As many already said, a random chance escape is bad (was a very annoying thing in MoM already).

What I'd suggest is this:

A system of active use escape spells with cooldowns and/or counters. So when you see that your sovereign is at risk in battle, you use one of his escape possibilities. If you want to kill the enemy sovereign, you have to plan ahead to counter his escape possibilities or exhaust them. So assassination and sovereign loss is possible but not easy. Like to kill the chess King you have to block all this movement options.

Part of the escape spells would be inherent, some researched or depending on the spell choices you made at some point. So not all sovereigns would have the same possibilities to escape or counter escape.

Some examples:

Player A engages Player B's army which contains the sovereign. The battle goes well for Player A so Player B's sovereign decides to flee before he is killed (and the sovereign should be sturdy enough not to die easily in a battle). He casts Invisibility and therefore can leave the battle towards an escape field and run for one more turn before he is visible again. If all goes well Player A will not have enough forces near that point to kill you and he can escape.

If Player A had prepared better, then he would have brought a unit imbued with true sight (or an equivalent item) along.

At another time Player B engages the sovereign of Player A. Before he can be killed, the sovereign uses Emergency Teleport and appears at a random point at 3 fields distance. He cannot use that spell again for 30 turns so if Player B has enough fast units nearby to catch him again, he will be cornered (unless he still has another "Free out of jail" card to play).

Quoting auboy105,

reply 21

I think the best solution to the biggest disagreement on this game would be:

Sovereign can die: Yes

Sovereign can grow very powerful over the course of a game. Losing this powerful sovereign would be a huge risk but a risk that could be worth taking.

The risk:

If the sovereign dies an heir successor takes over. This heir is like the sovereign at the beginning of the game. Weak. Brand new. You have to start all over building this character up all over again while your opponents still have very powerful and very experienced older sovereigns running around. Here would be the risk and challenge in losing your sovereign. This would be such a cool balancing feature! But please NO GAME OVER

I really don't get why people are so hung up on this idea.  How is the empire supposed to continue without the sovereign.  It is HIS ESSENCE that is restoring the world.  Without that it returns to a barren wasteland (unless they swear allegiance to a new sovereign)

My idea:

You can build a special, very expensive building in your capital. Only one of these buildings can exist at a time.

When your sovereign dies,  he appears there.

BUT:

The amount of magic used to "beat death" is incredible. Your mana goes to 0 and the city with the building in it is completely destroyed by the magic energy that is set free.

This way, killing the sovereign wont end the game, but it will be a devastating blow to the enemy.

Any solution that approached the "Contingency Plan" model sounds good to me. It doesn't change the basic idea of "SD=GO", and adds more options (which can mean more fun).

-Relics: be it a la Lich or a la Sauron, Relics are a nice solution. Should be of different levels of power. So you could have low level Relics that will save your life once (and you can only have a relic at a time so still killable if not given time to create another) and high level ones that could save it unlimited times unless destroyed (which would mean insta death or whatever).

-Clones: you could create a clone (or some) that would activate in a safe place (just pray that the safe place isn't destroyed before your sovereign's death) when the sovereign dies (in case of being more than one, you could choose which one awakens). The level of the clone would be the same that the Sovereign had at the time of creation and would have no equipment (ok, let's leav him some clothes because of ESRB). The process wouldn't be cheap and costs experience.

-Reincarnation Spell: Altough the original use would be to reincarnate dead heroes, if spells can be set up to be triggered under certain conditions (be it a Skill or Perk or anotehr spell you can research), it could be used on the sovereign at the moment of death. Mechanics? Like the one in D&D (3rd edition at least as I don't remember otehrs right now), so you could end with a Dog Sovereign.

-Avatars: The Sovereign can act trough other living beings under his service (who need to be imbued with Essence first). These actions would be battle/spells/bonuses related. And as long as the Sovereign is acting trough one of his servants, he cannot move or do anything else with his original body. The body switching can be repeated every turn but the mana costs increases proportionally and lowers the Sovereign's life (being able to die if it reaches 0, also receiving some damage if his current Avatar dies).

-Espionage System: Decoys: for city affairs, nothing like protecting the Sovereign from are spells and or assassin from the enemies with the old good decoy.

Altough those ideas wouldn't fit exactly into the lore (I'm supposing here), they wouldn't negate the "SD=GO" mechanic and shouldn't break the lore too much.

So if I understand clearly, if sovereign die => end game IS a core concept and killing ennemy sovereign IS ALSO a core concept

If I understand correctly, that means that another core concept is that the normal way a sovereign should be played is that it isn't hiding in city but acting on the map.

Since it is a strategy game where one ending is through the death of your sovereign, we need:

- to have way to avoid the sovereign being killed by an unlucky dice roll on the start of the game

- to ensure that you can kill an enemy sovereign in a fair way (aka no volcano spell in order to kill enemy sovereign), both for MP interest and AI computing

- make the hunting sovereign a viable but not too cheap strategy compared to other way to win the game

A proposal I have made few posts ago is to have a Highlander like way to handle sovereign death: sovereign can only be killed in combat when another channeler (a sovereign or a magic user hero) is involved directed, hand to hand. The sovereign can be defeated in combat (Hit points drop to 0 in the battle) but wouldn't die if no channeler was involved on the other side.

This would increase the immortal aspect of the sovereign (few things can kill him) while allowing some harrassement strategies: a lone sovereign attacking a well defended city without any defending channeler will be able to reduce garrison, and even take it (but that would take very long since it would been defeated for lots of turns)

I'd say in general that your sovereign is powerful enough that he can easily protect himself from long range spells like volcanoes or similar stuff (like a protective shield around himself with some levitation) except maybe some special anti channeler spells that can hurt him (but not kill).

So if you want to kill the enemy sovereign, you have to get him with an army.

