Firstly, magic is not underpowered    The reason we have two different views is entirely caused by the difference in how powerful we think magic SHOULD be.

My Opinion:  I think magic is probably just right at the moment.  My Sov can solo about 15 combat rating above itself unarmed.  Basically, with a LvL 1 spell (flame dart), I can beat 6 spiders.  That's with a lvl 1 Sov setup for spellcasting (15 Int ,15 Wis/Ess).  I don't think that a Sov should be able to solo an army of well armed and armoured troops.  Higher lvl spells DO help the sov kick more arse though.  I could solo about 30 rating above sov with lvl 3 spells and a lvl 2 Sov.  However Soloing success depends on how the enemy is made up.  Lots of units make soloing hard.  A couple of BIG units, makes it doable if you use tactics.  eg, touch spell, double int for damage, REALLY good for a single powerful foe, really bad for 10 little monsters.

Tip: Flaming sword is good for assisting your armies when yuo start getting bigger than parties.  2 damage per person in the stack = lots of damage

Your point on the summoned units being more powerful than spells isn't quite right imo.  That fire giant IS powerful, but it costs 16 mana to cast, and its range attack does miss, and it still cannot solo armies AND it cannot solo a single POWERFUl foe like my Sov could (My fire giant  died..... ).

Tip: Use your sov to lower hitpoints of enemy teams/squads/other high HP foes, so that you can attack with your own shock troops and not take any retliation hits   That way your Sov is NOT a liability, but help you keep fighting withought needing to rest to regain HP!!

I agree with you on the similarity of a few of the spells.....I did not a change in the description of a spell though, "hurl boulder", its indefensible, whereas I beleive other spells are defensible (modified by defense rating). 

Tip: DO NOT USE FLAME AGAINST "flaming defenders" (or whatever it was called), it was immune to fire!!!! 

Basically, I don't think any changes are needed to the mechanics of the way magic or shards work.  BUT I would like to see more spells that have effects that currently aren't available.  There is however a nice array of assist spells for tactical battles though, just gotta know when to use them!

one major problem with spells, for me,  is damage is based on 1 D20.   then on 2 * 1 D20.  if you have a shard. 

Rather, I would want it to have 5D4 (still max 20, but the average damage is now 12.5 and the damage will almost always be 9.5 and 15.5), only in incredibly lucky or unlucky hits would the damage stray to 5 or 20.

When you get a shard 10D4,   2 shards 15D4.

If that's too long  then have the program build and store a Gaussian Random Number  list when waiting for the Users Input, and just draw out a random number. 

Fireball =  Mean 12.5 Sigma 3      Fireball + shard = Mean 25 Sigma 5    Fireball +2shards =  Mean 37.5 Sigma 7.

Note the Dice method reduces the sigma as you add die, the sigma could be set independently with the Gaussian method.

The other Bonus to a Gaussian Method, spells can behave differently.

FireBall,   Mean 12.5   Sigma 6  ( Higher sigma because the ball is spread out  )
Ice shard,   15% chance to miss, or Mean 17 Sigma 2 (More hit or miss, if hit hurts more)

Lightning bolt , Mean 11 Sigma .5   (Lower Damage, but much more precision damamge, reliably does 11 damage)

Hurl Bolder,  Mean 12.5  Sigma 3 (standard damage, standard Sigma).

The other thing i would add is a level modifier and an essence modifier 

The one major thing that differentiates your late game channeler from your early game one, is his or her level. 

My rule of thumb would be that your channelers basic spells should always be able to 1 hit a stack o randomly spawned 'normal' monsters.

The game pops regular monsters all the time, and they get harder with time. (it also pops special monsters which are far stronger, but I'm just talking about regular beasts).    If a channeler has been leveling up in a standard way, has a standard amount of essence, and a standard Int  ect,  they should be able to squash a standard baddie with no effort.    So if a standard late game spawn were 1 stack of  60HP worth of spiders,  then your channeler aught be doing 60+ damage with one spell reliably.  I'd have to do a lot of playing and some mathing to find what the level -> bonus curve would look like but it would keep channelers from being wildly underpowered in late game.


