[Suggestion] [Gameplay] Magic System

Section 1:  Mana pools, mana management, casting spells

1.  Mana:  Mana needs to be a resource like gold.  This lets you manage it, build it up for awesome stuff, and be able to add to it as loot.  Elementium crystals, mana shards, whatever.  With mana being a share resource, it's a lot easier to balance various sources of things (shards, buildings, characters, magic items, etc).  It only represents how much spells cost.  This lets you cast multiple turn spanning spells, have upkeep costs, and even as a strategic resource, steal from other players.

2.  Channelling:  This is already in the game by the Essence stat.  The current system that allows you to cast spells needs to simply represent how much mana you can spend per turn.  As with the mana pool, this can be balanced by how difficult it is to get or increase this stat.  As a level increase, it should probably be moved to 1 for champions, but kept at  2 or three for Soverigns.  This further removes champions from being big casters.  The emphasis should remain on the Soverign for the big spells.  Since this is refreshed each turn, you can cast magic every turn as long as you have sufficient mana in your pool.  With the Sovereign, this would need to be larger in comparison, but act in the same way.

3.  Sovereigns versus Magic Users:  There needs to be an important distinction here.  In order to balance a Sovereign versus the lowly normal guy with a staff, simply restrict the spells they can cast.  The only spells that a magic using hero should be able to use should be a small group of Strategic spells.  This should be a subset that pulls spells from your overall spellbook.  A champion should be able to cast an enchantment on himself, or maybe even one of his allies (adding appropriate upkeep drains on your mana pool) and all your tactical spells.  Obviously, a champion's Essence stat would be much lower, which keeps players from spamming fireballs.  This would also balance the ability to cast spells so that you could have champions and even magic items that could be used by normal people (instead of a bow, a magic wand that shoots fire).

Section 2:  Spell Categories

Five main groups of spells, Tactical, Strategic, Domain, Global, and Champion.  The first four are available to the Sovereign only, the last is available only to champions and is built from the first four.

1.  Tactical Spells:  These spells are your combat spells.  Fireball, Ice Lance, Fear, whatever.  These would represent your current run "tactical" spells. All of these would be available to champions, assuming they have the Essence to cast them.  This would also include battlefield enchantments that last a certain number of turns.

2.  Domain Spells:  These spells are primarily enchantments which affect your domain (represented by the influence on the map).  Some examples would be "Fire Ward" which would hit anything unfriendly in your domain for 1 fire damage per turn.  Or Fountain of Life, which would increase the health regeneration of all friendly units in your influence.  You could have spells that magical enhance your influence by a certain amount, or even change the terrain types (think "this spell changes every grassland in your domain into swamps").  These spells could be either single shot effects (heal everything in the domain 3 hit points) or turn spanning enchantments.

3.  Global Spells:  These spell affect the whole world.  They are much more expensive than domain spells, but do similar things.  Really nasty stuff like "reduces any unit with essence by 1, globally", or "slowly changes grassland to desert" or "randomly raises volcanoes outside your domain".  Also, Disjunction (counter-magic) would go here, to counter said spells.

4.  Strategic Spells:  These spells basically are the ones that don't fit into the other categories.  You'd have your unit enchantments, global map effects (direct damage to a unit stack), and environment altering (raise land, lower land, etc).

5.  Champion Spells:  This would be a subset of the four different types above.  In order to make non-Soverign units more limited, you'd only put certain spells in here.  Minor enchantments and tactical spells make the most sense.

Section 3:  Additional Spell Effects and Area of Effect (AOE)

Coming soon...

Section 4:  Magical Research

Magical research is too simplistic and affected enough by in game mechanics.  As it stands, you have access to all the spells in a book, simply by choosing it upon character creation.  This section replaces the existing way that magic spells are researched, unlocked, and chosen.

Section 5:  Spell Books

I feel that spell book roles need to be altered in order to add more variety to the game.  This will allow players (and even AI players) the ability to choose a style of play.  As it stands, the are too many similarities amongst the four primary spell books (earth, fire, air, water).

Section 6:  Mechanics, Rules, Damage Allocation, and Dice

Coming soon...

Section 7:  Odds and Ends

This section is a placeholder for anything I forgot.

I was under the impression you were against micro managing cities.  Your swords/butter argument seems to be leaning that way.  I wouldnt mind needing one person to manage one building, except for hut, houses type of thing.  If you actually needed 1 person in town to be the merchant, or moneychanger.  Use people as a resource instead of it costing food.  I would like to see it on a global scale.  Think it was age of empires you actually needed people to work the farm and im fine with that.  With that you should do less resources is fine.  I did like the global effects in master of magic with metoer shower and such, it would make your protect settlement spells more valuable.  Although making mana a global would make a sovereign's mana less special.  I have gone around with a summoned army in your game, imbuing a couple of champions and jacking their essenses.  I do not think your AI can compete with that I could be wrong.  Would your swords/butter idea be as simple as what Master of magic did just flipping the bodies from one side to the other?

Hey Zelgath, I'm not remembering the argument that you are talking about.  Could I get a quote or some background? 

I've always thought that there should be "enough" micro.  Right now, managing larger empires is a pain in the butt.  I don't want to have three cities.  I want a world spanning empire.  I should be able to micro that enough to my satisfaction.  Tweaking, as it were.  But it should be optional, not required.

I prefer the more MoM style of people managing stuffs and cities and improvements.  TheProgress' recent thread is a really good idea.  I like the idea as people being lead back to the cities and it being a big deal.  Or roving bands of the downtrodden arriving at the forest's edge, and if you don't escort them in, they get eaten by monsters. 

Although this is a bit off topic