[Suggestion] Spell Upkeep

SD already announced they will create a global mana pool and spell upkeep into the system.

Great, where was this stated so I can be brought up to date?

I think it was mentioned in one of the recent dev journals.

http://t.co/wmN7snt

Thanks. Cool everything sounds good except for the bit about moving the spell books into the tech tree. The problem I see with that unless the tech tree gets changed in some way, is that given enough time, you can have all the spell books and all the spells in a single game. I think we need some limits here, I'm happy to see upkeep get brought into the fold as well as traditional mana points from the shards, but I think spell books should be picked at the outset and you shouldn't be able to be awesome in all spell books, just like MoM.

about moving spell books into tech tree

well yeah practically everyone agrees it's a bad idea.

But this is SD we talk about. They have their pride, they won't follow MOM or even AOW style for everything. Heck, I'm amazed they went for the global mana pool idea!

Anyway currently there is little loss anyway.. Even if you did the spellbooks MOM style, it still wouldn't matter most of the time, since most of the spells in ewom are not unique anyway.. How many damage spells that do damage intellegence/2 do you need really?

In fact by putting into the tech tree they are acknowledging what everybody already knows.. picking spellbooks when designing the soverign doesn't matter at all! so they decided to stop pretending it matters..

I bet though the 2nd or 3rd expanision will make each spellbook unique.. but that's 2 years off..

Hmm that's very unfortunate if they choose to go with poor originality over something that simply works better, but I guess that's their call to make, as I'm seeing everywhere else, they seem to want to listen better to the community and appear to be doing so, so I would hope they would just do what MoM did right and expand upon it.

Your right, the spells do seem like cookie cutter copies of each other, because they are all built around a common system of effect calculation, this makes their lives easier and allows them to define this stuff in XML files for easy editing/modding later but it saps the game of originality (ironically).

Something too many game designers seem to miss is that, genuine human thought, usually rules the day over randomly generated content or pseudo-architect-ed systems within a game. Ie, they'd be better off making that fireball have truly unique effects from the fire bolt, instead of purely damage, the kind of things that would require incredibly flexible XML to describe OR, simply require truly unique code to describe and forgo the ability to mod every damn thing in the game. It's not always a good thing to be able to mod everything imo, how many people truly end up modding a game, usually a few die-hard folks or groups, it doesn't benefit anyone for modding to be accessible to everyone, it sounds sexy but rarely produces anything meaningful and just shoe-horns good ideas into cookie cutter systems.

Maybe Elemental spell XML IS really that robust and flexible but it's not evident from the spells. I think it's cool we can raise/lower land, teleport and cast fireballs, but are spells that do damage really limited down to a simple math equation or can they be designed to affect certain creatures types, or are more effective on certain terrain types, etc? SD will have to fully explain their XML files before we figure this out because it's fairly impossible task to guess at how the values in the existing XML files work or what they even mean and it needs to be more than a wiki created by guesses and time-wasting trial & error, that'd at least let us know if the spells in the game are utilizing the underlying architecture fully or not. I say this because Brad has stated the quest system is really powerful, but you wouldn't guess it from how the game utilizes them (simplistic at best).

See I do not mind that the elemental books are going into tech.. Heck I would rather a system that let me pick spells then books .. for example say I want an attack spell I would love to be able to choose from fire,earth,ice, electric, and so on for each hero, rather then grab a book and then have all spells from that book available.. I prefer to tailor make the casters they way I want them... this way I have a big book to learn from but individual casters have smaller spell books.. in this way I could have a healing focused hero, damage focused, and so on.. but that's just my opinion.. I can and will work with what I am given..

Good point, I like that too but I still like the idea that the main soverign has spell books which limit what spells will be available over the course of a game. Again I'll point back to MoM and suggest expanding it. In MoM you could have your wizard who only specialized in say red magic and then you could recruit a wizard hero who had a few blue spells at their disposal. Part of what made recruiting that wizard exciting was that while your main wizard would never have access to blue spells, this wizard still allowed you access to a few if you recruited them and paid their upkeep fee. So it wasn't like you were totally constrained into red spells, there were some, (admittedly rare) situations where you might get other spells. I would like to see Elemental go this route as Twohawks kind of explained, except let these hero characters have their own personal spell book that could have more than 2 or 3 spells but allow them to personally learn more but still keep them from getting ALL spells in a spell book, after all they aren't the sovereign they should have some limits.

This is just cool, you can create situations where your limited in what you can learn (being all powerful sounds cool but always ends up being boring, it's like god mode in any game, fun for 5min and ends up destroying the game), I'd rather build up to being powerful and make choices in getting there and still not be completely unstoppable etc. I'm still heavily against moving the spell books into the tech tree, I think some of this stuff should be set at game creation and limitations aren't a bad thing, they are an empowering thing that benefits replaying the game and trying out new combination, MoM had this down REALLY well with spell book selection upon game creation, why fix or change a good thing, at the very least, use it and attempt to improve upon it.

I made a discussion titled 'shop depth' where I propose a sort of 'spell shop', amongst other things, that is meant to be a part of a highly specialized tech-town interaction. Under this system I argued that items, equipment, etc., would become far more unique and Kingdoms/Empires would not be able to be self sufficient. The same applies to spells - there would be a definitive cost for an Empire/Kingdom to specialize throughout all towns in the myriad different types of magical abilities.

Indeed.. ideas along this line do have merit for diversification and depth of play.. Sadly right now I feel these kinds of things are more of a down the road idea as we have other issues (stability,balance, and so on) to iron out first..

Seeing as Elemental in this state needs major foundational changes to address stability/balance/etc. to begin with, do you not think that this type of change is possible in conjunction with, and possibly in contribution to, the changes that would effect the game mechanics? This type of overhaul would drastically change the simplistic mechanics Elemental currently employs and contribute to the resolution of current problems which Elemental has, such as lack of complexity in the cost/benefit analyses players make, standardized units and technologies - i.e., cookie cutter ways to constantly win over and over again without any need for situational awareness -, the difficulty level in general, the balance between magic/equipment/items, et. al.

I do not think it is possible to address stability and balance issues independent of having already established the game mechanics. Such a change that I propose would change the entire way the game is played. Stability and balance would be modifications to this, not its determinant.

-Steve

One change that might be a good idea to the tech tree is one type of tech locking off other types, or having some requirement - you need to have horses or wargs to learn riding, you need to have a fire shards to learn the fire book, etc - that would make some sense, I think.

That way getting an army of different elementals would be a bit challenging at least.

I also do think spellcasting should take two stats; even with a common mana pool, perhaps wisdom/essence could still determine how much of it you can draw on each turn / combat?. Also if you summon a fire giant, if you can draw on only 6 per turn, it should take 3 turns to complete... stuff like that.

The spell upkeep would be best done as a temporary reduction of the global mana pool, I figure.

Good point Khardis, I like those ideas, some kind of rubberband effect so that choices must be made and strategies must be worked out to accomplish your goals, instead of just researching what you want when you want and casting at will. I like limitations, power must be earned, it's so much more rewarding when it is.