Another couple of options that I like.

Have your channeler stay in his tower, ala Master o' Magic. When he tries to cast a spell in a tactical combat, he has two options:

1) pay a hefty mana surcharge for casting spells over vast distances, or

2) Be able to project an avatar of himself into the battle. This avatar could cast any spells in combat with no mana surcharge as if he were present in the battle. However, if this avatar/astral projection is defeated in battle, there should be severe penalties such as a permanent essence cost or other very significant result - probably the second most severe consequence possible in the game, second only to channeler death itself.

True Channeler death would only happen if the tower in which he resides falls. There should be so many bonuses to the defending channeler, and the ability to prepare nasty surprises for an attacker, that death of a channeler should only happen if he is effectively out of the game anyway.

It would be impossible to get a quick kill of the channeler in the early game due to these bonuses/defenses provided by the tower.

Ah.... good point.

I think it's important that when a channeler goes into battle it's not an all or nothing thing. Because if the result of a battle is:

A - The channeler lives at the cost of a few health points that in general are ridiculously easy to heal OR

B - The channeles dies and you lose EVERYTHING

then it will be impossible to balance. Because if the channeler is weak enough that he cannot consistently win battles against moderate sized armies then he is a horrible liability in the field. Like your commander in SupCom once you reach tech 2. Yes he IS alot tougher than the T2 units. But NO you CANNOT use him in the field because all they have to do is kill that one unit to end the game. The 'Gandalf' channeler is patheticly weak.

OTOH

If the channeler is strong enough to kill a moderate sized army outright with option A being the result he can simply do so over and over again. The enemy is contantly being drained of resources at nearly no cost to you. The 'Gandalf' channeler is OP.

There really is no middle ground. It's on the knife's edge of going either way. Therefore a channeler NEEDS to be able to lose a battle without actually losing. Wether that means he must regenerate somewhere else losing time and some essence. Or he must sacrifice enough essence to finish the fight that you would consider it a loss doesn't matter. But there needs to be a price in there somewhere... That's my opinion anyway.

If the channeler can bring land to life again, imbue other beings with essence, cast spells... it would seem silly not to be able to create some safeguards to prevent his/her own demise. In fact, surely Stardock has been conssidering that idea all the way. But as Frogboy already said, we'll be able to test this and more in the beta.

I dislike the idea of the lands cleansed with essense, going back into ruin once it's Channeler dies.

Yay!  I've fought a long campaign and finally killed off my ArchRival Channeler.....oh no, all the cities I bled in capturing have all permanently gone to ruin.  Oh no, the little guy who hasn't fought at all and simply leveled up all this time is now the same size as me (since I don't get to keep enemy Channeler cities once they die) AND is more powerful.

Losing enemy cities to ruin once their Channeler dies = heavy punishment for conflict in the game.  The most pacifist player will almost always win!

totally, not only is it like paradoxnt says, damaging to the conflict of the game.  (you'd never want to kill a channeler if it means the land you took from him returns to waste)  but it does not make sense.   The world existed before channelers just fine.   The cataclysm wipped life from the world, and channelers are channeling the elements back into the world to make it living again...   once the world has regained its ability to support life, why would it lose it again?  (with the exception of another cataclysm or a spell that provide a similar results)

An argument for game over when your channeler dies if I ever saw one.

Well, they can't. I think thats part of the point of the thread. Having a channeler die in normal combat is game over, either instantly, or because you're crippled compared to everybody else and will lose 50 turns later.

But that's a problem. If your channeler can die in normal combat, using him at all is extremely risky. That will lead to "park in a fortified city whenever possible" channelers being dominant, simply because the risk when doing anything else is so high. The only way to balance such a huge risk is to make the channeler immensely powerful in direct combat, which leads to very complicated balance problems.

Now, if your channeler can be defeated but have cast a recall spell that will teleport him back to a city and prevent the death? A lot of problems go away.

Considering he's advocating for channelers to be immortal and death a mere inconvenience, I think even he must realize that he should be laughed out of the room for calling people who want death=game over carebears

Well Channelers are intended to be immensely powerful in direct combat if you choose to play that way. And if you intend to use your channeler in such a manner, you would most likely invest in making your channeler individually powerful. If you choose to play otherwise and invest heavily in settlements and champions, you probably should park your channeler in a safe place most of the time.

But yeah. If channeler death = gameover then there needs to be the option to create your own safety net - but the game should not provide it for you. It should be a choice with a cost, otherwise sending channelers into conflict becomes a relatively trivial risk. If you send your channeler into battle without any "survival insurance" (like an auto-recall spell that will teleport him out of harm's way in an emergency, or a One Ring, or using simulacra, whatever), then you are taking a calculated risk. Assuring your channeler's survival should require a fairly significant investment of resources. Something like an auto-recall spell could use a relatively small amount of resources but only work once (and then you have to cast it again), while something like creating your own One Ring could have a very large resource investment whose effect is permanent until the ring is stolen or destroyed (and it could have the disadvantage of slowly restoring your channeler back to power over time, not instantly).

To me, Channeler LOSE ≠ Channeler DEATH.

