I'm more or less with you. But I also like the way that the devs are planning to use Death magic - it's just another aspect of life magic. And it can be used for more than just killing and corrupting and raising dead. It should also be able to heal units (someone around here once gave the example of summoning parasites to eat away dead flesh, for example).

But I agree that death magic should be able to do all/most of the things you just said. Or at least things along those lines. But it shouldn't be limited to just blatant evil things. I want to be able to have an evil life-magic wielding channeler, and I also want to be able to have a good death-magic wielding channeler. 

There's nothing forbidden about death magic in Elemental, it's just an aspect of life magic. Death is, after all, just a part of life, or the absence of.. well.. "vitality".

As for all the other magics being about "good for you" and "bad for them", we don't know that. There could be numerous tradeoffs for using a number of magics, wheter it's a fire spell causing draughts, or.. whatever.

The only thing that seperates life and death magic is which way the life is flowing. Death is the absence of life.Are you removing life from a container or creating life to fill an empty void?

Ripping life from one thing and putting it into another could be considered death magic healing.

Empowering someone to use 100% of thier brain could be considered life magic killing because that the same thing as having a seizure.

Pet peeve of mine.

You always use 100% of your brain. If you would only use 90% you would have 10% dead tissue in your head.

But not all neurons fire at the same time (that would be a horrible seizure).

</Off Topic>

 

 

Magic the Gathering had a nice spell for water element: Unstable Mutation. It gave the enchanted creature an attack and defense bonus but weakened it in subsequent turns, killing it in the end.

Which is imho a nice idea of an evil life spell, mutating a creature to grotesk proportions for a short time, which then will die a horrible death due the mutation being unstable.

The good version would then be Giant Growth, making a creature stronge (and larger) for a short time without any negative side effects.

Giant growth spells could work by folding space in some undefined manner, from the giants perspective (and more importantly the laws of physics inside his body) he's normal size, from everyone elses point of view he's huge. Although freaky things will happen on the border: dose he hit with the strength of a giant, or the strength of a normal man devided across a larger area? I havn't really put much throught into it, just occured to me.

Back to the topic of death magic, I find the assumption that necromanctic summonings call evil things like dreadlords, there's plenty of non-evil things to summon, for example, lots of cultures have a legend about some great king or hero who will return when his people really need him, King Arthur is probobly the best known, why not have your necromancers find this guy and bring him back, in addition to being a hero you'd get some major morale boosts. A top level death spell might open a road between your lands and the afterlife removing the fear/sorrow of death entirely

I've been trying to watch closely since long before this project had a street name, and I'm still wondering if the dev plan includes a scoring system at all. I'm a bit conflicted about whether I want one or not, but that might be mostly because Stardock seem to have lost affection for the scoring side of GalCiv2 while I ended up finally doing some scored games after more than a year of playing simply to be playing. (GC2 folks: I know the non-Metaverse games also have scores, but I never paid attention until the AltMeta got going.)

If there is a scoring system, I definitely want the scoring algorithms to be based on the victory type, but in GC2 one win type (total conquest) is the 'baseline' and all the other wins just get a weaker multiplier). If Elemental has scores with weighting by victory type, I want them to look something like you describe, and maybe not just based on win type. If you are a water-only channeler, you should get a score boost for the number of turns where you controlled all the water shards (if you ever manage that).

Personally I couldn't care less about scoring, and the only reason I'm not against the devs including a scoring system at all is because I know a lot of people love their scores . But basically, scoring systems are always biased in favor of something or another. I much prefer detailed statistics to be shown at the end of a game. Frankly it's much more meaningful than one ambiguous number. Best of both worlds i guess would be for SD to include both, and being able to see both would also make it easier to diagnose big problems in the scoring calculations.

 

Well, if we depart a bit from the traditional elements, you could do the following:

Fire <-> Demonology

Water <-> Ice

Earth <-> Poisons, Illness

Air <-> Spirits, Ghosts, Void

 

Demonology would involve summoning and using (classical fire) demons to do ones bidding. For example, instead of casting the classical fireball, you would summon a lesser demon that would then charge the enemy and explode on impact. It would also include blood magic, that is similar to fire magic (blood - hot) [bit fare fetched I know, but not impossible] but works more with sacrificing stuff instead of spending mana.

Ice as an evil version of water would work I guess. Pretty straightforward, that one.

The evil version of earth could be poisons, illnesses and maladies in general; be it Black Death or stuff to poison a well.

To abuse air you could have spirits, ghosts and other ethereal beings to help one and of course the absence of air, vacuums and implosions as direct damage spells.

 

My suggestions are a bit summoning heavy, but they're just examples of course. I think there are a lot of ways to make the other elements interesting in a good/evil or positive/negative dichotomy. With my examples good or positive channelers would have more direct damage resp. helping and support spells while evil/negative ones would have the more sneaky, indirect, damage over time, destructive spells.

I never really thought about the spectrum of the schools of magic ranging from "good" to "evil." I actually hope that's not how it works (after all, pretty much any spell could be used for good or for evil). I'd rather it just be a neutral dichotomy between two different skillsets. Basically, the "positive" spectrum of fire magic might be predominantly offensive destructive spells, while the "negative" spectrum could focus more on debuffs and the like (sucking the heat out of enemy soldiers, reducing their fighting effectiveness, etc), maybe also summons like Vandenburg's idea (although i wouldn't want it to be called demonology ). I got the impression that the different aspects of the magic schools is a tool to increase player options as well as a way to add in some exclusivity (you can't have it all). 

