Has Essence been abandoned as concept?

Yep, you now have a global mana pool.

I'm hoping without much hope that FE will reverse this Inscrutable Decision made in post-relase WoM versions.

The global mana pool was a swell decision, but I have yet to read a good explanation of why Essence as a stat/resource needed to go. Used in a formula for spell-casting time, it would make a fine complement to Intelligence as a damage-modifier. Its original use in imbuing champions also seems like a suprerior tradeoff/constraint to mere mana maintenance for spell-casting champions.

If it really is gone forever, I'd sure like to see an extended dev explanation for the decision. I was quite happy to struggle through problematic builds for many months, but the forums have been more fun for me than the game since Esssence got Exiled.

i too miss essense. many reasons. to elaborate on GW's comments:

firstly as a means of limiting imbuing it was much better than mana maint. a one point per turn mana maint over the course of the game is absolutely huge, because the system is so coarsely grained. we have now created a situation where you'd be stupid to imbue anyone or summon anything (for more than a couple of turns) until you have a huge mana income (ie, late to mid game, when the game is almost won anyway). so you only imbue or summon long term as a whim because you can, rather than because it makes strategic sense. because mana accumulates without limit, every spell or imbue has whole-game repercussions, and this encourages people to be very miserly, which is sad (and if you are doing fine whilst spending lots of mana, it can only be because of poor ai and unbalanced casting costs). if someone blows all their mana in the early game, it's largely unfixable and could come back to haunt them as much as 10 hours later. of course, it's better than what we had before, when enchant slots were a triviality, and the costs of casting a spell were undone after 20 turns. a system that falls somewhere between the two would be better.

i love global mana. i think it would be better if it accumaled at a diminishing rate and then stabilised at a diferent level after 50 turns or something. or at least reduce some of the maint to 0.5 per turn (or whatever).

in the mean time however, it would really help to bring back essense, and spend it on imbuing (or enchanting, or creating fertile land or whatever). it made more sense in terms of the lore, but more importantly, it posed a more interesting tactical question. if you sacrifice your sov's spellcasting power to imbue others, you have to choose between being sauron or being the middle earth wizards: one powerful caster, or lot of weak ones all over the map? individual power vs. flexibility? whereas with mana maint you choose between flexibility or just not being able to use magic as often.

purely from a game balance view, magic weilding sovereigns should be as big a part of the game as combat sovs. however, a combat sov needs three stats to be effective while a magic sov only needs one. if this imbalance is not visible yet, it is only because the spell formulas are not balanced at present. once there are stat based damage spells competetive in the late game then INT will be a shoe in.

personally i'd do it like this:

int: limits what level spells a character (any of them) can cast, gives an admin bonus to income and determines spell resistance

essense: increases spell damage, spent on imbuing, enchanting items or creating fertile land.

 I'd rather simply use the spells themselves to determine casting time, anything which makes the spell lists more interesting.

 Not sure on essence itself. I liked the idea of permanent sacrifice to create other casters (shame it was so easy to get around) but on the other hand I prefer the mana system when it comes to actual casting, essence made it feel more like "Elemental : Slight Disagreement of Stage Magicians" than a war of magic.

 I think perhaps the best approach might have been to use the mana system and simply hard limit the number of casters excluding heirs you could have.

Could you maybe elaborate on the "Slight Disagreement of Stage Magicians" part?

For me, Elemental's early potential to be a ground-breaker in the fantasy TBS genre was all about the idea that essence was both an important stat for a major class of game unit and an expendable resource, with a 'mana econony' as the fundamental background. What I still don't get is how it became an either/or choice.

Re-visiting player as well.  Definitely bummed on the essence situation.  The entire allure of the game was based around the uniqueness of the concept.  Hoard essence and be a demi-god, but have poor infrastructure.  Spend essence to improve infrastructure and become weaker.   With the idea that the expenditure of essence was a permanent strategic cost.  Bummer.

Design-wise, 'Mana upkeep' is basicially Essence (a limiting resource that can be spent or hoarded), with a considerably less sexy name   The main problem is that the concept never saw its promised potential (In WoM, Hoarding Essence != badass). Luckilly, FE was designed with several new spells that should fill that void nicely.

Essence is still hooked up in the engine, so mods can use it (expandedfactions does) but it has no visual bar any more (like a health bar)

wrote a message.

erased it.

decided on this instead.

Essence trait. I miss you. Please come back to me. Will you be my valentine ? I will leave my wife and kids if you come back to me.

(yeah... that oughtta get boogie's attention - can't wait for the 1.3 update for some game balancing love)

I was a big fan of essence too.

I miss essence too.

The problem with essense being used to Imbue was then each hero could increase it normally on level up, so the more you imbued the more casting power you would have. The fix would be to only let natural casters increase it (possibly making it just increase each level, as it would likely be the optimal choice otherwise and that is bad), and allow repeated imbues so that it can be distributed as needed.

Then have major spells that actually use it up, creating a big decision for players.

And the global mana pool should stay, but essense could limit how much a caster can draw from the global pool either as a hard cap per (with each point of essense translating into multiple "casting points") turn or by modifing the casting time (mana cost / essense = cast time... or something like that).

