I agree.  Part of the larger problem of "no tradeoff's"  for any decision in the game (spells, buildings, cities, etc.).  I think it will get improved one way or another.

My question is why would you pick any spellbook or research magic at all when it's all going to be worthless by turn 100 anyway?

With Stats caping at 15 in CC, I don't see on what you'll spend your points. A lot of the current talents don't scale, so it's a little trivial. I mean, it's good to get +1 Tech per turn in the very beginning. After that it's a drop of water in the ocean.

And I do agree that the different categories lack total unique aspect to them. Maybe the "buffs" are a little different, but the attack spells and overland spells are pretty much the same.

Land spells ->

*Fire, make deserts,

*Earth make mountains,

*Water freezes the land

* Air.. uh... oups is Air desert? I can't remember anymore

Anyways, the point being that I just feel all spells are almost identical when comparing across the other elements. I would dare to say that even just pumpin in more spells wouldn't completely solve the problem.

One thing that totally blew my mind, there isn't even the ability to have a talent, skilll for both Sovereign or Faction to specialize in a type of shard. I mean Shard Mastery... sounds right. No?\

And do shard simply contribute to "dmg", or does it offer extra resistance to that element?

True, Magical power needs to be balanced as well. Because there are so few spells, and that scaling seemed to have been put on the shards shoulder, you get your spell way to quickly. And again, the uber stacks completely blow magic out of the water... so yeah. Meh.

Oh well!

MoM was very far from a perfect game, but one of the better ideas in it was that you could take multiple instances of a school of magic in order to allow you to cast more powerful spells from that school.  I'm not saying that Elemental ought to do the exact same thing, but the basic idea of concentrating on a school is sound (you just have to better balance those schools than they are now).

One really good reason to get all the books now is the Summons, since those are so powerful early to midish game it can be nice to have that huge summoned army to run around with and save the troops for your cities. Other then that though, yeah it's all pretty much samey.

There needs to be some kind of choice to the magic and it really needs to be quite a bit different in every book. My ultimate idea would be you pick one book at the start Fire/Water/Earth/Air then augment with a few other books to get optionally. If the books were different this would create a choice on Sov creation and help to make every game not play out the same especially magic wise. Even with shrines it makes things interesting, if I'm playing Altar and I chose Fire. and Capitar is right next to me and has a fire shrine and I don't well then i'll probably want to take the city that has the shrine to get that bonus even if he's my friend. Doubt it will happen though they don't seem to be big on the player having to make choices in this game for some reason.

Absolutely. The way the game currently is there is no difference between your choices for sovereign. In the early betas there was some differentiation and when they changed it so that all magic books were accessible to all sovereigns I assumed that it was for testing purposes.

If you're using a mod that makes shards work (there are a couple now), you could definitely make an argument for taking all the spellbooks... except Enhancement which you'll get through pretty basic magic research.

Mind you, at least one of said mods (Abilities, Traits, and History's Modification) greatly increases the number of useful sovereign traits so you might just find yourself low on build points for what it's worth.

Seconded! (sorry I edited but I hate wasting space!)

because all the spells are the same, inferno and blizzard are the same spell just reskinned, there no damage resistances to specific spells. so you might as well just choose like earth and fire to get the cool summoned creatures and put the other points else where.

I just wanted to make sure I understood a couple of things people said:

1. There's something wrong with shards not working (outside of some mods, apparently)?  what specifically is wrong? not increasing essence and appropriate spell damage like they're supposed to?  If so I can save 100xN guildar and not bother building near them -- until it's fixed!
2. If I understand correctly, each spell book has some sort of summoned creature, and each caster can only summon one of each?  So only one Rokoth' Promise per caster, but both an RC and a Minor Fire Elemental?

It had looked to me like all the books were about equivalent, so I took a sovereign with only Earth (for Lower Land, which I found really useful sometimes) and put the rest of the points into Organized and raising Int/Wis.  Sounds like she'll be a lot wimpier than I thought -- unless you can somehow pick up the elemental books in-game.  You can get the Enchantment book only a couple of steps up the Magic tree, which doesn't take long if you do it first, so it may still be appropriate to leave that one out.

You mean have something like Rock-Paper-scissors concept? Like most Strategy games should (to an extent).

But you are totally right with the "no difference" of dmg between magic and melee dmg. It kind of boils everything down to the same. Although I'd be completely down with having Normal & Magical Dmg. To make things extremely interesting (and complicated for some) would be to have magic dmg per spellbook type. So, Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Death &... (uh what's the name for the Kingdom spellbook) would each be a different type of dmg that would have it's own resistance.

But yeah, that would be a little crazy. I'll settle for the magic DMG vs regular DMG. So you would have armor and "magical resistance" as stats.

Thing is, I would be curious to see if we are already to late for this type of implementation.

You don't pick all the spellbooks because it is a waste of points since magic is so underdeveloped.  You only need one school and enchantment for the early city bonus enchantments.  Earth is a good choice too for stone skin.  Three at most.  One for combat, enchantment for bonii, and earth for buffs.

Why would  you even want 4 basic attack spells that do the same damage?