Lycenae

Join Date 03/2006

What I'd like to see in the impending magic overhaul in 1.1 (Hint: it's MoM)

Given that the magic system is slated to be revamped somewhat soon (yay!), here is my take on what I'd like to see happen to the magic system in v1.1 and after.

Since Brad has already partially addressed the "Global Mana Pool" issue (sounds excellent, BTW), I'll leave that to the side and talk about the part of the E:WoM magic system that is getting somewhat less attention: variety. I'm worried that if people expect that simply adding more spells will "make things much better," they may be in for a let-down. The current system, independent of the global mana pool issue or lack of spells issue, lacks strategic depth and "flavor." Right now, I feel more like I'm playing "Elemental: War of Identical Units One-shotting Each Other" rather than "Elemental: War of MAGIC."

Here's what I would do to fix it (stolen liberally from MoM) over time:

General:

+ Spell schools should have 30-40 spells each. The spells in each school that a sovereign may research during the game are randomly selected from this list based on the spell rating ("# spell books") that the sovereign has in that school. Each game should have a "I wonder what I'm going to see this time" feel to it.
+ Spell schools should have general theme, so that choosing that school will have actual gameplay style implications.
+ Spell shool knowledge should be rated on a scale of 0-10, where each numerical value on the scale is a "spell book." Choosing more spellbooks in a school should give access to higher level spells. Choosing fewer books means you get just lower level ones. Spell books can be researched on the magic tree, but are somewhat rare and certainly expensive. This change implies that sovereigns have a choice of "going wide or going deep" during the design phase.
+ Researching "spell levels" directly from the magic screen should go away. One must research all available low level spells first before one can learn the higher level ones. No more bee-lining straight to level three to get the giant. This will fix some balance issues.
+ Each pre-made sovereign (like Procipinee) should have their spell book choices trimmed drastically. Some should "go wide" into 2-4 schools and some should "go deep" into 1-2 school(s). The current (almost total) lack of distinction between sovereigns must go away. For instance, if Procipinee is to keep her presence in all magic schools, she should have 1-3 books in each school. This means she will be tactically flexible but will not have access to world-shaking magics unless she really gets lucky in-game and finds lots of books and researches others. This will add enormous flavor to each sovereign.

Schools and Themes:

+ Good/Life: Strong unit protection and buffing. Some anti-magic and anti-magic-item stuff. Weak direct damage. Strong anti-undead and Black/Evil countermagic. Some defensive and scouting "good" unit/creature summons. Some city buffs for knowledge and defense. Diplomacy buffs. Light/Holy magic.
+ Black/Death: Strong unit debuffing, moderate direct damage and excellent damage-over-time. Curses. Good undead and "evil" unit summoning. Some Good/Life counter-magic. Some land/world/resource corruption. Diseases. Some mana generation through unit sacrifice. Diplomacy debuffs. Shadow magic.
+ Red/Fire: Strongest direct damage. Strong unit buffing on the attack side, balanced by simultaneous debuffs on the defense side. Lots of summoning of strong attack creatures that are somewhat weak on defense. Strong land destruction. General chaos theme. Luck/Chance manipulation. Some Blue/Water countermagic.
+ Blue/Water: Weak to moderate direct damage using water/psionics. Strong illusion and phantasm magic. Strong countermagic. Water movement buffs, and anti-magic unit buffs. A few summoning spells involving water creatures. Extremely strong Red/Fire countermagic.
+ Green/Earth: Strong unit protection and buffing. Weak to moderate direct damage. Lots of strong unit summoning. Some food production buffs and land modification/healing spells to counter Fire/Death schools.
+ Gray/Air: Strong movement and speed enhancing spells and buffs, including teleport and flight. Moderate to good direct damage involving lightning. Missile protection buffs. Good flying unit summoning balanced between offense and defense. Good scouting spells including far vision. Ethereal magic.

Magic was the thing that MoM got almost exactly right in terms of "fun", and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Further, MoM stole gratuitously many of the best elements from Magic: the Gathering, so Brad/Stardock shouldn't be shy.

Grafting this kind of magic system onto E:WoM's already nice tech-tree system would be *great.*

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I agree with pretty much all of this. I hope SD is looking to MoM for a lot of their inspiration for the new system. One thing I'd like to add, though, I think they would be fine keeping separate summoning and enchantment schools as long as they were heavily buffed and had unique abilities. I.e. enchantment could counterspell, attenuate or amplilfy existing effects, etc. For example, if you "enchant" your fireball now it does double damage, hurray! In addition to the obvious city/unit enchants, item enchants, whatever.

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Just go play MoM already. Or better, spend your time making a mod that does all this.

I own MoM. I play it when I want to play it. As a result, I don't need or want a word for word MoM clone.

