My experience with this system comes from Neverwinter Nights. The big problem I had with it is that I pretty much never found a good reason to counter the spell. It was almost always more useful to save my own spell instead of wasting it on the counter.

How does this work though? All combat in MoM takes place inside of one turn. Or do you mean a combat round or two inside the tactical battle? In that case, I think a lot of spells would have their usefulness severely curtailed by this, heavily favouring conventional attacks.

Guardian Wind is single target, there is no "mass" version. Since you can cast only one spell per combat round, you couldn't cast Guardian Wind on your Phantom Warriors before your opponent gets a full round of attacks on them (Phantom Warriors must be summoned in combat, requiring a combat round to do so).

Compare this against another player who goes 11 death books and summons a wraith right off the bat. Wraiths, being undead, are completely immune to the illusionary attacks of Phantom Warriors and with their life-draining attacks they are capable of running rampant through your swordsmen and spearmen, leaving a horde of undead garrisons in their wake.

Ahh. The concept of more than 2 sides in a battle would definitely throw this whole debate out the window, as magic would have to be severely toned down in that case.

I think you're way out to lunch if you think you'll be commanding 1000 individual anythings in a battle. No, I don't consider a MoM halfling slinger to be 8 units just because it has 8 little pixel-art halflings in it. You control it as 1 unit and so that's all it is.

I doubt we'll have any more than 20 units under our control, regardless of whether each unit is depicted as 1 figure or 100.

No. You could cast multiple overland spells per turn if your spellcasting skill was high enough (based on the mana cost of the spells), but never in combat. You could have heroes or other spellcasting units cast extra spells for you, but you yourself never got more than one.

Death magic has the cheapest and most powerful early game summons. I have actually won a game simply by summoning a wraith at the beginning and then using that single unit to conquer the entire map. Perhaps a bit overpowered, heh.

Wrong. Undead normal units raised by ghouls or life drain attacks do suppress unrest. They are identical to regular troops except with the added bonuses and penalty of undead, just like any normal unit that's been buffed by black channels. You're probably confusing these with fantastic creatures (such as wraiths, ghouls, skeletons, sky drakes, demon lords, zombies etc.), none of which provide unrest suppression.

To get back on Topic ... not every spell-book has to have every defensive spell. Not every element needs to defend itself in the exact same way. Perhaps cost-on-turn counter spells are VERY specific, cost a reasonable amount, cost only one time, and wear off after 5 turns. Maybe these type of specific counter-spells are available by a book of Balance. If you have a Fire Book and a Balance book, the anti-fire spells and anti-water spells show up earlier in the spell-research list, however all spell-specific counters are available by the book of balance.

The book of nullification could provide generic global protective spells. These spells nullify at least a percentage of the damage if not all of it. These types of active non-specific global protection spells should tie your mana up in Semi-Permanent mana-per-turn-burns. Where lets say you have 100 mana, and want to buy a global shielding spell, protecting all cities with a forcefield. It uses 20 manaburn. Each turn you now have 80 mana to use, since 20 of it is locked up in maintaining the Global Forefield/Shield spell. Same effect could work for battle-field wide protection wards. The more affective the spell, the greater the ManaBurn. However, if you know your opponents aren't going to be using very high-end spells, or if you only want half the damage averted, you can use less strong versions, with less mana burn. (20 mana burn vs 80 mana burn). So that you have enough mana to actually attack something instead of remaining an impervious shell that can't do much on *their* turn.

yea, book of Nullification is a reall doozy

The Book of Reflection/Comtemplation. This book would give protective spells which are Semi-specific (against a certain element, against AOE vs single-target, vs any spell that tries to inflict X status ailment ...) counter spells. Semi-specific, and don't cost any mana to cast (when its cast). Also, most of these spells are unit-specific, but can be applied to larger units or even cities or armies (however that can be risky). Its a defensive spell, and when the attack is inflicted that meets the requirements, an amount of mana is subtracted from the defender that is equivalent to the mana used by the attaker. (could however be a combination of Mana x (Potential Deaths/ Caster's HP)

Essentially this type of counter could be infinite in expanse, to cover every possibility. The main concern, however, is that you could easily run out of mana by getting carried away and Warding everything. Also, I think it would be best if, instead of getting dispelled, un-used wards are simply non-triggerable until enough mana gathers up again (to make for less frustration). I rather like the Mana x (Potential Deaths/ Attacker's HP), as attacks from powerful mages can be countered more easily. However it might be fairer to simply have mana cost = attacker's mana cost. Or even, simply the destructive might of the attack could be calculated in an appropriate mana cost for the defender. In any event, the weakness of this book is that your mana reserves depend on what attacks the enemy use, and also who has more mana?

Other than the Book of Balance, Nullification, and Reflection, I think Elemental Books should have simple *SHIELD* spells for their element, which gives a certain value of magical defense against attacks of that element.

Also there should be a Book of Manipulation. Book of Manipulation would have spells like Dispel Magic, Dispel Counter, Counter Dispel, and Bind Spell.

counter-dispel would counter any dispel used by the enemy. Dispel Counter would have a chance to dispel any counters, including counter-dispel. (dispel counter defeats counter dispel under equal terms). While Counter-Dispel would defeat a Dispel Magic before the magic was dispelled. As the book states, this spell is about Manipulating others, which includes the phenomenon of the Manipulators manipulating each other in clever mind-games.

