The River!!! The River shall save you!!!

Hehe.. Why didn't I think of doing that? Oh yeah, no earth shards to harvest..

Yeah, this spell must be balanced for the final version, but don't ask me how....:|

Add an essence cost to it. (Which could make it useless though, depending how hard essence is to come by...).

Make it a multi turn spell which locks your channeler down during the spellcast.

Changing land has a high risk of angering the elementals of that land (mountain - earth elementals / water - water elementals etc.) which will attack whoever cast the spell.

Or my favourite solution, make it cost essence temporarly. I.e. you cast the spell which costs you 1 essence in addition to change the land through your magic. And as long as you want it or you're alive the land stays changed, but you can always cancel that transformation, giving you the essence back and reverting the land to it's old form instantly. This violent backlash of energy to your caster would also damage him by ten times the essence which is flowing back, so toil carefully with magic.

 All that sounds a little bit harsh. How about just code the AI to use boats or land altering spells?

This sounds good. Seconded.

Meh.

Sounds good, but how easy do you think it is to make the AI capeable of responding intelligently to this?  I fear that the dream for massive world altering spells is going to screw the AI something fierce.

Not really. If an enemy AI would like to invade one of your cities and it cannot reach it because of the terrain, it should simply alter the terrain. IE: Terrain is -1 = raise land. Terrain is +5 = lower land. It looks like a simple algorithm to me, even tho I don't know too much about programming...

I thought you were talking about poker.

Could a possible solution involve pushing the terraforming spells back to a mid- or late- game skillset?  By that point, boats and alternative means of transportation might be a bit more common -- allowing them to carry on without attempting to put in an AI that can understand what you did.

Conceivably this would be the best option. In theory if the Sovereign has enough mana and knows the spells, being either AI or a actual player, it can make a bee-line straight to the city it wants to attack. Mountains, oceans, whatever, just raise or lower the land as needed to get where you're going. The enemy Sov never got a chance to come at me so I don't know if it would have done this or not. (I'm guessing tactics like this aren't programmed in yet) All it did was funnel troops at me that couldn't reach me. I'm hoping in the final version when this happens the AI will just bring in it's Sov that can handle changing the land as needed or if the Sov is unavailable it would send in units by ship. Who knows though, perhaps eventually we'll have "Air Ships" as a transportation unit so things like this won't be a problem.

It's basic path finding. Can my units get there directly over land? No? Then how about if by boat? No boats yet? How about by spell?

Figuring out by spell is the hardest part, but not impossible. What is the nature of the obstacle? Mountain, water, other? What spells remove mountains or make them passable? What spells remove water or make them passable? Do I have those spells? Can I currently cast them? Do I cast them on units or on terrain? If on terrain, then move to terrain and cast them. If on units, what units am I sending? Cast on those units.

Just like any AI decision, you must define what the exact nature of your problem is, what you have at your disposale that can take care of that problem, and then calculate the most efficient of any remaining options that you have. If you have no options for getting there, then you don't move your units in that direction to begin with. You essentially ignore the idea of attacking any opponent you can't reach, and instead you prepare a defense against your opponent attacking you, assuming that they can reach you. Then you research towards something that will let you reach them, and then you start moving towards them after you know you can reach them.

Yes, or you vie for peace, and place the goal of dealing with them "secondary" if peace is achieved, and focus efforts somewhere else.

One thing that has always annoyed me is that the AI (in FFH) never seems to expand during always war situations. Its like warfare of any kind disables the AI to use settlers effectively. and YET!! Ive had a larger Army than an AI, and I was winning wars (the military advantage), yet entereing world builder 3 cities were building settlers, and another 4 were building libraries!!!! only 5 cities were building SOME sort of military, and their military was LOSING BADLY!!!! Its like they WANTED to be taken over!!! Grr. Well, patch M might be better, I haven't played enough to be able to check those situations in WorldBuider yet. I think the AI should be allowed to "halt production of X" in a city to crank out more soldiers.