Things like making spell books much more expensive, more spells, and unique themes for each school are great. That will improve the game. But copying MoM instead of just being inspired by it? No.

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econundrum1

Join Date 04/2007

+36

I disagree with much of the detail of what you say particularly this:

"+ Researching "spell levels" directly from the magic screen should go away. One must research all available low level spells first before one can learn the higher level ones. No more bee-lining straight to level three to get the giant. This will fix some balance issues."

I think having to research all spells at each level limit strategic choice, it should be possible to make a bee-line for high level spells while ignoring some basic ones. Balance issues are better addressed by making high level spells more expensive to learn and cast, the change to how mana works will help here making really powerful spells take a lot longer to learn and cast and in the meantime you might be overwhelmed by your opponent and the 12 low level spells his learnt while you focused on getting a high level spell you are still saving enough mana to actually cast and which will then take 10 turns to cast. My point being it allows for lots of ways to balance spells without limiting strategic choices.

However I agree with the general spirit of most of what you say.

Spellbooks need to be more focused in the sort of spells they allow, I agree they should be themed not just visual effects wise but in the sort of tactical and strategic options opened by the spells in them which is lacking at the moment.

I don't think the initial spellbooks you choose should limit you for the whole game but I do agree it should be harder for you to gain other spellbooks, I suggest you be able to do this through quests or by stealing/trading from other soverigns (there should be a spying system).

I also agree that at the moment there are too few spells, but I think this is partly because of the limited possibilities as the game stands, hopefully the magic overhaul will address that, I don't agree you should assign an arbitary number of spells in each book as you have and I think you could have some spell books you can only get through high level quests that are more powerful than others e.g. only contain high level spells. Though that said the books you can choose at the start should have similar numbers of spells at each level.

I also think that interface wise the spells should really be arranged by book. What I mean by that is the Spells screen should show the spines of each book and you click on it to open that book and see the spells in it. At the moment I hardly even look at what book a spell comes from which is not good for atmosphere.

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Quoting lord ebonstone,

reply 2

Just go play MoM already. Or better, spend your time making a mod that does all this.

I own MoM. I play it when I want to play it. As a result, I don't need or want a word for word MoM clone.

Things like making spell books much more expensive, more spells, and unique themes for each school are great. That will improve the game. But copying MoM instead of just being inspired by it? No.

He didn't exactly say to 'go and copy MOM' you know.

What is really needed however is to find other ways to match what MOM did very well. Theres going to have to be some brainstorming to introducing the kind of spells needed to make conquest through magic viable.

Top level magic in this game should be increadible good, it should be the kind of thing that turns the tide on it's own. As things are right now magic is nowhere near that good yet.

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Great suggestions.

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Disagree with all spells being random. You should have some set, with others random or else you cannot plan strategies.

Disagree with having to know all lower level spells to get to spells of the next level. However, I do think that researching the next spell level is arbitrary and pointless, so spells should just be available based on spell books and should cost more the higher the level they are. If there is to be a requirement, then it should be prerequisite spells as in a tech-tree where the studies are related.

Otherwise, in general I am very much in agreement. There needs to be more of that feeling you get from MoM. I think it would probably satisfy the majority of players if the main systems and mechanics of Elemental were as close to MoM as possible, and the rest of the game was full of added extras and options and even further mechanics, strategies and twists.

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MoM handled the randomness in spell knowledge by allowing an initial number of spells to be known per school equal to the number of spell books known in the school minus one. So, if you had a set of spells that you liked to start the game with, you just picked the right number of spell books to get the favored spells as an "initial pick". Also, you could skip spell levels up to a point during research. When you were selecting the next spell to research, you were given an assortment of 6 lesser or more expensive spells to research. Some of these were potentially higher level than the others. So, many of the arguments here against my suggestions were handled by details in MoM that I didn't have time to mention. And, no, I am not suggesting copying MoM. Just it's successful aspects.

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I'd like to see an even mix of random spells and researched spells such that if you really want your favorite couple of spells each game you can acquire them if you build enough arcane laboratories and go deep enough into the magic tree--otherwise, you can get spells fairly freely through adventuring but you only get whatever you randomly stumble upon. Such a system would depend on all spells being well-developed and useful, and until that point is reached we would have to stick with the current system that lets us cherry pick.

In any case I agree "themed" spellbooks would be cool. Maybe also random spellbooks which resemble a M:TG booster pack (a bunch low level spells and a couple higher level ones). Disagree with having to research all the spells of a certain level to advance to the next one--wouldn't that force "going wide" over going deep?

If we have the spellbook the player can learn whatever spell is in it (in however many turns it takes to research), all heroes would have access to it. If a hero or sovereign is of sufficient level they can actually cast it. Crystals would to add power to the spells of the same element.

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