Crafting Magic Items

Go open city menu and look for the design button and then hunt around in weapons selection, you'll see it around there. I think lightning spear if the name is right is one of them. Its a upgrade to plain ol pikes. But be warned crystal prices is PRICY.

I once accidently paralyzed my entire economy in one game once but managed to recover from that price tag shocker.

Weapons are built to order just for armies. You can buy items for heroes in the shop, but then it just costs gold (lots of it!).

I THINK what the OP is referring to is custom designed weapons, not the assortment of weapons we have now.

Those of us that have played NWN and some other games have an idea of what this entails (a point system that you use to tailor custom made weapons/armor/etc. to your needs).

Example: Taking a Legendary Broadsword (say 8 design points), adding Fire to it (another 4 design points), and giving it a higher chance to crit (+10%, 2 points).  Total cost 14 points.  I'm just pulling numbers of the air here, but this is how a crafting system works.  In this game, of course you'd tie Crystal and other resources to the design choices for a given weapon, as well as the 'design point system'.  You would then tie a 'design point cap' to the tech tree, so say you only have 5 points for custom design when you research Custom Weapon 1, 8 points when CW2 is researched, etc.  CW1, 2, etc. would be tied into existing techs on the tech tree, or perhaps a new tech or two might be added.

The Combat Tree could increase the max attack strength available for custom weapons (still point system based though), while the Magic tree would increase magical abilities available via customization.

That may be too involved for this crowd though!  But this does tie in to the wide disparity between weapons and armors currently available in Elemental.  If there was a point system behind how the weapon abilities were picked, then we'd see a little more uniformity between them.  Note the discussion recently about Masterwork Chainmail vs Masterwork Plate vs Regular Chain and Plate in another thread.  Sure, we can tweak those values after the fact, but a 'design point system' would be another way to balance the pros and cons.

Thanks Ericridge and Davrovana, that is indeed what I was referring too. I just wanted to understand that mechanic of the game as I could not find anything in the help files or online on it. I was researching the tech and did not see anything that allowed me to actually craft the equipment I was researching.

Its good to know to keep an eye on the store and questing items for my heroes though. I agree with Tjashen there should be some way to make items for your heroes instead of a lottery of items that currently exist. 

One more question, my starting city was no where NEAR a crystal mine? I didn't find one until close to late game. Is this common? Cause that sucked when I found out how important that resource was.

Sometimes you'll start right next to one. They are not uncommon, in my opinion. But you only get resources half as fast as iron mines...

Yeah, crystal is everywhere, but you aren't guaranteed to have it near your starting spot.

On average there is 2 iron to 1 crystal node. It is by design that crystals is to be scarce.

With that said I had several games where I was swimming in crystals but had completely no iron for like 100 or more turns lol

I was so lucky to not have to contend with vergas' sods when had that problem. <.<

And np you're welcome.

Randomness is random. You can always trade for Crystal if you really wanted to. Also, Ophidians provide a lot of Crystal, if you can defeat them.