Mana Shards And You
Elemental Forums
I've been keeping up with the Elemental Beta to a small extent and mostly vicariously through a friend of mine since it came out. I haven't played it yet, but to my understanding, when you start the game, you pick 'X' amount of spells and basically hope you get the shard(s) relevant to the spells you picked in the nearby landscape. (Barring the Alignment based magics of course.) I've no clue if someone else may have proposed this idea or not... I ran a search and surfed through all 14 pages of this section of the forums, and found no such thing, at least not obviously labeled.
My qualm is this: If you don't get your shards, you're at a big disadvantage. Not just minor, major. Sure, you could instead spend your time focusing on mundane means to conquer the land, or go for a Diplomatic Victory, etc etc. But without magic, how are you going to protect against magic, or combat other forms of magical defense or attack? The answer is, given these circumstances, you don't.
I understand that each shard you control puts its corresponding mana type into your 'Bank' each turn, and that you could always research more spells, but it seems like any smart player would be gathering intel on their opponents, especially in the early game. Given this, any player that realizes their opponent doesn't have access to their magic would, everything else being equal, make a push and go for the kill. Again, everything else being equal, the person with access to their magic is going to win that fight.
My idea is this: Rather than have Mana be exclusive, make it inclusive, but with a penalty for off-type use. This could also be done to only a certain extent, for example, allowing Fire Mana to be used for Fire, Earth, and Air spells, but not Water, it's diametric opposite. Going more in-depth, my idea would be to basically double the spell-cost for using the incorrect type. I.E., let's say you have a Fire spell of some kind that takes 2 Fire Mana. You need to cast this spell RIGHT NOW, but you only have a single Fire Mana banked, and two Earth Mana. Allow the spell to be cast, at the cost of all three mana points.
Another example, you need to cast your Fire-based spell right now, again, but you only have 4 Air Mana banked, and no Fire. Allow the spell to be cast at the expense of all four points of Air Mana.
Obviously, it could be done in many different ways besides, making the penalty a percentile or have it be bigger, etc etc... I just tend to think it's a bad idea, especially in the early game, for the player to potentially be locked out of their spell-casting. This is especially true in the event that any player has equipment/units/etc, that have some kind of mundane damage resistance, making magic the best, or in some cases, the only option to efficiently defeat an opponent, or defeat them at all.
Fall From Heaven gave you the ability to transform the 'Mana Nodes' to the type of mana you wanted, but I think this is a poorly thought out idea for Elemental, for Lore reasons. In my mind, it would be easier to take a small amount of mana and bend it to a purpose it's not originally intended for, rather than transforming an entire Shard, which would theoretically take a massive amount of power. With the Shards themselves being the source of that power, the idea that you could ever have enough power to quell and change the power of a Shard seems impossible, at least to me, but having that as a late-game option could still work and work well.