The other thing that has no effect that aught is Essence.

If each Int gives you +1 max damage each Essence aught give +.5 min and max damage (before modifiers).  I see Essence as magical muscle, Which you can spend to achieve things that you can not do with magic alone,  if somebody has kept all or lots of their magical muscle then they aught be throwing harder,  Currently they throw bigger stuff more often,  but adding a small + damage modifier as well makes sense.   if .5 is too big,  make it 1/3.

My final Damage Equation would be 

Base Damage =  Gaussian (spell mean+int, Spell Sigma)  // where Spell mean and Sigma are determined by shard count

Actual Damage = (Shard Count * Essence/2 + Base Damage) * Level modifier

anyway that's my thoughts.

enjoy

Robbie Price

I think the biggest problem isn't that magic is too WEAK, but that magic doesn't SCALE properly.

To me, the late game is usually defined by big armies, filled with squads (companies? the 12-soldier one) of units, usually with extremely high defense and high attack power. Most 'stacks' of units have upwards of 200 health when well-trained, while most have around 100-150. And magic can't do more than a fraction of that at any time, and can't do it reliably.

At the end-game, if you are fighting a Sovereign, especially a caster Sovereign, I would expect you to take massive losses. That sort of battle brings to mind legions of soldiers assailing the walls of a city, with fire and lightning carving the army into bite-sized pieces. Sovereigns represent the ultimate magical potential in the world, because not only are they channellers, they are channellers without the blood distilled.

Lore-wise, a Channeller is supposed to be a match for a Titan. They (the Titans) were afraid of Channellers, because they (both) were equal to each other. If Channellers weren't much of a threat, then the final battle, and thus the Cataclysm, would never have come about. At this exact moment in time, I can't trust my Channeller to reliably fight off a single human bandit. And it strikes me as ironic that he's useful only for taking down spiders.

Which, I admit, my Sovereign does quite well. Especially given that spiders have 3-6 HP early game, and I usually have 15+ intelligence, so the odds are in my favor.

At the moment - magic is very strong in the early game, and very weak in the late game. Against a lone target, hurling a spell is a viable, acceptable method. If that target is grouped, however, magic suddenly loses much of its value. AoE spells are convenient for softening up a large batch of enemies, but again, there is no way to do this reliably. In essence, a caster-type Sovereign will have a much harder time than a non-caster-type, unless heavy abuse of the Summoning book is used.

Reply to StillSingle - Early on, I abused magic to keep my cities safe. However, the more I look at my army composition, the more I realize that magic has no value late game. Softening up armies is a grand idea, but given the sheer size and number, it becomes difficult without a plethora of shards to actually have any meaningful affect. My argument is based on the premise that, in a game called War of Magic, magic should be something that is very limited (check), very risky to give (check), possibly world-changing (check), and because of its rarity, be like a giant siege weapon (no check). Magic represents, as I said above, something that the Titans wanted to control, and the Channellers represented something that struck fear into a Titan's heart. Against weak enemies, magic is powerful. Against an army, I am reminded of the old saying - never bring a knife to a gun fight.

Reply to Luketan - I think the biggest thing that hurt the dev team was the fact that Elemental is going to be multiplayer, and they had to fight to keep things balanced - hence why so many spells are simply copies. When balance comes into play, you can't do too many things that fly off the handle, else you risk having to fight with people later on when tactics/spells/mechanics are used in such a way that they just dominate the field. Personally, I'd rather have spells work in such a way that they are unique from each other.

If I were to draw from the Guild Wars system, then Fire would be hard-hitting AoE spells; Air would focus on single-target spike damage, or quick spells that rapidly build up damage; Water spells would be controlling and manipulating, freezing enemies in place and whatnot, yet doing less damage; Earth spells would take longer to cast and more mana, but always have additional affects that really hurt (IE, earthquake causes a knock-down, or a stun in this case...dust clouds would reduce chance to hit...etc.) Even from the WoW system, where fire magic hits like a burning truck filled with flammable materials, and where ice magic is more low-key, but has so many additional affects (slows, freezing, stuns, as well as restoring mana to allies) that it is too viable to avoid.