Death should be game over. But the Channeler should in no way or form be easy to kill, capture or corner. At least not outside of the very immediate start of the game, before you've managed to create your own, as Pigeon said, "safety net".

Having near-immortal channelers or channelers that simply teleport back to your capital as soon as he loses a battle carries the added problem of him simply attacking again. And again. And again. There has to be costs associated with it. Taking your channeler inte battle should be a huge risk. But if your channeler is the beefed-up Sauron kind of channeler, that risk will have to be weighted in every battle.

Probably because the other guy is also going to use strategy? Going with an idea that channeler defeat = game over, how do you balance the channeler properly? Just how big an army should it take to beat one? What if I bring my Elder Dragon into it, can a channeler take that out? Do we get duels where your god channeler simply marches across the map and flattens my entire empire, because he was balanced such that he can't be focused down instantly by a late game army?

When you have the ability to build some kind of safety net so that defeat ≠ death, you turn the risk of using the channeler into something people can choose to manage. That is where the options really open up.

Exactly.

Wow, I cannot foresee everyone attacking 1 of my points & ignoring the rest of my Reply #59.  When sovereign dies, his land rot away; I don’t intend this rotting to be permanent nor all land rot.  The rotting probably means temp reduction in productivity so rivals can advance troops more easily.  In that Reply #59, someone new will become the sovereign after some turns.   Reply #59’s point 4 lists the big penalties for losing your sovereign, but losing him does not mean game-over outright.

When the sovereign dies the game is over, how can I bring him to any battle so I can level him up?  When his combat power is balanced, he always risks dying in combat no matter how careful I treat him (or the safest thing to do is to make him a sitting duck type of Sovereign). 
Alternatively, if his one man stack of death (even at low level), the game will be boring because you just pushes him around & give him goodies, power him up & escort him with more troop.     Under this arrangement, it will be very difficult to balance the combat power of the soveriegn; can't be too strong, can't be too weak.

There are probably 2 better ways to do it. 
1)    Sovereign does not die when he lost a battle.  Maybe there is spell of return, he is skilled at escape/retreat.
2)    When he dies, a Sovereign successor will be show up one way or other.
Either case, there should be stiff penalty in some forms of my Reply#59 point 4.

I considered starting a new thread, as this is going to be a fairly large post and I don't want it to get lost in the larger thread. But for now I will post it here.

  We have two opposing and important interests. On the one hand, if channeler death or fight lost = game over, then no one will want to risk their channeler. On the other hand, if the channeler is incredibly difficult to beat, and there isn't significant cost to losing a battle, channelers will just wipe out armies, and if they lose they will just recall and pick up where they left off.

I think one of the problems is that many of those who are against channeler death being game over are looking at it from the perspective of they are the channeler that got defeated. Look at it from another perspective: If channelers ARE these incredibly powerful forces, and you manage to defeat one, wouldn't you just be incredibly pissed if he just reappeared back at his home town and resumed massive destruction of your armies?

I agree that the channeler losing a battle that he is at should not be the end of the game. I would propose that the channeler does not die in a lost battle. There are many ways to handle this. many of which have been proposed in this thread. I also think that the defeat of a channeler in the battlefield should be a huge victory for the player that manages to do so, and a huge setback for the defeated channeler.

I DO believe that there should be a condition where a channeler can be utterly destroyed and that be game over for that player. It would NOT be a VC for the winner (unless they were the only two surviving players at the time).

An idea that I had that I have not seen posted yet:

Each channeler has a wizard tower or equivalent like MoM. This tower or whatever could only ve in one of the towns that he possessed, but could be moved from one town to another via a spell.

This tower should give significant defense benefits to the channeler when he is occupying it.

When a channeler falls in combat, his corporeal form is teleported back to his tower - always.

His "spirit", "essence" or w/e needs to travel back to the tower. It is invisibile and un-attackable, and can travel thru ALL terrain squares. It should be one of the fastest if not the fastest unit in the game. But if it had travelled FAR from the tower (across the world) it should still take significant time to return.

Until the spirit returns and reunites with the corporeal body, the player is in a Sauron state (as he was during the LOTR trilogy). He cannot cast spells himself or imbue or do anything directly, however he is still able to control his troops completely and exactly as always. His cities and armies, heroes, etc remain his. He just cannot take direct action until the spirit returns.

Possibly there could be a spell that could make the spirit return instantaneously. If the ability existed at all it would have to be cast in advance and incur a significant ESSENCE cost.

When the spirit rejoined the body there should be some or all of the following:

Current Mana at zero (you would need to recharge your batteries)

Weakened physical state for x turns

Significant essence cost - in other words, if you did the "Immediate Essence Recall" described above you would be hit in the Essence TWICE.

Other?

In order to permanently kill a channeler one of two combinations of conditions would have to be met:

1) You defeat the channeler IN his tower, or

2) You destroy the tower during the period when that channeler's body and his essence were separated.

For either of these to occur, the defeated player would either have to make multiple huge strategic errors, or he is for all intents and purposes out of the game but is just to stupid to know it yet. If the channeler's tower (or whatever) is destroyed while he is in the field, he would have the ability to cast it in another city the following turn, possibly a small essence cost for this.

Whew. Sorry for the long post.