The spell system in FE has some serious problems right now, and they contribute to a lot of broken gameplay.
There are many other issues with heroes right now, but spellcasting affects both strategic play and tactical combat, so it has a heavy influence on all aspects of the game.
The mana system currently does a very poor job of handling the spells, as it encourages you to make heavy use of cheap buffs/debuffs and highly efficient multi-target aoe spells, ignore all high cost strategic spells or spells with a mana upkeep, and then later breaks down completely due to increasing mana income and/or cost reduction traits/items.
Once your total mana income surpasses a certain level and/or your mage heroes have enough traits/equipment, you can cast spells endlessly in tactical combat, and depending on your income, mana costs make strategic spells either impractical or trivial to cast - and trivial Earthquake or Cloud Walk is insane.
The other problem with mana cost as a balancing mechanism is that your mana income is highly variable dependant on the random map generated and the size of the map.
This can easily cause you to be starved of mana income, rendering high cost spells completely useless (indeed, in all of my winning games, I have yet to make use of the >100 strategic spells to any significant degree even once I could afford them, they're just grossly inefficient compared to tac spells with cost reducers or a tiny handful of the cheaper strategic spells).
If you remove cheap effective spells you mandate that the player must find a certain level of mana income every game to be able to use magic to any significant degree, while if you have any number of effective low cost spells you can safely ignore expensive spells and reliably plan your strategy around those cheap spells, which removes a lot of the richness of the magic system if large parts of it are consistently beyond your reach every game.
There are a lot of areas that spells touch, but here's a breakdown of some of the bigger ones and some thoughts on each.
Some solutions that spring to mind for these problems for Tactical Combat:
1) Ditch the mana system entirely.
- Go to a cooldown based system for spells.
- Now spells can be tuned with a windup time and a cooldown time, allowing for much, much greater predictability in the power of a spell - if a spell is 'balanced' by a high cost, it is by definition imbalanced when cost ceases to be relevant.
- Tune workhorse spells to have no windup time and a short cooldown. Players, AI, and monsters are expected to be able to use certain spells repeatedly and reliably, combat is tuned around this fact.
- Powerful spells have a long windup time and/or long cooldown, giving you a variety of options in battle, without the ability to spam high power spells every turn. This means that a high power spell has a dramatic impact on how a battle plays out, but cannot be spammed to end every fight once acquired.
- Initiative has no effect on windup or cooldown times.
- This system also gives consistent, important, and reliable use for Counterspells, which are currently completely useless due to the lack of windup spells and the init system affecting cast times.
- An additional system for tinkering with spell power: casting certain high power spells also starts a cooldown on other spells, either of the same elemental school, or the same level, or across the board, depending on their power.
2) Cap tactical combat mana.
- It can be capped to a fixed amount dependant on map size, an amount dependant on hero Level/Int/Traits/whatever, a combination of absolute minimum/% of total mana maximum, or any number of other systems.
- Once capped, you can predict with much greater accuracy the available mana pool of players/ai in tactical combat and can tune spells appropriately, such that some spells can be cast repeatedly in a fight, but others can only be cast a few times.
- REMOVE all forms of %cost reduction to prevent heroes from casting level 5 spells for no mana. It's too difficult to tune mana income against spell cost if a player can bypass the system entirely with Affinity and a Mage Robe giving 60-90% cost reduction (unless it's desired that the player can eventually infinitely cast tac spells by the late game, and the combat is tuned around that expectation).
In either case: Remove initiative as a component in spells with windup times. If a spell takes 1 turn to cast, it needs to take 1 full round of combat for all sides, otherwise high level heroes can cast these spells instantly, rendering the balancing mechanism of a windup time completely moot.
Strategic level spells are a different issue
Note that, interestingly, some Strategic spells already do have a cooldown. The framework is already there for a cooldown based system, but some thoughts:
Cooldown System
- Still works for strategic level spells. Can be adjusted based on map size to tune the power of strategic spells.
- Limits can be imposed on the number of maintained spells based on shards held/research in the Magic tree/magic items/hero traits/etc. This could affect city, unit, and hero buffing spells.
- Unit buffs could be moved to a maintained limit system, or a cooldown system, allowing for temporary army boosts that need to be timed for maximum effectiveness.
- Allows even ridiculously broken spells like Cloud Walk to be at least somewhat more reasonable, if given a long cooldown.
- City buffing spells like Aura of Grace and Aura of Vitality could be given a limited duration, allowing you to produce a handful of buffed units every so often - currently you can either produce them infinitely, or abuse the system by casting both, creating units, then cancelling both since the buffs stick around.
- Prevents the complete lockdown of enemy units in your territory with the repeated casting of cheap spells like Tremor, or the obscene power of repeated Earthquakes and Tornado which only have one turn cooldowns.
Debuff Spells
Currently debuff spells are the only spells in the game subject to a resistance check. I really dislike all or nothing mechanics, especially in tactical combat, and even more because in this case you have the option of either guaranteed damage, or a guaranteed buff/summon/non targeted spell. This makes debuff spells categorically worse than all other types of magic in tac combat.
Some suggestions:
- Keep the resist system in place, but allow partial effects if a debuff is resisted. Slow still slows, but has less of an effect. Shrink still shrinks, but does not reduce damage or increase dodge as much. Gravemark still triggers but damage only gains a boost instead of becoming a guaranteed critical.
- Add buff/debuff removal spells in addition to counterspells. This gives you the ability to counter your opponents buffs and clear debuffs as needed, creating some interactivity between spellcasters, something sorely lacking right now (it would also give another useful role for Spell Mastery)
All Spells
- Add Hero Traits to support buffing/debuffing/counterspelling/cleansing/summoning.
- Currently heroes can reduce mana cost and specialize in Evocation, boosting damage spells - but there are zero traits for boosting buffs or debuffs, or aiding in cleansing buffs/debuffs, counterspelling, or powering up summons.
--
Share your thoughts!
My personal preference is dumping the mana system in favor of a cooldown system. Mana has lots of nostalgic ties, but its a pretty shitty system for balancing power, as it's exceedingly binary. You have mana, you cast as much as you want. No mana, you can't cast anything.
Forcing your players to play spell-economics by performing cost-benefit analysis on Haste vs Thunderstrike is considerably less interesting to me than choosing which spells I'm going to use in battle if I can only cast certain spells once in the fight and others more frequently.
It then becomes a game of utilizing spells with varied effects intelligently instead of simply spamming your high powered spells until the entire enemy army is dead with no harm to your units, or casting the same sequence of buffs on your heroes every fight.