The best solution I can think of - we need to create our own spells. Not because Stardock can't, but because at the end of the day, their hands are tied with the balance issue. As much as I want to say Elemental is for us, Stardock is still a company, and they need to appeal to all of their players. I never do multiplayer, but I imagine that people would really start to complain if they were in a MP game and one tactic was the catch-all-win-all thing to do.

Does this mean that I think we players should mod in ALL of the spells? Nope. But once we players figure out how to make magic unique without being over-the-top, Stardock will be able to skip the theory, testing, and possibly implementation stages. They've done a lot of work already, so making their lives easier can't hurt : D

Actually I think SD is quite well known for saying they focus on SP first and foremost, they pissed off quite a few of the MP crowd actually with various announcements about how they were going to streamline stuff (recently reversed i think)

I think their problem is not with MP but with AI. They want to keep this reputation for good AI, they have stated they will never add spells the AI can't understand how to use properly.

If the spells are too different, too flexible, the AI would never learn to use them properly. That I believe is the real reason why spells are so boring. 

Besides I think MP isn't something they should worry about, because no matter how good they think they are at balancing..I bet you the EWOM community is far better at spotting "broken" spells and exploiting it.  It's kind of like magic the gathering.. where they play-test cards years in advance and they invite the best players in the world into their team and STILL they let slip cards that are way too good for their cost... or combine well with other cards in unexpected ways... Then WoC has to intervene anyway.

Personally, I think their reputation for AI is overblown.. oh sure it's good.. but seriously any real "strategy gane player" who finds the AI challenging after 1-2 games doesn't deserve the name.. And no I don't cheat with save games.

I rather have fun against AI that cheats a bit.. then play against AI that are marginally better but with boring spells

For one thing, there really should be a bigger difference in terms of damage between spell levels.  At the moment, advancing a spell level gives access to more spells, but doesn't necessarily give better ones outside of the realm of summoning.

This would probably give the best spell-casting balance in terms of scaling, since spell level is always slowly rising.  The problem with having spell-casting ability being experienced based is that at a certain point in the game questing becomes less important and the focus starts to shift to empire building.  Since there is no way for a sovereign or hero to gain experience if they are static, the only way to gain the extra int or essence for higher level spells is by grinding up your sovereign, and since enemies to fight are generated randomly, this makes this form of advancement random.

By having either a base damage or multiplier based on Spell level, the spells scale with tech.

The problem here is obsolescence of lower level spells.  So it isn't an ideal solution.  The ideal solution would be to allow for a consistent source of experience for the Sovereign (say an improvement that allows heroes to slowly gain experience, though at a slower rate than with combat) so that they slowly get more powerful over time, combined with normalizing the damage so damage gets consistently higher at higher sovereign levels.  Adding in better scaling for the spell level would still be a good idea here, since otherwise arcane research ceases to be beneficial.

In addition, as many have noted, the different spell books need to be more specialized.  At the moment, there isn't much reason for a custom sovereign to have more than two plus enchantment.  No spell should repeat twice between two different books (at least the mana cost should be different, preferably higher) and no spell should repeat a role already filled.  Let us take, for example, the first four attack spells in the four books: Flame Dart, Stab of Ice, Hurl Boulder and the lightning spell whose name I forget.  Flame Dart and the Lightning spell are identical, only the Lightning costs more.  Stab of Ice is also identical to the lightning, but has a shorter range.  However, it can freeze the opponent.  Hurl Boulder, iirc, is the worst of the lot, with a high mana cost and a limited range.  Maybe it does more damage, but I don't remember.

The issue here is, if you have all four books, you will only ever use one of these spells.  Maybe stab of ice because it freezes, but otherwise you'll pick the spell for which you have a shard rather than because one is beneficial to your play style.

Here's an alternate list of these four 1st level spells.  Here, I am assuming water is themed with support, earth with defense, fire with doing damage and air with speed and accuracy.  I am also using a fixed damage system here, as per suggested above, for simplicity.

Fire- Firebolt:

Mana Cost: 3  Range: Infinite

-Does caster's Int in Damage

Air- Ball of Wind:

Mana Cost: 3  Range: Infinite

-Does Half caster's Int in Damage, but ignores defense.

