Army units with spells ?

You can recruit/summon creatures with spell-like abilities and you can sacrifice some of your own essence to imbue your heroes with the ability to cast spells, but ordinary trained troops cannot.

Oh okay. So then it is possible to have multiple units with spells and abilities? You just have to recruit them?

yes, imbue them with your essence or recruit them.

Also I think some units may get special abilities, Saw a Hammer Unit with a special attack, so there may be units with a single spell attack.

In the Beta when you got a Champion to join you there was an Imbue spell that transfered Essence from your Sov, to the other so they can cast spells you have researched.

Hope it helps, the game has some very deep interactions in some areas and I expect the day0 patch to really beef up the AI a bit.

Enjoy the game and do not forget to Eat and Drink

Lee

 you can only imbue a hero unit (like janusk or any of the other wandering adventures you might recruit) I believe with children at least your direct children will be casters .. not sure about grand kids heh heh...

Out of curiosity, with respect to essence.  I've seen a lot of ways to lose it, and that it's valuable.  Is there any way for your sovereign to gain essence?

Cheers,

-tid242

when you level you can spend a point in any of the stats essence is one of these.. the only 2 remaining  ways to lose essence is to die or imbue essence at least that is the case in beta 4.. (unless i missed something in my hours of testing b4 heh heh)

Interesting, good to know, thx.  Another related question (I have not played the beta):

Obviously the overall essence possessed by your kingdom/empire is of great import.  One of the "free" ways to get essence is by having children.  Can children imbue champions (or can children's essence points be otherwise transferred to other mobs?)?

cheers,

-tid242

This is one of the things I'd like to see modded in... and it'll probably be fairly easy to mod in "wizard" units with abilities that mimic spells your sovereigns/heroes can cast. What I'd like to see trainable wizards that you would have access to with the control of a shard and also a required tech and buildings (like a mage tower)

when you imbue a hero(at least in B4)  it costs you 5 essence and gives them 5 .. our heirs stats seem a random mix between hubby and wife and as far as I recall in beta i never had a child become a caster.. this is in large part because the rate of birth was radically slowed down (and good that it was) and frankly In many cases in beta game got to a point where I could not go on from saves (the was from the evil memory leek they fixed), I had won or nearly so so I stop and started a new game.. Before I had a child or before they reached maturity heh heh.. once time a child died while in infancy that was like wow I hate that but I like that it can happen..

or even fire archers and other variants on magic ranged units..

I find that sort of odd that they wouldn't put that variable in. Archers with fire/ice arrows would be really cool. And I would love to see mages.

Yeah but the way it would have to be coded is as a special ability.

The first thing you would do is to create an item that you would then outfit your archer with that would give him the fire arrow ability.  Then in the spell xml file, you would create a "spell" linked to that item that would act as the fire arrow ability.  You would have the item give the archer "mana" in order to limit the amount of times the fire arrow ability can be used per battle.  You would create the effect in the particle editor, and you would also need to associate the item with a particular tech in order to be able to research the ability to use the fire arrows.

I could probably do it in a couple hours once I figure out the syntax of the XML files...