For those that have been here a long time, you may remember my pitching for having multiple pre-saved spell books. (example, and again)
in my previous posts, I talked about having pre-sets including "weak magic" (having only the basic low level spells, or making the strong spells especially difficult/rare to recieve), "Strong Magic" (having easy access to many very powerful spells, perhaps removing some weaker redundancy spells that might have been used in the weak magic) and "tournament magic" including the most balanced arrangement of spells, possibly for tournament, ladder, or other compeditive play.
I have however, thought of something new. We could have "tactical" vs. "auto-resolve" spells and spellbooks.
Tactical spellbook would include a lot of "in battle" use spells, that may not be useful (or even usable) for games where combat is auto-resolved
In turn, 'auto-resolve"spellbooks could have enchantments that specifically effect auto-resolve rolls (say a moral boost, or firy heart might give auo-resolve bonuses) or variants on the "in combat" spells that allow them to be used outside of combat.
One example that comes to mind is a generic fireball spell. In tactical combat, you'd expect it to hit 1 target with AoE, but that doesn't work if everything is auto-resolve. In tactical combat it would be a decently useful spell, but a skilled tactitic player might be able to space his or her units to recieve mininum damage from such spells. However, in auto-resolve, such tactics would be removed, so either the spell would be gone or it would be usable from the over-land map. However, in the overland map, it would have to either A: hit all units on a tile (in which case it would be broken if the same damage as recieved in combat) or B: reduce damage per unit hit or C: have a set number or ratio of other units hit by the "splash". Anyway, it would have to be modified to fit the new purpose (or just removed because it is useless and can't be used outside of combat). This is why I call for set(s), so auto-resolve and tactical based games can have their own spell lists.
Another idea is just have a window that appears before auto-resolve combat where you pick how much mana and which spells you want to use in combat, and that is factored into the auto-resolution. This may be the best option, but it seems like a cheap to solve the auto-resolve vs. tactical gameplay problem. (what do you think?)