Earth- Clay Armor:

Mana Cost: 2  Range: Infinte

-Increases Target's defense by the caster's Int against the next attack.

Water- Cure Wounds:

Mana Cost: 3 Range: 2

-Heals target a number of HP equal to half the caster's int.

This isn't balanced, but as you can see, all these spells are useful, all of them target a different aspect of combat, and many of them counter each other (here, fire counters water, water counters air, air counters earth and earth counters fire).  There is no reason an AI cannot understand these spells and how to use them, as all of them feed directly into combat calculations.

Balance wise, just make a simple base damage multiplier for each level as a baseline, and then balance from there.  For example, add half the Int value per level, or some-such.  It's much easier to properly balance things across levels if you have an idea of what proportion the scale should follow.

I was also really disappointed that global spells have such a short range.  There's a point where my sovereign should be able to sit it out happily in their tower, like a more typical arch-mage, crafting unspeakable horrors or subtly .  That shouldn't have to be the case, and it should be a long road to get there, but it should be an option I can pursue if I don't want a combat-oriented sovereign.

In other words, there are Gandalfs who ride into battle and blast people and there are Sarumans who blight their enemies from across the mountains.  That sounds like a simple trade-off to me.

I hope they aren't against it.  From a design perspective, having different books without making them different in any meaningful way is a bit ridiculous.  It'd be okay if it were purely cosmetic, like they were all almost identical but had different graphics, but then there is no reason to allow selecting multiple books.  If they want to have MoM style spell progression with different schools of magic and researching newer and better spells, they need to pay more attention to the MoM model of doing that.  As it stands, MoM has a much more thought out magic system, and that game is 20 years old.  As it stands, the present system is more comparable to Heroes of Might and Magic, but with less differentiation and an necessarily limiting spell-book system.

I really love the look and feel of this game.  I appreciate what it is trying to do.  I honestly think it's capable of being the best Fantasy-Strategy game since MoM, if not of all time.  But not with the flawed design I see right now.  There's simply no discipline to it, and the magic system, which really should be the centerpiece of a game called "War of Magic," feels like it was hustled together and tacked on at the last minute, and that nobody really thought deeply about how it was supposed to work out.

Like healing spells.  Why are there no healing spells in the core spell-books?  This is supposed to be a strategy/rpg hybrid.  Healing is essential to make my party survivable, so I can actually keep them alive long enough to level them.  As it stands, the best course of action is to weaken them with spells from afar and then fight purely defensively.  Then, if anyone gets hurt, I either have to use potions or food, which I can only get at home, or I have to trek all the way back home to heal them up.  It means my sovereign has to stay too near to home-base to go out questing, or if I do I risk a party wipe, which is really costly in this game.

Speaking of which, why no resurrection?  Heroes, especially early on, are expensive, and you only get them once.  If they die, that's it.  I had this same issue with Fall From Heaven 2, but there the engine probably doesn't allow it and it's much more focused on strategy.  You don't need to risk your heroes to level them either, so you can save them for the tough fight if you want to.  Here, they must fight to level, and thus they must be risked to level, and then one false move and all that hard work is wasted.  No healing to make up for tactical mistakes.  No revives for when you are surprise attacked by an overwhelming enemy or the hero becomes stranded.  It makes them really worthless after the early game except as sources of children (and therefore of additional summoned creatures).  And this all stems from not thinking out how the magic would be used beyond pure offensive power.

I mean, HP is a calculation that fits snugly into their combat mechanic.  The AI should be able to understand increasing and decreasing HP.  If not, why bother with tactical battles at all?  Just make all spells buffs, de-buffs or out-of-combat attacks and auto-resolve everything.  Less spectacular, but much easier to code since you don't need additional battle AI or a battle engine.  The actual combat becomes a predictable probability calculation with all variables contained purely in the campaign map.  That would be much-more in-tune with Galactic Civs 2, even though it would really hurt the RPG elements since you cannot protect important units.

