Technology and Magic research

No please no muskets or cannons... I feel like that would ruin the feel of the game. I would be happier if it stayed very medieval: LotR and ASoIaF style. This isn't warcraft... 

Well, like I said I'm just using my own logic and happy thoughts of a few cannon and riflemen against a dragon..I see your point of course, god bless modding.

Indeed, god bless. I'd happily look forward to seeing a steampunk mod of Elemental, but I really feel the canon game could do without that stuff. 

Technology shouldnt progress beyond an early medevial period in a society where magic is avilable. Technology progresses in order to get things that take a long time doing to take less time. It also progresses to facilitate war. Its reasonable then to say that magic facilitates all the needs of war while offering the ability to make daily life easier to those who can afford it.

An example would be: Why develop medical care when a mage can heal someone with a spell?

or: Why learn to make gunpowder when you can field a cadre of mages who can wipe away hundreds of troops and you meerely need to protect your mages from other mundane soldiers with your own soldiers.

magic would cause research to faulter. One can even say that the invention of explosives would be considered an ungentlamnly tactic because it allows cheaper soliders (one would assume a mage would cost more to field) to reap deveasting affects with minimal training.

Thats my thought on technology versus magic in society. I doubt you'd see cannons alongside magic as the metalurgy and chemistry most likely would never be pursued. You may be tempted to point out that "every ship can't have a mage and therefore ships would facilitate the need for cannons!" however, this doesn't hold water as naval galleasses and galleys existed long before cannon... where men fought with grapling hooks and swords on the high seas in pitch battles that raged across entire fleets in the bright daylight and in ferocious sea's where none but those involved would ever know the deeds performed.

Err that came outta nowhere.

Your logic is flawed.  First of all magic is very rare, as are people who can do it (IE our avatar in game).  So technolgoy would still progress, indeed the 'wizards' themselves would want new stuff invented so they could concentrate more of their power in other ways.  50 easily trained musket-using soldiers are cheaper and easier to train than 50 longbowmen.  Also magic would still be so all-powerful that the 'wizard' types wouldn't really be frightened of it short of nuclear arms or handheld machineguns. 

In short: The all powerful mages aren't healing people (unless it's a metaclass spell maybe) and better soldiers are better soldiers.  Why waste magic on enchanting some swords when you could be summoning a demon and letting the soldiers use guns. 

Ha ha. I don't mind muskets. Warhammer fantasy battle had musketeers and even steam tanks.

Bear in mind that  firearms already existed in medieval china long before the europeans perfected the technology and military doctrine for its use in the battlefield. Early on, lack of industrialization probably kept firearms from being effective as muskets were only effective when used in large concentrated numbers.

Well, since I am a MOM nostalgic and in this there was Steam Cannons and Warships I have no problem with a powder technology branch of the research tree for determined factions. Furthermore, it would remind me of the powder bomb used by the Uruk-Hai in the Helm´s Deep; maybe Saruman did it, but without any magic.

I think this game wouldn't be limited by a historical view; it's a fantasy game and therefore the less the limits the better the experience.

I would be happy to see nothing that uses gunpower in the game.  Improved catapults and crossbows could fill this gap if technology improves things in that direction.  Perhaps one branch of technology in the game could be the better union of increasing wepons tech with magic -magically enhansed catapults and crossbows for instance.

Just my 2 cents...but I dont think guns/canons fit in the theme of the game. If I want that type of stuff I would just go play Civ4. However, I defnitely think this type of thing will be modded. And while I would never play a mod like that...I do agree with the OP that this type of thing will give the game more variety which will make the game more fun for some folks. And that's not a bad thing...

I think it would be cool to see technology going up against magic. And then when technology advances far enough you could have magitek just like in FF3...

What about having gun powder being part of the technologies you have to find?

Once you discover it in the world, you can then research ways to use it.

Coming from a fantasy role-playing background, I generally prefer to exclude technology such as black powder weapons.  It certainly wouldn't ruin the game for me, if it existed though.  Given that there is a limit to developmental resources, I'd rather focus them on a broader more diverse technology tree and magic tree if I had to choose. 

I do hope that there will be gamesettings that allow for multiple choices with regards to magic's availability, I prefer a magic rich world, and was kind of disappointed with the scarcity of magic in LOTR.

xianqi2: It would seem they could easily have such options during random world creation, but easily modded otherwise. 

I for one am pretty strongly against gunpoweder, steam, or other IR techs appearing in the game, b/c 1) magic & science generally don't play all that well together, and 2) it's been done sooooooooo many times before this that it has become rather tiresome. It's not at all unrealistic: gunpowder was only invented once in human history, and the world of Elemental obviously does not follow our physical laws.

Gunpowder was only invented once because once it was invented there was really no point in inventing it again...

Well, gunpowder was invented several times in different places in different forms... I'm no expert on the subject though so whether there was any sharing of information between the various inventors (directly or indirectly), I don't know.

But anyways, yeah assuming perfect sharing of information, things tend to only be invented once because you can't invent something that's already been invented (that's called copying). Without good information sharing, things are/have been invented multiple times all the time.

But I'm with you anyway - I don't want gunpowder and stuff in this game. I wouldn't mind seeing things like airships, and other mildly steam-punky contraptions, but mostly under the condition that what keeps them afloat, so to speak, is magic, rather than technology.

A mini-expansion or content package that introduces steampunk-ness into the game would be fine with me, though.

Honestly, I could see cannons. No muskets though. Even cannons though, in this game anyway, should be fired by concentrated magic and limited to ships and fortifications.

Oh come on... We all know we're gonna see mods of gundams vs stempunk vs magic gnomes... It's already been said it won't go in the main game but it can and will be modded in...

I would think your logic is flawed.  I the "powers that be" were the magic wielders, they would be thwarting anything that would jeapordize their power.  If technology was threatening to tilt the balance of power away from magic, the magic-wielders would be stunting that particular technology.

Regardless, this is a fantasy setting.  Introducing gunpowder into a fantasy setting will always be met with resistance.

While this may be true of some channelers/cultures this would definitely not be true of all. Not all channelers are interested in hoarding power. Else they would never imbue their power in others for fear of being over thrown. And the channelers who do hoard their power would probably percieve something so crude as a musket as little threat to them when they have the power to alter the face of the planet.

You know, I had this issue in my D&D campaigns, especially when characters were able to extend their lives for centuries.  That is, eventually the world would become urban and developed enough to reach a late renaissance age of technology (after the heroes avert the usual worldwide catastrophe that stints development).  To remedy this, I had a simple solution: the laws of physics in my D&D campaign did not accomodate gunpowder or fossil fuels.  Instead, there were magically motivated equivalents used to create things like firearms, trains, and airships. 

I would personally like to see something to that effect toward the very end of very long Elemental games: technological devices powered by magic (and they don't necessarily even need to look like their real world equivalents.)  As Snall said, watching hundreds of riflemen pepper a dragon with icy energy bolts while the dragon's massive tail rakies scores of soldiers up through a billowing blue mist--- would be very satisfying   

As to the idea in general, I just like it because it would be the perfect game, with ALL possibilites.

EDIT- As to the post above mine, I would also be super-duper happy with a 'magic'-tech tree that spiraled to the insane. 

Depending on what you mean by "insane," that has probably been the plan all along. Even before the site launched last year, the devs were talking about world-wrecking magic for the late game.

In the meantime, there have been occasional bits of typing that indicated the magic system would be more detailed than mundane mechanics. Some of the recent UI screenshots seem to make mundane research look prominent, but I suspect that when we get the beta in our hands, learning magic will be more important than mastering the crafts of smithing or masonry.