I want the alignment of channelers to be independent of what aspect of which schools he chooses to focus on. Could be a little awkward to have a Death magic-wielding necromancer be good-aligned, though, but not inconceivable.

Edit: TheColorOfHeartache got to a lot of this while I was composing this post

Well to summerise my response: I now understand your point better, but I still somewhat disagree (at least its an informed disagreement this time )

Firstly in regards to Holy: Now you've clarified it mostly fits with caviats, searing light and sunbeam have nothing to do with Life, banish undead is purely a necromancy spell (and as a pure attack spell its also a "negative"), heal fits, resurrection requires both life and death magic (you have to find the origonal soul, getting a soul back from the afterlife, even a willing one, is necromancy). As for devine blessing, I think I've made my views clear

Nature magic also only partly fits, growth magic, healing magic, etc: they fit. Summoning animals, animating trees (add life to a tree and you get a bigger tree, not a walking talking fighting tree. However if you can find tiny fighting trees then life magic can grow them), summoning faeries and other nature spirits, not really.

 

Next you say you argued for positives and negatives, that's not exactly how I remember it [quote who="Vandenburg" reply="15" id="1977771"What I'd prefer is a Positive vs. Negative spectrum instead, with 'positive' obviously being "good" while 'negative' would be "evil" (overall). [/quote], ok you really could have explained that better lets move on. How exactly do you define positive and negative if not good/evil? All I can think of is Help me / Hurt him is that what you had in mind?

If so then I don't think it really works to holy and necromancy along those lines, there many postivies and negatives for both: at first glance you might see something like grow my crops vs wither his crops but you could invert it to grow weeds in his crops / kill weeds in my crops. Or heal vs hurt can be inverted to heal deseases vs hurt deseases. And the necromancy classic: raising skeletons to fight is argueably no worse than building a golem, it might be considered desrespectful to the dead but if you have their permission ("You'll be glad to know that with my necromancy after your dead your bones will go on to serve the commies a steaming platter of shame with a side order of suck it! Vote for me if you want to live!).

 

pigeonpigeon, thanks

You have to consider the existance of actual souls, which is usually connected to the light. 'Holy' magics is usually, in a fantasy context, indisputably a part of Life magic. I'm not saying that all indisputably belong to "Life". Also, as far as resurrection goes, remember that there is no death magic in EWoM; 'Death' magic is a confirmed part of Life magic. It's all in how you use it.Technicly, there's nothing saying that you cannot use a potential Life magic-spectrum interchangably with traditional fantasy Nature magic, including summoning faeries and nature spirits. Even the summoning of spirits can be tied to life force, especially if you consider their attachement to other 'foresty' aspects that are entirely possibly to achieve with the use of life magic.

No, positive and negative. Generally, this would be equal to the usual perception of good and evil (as I said in the excerpt you quoted). But as I expanded on after the excerpt you quoted, if you took the time to "read->comprehend->write", Positive and Negative are the presence and absence of the classical element.

To this, I used the example of the Fire element to create Ice magic. Because if Heat (Fire) is the result of the Positive of the classical Fire element, then Cold (Ice) would be the natural result of the Negative of the fire element. As I said, "Ice, moving away slightly from the classical dichotomy, would in this case be the absence of Fire". Just like Death is an aspect of the Life element (confirmed); But instead of arbitrary Good vs. Evil where death is the natural evil, we'd have positives (generally 'good') and negatives (generally 'evil').

You've missunderstood the words positive and negative. It's detached from morals, just like being HIV-positive is (generally) not a good thing.

Raising armies of undeads would no doubt be a positive thing for my vampirical empire, but the usage of the Life Element would be negative. Likewise, my good-aligned frosten kingdom with polar bear paladins would use negative fire magic, forfeiting the power to scorch the lands in favour of raising.. I have no idea. A glacial wall, or something.

I hope they don't follow this route with the different aspects of magic schools . First of all I don't think it's very workable (what is the absence of earth, water and air? The only things I can think of are liquidity, solidity, and void - but the first two would just result in negative water = earth and negative earth = water...). I would much rather the two (more?) aspects of the schools of magic not have anything to do with the presence or absence of the element, but rather just involve using the element in largely different ways.

One way of doing this is to have one aspect be mostly utility, while the other be mostly combat related. For example, one aspect of earth magic could be to ruin your enemy's crops and make your own extremely fertile, to shore up your walls, etc. The other aspect could be used to hurl boulders in combat, create earthquakes, etc. Each aspect should still have a little bit of the other aspect in it, though - but with much less variety, strength and efficiency. Likewise some spells of some elements might be very similar to spells in other elements. There are many ways to ruin somebody's crops or improve your own, for example. Plus the much desired multi-element spells - I really hope those are in.

And they needn't even follow the same mold for each element. Earth magic could be divided into utility and combat, life magic could be divided into giving life and taking it (and giving life should be capable of killing, and taking life should be capable of healing ). Fire magic could be divided into two different types of combat-oriented magic (buffing/debuffing vs. destructive spells). I think a system like this would be much more interesting than one based on the absence/presence of the element or good/evil. It allows them to make much more meaningful boundaries between the aspects of an element. 

Yeah, but they've also said that each sphere will have a sort of spectrum. So, for example, knowing that your opponent is a fire channeler won't be enough to accurately gauge what you're up against - you'd want to know which side of the spectrum he is on, because that will probably affect what spells he can use well. That's what we're talking about.