LightofAbraxas

Join Date 03/2008

+23

Discussion: How should each school of magic "feel"?

So, over the course of creating a mod which expands the game's magic system, I've found myself thinking alot about how each magic school should "feel" during play. In my opinion, the absence of different "feels" is one of the main shortcomings of the vanilla version of the game's magic system. Ideally, each school should be good for a specific style of play, but be able to be used in new and interesting ways for the creative player.

I'd like to spark a little discussion about what everyone else's conceptions of the different magic schools are. How should they feel, at a very high level of abstraction? What should they be good at? What should they be bad at? You can limit the discussion to the base elemental schools, or all the schools in my Expanded Magic Mod (which would be helpful to me, and I would greatly appreciate), found here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/402629.

I'll kick things off:

Air: I think that school should be good at increasing awareness of the game world, and should have damage spells at high levels rather than low, that affect all units on the battlefield. Should be bad at high-damage, targeted spells.

Earth: Should accomodate a turtling style of play. Good at spells that accomodate high-level strategy through affecting terrain. The Earth-focussed player's power should come from armies, supported by increased food production. I'd envision a faction that could be viable with fewer cities, that creates defendable chokepoints through terraforming. Probably the worst damage production of all the elemental schools.

Fire: Pretty simple. Direct damage in all its forms. Single unit and multiple units. Bad at everything else.

Water: I'm really not too sure about this one. Right now, I have it conceptualized as an Air-Earth hybrid, which doesn't feel very satisfying.

Now, my custom schools:

Light: Gandalf from LotR. As well as a significant illusion component. Should be good at supporting a lightly armored military, as heavy armor would hurt dodge-enhancing magic. Should be bad at direct damage and support spells. The only non-Ether spellbook to be any good at summoning, in the form of illusory units.

Ether: Summoning creatures from other planes. If anyone has any other flavor suggestions...

Blood: I think that Life magic and Death magic should be two sides of the same coin. A school that can do great good and great evil. There should be temptation to do powerful things, but should come with substantial costs, diplomatic and otherwise. Should have a wide variety of benefits. Powerful, high-risk-high-reward type damage spells.

Spirit: I think that this spell school should feel the most "mystical," whatever that means. Mediocre damage output, but with the ability to be in many places at one. Should increase strategic awareness. Should have interesting effects not available in any form to other schools. Should be able to do a wide variety of things, but perhaps not as well as other school.

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This has always been a personal preference of mine, from back in the day when I first picked the game up, but I always loved having a Fire Giant and Fire Elemental in my group, and said creatures throwing around fire spells. Made me feel more in tune with my chosen element.

These days (due to the random seeding nature of Elemental Shards), Elemental Spell Lists don't seem as 'personal', since you pick them as you need them. That being said, I'd like a minion or two from the appropriate Element that do cool things (i.e. not just soldiers for hire).

Don't know if you can address that, but those are my thoughts.

The other things you are working on sound really cool. Looking forward to it!

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In a basic way I'd tend to:

Earth: Defense

Fire: Attack

Water: Movement

Air: Control

Each element should have some attack spells but how offensive/defensive they are and how many would depend on the element itself (fire being prone to have lots). Some would have secondary "roles", like Water having Healing, Earth having poisoning, etc.

Custom "elements"...

Hmmm Ether for me would be like the Void or the fabric that ties every other element. So it would be more powerful than the other elements while at the same time offering basic spells for any channeler to use. And would deal with the magical flow (counter spells, summonings beyond the elemental ones, enchantments, utility spells...). It would be like the "common ground" of the magic users. In my mind it seem more clear than what my words say.

Blood has potential for limited control, healing, poisoning... Except for maybe some "rituals", I see Blood as a more localized and limited magic (hell, I'm using Blood in my mod so I'm biased by that). Enchantments to improve your units, curses to weaken or destroy your enemies and that kind of stuff. I would love it costing Hit Points instead of mana, being the "cheap magic".

Light not sure. Illusions sounds more of Air (with maybe mix of other elements). Cannot really think of anything, sorry.

Spirit: Summoning (natural spirit beings, like shamans could), some movement (spirit walk or something), unit boosting spells.

Just some ideas. It's best when you actually start writing spells (just the ideas, no fulldetails) just to see how solid the element is in its supposed role (and can give new and cool ideas).

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For elemental, i have just one word - defense!

I think it has much more room for defense in general than anything else. Even plain soldiers should be more resistant to elemental magic attacks if they have a shield - any shield, and lesser resistances for basic armor. But armor could also increase a vulnerability, such as metal armor increasing vulnerability to electrical attacks, but providing some defense against fire, no defence against dark magic but heavy defense against rock slides or hail, you know, basic common sense really. Then there is plenty of room for specialized shields and armor with resistances to specific forms of attacks. This is in addition to the magical defenses already in the game.

