I agree with you about reaching a equilibrium most of the time, but in a way that will make the sort of "bug" post I am talking about more likley since the rate may seem constant and suddenly change unexpectedly when they've just spent an unusal amount of mana. As I say though I think it is basicly a good idea, a good way needs to be found to make it evident to players how it works though.

Yes I do agree that you should get a balanced starting pool of mana from your Sovereign, rather than being given a spawned shard. Then again since all magic is supposed to be tied to the shards lore wise and just channeled by you it kind of does make sense you'd need to control a crystal to start with and that controlling no crystals should mean you generate no mana. However even if you give players a shard to start with they should then have to fight guardians to gain any further crystals and those should be hard fights.

Some people are saying that in a GMP, each magic user should have a mana limit per turn.

So...how do people picture the mana per turn limit working?

How would this be any different from an individual pool, in the end? It would basically be the same thing in many ways.

What I want to avoid is individual mages becoming unimportant and even more generic. I worry that the GMP will do this.

Right now this also problem because everyone has access to the same spells. A child that comes of age can cast a high level spell with enough mana. I wish that spells were more restricted because this would make each individual different and restrict powerful spells to powerful mages, which would help with the balance issue below...

Balance is a HUGE issue with this, I just had a similar situation. I think a magic-heavy strategy should be viable (this is a war of magic) but it shouldn't be a win button. I think we can help fix this by restricting spells use to character levels. Right now a young child of the Sov can cast ANY spells that the empire knows...this makes them very powerful from the start. I would rather force them to level up to use those big spells.

How about instead of using different schools, you bind a champion to a specific element? The game is called Elemental after all, and there are different spell books for each already.

If it's just a global pool, anywhere you have a caster you're at full strength.  Your pool can't be very large, or your one caster will be a godlike entity, unleashing massive devastation all by itself.  If they have individual limitations, the pool can be large, leading to more scale in spell power and more strategic use of mana as a resource.  Individual mana would be individual, your pool is unrelated to the total.  You can't have it draw from the primary source each turn because there is no primary source.

I think the pool can be as large as you want, as long as there is a restriction on how much you can draw from the GMP per turn. That way the Channeler is still kept in check, and you have to think about how you are going to allocate your mana spending, keeping in mind how much you currently have, plus how much you accumulate per turn.

I also agree with those who think that the game should be using larger numbers, but I think it should be a great deal larger, with some spells costing around 500MP or even more. These chunkier numbers add to the feeling that you are doing something significant and more epic, and also make things easier when it comes to adjusting figures for balance.

I think that basic spellbook should be something like :

- Alteration (enchantment that profit sovereign, champion and troops)
- Evocation (direct damage)
- ...

And the costs of them should be higher and every element should be represented in each school. 

This will make specialized sovereigns able to profit from different shards even with only one spellbook

Generally, the way things like this have worked is that your faction draws Mana like it does gold (or iron or materials in this game).

(Mana Income) - (Spell Upkeep) = (Net Change).

Then, each caster is allowed a ration per turn, which they can draw up to the maximum of every turn (based upon Wisdom or some other such). For some spells which cost more than they are allowed to channel per turn, they would be disallowed from ever casting in Tactical combat, and for Strategic Spells, you will likely default to your Sovereign (if basing upon other games' usage of Global Mana pools).

During turns in which no caster uses mana, it will stockpile for use on subsequent turns.

I could be wholly off base with my assumptions of the system, but I've yet to see another implementation of anything referred to as a "Global Mana Pool" which deviated too much from what I have outlined above.

If I remember correctly, MoM had what I might refer to as a GMP, but only you (your wizard) had access to it. Your heroes and magic-able units did not draw from your GMP at all, but had their own individual mana pools, or limited magical attacks. Heroes could only cast spells within combat, and their mana limit reset after every combat (or after every turn, I'm not sure now).

But I haven't played it in a while so I could be wrong. Can anyone confirm this?

yes, but your wizard could cast overland magic at every battle, limited by your skill level. say if you had a skill of 20, you could ask 20 mana of spells each battle. also range penalities would magnify the actual amount of mana you had to spend.. say you cast spells over a distance with x2 penalty... you could cast 20 mana of spells.. but due to distance penalities would use of 20*2 =40 mana..

correct?

I really really hope you succeed...

Do you have a save game or something that demonstrates this? We use 32 bit integers for pretty much any indexed value, so it's highly unlikely that the spell books would use anything less. 

Yes.  Elemental champions have no personal spells they can know.

The 127 is an old (and somewhat funny) MoM bug where some heroes have spells that they cannot cast.