Magic just feels so UNmagical

I'll go ahead and second this, magic is allready a finite resource in battle and when blasting somone with a litteral ball of fire is less effective than hitting them with a stick, then something is wrong.

It was so bad I did in fact scrap a magic spec'd character for more of an idiot bruiser last playthrough.

Good news though...  a Stardock rep has posted a couple times in this thread and it's become clear that part of the problem is that shards are *NOT* being factored in at all during tactical combat.  He/she also hinted at a fairly major potential overhaul of how magic damage is dealt with.

This.  Also, in the thread (titled "magic shards aren't working" or soemthing like that) the devs hinted to the damage calculation by giving a sample of what he did to fireballs.  If that sticks, shards will play a HUGE role and magic will be awesome.  In the meantine, shards reportedly have an effect on auto resolved battles, so try using those.

The missing needs to be addressed as well.  I cast fire shard I don't know how many times and landed 1 in 10.  Not only a waste of mana, but a waste of sovereign turns.

R,

Nacho

Yeah, as far as i can tell most magic is pointless.  It misses constantly and does very little damage.  Your mighty wizard is much less able to compete in combat that a peasent archer? WTF.  Why would channelers be in charge of anything?  Magic needs help, i mean really even if shards were working it is pretty silly that you have to get lucky on shard locations for your magic to matter in the slightest.  BAM my spell did 10 damage.... too bad that unit has hundreds of hp and hits for 50-100.

Yes I agree. Summoning is useful, but other than that, I feel magic is a waste of time.

same, magic need a major overhaul

Eesshh... you'd think a game with magic in the title would have put some thought into the magic system.  This is one of a few major flaws that so far are keeping me from buying the game.

That's not true, the Enchant weapon and armor spells are great as well.

its sad that the magic doesn't work fine in a game called war of magic.

i also would like min and max dmg for spells (also for weapons) so that a normal fireball will do int/2 to int/1. or 3 to 7 dmg + int/2

I just realized hoe biblical magic is going to be once it's fixed, especially those AOE spells.

i just got magic 1 shoted by some empire unit.

apparently hits everything on my side or some such by 10 hp.

Since magic is a finite and limited resource I don't know why they don't just go completely over the top with the spells. You could allow a sovereign to be able to wipe out an entire army with magic; it's not like MoM where you can hurl spells into every battle, until you get a dynasty started up you only have a single unit capable of casting spells. Of course, the AI would need to be taught to try attacking on multiple fronts rather than run lemming like at the same city in order to take advantage of the fact your casters can't be everywhere at once.

Plus, it'd make taking on the enemy sovereign a Big Deal, rather than the damp squib it is at the minute when you can run them down with a single unit of horsebowmen. Wiping the guy out can remove his entire faction - it should feel like a climactic life or death struggle, not duffing over a senile old bloke with a club.

I agree 100% Archonsod.

*IF* there were a differentiation of magics, like the casting limits in MoM's tactical combat but much more generous mana pool or the casting chamber upgrades in AoW I wouldn't feel compelled to hoard my currently completely ineffectual magic in combat.

I'd be happy enough for now if they fixed ONE of these aspects...  either a way to pool essence like you do with gold but still use the essence stat as a hard cap in combat (i.e. no more godawful 1 mana per round regen) or make those precious few spells I can cast with the current system be completely badass.

Either way it'd prevent the sovereign from wandering the map and one-shotting group after group with great impunity.  Granted this doesn't happen with the current anemic state of everything "magic" in this game, but just to clarify I'm not looking for an analog to my grotesquely overpowered min-max melee sovereigns who do just that now.

absolutely right!

Sovereigns should dominate with their magic... heck, sovereigns should:

1. Very rarely use melee

2. When using melee, have it magic infused

3. Be the toughest unit on the battlefield

4. have int, wisdom, and essence combined into a single stat (essence) that massively boosts magic power, mana amount, mana regen rate, etc (aka, reduce multiple attribute dependency for sovs)

5. And magic should be massively more powerful.

A sovereign should be able to use magic to go toe to toe with dragons / armies and annihilate anything less. Attacking in multiple fronts is encouraged, and only the most powerful nations should be able to defeat an enemy sov using a mundane army (aka, without a sov of their own).

I flat out deleted all my mage sovereigns to make melee powerhouses that single handedly slaughter all in their path.

Yes, yes, yes, maybe and hell yes

Sadly the melee powerhouse option is just as annoying but from a different perspective...  if you play your cards right (go heavy into adventuring and magic tech trees to get LOTS of gold and fairly cheap "magic" gear) you'll destroy EVERYTHING you see singlehandedly.  Well until you get to the Creator's Forge quest and have to fight a bunch of spiders that keep you permanently webbed.

