I apologize in advance for the wall of text, I do hope it doesn't hit too hard.

I have read the forums and seen ingame (beta 3 and 3A) how the magic system works currently. I agree with some of the posts about magic essentially feeling a little underwhelming. Most of the problems I see here come from essence being such an integral part of the spellcasting process. So I started thinking how the current magic system in the beta could be improved toward something that still holds current ingame components while making magic feel powerful and useful

1.The role of essence.

Essence should be a resource only available to the sovereign, only usable by the sovereign. Essence essentially needs to really feel that your sovereign is pouring a part of him/herself into the spell being cast, which in turn will give you a massive return reward. For example when you Imbue your hero with essence, that hero will instantly gain the ability to cast spells (see point 2 for spellcasting revamp) at the cost of 1 essence. Or you have been really unlucky with food in the game, so you sacrifice a part of yourself to empower and enrich the land to create 1 food patch. A third example would be the ability to summon a, lets say Storm Titan, that would be a single powerful unit with 30 attack 30 def and 100 hp, but would once again cost 1 essence. A sovereign would start the game with between 1-5 essence depending on how much you would spend at character creation(minimum of 1), and for every level your sovereign gains he/she would be granted 1 more essence automatically. The ammount of essence would allso directly correspond to the power of spells, and the overall power of your sovereing, so that there would be a reason to keep your essence to yourself, to make your sovereing feel more powerful (think Sauron at the start of The Lord of the Rings hammering away entire groups of enemies).

2. Spellcasting revisioned

Spellcasting will be directly related to 2 statistics primarily and will draw from essence as a third statistic to limit massively powerful spells. Intelligence would directly affect the magnitude and effect of a spell being cast, from giving timed spells more duration to granting that fireball a bigger area of effect as well as more damage. Wisdom on the other hand would directly relate to your characters ability to cast spells by adding 1 "Mana" per level of wisdom. Mana regeneration would occur at the end of every turn, returning a casters mana back to full, so next turn the caster can fight against that pesky spider infestation with a new volley of fireballs instead of waiting several turns just to see mana regenerate.

3. Minor improvement, rename spell points to spell research points or something similar to clarify their use.

4. Constant effect magic

By constant effect magic I mean summoning spells or city improving enchanted farms etc. These spells would put a strain on the specific spellcaster maintaining the spell. Lets say for example that our sovereign casts Brilliance on one of my cities. Maintaining Brilliance would put a constant strain on my sovereign by reducing the amount of usable spellpoints per turn. For example my sovereign would have a wisdom of 15, which would give him 15 mana to use each turn. Now if he casts Brilliance on a city, that number would drop by 1 to 14 mana available each turn. This way it would be beneficial to sacrifice your essence to give other characters magical abilities so they can cast spells, or if they are not combat oriented, to maintain beneficial summoning or enchantment spells up on your cities and armies. This would also punish the sovereign or hero for being careless in combat as the individual maintaining said spell goes down, so does every spell in his maintained spells list.

I'm hoping this will give the developers some new ideas for the direction of the magic system and how it can be paced to be faster and more engaging/rewarding.

Overall I'm pleased with how the game is shaping up, and am hoping that pacing will be fixed for 3B, so that training a damnably useless peasant doesn't take 5 turns!!!

Dartanis out.