Elemental Forums
In some dev journal somewhere (I only heard about it secondhand) Brad let slip that this game's "spell of mastery" is called the "spell of making". My question is: what exactly do you make? My guess is that you create a new, paradise-like world for your people to live in, and warp them all there. Thoughts?
I think it just gives your channeler ultimate control over the world through magic. Basically giving you the power to remake the world however you want - whether that's to make a completely new world or just to make little edits here and there.
True, but my question is always "how". One thing I thought of was that it might reunite the shards of magic into one whole, which is then bonded to you. However, it could at this point be anything. I'm not even sure the devs know! They've been oddly tight-lipped about the entire subject of magic since they started posting.... the only info we've gotten was on the eye candy, as opposed to how it works.
The spell of making... aka win spell should provide other opponents an opportunity to stop the caster. Here's a few ideas:
1) Once the spell is researched it take 10 turns to cast the spell... during these 10 turns all players are notified and have a chance at stopping the caster.
2) Other spells can be casted which can tempoarily prevent the casting of this win spell.
3) Essence can be used to cancel the spell once casted.
All sounds good, except for that last one. You would be unable to cancel the spell after casting because the game would be over.
In MOM it was triple huge fireballs that couldn't be countered. You are too late for I have the Spell of Mastery! Triple huge fireballs covered the whole battlefield and killed all but the highest hit point creatures/heroes. A 2nd cast was enough to finish those off. Thus, if one captured and cast the Spell of Mastery first they won no matter how weak their army or position. 
Terrible ideas as that would all but eliminate a weak opponent from ever getting the spell off. Nope, once it's started the only way to stop it is to kill the caster. I do agree with a certain amount of turns to do this, but, nothing else.
I more or less agree, but I think there needs to be significant heads up beforehand. The problem with magic and tech victories in most games is that by the time you find out that someone is on their way towards a tech/magic victory, it's almost always too late to do anything about it. This is annoying when you play a game and then after 300 turns see "Player A is researching Tech Victory," and then 20 turns later by the time your forces finally reach Player A, the game ends, you lose. However, it's just as bad the other way around - I have never lost a game after starting to research the tech victory research (the AI has never had time to kill me once it gets that warning before I finished the research).
So my point is, there needs to be enough warning so that something can actually be done about it, but the spell has to be done in such a way that weaker players still have a shot at pulling it off. One thing I can think of is to have the spell take a very long time to finish casting, but maybe give you incremental bonuses as it progresses. So even if it's going to take a relatively weak player 40 turns (arbitrary, hypothetical large number) to research, their power would grow every turn - so the longer they hold out, the stronger they become. Balanced right, this could give enough warning to do something about it without totally screwing over weaker players pursuing this victory condition.
I am also not opposed to giving methods of impeding the casting of the Spell of Making. I'd rather not be able to just stop it outright, but to be able to slow the casting down - by how much would be determined by the relative magical prowess of the opposing channelers. And to prevent the whole world ganging up on that one player and bringing the casting progress to a complete halt, there could be a limit (more channelers opposing could have quickly diminishing returns, for example).
IIRC, the backstory behind the game is that there was a big crystal that was shattered, and that the channelers can draw from pieces of it. Maybe the spell of making reforms all the fragments into one big one under the control of the caster? You'd be the only channeler left at that point.
Either that, or maybe it makes a horde of bear cavalry riding black mages. 
What we must remember is it is the WEAKER player we are talking about here and the opportunity for winning must not be taken away for BALANCE sake. If the WEAKER player was lucky enough to find the scoll of Making he/she should have that last chance opportunity for a win since a Strong/Strongest player is hardly going to be stopped casting it. One delay could ultimately ruin the chance for the weaker player to win. We need that FEAR in the game that the weaker player can defeat us or that the AI can defeat us by being first to start the casting. I'm ok with a balanced amount of turns to cast it, but, the only way to stop it should be the elimination of the caster or capture the castle/city it is being cast from.
If any of you played Civilization you remember that 99.9% of the time the first one to start their race into space would win the game. I know I did. Even with all the ai's coming against me I never got stopped launching that spaceship. The thing about Civilization though is that I was always the strongest race/nation. It would have been nice if I had to be the one to stop the AI from launching, but, that never happened. The weak races/nations never had a chance to win.