I agree it'd be fun to see the sovs and their proginy get the power to unleash ultimate destruction from their fingertips but right now it acctually feels alot like HoMM, direct damage spells suck but your buffs like flameing weapon and the like are really potent and make it worth haveing somebody that can cast in your stack.

I'd like the spells to get a bit more interesting. Offensively the only differences between the spells seems to be range and radius, I think they should take a page out of Kings Bounty and  get a bit more interesting effects.

Just out of the top of my head:
Spells that are more powerful but can friendly fire
Spells that push/pull aswell as damage
Roots/Polymorphs/Petrifications
Mines/Walls of fire

Also more interesting areas, like cones or horizontal sweeps.

The buffs could also get a bit more impressive, there should be spells that massively increases a stacks chance to hit or be missed, at high enough level you should probably also get buffs that buff the entire army at once rather then on a per stack basis. In the same vein there should also be pretty neat curses.

For buffs i like deflect, it's ridiculously overpowered. It makes you immune to counter attacks soooo.

Deflect, Stab of ice, repeat.

In this way one of your kids (because they can have stupid mana regen) could quite easily solo a dragon.

(Ducking the shoes).  I like that they made magic just another aspect of the game instead of its main focus.  Otherwise Uberstacks of summoned polar bears with magic lasers on their heads teleporting around the world map and completely eliminate the need to quest or worry about Warfare and soldiers.

I dont know about magic being completely poor. I can decimate entire armies with just my sov, my sov's son and his wife. 40 ish man each, 20 intellect and 7 movement points.

Suddenly 10 damage a turn x 3 becomes 70 damage a turn x 3, and that's over a 3x3 area.

Cheap tactics aside.

Magic doesn't feel powerful. I'd rather see magic do massive damage at much greater cost... with some decent particles, please fireballs make it look like my casters are throwing sparklers.

More poweful magic could be balanced by adding a random chance that one or more of your offspring aren't born with the ability to cast.

Hyperbole aside, it would be nice if magic could do anything really useful past the early game.  Yes, sovereigns can THEORETICALLY be seriously overpowered at the beginning (though that's more than moderately debatable) it's completely neutered in middle to late...  shards being completely worthless in their current incarnation and the incredibly high rate of spell misses or very low hits (1 point of damage against a level 1 jerk with 4 HP and no defense with a spell listed as doing up to 30 before shards are factored in).

You can catch on fire from a sparkler!

Well, the sheer randomness of the combat system is a little too much no matter who you are. I've been experimenting with different playstyles, I had a maxed-dex sovereign the other game with some absurd amount (like 130ish) of defense, and I winced every time some 15 attack bandit whacked him for 12.. it happens more often than you'd expect.

But it feels like the randomness hurts casters worse, due to limited mana. If your maxed-attack sovereign gets a bad roll and misses a 5 def enemy with his 100 attack, you can always swing again next turn, maybe you'll lose a few extra health due to the delay. If your maxed-defense sovereign gets a bad roll, you can lose a third of your health against an insultingly trivial enemy, but you can still finish him. If your caster gets a bad roll and misses a high level spell, you not only lose time and possibly health if your enemy attacks you back before you can cast again, you also lose a significant chunk of the very limited amount of total damage you can do before your mana runs out, and it doesn't take many bad rolls before suddenly you realize you can't finish this battle.

Honestly, rather than making spells into epic destroyers of armies, I'd rather see much more mana regen both in and out of combat, so a caster sovereign could practically match a melee hit-for-hit in a long battle, and repeat this performance every battle - it just seems more balanced. Misses would still be irritating, but not as crippling if you just had to wait an extra turn to get the mana back and try again. I mean, I don't want magic to lose its epicness - I wouldn't want casters turned into archers with fancier special effects - but I'd rather have a lot of sustainability (i.e. mana regen) than a little more power. What if wisdom granted mana regen in addition to the current effect?* It'd let players choose between more damage to wipe out armies with their initial mana pool (int), or the ability to cast continuously throughout every battle (wisdom).

Of course all aspects of combat, attack and defense and spells and everything, could do with a hefty dose of normalizing (i.e. making average results more common than extreme lows and highs), which would help everyone - but casters particularly, due to the reasons mentioned above (how much you have to count on those very limited spells not missing).

*Not even sure if the current stated effect of wisdom ("make spells cast for less action points") even works, but if it does, adding regen would make sense - casting more but not stronger spells lowers your mana efficiency, you'd need more mana to keep up with an int character if you focused on wisdom.