Anyways, got a bit off-topic.  Point is, there is no justification for the magic-system as is.  It wasn't really thought out, and it needs a good designer to look through it and think about how the books relate to each other, to the tactical battles, and to the game as a whole.  AS it is, it's a feature, but it doesn't support or compliment game-play in the way that it needs to in order to be an enjoyable and strategic aspect of the game.

Goodmorning all

While I concur, one can use magic well in the late game, if one switches to a support role. one of the major 'Sells' of the game was world changing magics.  My Soverine should be able to bring down a rain of fire and brimstone upon the whole of the opposing army, hitting every opposing troop for between 30 and 90 % of their health.  or raise a wall and drop it upon a legion of troops crushing a third of my opposition in a single stroke.  

the Magic was marketed as 'your strong enough that along you rivaled the gods(titans)'.  I want spells that put me nose to nose with a dragon, and make the dragon hold up a red flag to parlay.

just saying.

Robbie

Yes, magic is pitiful in this game.  It's marginally useful before beasties start to gain strength and generally doesn't scale worth a crap, especially vs conventional troops and especially vs logistics tech.

Something has to change.  Just saying spells can do "up to your sov's intel" in dmg is pitifully weak even if everything else worked (like shard amplification).  The sov's level should come in to play, so you're encouraged to level the idiot, and the spells should do guaranteed dmg + random dmg to justify their insane mana cost and the existence of utter crap mana regen.

So maybe a basic attack spell (fire dart, for ex) should do (LVL * INT) / 2 as base dmg then 1 to that same value again as random dmg.  So a lvl 2 sov with 10 int would do 11-20 dmg with a fire dart instead of the utter shite it does now.  Then mix in your shard bonuses for extra dmg.

THEN when a lvl 5 sov is up against some baby ogre or whatever that's rocking 50hp and decent def (say sov is up to 16 int by then) you'd be doing more like 41-80 dmg (apparently mitigated by def) and potentially vaporizing that idiot instead of doing 4 dmg and wanting to abandon spellcasting.  THEN your sov would feel like a hero, instead of a portal bot of a zero.

Maybe my ex is too drastic but something has to change.  If your sov, your MAIN DUDE, in a game about magic, is in the field casting spells, and you've leveled him and invested in casting stats, then he damn well should be lowering the boom on mobs, not tickling them and wasting mana.

Late?  Magic becomes useless way before late game.  The only use for magic is to teleport around your conventional troops and maybe to cast brilliance on a few cities early to speed up researching techs for death squads.

Parties/Squads/Companies of basic troops blow away everything else in this game atm.

I'm in mid/late game.

My basic squad unit (8 soldiers combined) is at 210 health, 290 attack, and 384 defense.  I have 2 towns that can build them in 6 turns and their cost is essentially trivial for my current empire (5 leveled cities and don't even need that many).

What spell you gonna cast vs that?  Maybe teleport - to get the heck away.

I have 2 with my sov plus 2 party units from the previous generation of death squads.  I could have 10 with him if I wanted to, but my current army is so far beyond overkill that it's just pointless.

In that game (my current and probably last for a long time) I took the stupid trait because magic is so pointless in this game that you might as well have those 3 extra points at sov creation and slowing down magic research doesn't hurt you at all (put all extra points in con so your sov has health to live thru autoing battles).  My sov is stupid and ugly (cracks me up) and still has a bunch of children and boatloads of spells he never uses.  I'm at a point where all I do is research to unlock the next level of spells because the popups for spell learning are just a hassle.  I ignore the +arcane NPCs and +arcane structures are the lowest on my priority list.  I just crank tech knowledge to run wild in the warfare tree to build a better death squad.  It sucks.  But why bother with magic when you can easily roll everything with parties - and it's cool to design death squads.

Shards/shard bonuses to dmg seem to be broken too.

Rock on.

I think what Stardock was going for is that they didn't want to have spells have independent damage values, modified by intelligence, because then they'd have to write a battery of spells to scale up and that was boring, considering they have, what, 6 varieties of damage sources to address?

So instead they hinged damage on intelligence, and made spells modify your intelligence damage. So there are "up to half your intelligence" "double your intelligence" "equal to your intelligence." traits on spells.

