It's also semantics that we have units with weapons and armor, we could just have numbered entities of generic composition.  Semantics are the foundation of language.  If you do not have fire, then you cannot have fire resistance.  You are arguing against diversity, not for it.

Why do you think an entire sphere can be filled up with damage spells, but damage spells can't be unique between spheres?  Nature ball as a serious spell, is it a giant granola bar or what?  We could put Monk in the game and he'd be paralyzed by getting "nature" on his hands.

Control of the elements, storm generation, air movement, atmospheric effects galore.  Air has no need for a generic damage spell to match fireball, they're the typical generic spell lists.  Effects can work against the same resistance score that counts against damage.  You don't need a snowball, you need a thunderstorm randomly frying units in the area, gale force winds that neutralize ranged attacks and slow movement,  Air and Fire don't have to be the least bit similar in any way.  It's no less stupid to assign a damage sphere than it is to make attack spells generic between them.  It's self limiting idiocy.

You can do lots of things simply, or make a mess.  You can have a stun effect, but it can't be a thunderbolt that doesn't work on rock golems.  You can set something alight, but it works on a water elemental just as well as a scarecrow.  To do it anyway, you make the previously described mess.  It's a horrible thing to behold.  A damage type is a simple, clean method of categorizing and modifying the effect of that damage in a logical manner.  It's no different than having a trigger for units being living versus something else.  An animated skeleton obviously can't be killed by paralytics or poisonous gases.

Now there's something I didn't think of. You know those screen shots we've seen of the graphics build? Remember how it looks like each node has a colored beam of light heading toward the sky? Maybe if you're channeling energy to another Sovereign the beam could go skyward then head toward the Sovereign you have the agreement with. Could be interesting.

The beams may have to be toned down a bit though or when you scroll out to sky level every map will look like there are rainbows going all over the place...lol.

The point he was arguing against (I think) was the idea that different magic damage types are the only thing separating spells.  Yes, you could, for instance , have one spell category have more AoE damage and one have more single target damage, or lots of individual targets, or other differences, but these differences have nothing ot do with separate damage types.  (This is the argument that commonly comes up, that "fireballs and ice bolts will be no different", that everyone has probably seem way to often.

This assumes that rock golems must be immune to lightning in game, water elementals must respond differently to fireballs, etc.  Really, though, it is just a convention that many games simplify things ot that point but not further.  Most games do not, for instance, calculate the difference between qualities of production materials for different objects, the various complications that go into diplomacy, do not include political maneuvering, do not consider  difficulties in communicating (how do you instantly know what a far away city is doing when your units, in game, take 20 turns to reach it?) or supplies (Where exactly do your archers get replacement arrows from, anyway, and how are they unlimited in combat?), even though all these things are "realistic", or likely would be in an actually existing world.  The fact that a game will include some things, but not others, is somewhat arbitrary, and somewhat a matter of what is fun to play.  In this case, having lots of different damage types is likely ot be less fun to play.

So basically, you're arguing that a complex strategy game should be more dumbed down than the typical rpg all so we can have monotone damage and effects that are universal in veracity.

Why remove thinking from what's generally the most entertaining aspect of the game?

I still hope and expect to see damage spells in every sphere. Of course some elements will be very strong in a high variety of dmage spells but maybe less utililty spells, another sphere May only have a few direct damage spells but may have lots of buffs, damage over time, etc. I should not say "of course", because really nothing is a given at this point but I think it would be terrible to have all damage spells concentrated in one school.

I also hope and it sounds like different schools may have various effects outside of damage. Again, it SEEMED like this would have to be a given, as being stuck with a bunch of spells that only did damage would be pretty dumb.

psychoak thanks for the tag, I really needed a break and was beoming a real douche there. Let me know when you get tired of explaining the obvious, I'm good to get tagged back in - I REALLY don't think we have anything to worry about, I don't think they are going to take the "reverse polish notation" approach to damage. We'll see.

Of course I am just an old IBM Assembly language programmer, I know these object oriented guys sometimes do like to go a bit overboard on complexity of code... Maybe in OOP it does make more sense to have an element flag on the spell and then alter the units magic resistance based on what school the spell that is "hitting" them comes from.....

No, I can;t see how that isn't extra programming AND more confusing to the poor user. I was getting a little bit with people that were arguing for LESS complexity and then in the same breath were proposing this  crazy scheme of how they were going to do different damage types without doing different damage types. I have this little WTF sign in my brain and i think I had to replace the light bulbs a few times...

