and once there are some more useful offensive spells in the midgame and onwards.

personally i think there is too much mana maint floating around. using anything with mana maint in the early game is a really bad idea. i'd really wish imbuing was limited with a different mechanic (and a permanent one, to get around this issue). my preference would be bringing back essense and using it as the spell power stat; so a player has to choose between one powerful caster or many weaker ones. again, once the spell selection improves the use of just INT for everything magic related will make this by far the best stat. it's uses are overconsolidated. if you move spell power to essense (and compensate by giving INT char's an admin bonus to income) there will be more nuance and different ways to build as caster character (just as there are currently for fighting characters).

but i think the real problem here is linearly generating, endlessly accumulating mana. simply put it encourages players to save it all for a rainy day that may never come. since you never really spend mana to make mana every spell puts you at a slight disadvantage for the rest of the game vis a vis someone who's spent the first half of the game accumulating. and it's impossible to make maint spells viable in the early game because it represents a large chunk of your mana gen at that point. but at the same time increasing mana gen at the start would be overpowering. splurge in one war and you can be at a irreversible disadvantage for the rest of the game. these probelms don't really show now, but they will once we get more worthwhile spells and more competetive online play

i'd prefer non linear generation, as detailed in the fourth reply to this thread

https://forums.elementalgame.com/400823/page/2

although i will admit i'm not sure how you'd get this to work for the uber spells like the volcano ones, where the whole idea is that you save up mana for ages.

I like it better as is.  Maybe make it so you can't imbue anyone with less then ten intelligence, and add more intelligence requirements to spells. Also make it permanent so you can't just cancel.

I like the global mana pool, but agree that mana maintenence needs tweaking:

*I feel that the mana maint. for imbuing a champion is too low. It should cost 2 or more mana per turn.

*Only champions who meet a certain INTELLIGENCE or CLASS requirement can be imbued. Those champions who can be spellcasters need to be uncommon. Magic casters are supposed to be rare. They need to be very valuable pieces of your army that you can't easily replace, and take great care to cultivate. This would also make the hero-related techs more valuable.

*There needs to be a spell skill rating ala MoM. It could be based off of intelligence or something (1.5*int or 2*int). It is far too easy to cast spell after spell in combat and strategically.

*Spells that enchant heroes and imbue should have a short range.

*There should be more ways to generate mana to counterbalance the increased mana maint.

*Spell shards should be rarer and more powerful.

*With spell skill rating, short casting range, and fewer champions capable of being spellcasters, this should solve the problem of players casting and dispelling unit enchants before and after combat, or hording mana to unleash 1,000 points worth of destruction in one round.

We need to strive towards a consistent feel in how balancing population, gildar, and mana works. 

Concerning the imbue Champion problem, I didn't even think to un-imbue a champion because it seemed counterintuitive to me.  I probably still won't under the current system.  So, one option is, if you don't think that it's a fair mechanism, don't exploit it.

However, as I thought about un-imbuing, I find that I kind of like the idea, with a twist added.  When you imbue, you very suddenly flood the hero with your essence and powers.  If you were to suddenly leave the hero and withdraw your power from him/her, it might leave the hero devastated/exhausted.  One way to manifest this in game terms might be by causing a loss of hitpoints to un-imbue.  The formula could work something like HP loss = 10 + 5x(Lvl Sov - lvl hero)  That means that a relatively strong hero (same level as sov) would lose only 10 hp.  On the other hand, lets say you're a lvl 7 sov and you just hired a lvl 2 to teleport an army from one place to another.  That guy loses 35 hp and quite possibly dies.  If you want to un-imbue after a battle, these deductions would also be more likely to kill, so you'd at least have to wait a few turns and hope you don't get attacked right after un-imbuing.  Another option would be a permanent deduction to max hp or to some attributes for the hero, but I kind of like the HP one, maybe coupled with not being able to move the hero for a few turns.  That doesn't diminish the pros of un-imbuing, but it does force it to become a more strategic decision.

This is a problem I thought they might have which is why in a previous thread I suggested imbue would need to have a high casting cost, so that it wouldn't make sense to keep canceling and recasting as needed.

I'm already on record as saying that the Global Mana Pool is too wargamey and that I don't like it.  That being said, it's apparently here to stay, so I'll have to live with it, seeing that I'm in the minority.

I think that the old system, at it's core, was fine.  The problem was that Mana Pools grew too quickly from multipliers.  a 15-20 Mana magic pool made you think.  I remember keeping my Sovereign out of harms way many a time while her pool replenished, so I could scrape up the mana for that Fire Giant I was wanting around.  Once the multipliers kicked in, having 30-50 or more in my Mana pool was probably a little excessive.

