, Assuming they are all going to work about the same, assuming things that are not covered by the other elements will all be lumped into mystical,  assuming all spells from an air node will be electrical damage, and on and on.

When coding at this stage alot of stuff is just setting ground work.  Take the AI for example.  They've coded the structure to write an AI, and wrote one that just does random things for now.  I suspect it's the same for the damage types.  They went ahead and wrote up 4 quick simple damage types, and added them so they can ensure the asset they are currently building is functional.  Going back and filling in all the different types is something that will come later, and likely progress as the game does once we are much further along into the beta and they start designing spells.  Note I didn't say design the magic system, but design spells.  Odds are when magic goes live we'll have a limited subset of spells that will probably for the most part use these damage types.

There is a fair chance that when adding the magic system, someone will add one more type just to make sure thats working properly.  The thing to note is that they are going through and removing anything thats hard coded and replacing it with classes / functions to handle it.  This makes it very easy to change things later, but takes more time to code now.  

Anyway, I'm getting off topic a bit.  Don't get too worried about the limitations of the damage types.  Given the way his post was worded, and the content, I'd bet a dollar to your dime that it is just a short placeholder list for them  to utilize while they code more basic parts of the game.  Filling in assets like this comes much later, just like the options available in the tech tree.

You don’t research “magic swords” but instead would take a mundane sword and equip a fire magic kit with it. Players can equip multiple kits with their unit to make them increasingly lethal (but expensive) or defend against fire damage by using a defensive fire magic kit.

 

I don't understand this, does that means that we will get a seperat window to design weapons and armor or is this a kit like the the scouting kit currently in the game?

Are we going to see an overhaul of the design unit screen?

Warder