Of course I'm arguing against useless diversity. Let's say it again: the diversity added by damage types is not worth the complexity it adds. There are far more interesting ways of adding diversity (like spell effects).

I don't think so, no idea how you got to that conclusion. I have never said that if we have one damage type then all damage spells can't be unique, but the opposite. But I have said that having some spell effects (buffs, damages, summons,...) predominant in some spell schools would be interesting (at least for me, pretty similar to what MoM did as it made different playing as a life mage, or a chaos mage,...).

The only thing you can do with a damage type is to do someone vulnerable, resistant, or inmune to it. End of the story. You may find that interesting and varied, but other people don't (it's just specializing the magic resistance attribute for concrete cases).

It's not logical because there are no laws that define magic but the laws that the game designers wants to create. As soon as you get out of the "obvious" examples (fireball and fire elemental and so on, and even those can be broken easily), there's no way of agreing what makes and what doesn't makes sense.

This is the crutch your brain is tripping over.

Damage is only one consideration for resistance.  Resistance is the primary feature.

A fireball.  Simple, easy to grasp.  What does a fireball do when it impacts a person?  It burns, it hurts a lot.  It needs to have some sort of accelerant with it to light you on fire though.  If you just get torched, you're left a little charred.  You don't continue combusting without help.  The reason?  People suck at burning.  Wood doesn't, wood combusts without an accelerant.  Water is incapable of combustion, it's a result.  Rock only combusts at extremely high temperatures, and even then not much.  Then we get into magic, and we have crazy things like plasma based magical beings.  Fire wouldn't do any harm to something that was a fountain of plasma generation, extra heat would increase the rate at which it turned the surrounding matter into plasma if anything.

A tree doesn't have to be fire vulnerable and take more damage, instead it can easily alight even to weak fire attacks.  There is so much more you can do with a resistance value than just modify damage, and you're simply making things messy if you don't set this up by types.  It's necessity to have complexity.  After you already have a resistance system, it would be even more silly to then modify damage based on individual spell triggers, you set them up as types.

Couldn't agree more. The devs should "inspect" Dominions 3.'s spell/magic system. That game has the most detailed & diverse spells.

One problem the devs may be struggliong with (I know I am) is how to implement different resistances. I mean fire and codl resists I think we all get - but how do you implement earth resists? What kind of damage would  earth spells do? How about air ( you could have an electrical damage type I guess) and I think this may be where some people were getting hung up, because  at the end of the day, whatever damage is just done to the hit point pool, rather the hit points go away due to being burned, frozen, electrocuted, poisoned, hit by a rock or stuck thru with a spear.

My opinion is that earth spells should mostly just do plain physical damage and use your physical armor as the "resistance". But then say you have a mud spell for slowing people down - it doesn't make sense to use the armor as a resistance, in fact the more armor you are wearing, the MORE likely you would be to get bogged down. Some people would say again I am reaching for something overly complex, but the nice thing is these computers handle most of the complexity, and it would jsut be one of those things you learn as you play. I think it is pretty easy to conceive that your armor would protect you from a stalagmite suddenly shooting up out of the ground and trying to skewer you, and yet makes you more susceptible to being slowed down in a literal quagmire.

And yes, it could get ugly and complicated if done wrong, but I still thing it could be easy and straightforward if done right. I could totally see steel plate armor protecting against mundane weapons and earth but actually lowering your resistance to lightning. Maybe it would be nice to have a spell called "insulation" or "non-conductive". This does kind of bring the resistances into the unit stats at unit creation, I know that isn't going to be there and I understand and partially agree with the why. I agree with psychoak though, I think just having damage types and resistances is the straightforward and simple way to deal with it, the other options are not to have it at all, and the worst option is trying to do it in a non-straightforward, complicated and messy way.

That game has the most diverse everything: spells, artefacts, units, magical monsters, magical sites, races/civilizations with their background. It's just a wishlist come true.

Of course, a lot of it is abstracted since they don't have much resources to put into the game. When frogboy can make the channeler burn a city with a volcano, Dom3 just shows you the sentence telling "Province X was devastated by a volcano. One third of population died".

I would dream of seeing all that variety put into a more detailed and graphical game like Elemental...and it would be a nightmare to see E:WOM end like Civ Fantasy because 'casual players' equal strategy game with Tic Tac Toe.

I'm sorry I like more the simplicity of X damage + Y ongoing damage during Z turns (everything modified by magic resistance) than, X damage modified by your specific resistance + Y damage during Z turns modified by your combustion index for magic fire (another useless attribute).
 

