Another discussion from the general forum...

Initial Problem: If a player's avatar is killed, what happens to the player?

Solution 1: that player is eliminated, and all their cities/armies/etc revert to neutral or go *boom* or something.  I believe this is the current idea for Elemental based on the GameSpot Interview ("If you die, it's game over.")
- con: this has made it very easy to "short-circuit" challenge by ganking AI avatars because the AI was stupid or it was just very difficult to defend any one unit against a determined attack
- pro: provides a way to eliminate inferior players and win the game without having the potential tedium of taking over the whole map in the conventional manner

Solution 2 (e.g. MoM) : player is moved to a "limbo" where they cannot cast spells or are otherwise severely limited, and must cast a "spell of return" to return to the normal state
- con: copyright infringement
- con: in MoM, it was rare for a wizard to actually succeed in casting this, so it was sort of just prolonging the inevitable, but it made it harder to win with 1 city versus 40 cities just by ganking a wizard (if they had enough, they could come back pretty fast)
- con: may be tedious to take out the remains of the player's empire and thus win the game even when the victim has no reasonable chance of success

Solution 3 (e.g. AoM SM) : if player has a suitable city (with a "tower" in the example), the avatar respawns there next turn.  If no such suitable city exists, the player is eliminated.
- con: may not feel like avatar death is meaningful enough
- con: may lead to tedium if the victim has too many towers, even if the victim has no reasonable chance of success

Alternate Solution: if avatar dies, the player can expend a certain quantity of "essence" to respawn.  If the player doesn't have enough essence, the player is eliminated.
- pro: based on preliminary info, essence is a very limited resource so the number of respawns could be very limited, or zero if the player has used a lot of essence to re-seed terrain and whatnot, so avatar death would still *really* hurt
- pro: the AI could take essence level into account and realize that it should protect it's avatar at all costs when essence is too low, hopefully making it hard to gank-eliminate an AI player without forcing the AI to never use the avatar on the field.
- pro: you could still short-circuit an obvious-but-tedious endgame by killing avatars, you would just have to kill each one a couple-three times instead of only once.
- con: takes developer time, though hopefully not too much to just do a check on death against the essence value

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Keith