Part of the draw for this game for me personally is the ability to perform land altering spells, and not just in the end game. The solution is in making things like rivers inherently fordable and changing the pathfinding AI so that when calculating the shortest route, it adds the time to cross the river tile as though it were a "this tile takes 7 movement points to cross" with the additional six being the "build a canoe part." As soon as it hits it, it works on fording it. (If troops can't build boats, on the turn the pathfinding pathfinds across a river, it sends for a worker or caster to ford it.)

The other way, which I think works worse, is the following AI computation:

"I'm blocked, what am I blocked by? In case of River, perform action Build a Boat," into the pathfinding AI.

Because unless totally blocked by the river, it'll take fifty turns going around it rather than 7 to just cross it, because the AI makes the mistaken assumption that rivers are inherently uncrossable.

RE: totally incrossable land (like ultra sheer cliff faces or vast pits) was dealt with in populous by air ballons.

In Elemental these solutions are good:

Large Essence Cost, which makes impassable land spells prohibitively expensive : (
Natural soil erosion / cheap magical erosion will make those cliff faces only temporary spells
Tunneling abilities, stairways carved from the rock by quarriers on behalf of units : )

Cheap "non-channeler" ways of using magic to deal with the problem:
- drop a glacier in the pit and walk across, fill it with water and freeze it, whatever
- cast the "fly" spell, "levitate"
- "earth to mud" spell
- "pass-wall"
- "wind walk"

A smart AI would calculate which one was the quickest to do, and send over a caster unit. If the battle was important and no caster units were available, it'd bring over the soverign.

The scary question balance wise for this spell is what happens if you lower the land and create a river while enemy units are standing there?

Sure, you all can figure out how to overcome this easilly.

Point being that AIs (yes even the overrated stardock AIs) cannot.

I will hope to be proven wrong, but I don't know what anyone would point me to to make me begin to consider that it's going to be any different in elemental.

I really am beginning to fear that Brad has fallen into a feature creep pit and that elemental is going to try to do too much, being everything to everyone.  That might work ok in MP, but I have the sinking feeling that SP is once again going to bonk for me.

Well, I think that Earth Based spells "could" be temporary, OR could require a constant mana burn to keep active. If you decide to "regain" that lost mana, your spell will deactivate, which means that the land will slowly fold back to its original "intended" form. probably within 5-10 turns or so, depending on how CHANGED the land was, it will all be largely back to normal. Although you might find a random giant eagle's nest to have formed in the middle of your grassland

You could have it permanently drain a fairly small amount of essence every turn you maintain it. That way stonewalling an overhelming AI with a river out of your ass, a move which could potentially turn complete destruction into not losing a single city*, has a cost that isn't crippling to you but that you'll feel for the rest of the game, and you won't be able to rely in a river as a wall whenever you want to play builder.

*one of the biggest problems in a 4x game is having a big enough military to fend off your attacker, but having most of it away from his border with you. In the time it takes to mobilize and move it, you've gotten the shit kicked out of you. "SURPRISE RIVER" makes you basically immune to that, unless there are a lot of really good swimmers or shipwrights in elemental.

That idea sounds ..... as if my head was exploding with bad news and a case of lame knees. 1 Essence per turn?? Thats actually *quite alot* ... and here I thought my Mana Burn idea was expensive yet potentially balanced.

NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE would use Earth magic/Map changing magic, if it used Essence Drain. Essence cost? Probably not many people would use it. Essence DRAIN!? Absolutely no one would use it, other than for perhaps the novelty of it.

Using essence permanently to inconvencience an opponent for only one turn (even if its just 1 essence) is not a very good idea. (unless you are out of mana, and instead of spending 100 mana you decide to use 2 essence or something- probably a near-death struggle move to survive)

Is there a difference between the two? Doesn't everything that "costs" essence, such as healing land and... healing land... (edit: and imbuing/hero buffing when they get around to adding those) do so by permanently removing that essence from your pool?