Your "we can do more than modify damage" with a resistance sounds great for a tree and the ongoing damage, but it looks much worse for an ice elemental... If you are trying to model two effects, you nearly for sure need two values.

But really, I think everything that can be said has been said in this debate.

At the end of the day, those "basic" elemental attacks do mundane damage. Fire is quite mundane by itself, as well as water, air or earth. But why is it considered Arcane (just to follow Stardock) when casting the spell? Because the way that fire or whatever was created.

You could set on fire a person by mundane means and he would suffer mundane fire damage. Or you could cast a fireball to him for a similar result, although in this case it would be arcane fire damage. If the person were to have fire resistance, it'd not matter if the fire was of mundane or arcane damage because his resistance would work the same. If the fire was of arcane origin and the person also had arcane resistance, then he would be better resisting arcane fire than mundane fire.

Let's suppose I raise some earth pikes to impale some poor soldiers. You don't need magic to be able to pierce someone with a pointy rock, so in the end we could say that the damage would be mundane but in the case of the spell it's arcane because I'm using magic to shape the earth. So if the soldiers have arcane resistance, they might make the spell fizzle, resists its damage... If later in the battle a soldier falls over one of those earth pikes, his arcane resistance will mean nothing as once created, the pikes become mundane as the magic that created them dissapear.

If I try to use an Earth Tomb on a Sovereign, his arcane resistance will enter play. If I Create a mountain at 5 feet over him and let the gravity do the rest, the arcane resistance of the Sovereign will mean nothing. Massive mundane damage by a falling mountain laughs of arcane resistances. Even if I had tried to create a magical mountain to get a +5 to Crush, it would be the same to create a magical maul; his arcane resistance won't protect him from a +2 SWord so why would protect him from a +5 Falling Mountain? And even if it could, the mountain example should be one of those cases of instant death unless trick in the sleeve.

A Wall of Fire created and sustained by magic, would be arcane damage in origin. If you just set on fire a pit of oil, mundane fire damage, at least once the setting on fire part ends (which we started with magic).

About effects like Mud, if units* were to have stats like Channelers/Heroes, they could try stat checks.

*unit being a single individual if he is alone, a party if they are four... A single unit would make a single check no matter how many individuals compose it. For the sake of simplicity, carebears, casual players, coders and/or whatever.

A damage type doesn't necessarily need to be elemental.  If you can deprive a room of oxygen with air magic, you wouldn't be doing air damage, you'd be asphyxiating them.  That kind of attack, something that only harms living, breathing creatures, would be it's own type, something negated by things that aren't living, breathing creatures.

Earth spells that did damage would likely be physical attacks, thus have physical damage.  I envision a flying monster being resistant or even immune to earth effects based on being able to bypass irritating things like the ground turning to quicksand, but not to having a boulder hurled at it.  The damage type would be whatever was applicable, not what sphere it was.

I rather like the above post for the most part, but I don't know about having two resistance sets for all the spells.  It seems more like arcane resistance would be something exceedingly rare in a game where your channeler is the only guy with magic till he spreads his power around.

Negative.  If you're trying to figure out how you damage a cold immune ice elemental with a flying popcicle, it's easy.  A snowball doesn't do cold damage, it does physical damage.  You don't freeze when getting struck by one, the cold effect is minimal.  It stings from impact.  A freezing effect would be what is countered by the cold resistance, not physical impact.

Exactly. Actually, this is the case even if they DO different kinds of damage. Nothing of value was lost !

Absolutely not. Open your eyes. Most unimaginative games like Diablo and its clones disguise the fact that offensive spells are actually all alike. They mostly differ in damage tags. Yes, tags. They don't differ in other statistics, only in arbitrarily set labels which cause them to occasionally do more or less damage against certain opponents. But mostly, they just disguise game's primitivity.

Blizzard games in particular are infamous for using permutations of "area effect", "damage type", "damage over time". They can't come up with anything new. Compare that to Nox. You can finish Nox and not realize monsters don't differ in resistances. Wait, there's almost no resistances in Nox ! It's much subtler and organic. Slower missiles are bad choice against knights who'll just parry them. (chain) lightning is good against groups, but risky as it forces you to be stationary while casting. Magic missiles are easy to hit, but not very mana efficient. Fireballs are good against groups, but require good aim, are risky up close and unlikely to hit fast targets. And these are just a few. Each offensive spell is different and each has a niche, and you keep using even the earliest even in endgame.

What I'm trying to say is Elemental may do like Nox and instead of focusing on false variety (damage tags), focus on other areas.

Sorry, but you're wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick_effect