CIV III brought in that you don't get every resource you need in your territory to build that spaceship and that was the best feature they made in the CIV series since it forced you to attack other races/nations to get those elements or hope they would trade with you for them. Now if we could have something like this as well it would also make the game more interesting and challenging trying to get all the ELEMENTS (pun intended) to begin casting that spell of making as well as finding the powerful scroll. It would be nice if it were more than just crystals like from the movie "The Dark Crystal" of course playing Gelflings might be fun too.
other players do need to be warned when the spell is being cast. Otherwise it would be like
playing... playing.... oh, by the way... you've already lost <game over> which would be stupid
I do not believe the spell should take 10 turns, I think that you should be able to effect that. In MoM, it usually took at least 10 turns to cast the spell, but if you turned every part of your magic into casting it (saved up for a while in the begining, and turn everything towards your max mana-per-day) then you could get the casting time down.
It is actually the way to go for weak players, because strong players likly have too complex of an economy just to shift it into "casting spell time" (for example, I usually have enchantments and summons when I'm playing a military type game, so if I just cranked all my dials to 'cast spell' I'd be suffering some massive mana drain each turn)
A weak player however, could save up for a while (assuming the weak player is not already at wark with an opponent) and might be able to influence the casting of the spell enough to get it off before somebody could stop him. (this would be especially true if there were multiple worlds and the wizard moved his wizard tower to the most remote island in the middle of no where before casting the spell.)
I for one would like to see it where you are seen to be casting the spell for everyone, and they all make a mad dash to your location to try and get you. However, you can still cast OTHER spells while doing it, to create a sort of Normandy Beach situation where people are rushing to get to you off of your mountain while they themesleves are being picked off..... although it might need some extra stuff I didn't think of to actually achieve that effect..... another good idea would be to have your infrastructure, units, and population gradually vanish dirng the casting process.... not always coming back in 1 piece if you get stopped.
If I'm not mistaken doesn't GalCiv2 notify you that another race is doing that transcendency thing? Tells you how many turns it has left etc. etc? I thought of having a beacon of some sort on the mini map glowing or pulsating where the spell of making is being cast. I don't mind other players knowing, but, to add more challenge casting a spell of knowing would add more depth to the game.
It does, but in GC2 ascendancy victory is completely different from Tdchnology victory. I suppose you have to research Hyperdrive to build constructors, but aside from that tech doesn't really make a difference as long as you can hold onto the crystals.
But the point of ascendancy victory is you don't have to be the most powerful player to win that way right? Just using it as an example of putting FEAR into the player as I was leading in everything except toward the ascendancy victory condition. I didn't even know what it was or how to do it the first game I played. lol Then that message pops up and says I only have a certain amount of turns to stop it or I LOSE! I was pissed and elated at the same time discovering that finally someone made a game where the most powerful doesn't necessarily win.
Yeah. Also, just to clarify: in GC 2, there is (and has always been) a technology victory (which leads to ascension). In one of the expansions, I don't remember which, they added something called an ascendency victory, where you win if you can hold onto enough ascension crystals for long enough.
Both of these are supposedly methods through which you or the AI can win without being the strongest player militarily (or economically - as from my experience as long as you've got the economy, it doesn't matter what your military is because you can churn out a military to rival even the strongest in a very short period of time). That said, I actually find ascension victories to be at least as hard as conquest victories and I don't think I've ever pulled one off as a relatively weak player. That might just be my incompetence, but it's my personal experience. The public relations hit for controlling those crystals hurts, and it takes so long to accumulate enough points that either I'm powerful enough to win by conquest anyways, or I'm weak and hated enough that I lose before I can ascend. Same with tech victory - if I have the ability and time to research that, I'm already one of if not the strongest players.
But yeah - I'm totally for there to be ways for relatively weak players to win, but they have to be preventable. I don't want to run into the situation where by the time someone on the other side of the map gets far enough along towards a victory condition that the world becomes aware of it, there isn't time for me to do anything about it. And it isn't practical to force the player to maintain high enough intelligence on all players in order to monitor the situation and get advanced warning - that would get old.
I don't see how a weak player could actually pull off an ascention victory. A strong player can take the bases that hold the crystals from a weak player without a lot of difficulty.
Exactly. What I want from magic victory is a system where economics and conventional military strength don't matter so much as spellcasting ability. But, since we know NOTHING about how magic actually WORKS, I am not even sure if that is possible.
I know this probably would never happen, but I think it would be cool if you could play out your victory, like if the spell of making let you reform the world and drop the most powerfull spells on your enemies. Perhapse a little pointless in multiplayer (Damn, dude got the spell of making. Might as well just log off now), but it would be awesome in single player...
Map settings make for big variations here, especially Immense maps that aren't stuffed with habitables but have nine AIs to start. You can get an ascension win as a mid-ranked military power if you have a few crystals in the right out-of-the-way spots and can manage to keep the major AI powers at each others' throats. It takes a lot of patience, though, and you can accidentally end up a top military power even if you hadn't meant to.
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