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Personally I would have water be nurturing.

Buffing and Healing.

Depends really if you're counting ice as water or if you're going to separate them.

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Air: Lightning that stuns; Storms; best single target damage potential; anti-missile weapon; mobility, flight; freedom; anti-earth

Earth: Physical rock attacks that cause knockdown; damage reduction; endurance; strength; imprisonment; gravity / anti-air

Fire: Best and most balanced damage potential overall with damage over time component; even protective spells damage attacker; anti-ice

Ice: Cold attacks with combat/movement debuff; largest AoE potential with Blizzard; winter; anti-fire

Creation: Life; Nature; light, fertility, buffing; healing; anti-ruin

Ruin: Death; Undeath; shadows, debuff; curses / hexes; anti-life

Arcane: Mind spells; Illusions; Spirit; Force; Signs, Glyphs, control, counterspells; least damage potential but hardest to resist; Universal

The 4 shards could also have been Elemental (material) / Spirit (immaterial) / Creation (life) / Ruin (death). Personally I think that would have been a much more interesting way of categorizing magic, since the 4 Elemental schools are pretty similar after all and rule out a lot of spells.

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Just some ideas. It's best when you actually start writing spells (just the ideas, no fulldetails) just to see how solid the element is in its supposed role (and can give new and cool ideas).

I actually have! Check out my mod to take a look at specifics and make suggestions, if you would be so kind. There are a couple spell schools that feel really thin, still.

Thanks for the comments, guys. To pose another question... to what degree do you think that spells should be constrained by "imaginary realism"? It sounds silly, I know, but let me give you an example. Mobility spells in the Air school. It feels right, sure... but how would this work? Providing a tailwind when marching? Or does the actual mechanism by which the spell would work not matter so much as the general sense of fit?

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ElanaAhova

Join Date 09/2008

+105

Wonderful ideas, wonderful to read.

I have some suggestions related to shards and making each type of magic 'feel' different.

First, the magic of each element should have many spells that don't duplicate other magic books/schools/shards.

let healing / protection be mostly in only one school of magic.

and introduce a concept of magically enhanced territory related to shards / shrines / etc. The idea here is that if a sov builds certain improvement on a shard, an area of influence will emanate from the shard. Within that area of influence, the shards school of magic will be enhanced in some manner.

An addition to this might be creating 'affinities' for certain magics. NPCs, SOV with an affinity for a certain type of magic will have beneficial enhancements when using that magic.

And, then create a set of relationships between the types of magic that may create a stacking, or a negative relationship between them. using the element 4 elements based on the European mythic system currently in the game (earth air fir water), air and earth ore opposites, they never stack, they clash, oppose each other.

Just some ideas...

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An addition to this might be creating 'affinities' for certain magics. NPCs, SOV with an affinity for a certain type of magic will have beneficial enhancements when using that magic.

Agreed. A system like this is already in my expanded magic mod. The affinities are faction-wide, for the most part, though. It doesn't really work on a character-level basis without a system for skill progression.

I've noticed that in the CoreShards.xml, there seems to be some disabled code that is meant to do just this. So... maybe it's in the works for future patches/expansions?

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Personally, I'd separate strategy from elements. Give each element something 'neat' but don't also make each element a defacto cut and paste definition. I'd rather have it so if I want to turtle, I pick up the Defensive spell book. Alternatively, building upon spell books much like technology. For instance, I study Defensive spell books... and then from there I can pick Air Defense, Earth Defense, etc. If I want to heal units, there should be healing style spells in every element.

The reason I'd prefer it this way is to keep options open and allow for player flexibility as well as giving the developers some freedom to be unique. There's honestly nothing stopping or forcing Earth to be slow and ponderous other than cliche. Also, it allows for better balance - finding an elemental shard would always be of benefit rather than hit-or-miss.

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ElanaAhova

Join Date 09/2008

+105

I'm not a programmer type, and I have never looked at the code. But it is both interesting and encouraging that code is in there that might lead to this. Thanks for the info...

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Quoting sagittary,

reply 9

finding an elemental shard would always be of benefit rather than hit-or-miss.

For a mod, I'd get rid of the Shards or wait for an option developed by Stardock that allows spells to have more than one cost, so we can choose when casting, which price we want to pay for the casting.

Quoting LightofAbraxas,

reply 6

I actually have! Check out my mod to take a look at specifics and make suggestions, if you would be so kind. There are a couple spell schools that feel really thin, still.