100% of spells DO NOT cost essence. Things that are meant to be rare and powerful cost essence. Embuing Champions with essence so that they can cast spells .... thats so that THEY CAN CAST SPELLS!!! (its not raising a mountain for a *few* turns)

Reviving the Land to your element, costs essence. It keeps spreading for the entire game, eventually covering close to 75% of the map ... FROM a ONE TIME cost of 5 essence. (not raising a mountain for a *few* turns)

these are already decided on by the dev team.

Now, other things which *might* cost essence, are

-blue-prints for a powerful Magic Item

-blue-prints for some twisted Hybrid monster of your creation

-especially powerful spells that have a PERMANENT, UNCHANGEABLE gameplay effect. (like summoning a Bone Dragon)

now, its possible that the actual forging of magical items, and the actual creation of magical beasts, will cost essence (instead of just the blueprints/prototype), however, that is still something which gives a permanent item, or permanent unit.

Now, if you want to say that springing a Mountain Range in the middle of Boise Idaho should have a one time cost of 1 or 2 essence, (or heck, even 5 essence), then thats fine. I mean ... if someone wants to flatten your cozy little mountain range *THEY* would have to spend essence. But ... 1 essence per turn for *each* terraformation??? In a 300 turn game you might have 150 essence (or less). //I honestly have no idea// ... but you get more essence by leveling up, ect. If something drains you 1 essence per turn ... it needs to be nerfed to 1 essence per 10 turns, or 1 essence per 15 turns.

My initial proposal was that every Square of Terraformed land would cost 10 mana per turn in Upkeep. (Undead armies might work similarly, if more cheaply --like 1 mana per 100 skeletons, and 5 mana per Super Zombie Lord)

In this way, if someone wants to surround themselves in mountains, they might have to spend 50 mana per turn or so to keep it up. Lets say they have 100 mana, and it DOES in fact cost 50 mana for them (in this situation). Then, each turn they would have only 50 mana to use, vs other sovereigns that might have more. Don't like those numbers? they can always be changed. Maybe 3 mana per turn for minor changes(hill to mountain), 5 mana per turn for large changes (plains to Mountian), and 10 mana per turn for GIGANTIC changes (ocean to mountain).

I think there should be some general rule against "sinking" an enemy city into the Ocean, however. I mean ... that would just be lame. It should be more expensive to Directly damage your enemy via terraforming. Perhaps a straight-up essence cost, or perhaps a Mana cost so high that you need to control a lot of Shards.

Do Shards give you Essence as well? Or just mana? Im kind of lost on that, but I would assume just mana, as Essence is like .... mana X 100 in terms of usefulness and repeatability. But of course, at any one turn mana and essence probably have more of a 10 to 1 exchange rate in terms of utility. Only if you assume that its the very last turn of the game, however.

Re AI:

I haven't written a line of code for the AI yet.  Right now, I'm just assigning one of my developers to write APIs for me to later use.

Good to know. I think the simplest answer would be when a player puts water between his kingdom and the AI that the AI should just raise the land back up so it's crossable and not under water, Or have it build boats and ferry units across the gap to me.

Speaking of boats, for some reason a lot of games struggle with making AI that will put units on boats and launch invasions by sea (the Total War games are famous for always lacking a AI that can do this at launch). We need to make sure Elemental doesn't suffer from this.

Of course if you make these land changing spells relatively simple to cast then I think alot of their impact will be disapated.

You also would have the problem where a run away power just runs away even further because they can afford to simply remake the entire world as it suits them.  At that point the game becomes significantly less interesting I would imagine.

Raven is right though that AIs typically struggle with naval operations, maybe SD will overcome this, but my 2c is that making the system really simple will help the AI alot more than trying to cram in a bunch of 'cool' stuff that it will not be able to handle well.

Though from my perspective I'm more than happy if there is no water or ships at all on the map.

At this point, I barely am able to cast a spell before I murder everyone else's sovereign. Or I get murdered. I wish they toned down AI aggressiveness a tad so I can make it to mid game.