So what do we have?
Light and dark
Air and earth?
water and fire?
Anything else?
I was thinking about the dark sun campaign from d&d. Each time a wizard cast a spell it burns a part of the world. Wouldn't it be great to have some elemental bars that would fill up each time a spell is cast. When the bar is full a portion of the world transform into an element. If a water bar is filled up then an area is flooded (and why not an area chosen from the kingdom of the player with less water affinity?). A fire bar full? an area become a desert. Light full? renewal of an area (but in the kingdom with the most affinity with light) etc...
I hope elemental will not just be about elemental creatures but also some kind of diplomacy between each one. And some balance to keep.
From what I have seen, the four classical greek elements + Life.Wouldn't be suprised if we saw 6 elements however, as that's how many factions there are within the races.
There's supposed to be a positive and negative aspect to each element, so you get 10 magical schools atm.
Don't forget the dark school of magic.
Isn't Dark Magic the negative aspect of Life?
Yeah, called Dead Magic.
I thought about something else : the world would slightly change in favor of the element used the most. So each spell cast would have real impact on the world.
Heart!
I imagine that there will be plenty of spells that change the world, majorly or less so.
As a passive effect on spellcasting? Pretty cool, though I see no reason why the southern part of the map should grow... browner (or something?) when a northern channeler raises a mountain. Coding it as an effect to certain spells would be great however.
Perhaps a gradual change in the area surrounding your channeler depending on how you are aligned? If aligned for positive life, abundant crop yields and rolling hills of green should go together hand-in-hand.
Go planet?
Captain planet, he's a hero,
Gonna take polution down to zero!
./snicker
I believe that's already been specifically mentioned as in -- good casters create green fields and forests, evil casters end up with the Land of Mordor (where the shadows lie...).
Elemental just got a new Hero.
Heh! Any time anyone mentions captain planet I always think of the robot chicken version.
Maybe it should be renamed:
Elenvironmental
And then we could add in pollution as the secret, un-named element.
But do they create them passively simply by being good, which spreads from their cities, or do they actively use spells to do so?
How can shadows lie? Someone shines a torch on you, and instead of going away from it, the shadow goes toward the torch?
I want to be evil but have lush green kingdoms.
No doubt. Greenpeace terrorist are pure evil to highly cherished free market industrial capitalists.
Probably both. I imagine there will be an influence/culture mechanism of some sort, judging by the screenshots.
Well, some elements are often mixed in with each other, so it depends on where things want to lie.
ICE - often mixed with water. The aspect of 'cold' could be its own line however. Frost giants and ice dragons would be the big summons.
Lightning - less often mixed with air (or I guess light) than ice is with water, but often it is mixed somewhere. It easily is its own element (often is). Lightning dragons would be easy summons along with storm giants.
Sonic - the element of sound and vibrations. It would be pretty easy to have a bunch of spells around changing sound, music, and vibrations in general. Probebly wouldn't have much summons, but might have strange powerful spells like ones that prevent all communication (shuts down all diplomacy until the spell is disjuncted)
light/color - I mean straight up light, rather than 'light' which is often used when refering to life or holy magic. Something that would let you daze and confuse people. Shoot prismatic waves and walls of pure light. Living color avatars and blinding rays would be strong features here.
Metal - an element seperate from earth according to many asian folklore. Earth is often associated with wood and dirt where metal is a very strong, hard, sharp element. Summon powerful metal dragons and super-reinforce metal features.
Nature - listed in case its different from 'earth'. This would have the creatures and other such things. Spells that make forests grow and summon sprites, war bears, and naga. Forest dragons would love this stuff, along with the ability to overgrow entire cities with vegitation.
emotion - not sure what to say here really. but it sounds like a cool element. Cupids would have to be a summon, with many controlling spells, moral boosts, and strange buffs. I guess its like "heart" which may or may not have been a joke to everybody
void - I imagine this would be mixed with some sort of negitive school of magic, but it still stands.
If I would have to guess, I would think that dragons won't exactly be a summons. Perhaps controlling existing dragons, but from the way they've organized things I doubt that too many beings that powerful are just going to appear out of thin air.
They were summons in master of magic and they are on the cover of the War of Magic game box apparently. So I figured dragons would be one of the most "elemental" features of the game. Thats why I threw them in.
A few notes here, Ice is composed of water but coldness itself is often asociated with air, the reason may be, one of the effects of cold is that it slows down; and slowing is the negative of speeding up, and speeding up is the domain of air.