I have but I'm not sure that I can actually say much. At best I could give you my viewpoint but it would be biased by how I see magic in fantasy worlds. Which should be useless to your game world (or the few I know about it reading that thread). And I won't be able to stop mentally comparing to what I do for my mod in which (as much as I hate to mention my mod out of its own thread, so I apologize) some factions use the basic four elements (which "reduces" the spell selection compared to yours, which apparently has 9 open magic schools, but also reduces greatly the overlapping issues) while others stick to only one special type of magic associated in exclusive to their faction. In my case would be Blood for vampires, Attor (short of necromancy) for undead, Faith (I have made the Paladin spellbook so imagine the theme) for a concrete group of humans, and Chi (more like psionics actually) for another group of humans. So now that you know by bias...

I must say that in yours I see lots of magic types. That means great chances of overlapping which by itself may not be always bad (some overlapping is actually good) but that can blur the lines between the different kinds too much (at least until you get the grip of them, as creator of the mod you know best how things work there). Makes me wonder about specialiation and how actually works all the sytem in research (at least Shards are generic).

Intuition: being common grounds, anything goes.

Four Elements: Nothing really special to mention. Air seems to have too much damage and not so much "control". Only Wind Sense for awareness theme. I cannot think of any other neither. But the other elements seem fine and with more clear themes (water still needs some more meat but seems fine too. Maybe some more damage, some more tactical control...).

I read the Light name and I can only think "Aspect of Fire". It may have some deep significance in your mod but reading the spells you have there now, I'd rename it Shadow/Darkness, except for Radiant Visage I suppose. It may be my own bias so as I said previously, just my limited point of view. Focus noticed: Combat. Not convinced.

Ether offers what you mention in the OP: summoning. Other planes must suck though. Demons only? Summons that are not for combat and/or that go to combat like something more than tanks, could be welcome. The summons can offer great versability to their caster, so depending on the outer planes of your mod, it may be worth considering. Focus noticed: Summons. Seems fine to me.

Spirit is some kind of mix of Mobility and (After)Life. Nightmares reminded me of a spellbook I want to make called Dream (all related to sleep the enemies, have their nightmares kill them and such delightful stuff). Anyway, the moblity part doesn't feel very mystical (Incessant March?) but maybe is because of the names (spirit Walk goes fine). As I mentioned previously, I would go more for some spirit summoning (not Ether related), some movement (but not so much as right now) and buffs. Focus noticed: Mobility apparently? I'd go for spirit buffs and all that shamanic stuff but up to your wishes and lore.

Blood: Dragon Age blood magics aside, I like to think of Maho from Legend of the Five Rings (worthy to check it out for its Elemental spells too) and better of Quietus from Assamite vampires (good old Vampire: The Masquerade). Coating the weapons with poisonous blood, spitting acidic blood, clogging the enemy's bloodstream, blood puppets,... and some more beneficial effects too like purifying any blood related illness. Your spells feel fine altough I myself would focus it more on combat/healing aspects. I don't see so well those about increasing research or production. But it may be just me. If you consider "blood puppets", I suppose they make sense (not popular spells then). Remember that with the proper sacrifices and high levels of blood knowledge, decimating entire populations (or maybe take total control of enemy champions) is not impossible. Focus noticed: Jack of all trades. The focus on combat/healing would seem to fit better your idea of life/death mentioned in the OP.

If by any chance you found anything useful there... I blame randomness.

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the problem is with 5 spells per school it feels like nothing

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And I won't be able to stop mentally comparing to what I do for my mod in which (as much as I hate to mention my mod out of its own thread, so I apologize)

Lol, I've pimped my mod in a couple of threads (including this one), so maybe I should be the one apologizing. Second, I need to go ahead and post the lore background for the mod if I want to sell anyone on a different spell system. I think that I'm going to release a canon lore version of the mod as well, realizing that others may not like the lore.

As for summons, it's a skill issue on my end. Finding the code to link other units to the summoning spells, finding the actual units that are viable options, etc.

Anyway, thanks for the lengthy post. It's food for thought.

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You don't need to apologize, it's just my personal preference about avoiding as much as possible to talk about my mod out of its thread. I feel dirty.

I don't know if Lore would sell or not (for some will for others it will doom it) but it would certainly help to understand the system better.

About summons, I remember having trouble just adding my Light Angel to the Paladin spellbook. I wasn't sure if it was because of adding a complete custom character with armor and weapons or what, but it simply didn't work. Finally managed to write the name well and made it work. So normal summoning seems more a matter of models and what skills/role to give them. I haven't looked at city or tactical summons though.

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