To 'fix' the old system, you'd need to set a target for Mana Pool sizes.  25 or so seemed interesting to me, as long as it only regenerated 1-3 points per turn.  Just enough to crank out a few damage spells, but low enough that you could deplete it fairly quickly and need to recharge.

As for the spells and maintenance problems, that's something that can be tweaked.  If a maintanance cost of 1 for a Fire Giant is deemed too low, make it 2 or 3.  Voila, problem solved.  Personally, I made it a point in the early/midgame to keep my Fire Giants alive, because that 16 summoning cost was a bear.  Plus, units are 'free' mana wise, so I didn't consider his 'mana maintenance cost' as an issue.  Paying 16 mana out of a smaller mana pool to get him in the first place was enough of a balance factor.

Plus, Fire Giants had fireballs, which they could cast 2 or 3 times in combat.  That was nice, but not unbalancing, as archers have unlimited attacks of comparable power.

Also, as long as my heroes had to pay Character Points to boost their mana pools, this also limited summoning availability.  Getting their mana pools up to 16 took some time in the early/midgame, so generally I only had one or two Fire Giants in my entire kingdom, because only one other caster had enough essence in his pool to summon him.  I took great care to keep that character safe in battle!

Again, it was the bonus structures that knocked this out of whack, not the 'base' size of the pools.

These days, if I lose an imbued champion.  No big deal.  Pick another champion, move on.  In the old system, losing a hero with a big mana pool WAS a big deal in the early/midgame.

So, I'll go on record, AGAIN, that we should go back to the old mana pools, but REALLY reduce multipliers to those pools.  Oh, and bring back spending character points on Essence pools.  And speed, move, accuracy, dodge, etc. for that matter, with balance tweaking to reflect the effectiveness of each stat.  Characters were more intersting under the old system.  This way, not just any hero can crank out spells.

Intelligence isn't enough of a limiting factor under the new system: 3-4 character levels will usually solve that one currently (+9-12 to Int generally gets you above 20). It took a lot more than that under the old system to get the base mana pool of a hero above 10, at least until the multipliers showed up.  Plus, under the old system, Essence as a 'stat' didn't serve multiple purposes, like Intelligence now does..

How about keeping the global mana pool as a resource but having a limited amount that each caster can 'channel' each season; this is similar to the way that AoW did it. Make this characteristic based on INT. For instance your caster can channel INT * 2 mana per year (actual multiplier needs adjustment along with mana cost of spells), so a hero with 25 INT could cast 50 mana worth of spells per year and no more. Each season this amount replenishes by 1/4.

How this works. I start out with 50 worth of channeling in the spring. I cast 25 worth of spells in the spring. Now I'm down to 25 mana for channeling for the rest of the turn that takes place in the spring. Summer rolls around, 1/4 is replenished so now I can channel 37 mana. And so on...

If you wanted to cast a higher level spell, such as a powerful enchantment or summons, your hero has to cast it over multiple years and turns.

Allow casters to pool abilities to cast powerful spells in a shorter amount of time at some penalty. So for instance you want to cast a powerful spell that costs 300 mana, you have three heroes that can each channel 50 mana per year. One hero begins casting the spell, then the other two cast a 'combine minds' spell that adds 1/2 their channeling ability to the spell or 25 mana each. Thus you can cast a spell in three years (12 turns) that otherwise would have taken six (24 turns).

However, all heroes are still limited by the amount and production of mana in the global pool. 

This has multiple benefits. One, limits the number of spells that can be cast per turn. Two, would encourage another level of strategic thinking, do I use my channeling in this combat and risk having nothing for a possible counter attack. This becomes a secondary decision on top of concerns about the total global mana pool. Third, it helps to differentiate spell casting heros to a greater degree, i.e. not every hero is equally good a summoning an earth elemental, some take much longer than others.

Just an idea, but it might solve some of the problems.

I would simply be in favor of

A) Making ALL spells scale somehow via intelligence. (Enchants are more effective, summons less costly, etc)

Raising the initial cost of enchantments like Imbue Champion or Arcane Weapon. You won't be 'undoing' them if it costs 20 mana to cast, and 0.5 to maintain. You can even raise the initial mana pool so you can imbue Janusk or something.

1. Bringing back a Spell Skill stat of some sort is needed. Whether it is separate or based on INT can be determined.

2. Making non-sovereign heroes that can cast more rare would be a good thing, they should be valuable.