Yep, you now have a global mana pool.

i too miss essense. many reasons. to elaborate on GW's comments:

firstly as a means of limiting imbuing it was much better than mana maint. a one point per turn mana maint over the course of the game is absolutely huge, because the system is so coarsely grained. we have now created a situation where you'd be stupid to imbue anyone or summon anything (for more than a couple of turns) until you have a huge mana income (ie, late to mid game, when the game is almost won anyway). so you only imbue or summon long term as a whim because you can, rather than because it makes strategic sense. because mana accumulates without limit, every spell or imbue has whole-game repercussions, and this encourages people to be very miserly, which is sad (and if you are doing fine whilst spending lots of mana, it can only be because of poor ai and unbalanced casting costs). if someone blows all their mana in the early game, it's largely unfixable and could come back to haunt them as much as 10 hours later. of course, it's better than what we had before, when enchant slots were a triviality, and the costs of casting a spell were undone after 20 turns. a system that falls somewhere between the two would be better.

i love global mana. i think it would be better if it accumaled at a diminishing rate and then stabilised at a diferent level after 50 turns or something. or at least reduce some of the maint to 0.5 per turn (or whatever).

in the mean time however, it would really help to bring back essense, and spend it on imbuing (or enchanting, or creating fertile land or whatever). it made more sense in terms of the lore, but more importantly, it posed a more interesting tactical question. if you sacrifice your sov's spellcasting power to imbue others, you have to choose between being sauron or being the middle earth wizards: one powerful caster, or lot of weak ones all over the map? individual power vs. flexibility? whereas with mana maint you choose between flexibility or just not being able to use magic as often.

purely from a game balance view, magic weilding sovereigns should be as big a part of the game as combat sovs. however, a combat sov needs three stats to be effective while a magic sov only needs one. if this imbalance is not visible yet, it is only because the spell formulas are not balanced at present. once there are stat based damage spells competetive in the late game then INT will be a shoe in.

personally i'd do it like this:

int: limits what level spells a character (any of them) can cast, gives an admin bonus to income and determines spell resistance

essense: increases spell damage, spent on imbuing, enchanting items or creating fertile land.

Could you maybe elaborate on the "Slight Disagreement of Stage Magicians" part?

For me, Elemental's early potential to be a ground-breaker in the fantasy TBS genre was all about the idea that essence was both an important stat for a major class of game unit and an expendable resource, with a 'mana econony' as the fundamental background. What I still don't get is how it became an either/or choice.

Design-wise, 'Mana upkeep' is basicially Essence (a limiting resource that can be spent or hoarded), with a considerably less sexy name   The main problem is that the concept never saw its promised potential (In WoM, Hoarding Essence != badass). Luckilly, FE was designed with several new spells that should fill that void nicely.

wrote a message.

erased it.

decided on this instead.

Essence trait. I miss you. Please come back to me. Will you be my valentine ? I will leave my wife and kids if you come back to me.

(yeah... that oughtta get boogie's attention - can't wait for the 1.3 update for some game balancing love)

I miss essence too.

Care to elaborate?

They are loosely the same, in terms of design. Both make you choose between casting and have magical potenial. However, they are nothing a like thematically and do not work out the same. Essense as implemented originally makes it a great idea to imbue everyone, while (according to one post in this thread) global mana as it is now makes it a bad idea to imbue people at all (particularly early in the game).

I have been posting the same thing since it was brought up that the orginal magic system was broken and the devs were going to change it up, less the part about only natural casters gaining essense (note the natural part, heirs should gain it too; otherwise it would overly gimp the AI and would stamp out magical power).

Hence preventing essense from being gamed by limiting who can gain it on level up would improve essense, as would adding more things to spend it on. If essense acts as a cap (either hard or soft) on mana usage, then over a certain amount it no longer make sense to hoard it. Finer grain numbers would also help.

I do not believe there is a single solution to this, rather a good mix of diffrent things is need to balance it. Each will give more tools by which to tweak things so that they are Just Right.

What essence should have been is an additional cost for very potent spells or effect. A sacrificial cost. Something that prevent you from casting 10 volcanoes in the same game. And ultimately, something that you only get a limited supply of in the course of the game, a supply that cannot grow (or requires tremendous efforts to make it grow).

I do not understand why it was abandoned. Mechanically, it didn't have to play the same role as mana. A larger empire brings more mana from the large number of mana-producing resources; mana can be refilled. Essence, as it was supposed to be originally, was the personnal power of channellers, the ability to change the world in dramatic ways but a very limited number of times, to do things that were beyond the reach of simple spellcasters.

This is already in the game.  Every spell has a stat prerequisite, usually intelligence.  However the sovereign does not abide by this mechanic.  They can cast any apell no matter how gimped they are.

Hopefully, because the game was able to make that an interesting trade-off for many maps and playstyles.

It would also work better if the biggest strategic spells 'normally' took multiple turns to cast and you were talking about making other spellcasters vs. being able to cast your heavy stuff quickly, not an either/or. I'd also have liked to see the tradeoff working at the tactical level, where you could have Harry McSharing and friends vs. Sue the Seriously Scary Horder, where Harry could win with magic if he had all his friends with him and had learned a good set of non-massive combat spells.

However, Age of Wonders does not encourage hoarding mana for the end game as it has a casting cap.