Bind-Spell, meanwhile, steals a spell which takes multiple turns to cast and uses it for your own. If there is a Spell that simply wins the game, it can be Dispelled, but *NOT* binded by another player. Bind-spell can be dispelled by Dispel-Magic.

As opposed to other schools of magic, where the defense is against a particular type of spell, Spells in the School of Manipulation are Targetted at a particular enemy Magic User or Sovereign. I'd like to have diplomacy score somehow influence the chances for a Manipulation spell to be sucessful. Perhaps such mind-spells like "Charm" and "Dominate Champion" can also be included. Such domination spells, however, should not be permanent-partially due to the rarity of Champions, and partially due to the already powerful nature of the School of Manipulation. Charm would dis-allow an enemy unit to attack for X-amount of combatvturns (but can still move) and Dominate (if sucessful) would allow you to control an enemy Champion for 5 combat-turns. Perhaps Manipulation could also include such spells as Ghastly Visage, Turn Undead, and Illusion army.

Ghastly Visage can cause fear, Turn Undead can cause undead units to weaken/flee, and Illusion army can reduce enemy morale.

Chong Li ... controlling a Legion is controlling 1000 individual units at one time. There is a difference between controlling something one at a time and controlling alot of something one at a time.

Your examples work fine IF, say, legion was our lowest unit. Its not. Not everyone will have legions, being able to build one is an organizational tool, and is basically a way to pay for those 1000 soldiers more efficiently, and get them built more efficiently, therefore building the biggest available unit will usually be the logical choice when resources are plentiful and time is not a factor.

One thing to keep in mind is that the lowest available unit is 1. All units refer back to the lowest common denominator in this came, which is 1. Just assume for a minute that via the lore or some such, we were supposed to assume that 1 unit was actually representing 50 units. Then 1000 would be representing 50,000 units.

Essentially, a Legion is a fleet of 1000 ships, not one Giant Ship that has the number 1000 next to it. Read the combat information more carefully next time, please. "Using fleet analogy as final logical resort "

Because of what I have just told you, are the exact reasons WHY this combat system is going to be Awesome in a handbasket with added Sprinkles!

Without proper and balanced counterspells and protection spells, magic will be way too powerful. No one likes heavy gameplay imbalances, right?

Sorry, but the whole pointing thing with arrows made your post confusing and difficult, if not impossible, to follow. I think you may have been trying to say having things unbalanced is okay, but i can't be sure, since FfH2 didn't have counter spells anyway.

And general counter spells don't make things unbalanced. If someone spends their casting time and mana putting up a counter spell, then that was time they didn't spend throwing fireballs. The other player could take that time to put up their own counter spell, or they could spend it in punching through the first players counter spells.

As long as counter magic is not an absolute defense it becomes a trade off which, if properly balanced, will not make casting pointless.

Much nicer. And i strongly agree. The difference in power are what makes games interesting.  If every faction is identical and uses the same things, yes, they will be balanced, but you might as well be playing chess. (not that chess is a bad game, but its not a 4x fantasy).

Ice shield should be totally ineffective against lightning, since water is conductive. It should cancel out the fire storm but be destroyed since the firestorm would cancel it out. Any ice attacks would be totally stopped by it, and any water based attacks should actually increase its strength, as the water would freeze to it which would add layers.

Something like that.

ya, if the shield dosen't cover a unit and the fireball splashes past the edges, than that unit should get hit. The point there was that the ice shield should only protect against one fire spell of the same strength before being used up, but it would have different reactions to different elements. Paper-rock-scissors, only with a dozen of different elemental types.

And ya, i didn't even think about the dissolved ions thing. Wouldn't that be funny. If someone is using a water shield you can just toss a bag of salt at it, then blast away with lightning.

Gave it a bit more thought. It would be pretty cool if you could use physical items to cancel out spells. If someone shoots an ice spell at you, if you happen to have some bags of salt and catapults, you could hit the ice spell with the salt and lower its freezing point enough that it goes back to water and falls apart. Would be pretty cool.

Some interesting ideas there. I hope you are planning to do a mod with all of them, sounds like it could be pretty cool.

You can break down these things into three types of spells:

1. Dispels (or Disjunction in AoW speak) that kill a currently active spell. Typically, the cost and chance of success are based on the power of the spell, the enemy spellcaster, etc.

2. Counters that try to cancel a spell being cast. I've never seen these modelled very well in a TBS game, personally. Mostly because of the turn based nature, if I throw a fireball in combat it's not your turn and you can't do anything about it. Multi turn spells could be fought with a counter, but still. I'd really like to see a way to attempt to counter instant combat spells, though how you do that fairly is not something I'm sure of.

3. Shields or buffs that protect against spells before they're cast. World of Warcraft's Anti magic zone (and Dragon Age's Glyph of Nullifcation) are such abilities, they weaken or outright block magic within them. AoW's forcefield structure protected a city from being hit by magic pestilience and such.

One other consideration that affects this is casting range. Can the Sovereign cast spells anywhere on the map, anytime? Or is there a range or influence zone of some kind? If you can simply blow up the enemy capital from anywhere on the map magically, there is a need for stronger counters in order to make that even remotely balanced.

They're reading it, but they read more then they post. As soon as one of them posts, the thread changes into talking to them, instead of talking amongst ourselves.

Or, they may just have nothing to say on the subject right now.  

Ok but what about vanilla protection and/or counter spells? Since the devs are ignoring this topic, I suppose that the answer is: no, there won't be spells like these in the vanilla game...as for modding I am not sure at all, that we can mod in spells like these, but hopefully I am wrong in both cases.