I personally always use ice. Its simply my favorite element and in every game with spells I tend to use just ice spells just from the principle. And one thing I dislike is, and I hope it wont be in Elemental, having ice spells in two schools of magic. I am pointing at AoW:SM here especially; a majority of spells involving ice were in the Air sphere, but certain spells (mainly quite important Ice storm) were in the Water sphere; and by doing Cosmos and merging Air with Water, you couldnt reach Ice Storm with water levels and have other level 3+ ones in Air. That sucked.
If we want complex magic systems, we certainly need to divide elements to more than simple 4; but truth is, any extra element from those 4 is a combination of the 4 main ones in different ratios, with exception of Life and Death (which are present in elemental).
Long story short, if there are actually to be a dozen of ice spells, do not split them up in two like in AoW:SM. Either create a separate element, or make combining of elements in such a way I wont be restricted.
The thing is, if im going to be ice mage, Ill be having some degree of water and air mastery; so technically I will be "fluent" with 3 magic paths; water, air and the related ice.
I think it would be neat if there were small skills or benefits one could gain if a nation owned at least one shard, or maybe special ones if you owned two different shards (a little boost for rainbow wizards). For instance, if you owned and air and water crystal, your nation might get a ships might get a slight bonus for sailing. Not a big advantage but if it fits your particular strategy you might want to put in the extra effort to get that air shard. Fire and earth - enhansed metal weapons or the ability to have a lava mote. OK, I have not thought through this very well but there might be some neat, logical bonuses that come with shard owership.
Technically, it's actually the other way around. One of the effects of things slowing down is coldness .
I'm kind of hoping you don't have to choose your mastery at the start of the game. I never liked having to determine so precisely the nature of my end-game wizard or channeler or whatever you want to call it. I didn't play MoM much but it always drove me crazy in AoW. I want my channeler's proficiency in the various schools of magic to depend on my in-game choices, not on a setting a choose at the start of the game. As my channeler gets stronger I want to be able to improve his proficiency in the different skills, not just research bigger spells or cast more per turn. In AoW I never really got a sense of my wizard's power increasing much with time. Yeah they get new spells and they start to do a little more damage, and I could cast more per turn, but it felt so impersonal.
I want to be directly involved in shaping the nature of my channeler throughout the game. I also want it to be more open-ended than in AoW. There you could allocate six spheres to whichever masteries you wanted and that was that. But if I'm playing on a big enough map that lasts long enough, I don't want to be so artificially limited. I want my channeler to be able to master, or at least to become very capable in, as many schools of magic as he has the time and skill for. There should be trade-offs of course. For one, if I choose to invest in becoming a better water channeler in addition to my expertise in earth magic, then the spells of my rival who has focused solely on earth magic should be more powerful than my own.
Basically, if I'm playing on a map that takes a month to complete, I want my end-game channeler to be able to be an all-powerful earth mage who can cause a massive world-wide earthquake capable of completely altering the geography. But I also want to be able to create a jack-of-all-trades channeler who is very powerful in many different schools at once, yielding greater versatility (including spells that draw from multiple schools) at the cost of raw power in any one school. Such channelers could still cause world-wide devastation, maybe on an equal scale, through a smaller selection of spells that draw from many schools at once.
Another thing I noticed in AoW is that I almost always ended the game having researched every spell I could. I'm hoping that won't be the case in Elemental, at least unless you're playing on a really massive map. I also hope that even if you run out of spells to research, you can still improve them in some way.
Thank you! I also want my "Mordor Kingdom" to be a lush green paradise.
I agree with Pigeonpigeon on the flexibility of the channeller. I think it could work that as your chaneller goes up in level or something like that, you get to choose a new bonus, which could be more power in an existing magic school, access to a new magic school or some type of special ability. I think that someone who specializes in a particular field would be able to cast the same lower level spells for more effect. I.E. the fireball as a base fire chaneller would do 10 pts of damage, and the same fireball spell for a higher level fire mage would do 15 pts, etc.
Mixed spells like the Ice Strom would require at least 1 level in water and air. You could even have uberspells that require high levels in all disciplines. You could limit powerful spells to only be reasearched by high level mages, or allow greater access, but with enormous research times at lower levels.
I would accept Ice being wind/water combo spells. That being said, I would also expect it to be a wind and life spell. Life is often accociated with warmth and death is often related to cold.
I would expect earth/life would be like plant growth or something.
fire/life might create some particularly bad spells. Things like forest fire (converts a forest to a wasteland, but at the same time if life = temperature then fire/life could be lightning. I personally think lightning would be better for fire/wind, but whatever
Fire/earth would be magma and such... maybe a meteor.
wait, I remember doing this in another forum thread. Sorry but I get excited about it.
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