Arcane knowledge all the way for the ultimate spellcasting Channeler.

An idea came to me the other day regarding taking the magical route to victory.

Imagine a game where it is viable to specialize your cities for arcane research and, in doing so, make a mighty wizard out of your Channeler. Unfortunately this may seem a ridiculous notion to some because the way combat and magic are implemented now, magic is underpowered and everyone protects their Channeler with the strongest armor and weapons. I have a few suggestions to make our dream of a fearsome magic-wielding naked Channeler a realistic strategy:

Make the entire Magic tech tree researchable only with arcane knowledge .
Add new arcane technologies that improve the Channeler as a spellcaster. Recall the game Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic where you had the choice to either research spells or improve the magical abilities of your Sovereign; I am suggesting the exact same thing. For example, one ability could increase the mana per turn produced by the Channeler significantly. A great abundance of mana could help differentiate the warrior and wizard Channelers by only wizaards having enough mana to afford the most powerful of spells, or afford the upkeep cost of maintaining legions of summoned creatures.
Enforce Intelligence requirements for spells on Channelers.
Enforce Strength/Dexterity requirements for all weapons and armor for Channelers and Champions.
Give wizard Channelers a viable way to absorb damage and generally survive battles through spellcasting. Think of archers and warrior Channelers who have enough intelligence to blink next to a wizard.
Make all spells heavily dependent on intelligence so that low level spells scale up well in late game. This can also serve to defferentiate warrior/wizard hybrid Channelers for full fledged wizards.
Give magic-focused factions the ability to craft the most powerful items that can be equipped by Channelers and Champions alike. I'm not speaking of items that you would equip armies with, but unique items like "the one ring to rule them all" from Lord of the Rings of which only one exists per game. Considering how magic-focused factions would have little knowledge of weapons and armor, their weapons and armor would have to have a magical quality to them. Whenever the diplomacy gets an upgrade, these priceless unique items of power could be traded away to other players. Buildings, training and item crafting should be done in parallel with crafting taking a long time to complete.

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I think it would be REALLY funny if one of the magic items you could create (going along with your Ruling Ring LOTR reference) was a set of rings that gave fairly significant bonuses to a Champion(s) who originally starts out as a non-ringmaking race's hero, but has a slight chance (~1% per turn or something like that) of 'corrupting' the Champion to your side - permanently (champion can no longer be traded), so long as your sovereign has the Ruling Ring. You can accept the ring from the faction that made it and get some kind of immediate bonus to the Champion's abilities - perhaps even a permanent Death Ward - but the 'gift' might come back to bite you later on.

I also think that another way to possibly connect the magic tech tree with magic would be to require that at least one Arcane Lab/Lore Hall be built for each level of research that you put into the magic tree - i.e., you are at level 5 in the magic tree and you cannot advance any further into the tree until you have at least 5 Arcane Labs/Lore Halls (other arcane knowledge generating structures should probably count as well, and you could work it so that the more Arcane Labs/Lore Halls/arcane knowledge generators you had, the less worldly knowledge it takes to research the next level of the Magic/Sorcery tree).

The biggest problem that I have with the magic system as it currently stands is that, through the entire game, it is more or less a nice set of supporting abilities that are useful but not particularly game changing or significant. Granted, Heal in the early stages of the game can be ridiculously powerful because you can restore ~half the life of any unit likely to be on the field, and if you have armor that is roughly on par with enemy attack ratings, then it is somewhat unlikely that the enemy is going to be hitting for more than a few points of damage at a time. Empires lack this spell, and it can really hurt their armies' ability to do things early game, since the only way to heal the Fallen troops is to go home and wait a while or push on and replace those who fall.

One thing that I think also needs to be included before a viable wizard sovereign can really come into being is a starting spell that does a bit of damage. It doesn't have to be a very good spell, but it needs to do a couple of points of damage for no more than three or four mana, because otherwise you get back to relying on weapons and armor that your mage king wants to get away from.

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