Care to elaborate?

Yes, please. To me, the mana upkeep thing is not at all like Essence was. You can lose and reclaim shards, but Essence spent was Essence spent and restored lands felt really precious, nothing like the spreadable spam that we have now.

If I'm remembering rightly, the basic fixes Gwenio1 suggests in reply 12 were floating around as soon as (or maybe even before) magic was in the betas.

They are loosely the same, in terms of design. Both make you choose between casting and have magical potenial. However, they are nothing a like thematically and do not work out the same. Essense as implemented originally makes it a great idea to imbue everyone, while (according to one post in this thread) global mana as it is now makes it a bad idea to imbue people at all (particularly early in the game).

I have been posting the same thing since it was brought up that the orginal magic system was broken and the devs were going to change it up, less the part about only natural casters gaining essense (note the natural part, heirs should gain it too; otherwise it would overly gimp the AI and would stamp out magical power).

That was the game breaking thing about essence: channelers could boost it at level up. So you imbue a couple of people, then once they gain some levels you're WAY ahead of where you were if you didn't imbue them. So for reviving land, you just wanted more channelers. There also never was anything else to spend it on, so you couldn't do things like imbue an item at creation to make a crazy good magic sword.

I miss it as a concept. I don't miss it as a mechanic, because the mechanic never worked well.

As for the mana upkeep... well if you have 2 mana generation per turn and it costs 1 per turn to imbue a channeler, do you really want to do that? It's crippling to your ability to cast spells.  Once you get more mana regen the problem isn't as bad, but it's insanity to imbue anything for a large chunk of the game. The numbers are too coarse grained, it'd work better if spell costs and regen were 10x what they are now, and imbue had a scaling cost based on how powerful the caster is.

Hence preventing essense from being gamed by limiting who can gain it on level up would improve essense, as would adding more things to spend it on. If essense acts as a cap (either hard or soft) on mana usage, then over a certain amount it no longer make sense to hoard it. Finer grain numbers would also help.

I do not believe there is a single solution to this, rather a good mix of diffrent things is need to balance it. Each will give more tools by which to tweak things so that they are Just Right.

Case in point, this mod, which is still in development, uses exactly this mechanic.  Charisma has been renamed to Presence, which in the Sorcery Spell Book increases the power of the spell effects, but it also increases the mana cost and MPT cost.

Point being, this mechanic can be achieved.

EDIT: Beware the shameless plug.

What essence should have been is an additional cost for very potent spells or effect. A sacrificial cost. Something that prevent you from casting 10 volcanoes in the same game. And ultimately, something that you only get a limited supply of in the course of the game, a supply that cannot grow (or requires tremendous efforts to make it grow).

I do not understand why it was abandoned. Mechanically, it didn't have to play the same role as mana. A larger empire brings more mana from the large number of mana-producing resources; mana can be refilled. Essence, as it was supposed to be originally, was the personnal power of channellers, the ability to change the world in dramatic ways but a very limited number of times, to do things that were beyond the reach of simple spellcasters.

That's actually where I am as well. I LIKE the global mana pool, and mana maintenance. I think those are good systems in the game.

I do however, hate that essence is gone. It should be used as a means of determinig how good a caster someone is. If your essence isnt higher than the casting value of a spell, you cannot cast it. Mana per combat is limited by essence. Essence can be spent on certain persistent world upgrade spells and super-high level magic. Essence higher than required for spells eithe rmakes them more mana efficient (maintenance), cheaper to cast, or cast faster, depending.

Yes, its a little intricate, but I see no reason why global mana as-is and essence as a caster-consideration arent included next to eachother.

This is already in the game.  Every spell has a stat prerequisite, usually intelligence.  However the sovereign does not abide by this mechanic.  They can cast any apell no matter how gimped they are.

Intelligence already does a lot of that, and I'm not sure its a good fit for essence anyway. If letting someone else cast means my own ability to cast drops enough that I can't use my biggest spells anymore, why would I want to do that?

Hopefully, because the game was able to make that an interesting trade-off for many maps and playstyles.

It would also work better if the biggest strategic spells 'normally' took multiple turns to cast and you were talking about making other spellcasters vs. being able to cast your heavy stuff quickly, not an either/or. I'd also have liked to see the tradeoff working at the tactical level, where you could have Harry McSharing and friends vs. Sue the Seriously Scary Horder, where Harry could win with magic if he had all his friends with him and had learned a good set of non-massive combat spells.

IMO Essence was one of the many original things this game concept had that the devs never managed to balance into a functional gameplay. Global mana pool and mana manteinance work great... Not original at all, no intellectual effort to create a system around it AT ALL, since it'sthe system used in Age of Wonders and other games of this kind.

Apparently the new politics is not to make the original concepts work, but to drop anything that is unusual to this genre of games, hopefully at the end we will still have an original game, but in any case at least it should work.

I still see a bunch of things that need some changing/cutting, and I am sure a lot of things will be simplified in FE.

However, Age of Wonders does not encourage hoarding mana for the end game as it has a casting cap.