I suppose they figured then they could just focus on writing a handful of damage spells per element, and let the intelligence growth of casters balance it out over time. It seems like this idea wasn't tested for real balance, it looks good on paper...but most things do.

I think they wanted a very narrow power scale in the game too, but armies completely blew that hope out of the water. Sort of like whoever was doing items, and perhaps armies, wasn't exactly on the same page as the magic guy about what scale they were working with. It could all be addressed by balancing and time, but the core system isn't that interesting, and its reverse thinking and severe damage range has a lot of people scratching their heads.

It's kind of like they tried to do the exact opposite of the common spell formula.

Most games have the set damage for each spell and the extremes are scaled to the level of the game you're at, and they control for and adjust damage variance. Intelligence (or THE mental stat) usually contributes secondarily to the overall calculation.

Here the stat is the core and really the spell just modifies what raw damage your intelligence can deliver, modifies its delivery AND goes for 100% uncontrolled variance.

Yay for trying something new but...I think the whole model needs to be more in line with what's tested and proven. Unless there is some serious balancing coming and an absolutely innovate way of thinking about spells...the latter of which hasn't been shown so for.

I really think Stardock looked at the dominant way of handling magic today in video games, knew they wanted to do something different, but didn't commit to the time necessary to design something really new that also gelled in a live game. There are times when I can kind of see what they were going for, where spell power is more driven by the character than the spell per se....but it's just not working now, and it does sap a ton of flavor out of magic.

It's just not that interesting though. It makes you almost totally dependent on shards for real power, which I guess fits the lore, and all spells end up being the same, or lack any characteristics, because they're all coming from the same damage range, and end up in the same damage range, which is everything.

That's addressable by making spells more interesting, but I just don't get the sense of getting stronger in Elemental. I just get access to more skills, and then with one or two shards, I've gone from doing crap damage, to doing (maybe) crazy insane damage.

I'm inspired by the discussion above , just thinking aloud

Leaving aside "hit rolls" , spell armour and defenses

You can have spell damage range based on

1. A base value that is fixed regardless of who casted it and depends only on the spell (i.e 10 points of damage)

2. Some characteristic of the caster only e.g. intellect or level of caster (i.e Half your intellect score or half the level of your caster)

3. A combination of caster characteristic + spell cast ( i.e Base 10 + 0.5 for every intellect score)

All these 3 systems can allow variation in damage (whether linear or normalized) - in some rare cases you could have a spell that always did the same damage.. Something like Doombolt in MOM that always does 10 damage but that's obviously a special case.

Examples

1. Does damage from 1-10

2. Does damage from 0.5 your intellect score to 2x of intellect score

3. Does damage 1-10 + 0.5 for every intellect score or 0.5 your intellect to 2x your intellect + 5

Variety could be added by playing with the min and max scores , so some spells would have lower caps but be very consistent in dealing damage versus others that could be extremely damaging but could also have a lower min damage.

Further more some spells could allow you to put in more mana into the spell to boost power of spell (was in MOM). 

e.g does 1-10 + 0.5 damage per extra mana put in or does  A*intellect score, where A = 1,2,3,4,5 depending on mana used.

A very good discussion above about how MOM bases damages on just the spell being cast itself makes researching new powerful spells very critical. Say you discover a new high powered spell, suddenly all your casters can cast it and do the same amount of damage regardless of whether they are newbies or superheroes or how high their intellgience is ..

Of course in reality.. just because you discovered superdamage spell A, doesn't mean all your casters can cast it. Casters might not have enough mana, or you could say they couldn't cast it because they are not high level enough.

Traditional RPGs like DND scale damage based mostly on level. Eg Fireball Xd6, where X is level of caster.   EWOM uses intellect score, which could be done in the same way. This is probably superior to the current system since you get more normalized results.

I'm not sure replacing level of caster with intellect to scale damage is better or worse though. The main difference i can see is that by using intellect rather than caster level, the starting build becomes critical, since with low intellect at the start it;s hard to change.

Then there is a mixed system with the power of a spell based on the spell itself modified by characteristic of caster..