Maybe instead of allowing escape make the sovergin become "mortally wounded" but still alive for enough turns to comission a quest that would heal him, the quest could get more expensive the more you risk. Say you send him out on a major attack and loose it would cost double or tripple what it would cost if you were attacked in your own city. i personally like the idea of the game ending with the life of the sovergin but maybe this would strike a nice medium with people.

Duly noted that sovereign death = game over is not negotiable.

But will it be moddable?

Regarding evade or hide: Those are kludges. They all try to prevent the sovereign form being killed, thus rendering a 'hunt the enemy sovereign' strategy worthless. Hiding renders it just plain impossible, no matter what skill opponent uses. Evading is slightly better but far too random. The Evade skill looks pretty bad in terms of defense. I think one might want to use it if he plans to gamble his sovereign away but it's porbably going to be a waste of points no matter how you do it. In SP, save/reload will be more efficient.

If you really want to allow a sovereign to be able to both defend themselves and be able to risk their lives adventuring, why not making them stronger in their own territory (a la dominions again)?

So if your channeler is in his castle at home, he's super tough as a defensive unit and super hard to kill. If he moves out of home, then he becomes an easier target. The difference with 'hide' is he can still be targetted and killed if an opponent puts enough thinking and energy to reach that end without taking the whole kingdom first.

Hmm...after thinking about this a little more, it seems too easy to exploit.  Run around with one additional weak unit in your army and any time you get engaged, it's a free teleport back home.

Sorry for bringing up Age of Wonders all the time, but I followed its creation very closely at the time in the forum and that experience I believe could be useful. The thing those developers ended up agreeing on, was that the most features were optional the more the game was going to be successful and the "Leader" was definitely a key factor of gameplay. To put it very simply the leader could just exist whether or not a unit representing him is actually on the map. In other maybe his actual presence could be moddable or at least his skills so that he could be given an infinite number of hit point and zero attack skill so that killing him would be impossible and he would be unable to hurt anyone in battle.

Thats why the teleport should be available even if alone. Just make the teleport costly enough either in massive mana usage or even possibly a small essence cost - this will prevent peopl from just running around killing stuff and porting out any time danger rears its ugly head. Or actually that might be a viable strategy, but it will definitely entail a heavy cost. If it costs 5 essence to found a city, it seems like a cost of 1 or 2 essence per port would be pretty costly, but still provides an out for hitting the panic button.

I don't think the hide button is a kludge at all it is a viable option that provides a choice to the players - you either get to have your channeler out levelling up and contributing to combat (and taking risks) or hiding, researching and being safe. And I agree the channeler's life shouldn't be left to a dice roll - well ultimately it will be no matter what, it is always going to come down to the die roll that lands the killing blow - but there should be plenty of options available to play it safe.

I think comparing it to AoW's sovereign hunts, it's probably a fair concern to raise, but I think they are already showing some great ideas to nip that in the bud. Calling a solution a kludge is just stupid, it is only saying "I want you to use MY solution, I don't like YOUR solution."

For the reasons I have already stated I don;t care for the evade option, but I'm willing to see how it plays out. Other people have pointed out bad things about evade (why spend points to mitigate a bad outcome over spending points to avoid a bad outcome?) and again evade is just too dicey - give people a SURE way out, but force them to exercise the option at the start of battle, not halfway thru the fight when things have gone poorly.

The "save/load" option is invalid. people are going to exploit that in single player no matter what you do - I think it is lame and sucks, but there is no getting around it, and games should not be designed around negating that. In SP people are gonna do what they are gonna do. /shrug

I think if the sovereign dies it shouldn't be 'game over'. It should be 'half-time'. And everyone gets a little refreshment before starting up again.

Well, I don't mind the Death = Game Over way this game seems to be going to work. Having played rogue-likes a lot (Mostly Angband) I'm a bit used to this and I think it really makes you think about the way you play. Should I attack one more monster, or run away for a bit to heal up... Off course dieing from a stupid decision or a bad roll isn't fun, but if you can learn something from it, it can make the game last that much longer.

In the end, a game like this is one dice roll after another so the end of a game always depends on a dice roll one way or the other. Getting a great starting location on a random map can make a big difference in the end. Finding a nice artifact at the right time might make a difference in a fight a few turns later and could mean that you win instead of loose. Both of these examples depend on a dice roll, but I don't see anyone complaining about this.

As I said before in another thread, I've seen people asking for a way that won't make the end game get boring. Hunting down every last family member, destroying every last city to finally wipe out an enemy would get pretty boring pretty fast I'm afraid.

Why would it be? I mean, having your sovereign in a battle will / should give you an enormous advantage when fighting an army without a sovereign. A battle you probably would have lost suddenly becomes an almost certain victory. I imagine it will be easier to get a higher level sovereign when you use him/her in battle a lot. Off course you'll have to be carefull which battles you choose, but that's part of the strategy to play this game.

So, you have a high level sovereign that get's killed by some other player/ the AI. The most powerfull unit you had (Well probably) is lost because you couldn't / did't keep him / her safe and you want to replace that unit with a new lvl 1 unit? What chance do you have to keep this oh so weak unit safe where you couldn't keep the high level one safe? Losing your sovereign will probably mean you're losing the game anyway, so why prolong the agony? 

I haven't been able to get my sovereign killed in the beta yet, and have been using him to completly discover the map, killing spiders / trolls / other sovereigns whereever I found them. I've defeated a lvl 10 troll with a lvl 4 sovereign. What some people might forget is that the sovereign is a powerful unit and might not be as easily killed as some think / fear. In the end, I wouldn't mind an option ot have an heir / spell / building to keep on playing after sovereign dead, but maybe we should all take a breather and wait and see what the future betas will have in store for us and see how easy / hard it will be to kill a sovereign.