Landisaurus uses:

Life magic + Web-magic to cast:  

mainly because this was from eons ago when there were less people on this forum (and some different people)

so I'm curious if any newer members of the forum have an opinion.

yeah, its because original post was before I had an avatar.  (nov 11 was a week after the official announcement date of Nov 4th after all)

I'm more interested in what people think about the sub schools.   Things like "fire + water = lightning" might have a better alternative.  Perhaps lightning should be "fire + wind", leaving water/fire combos to be either A: rare (because they are opposites) or B: steam (because thats what you ACTUALLY get.   Heat+water = clouds > which results in lightning with the right kind of pressure)

Perhaps lightning should be CRAZY powerful and be a fire + wind + water  > tripple element spell. 

Also, I was hoping for some general spell ideas.      (I'm marking essense requiring spells)

fire + water  (essense) = raising ocean temps spell > lowers fishing yields

earth + water (essense) = underground irrigation matrix >  increases crop yield as if irrigated > works even where river/aquaduct is not present.

water + life = acid arrow > direct damage spell that deals additional damage over a few turns

Off Topic: bad sign when people has to start making necroposting to keep the forum alive...

On Topic: I like landisaurus first post's idea in this thread. A pity we barely know anything (do we know anything?) about magic system...

"Thread necromancy" is eye-of-the-beholder slang. Calling it on yourself seems weird, but bumping an interesting post that you think deserves renewed attetion seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I ignored this one the first time around because we had no real info on how magic was going to work. We've had about three saltine's worth of an info snack in the meantime, so I still have no direct response to the OP. Except maybe that I'm guessing now that spell books will be faction-centered and not element-centered and that it's shards (mana sources) that will determine what elements you can mix in spells.

I wouldn't say I'm doing it to keep the forum alive.  It has been rather active of late.   I just wanted to talk about it, and why bother creating a new thread where there was an entirely unused thread sitting back a few months.

I'm not entirely sure if  that is true.   I mean, it certainly is in multiplayer, and I would like to try to create a balanced game.  But frogboy said that Elemental was a mainly single player game, and he also said that late-game was going to have some intentionally unbalanced spells (provided everybody is equelly broken, we'd be in a good place).   But I don't think balance is nearly as important here as it is in say... demigod or even Sins of a Solar Empire.

That being said, depending how structured the spell selection is, it might be able to create rather balanced spell sets and still include many combination. spells.  The best way I see it, is stack the spells in research order from lowest level to highest level.   A lightning spell that would require 3 fire tomes/levels, 3 wind, and 3 water would effectivly be a level 9 spell.   So that should be a pretty darn powerful  spell (assuming you rarely get over 10, as is the case with MoM) and as a result it would come very late game.

An average strength lightning spell might come from 2 fire, 1 water, 2 wind, and that would be about a level 5 spell.   It should be arranged in the spell book with other level 5 spells in terms of research order, and be about as powerful as such.  This makes sense for lightning to be stronger than the level 3 direct fire damage spell, because lets face it.  lightning doesn't strike the same place twice, because the place isn't there for a 2nd time.

Steam burns are about the worst kinds of burns there are.   (low level fire/water) and some of the combo spells I've thought of (boiling seas: for example) would be both very powerful, and I'd imagine requiring a lot of both schools.

So I  think balance shouldn't be that much of a problem with having lots of combos.  Combo spells would be largely late game anyway.   The trick is if you have a crazy awesome 6 fire + 6 earth combo spell, you may want to be sure there is a crazy awesome 12 fire spell for the all-fire guys.   

And reasonably, a person that is able to get 30 tomes/levels, to have 6 in every element...   likely deserves something that is not obtainable by somebody that focuses only on a single element (assuming that at most you can start with 10 tomes)   If you look at MoM, a person with 5 in every tome is almost hurt because they now get very little access to any of those "rare" spells that the specialists are swinging.   Making a scale would probebly be best.   5 books = xx number of spells, 10 books = xx number of spells.   And stick to that ratio no matter how many elements are included, again something MoM doesn't really do.

Definitely like ALL of Landisuarus’ posts in this thread.  Necroposting or not, it is good idea.  One thing I like most in MOM is their spell selection.  It is so flexible & allows you to think about what strategy you’ll like to go with be4 even the game starts.

Coincidentally, my thread about complete Spell moddability fits well will Landisuarus’ spell combo idea.   Some kind of physics handling & material creation/destruction is needed for his idea to work, if there is no hard coding for spells.  

So far, we don’t know if spells are hard coded.  I’ll be sad if they are.  OTOH, if the game engine allows that, EWOM is truly revolutionary. 

BTW, on the topic of Spell Balance.  I believe it should not be balanced on book by book basis.  It is ok that some books are stronger than others.  Because the balance should instead be done by "Sovereign Points" (with is similar to MOM Wizard spell picks).  You spend these points customizing your Sovereign.  If you spend more of these into your spell casting ability, you don’t have as much points to spell on enhancing other of his abilities.  And the map maker/RMG will decide if they want same points for all Sovereigns or not (say give some bonus to weaker starting position)

nice!   I thought of metal for fire+earth myself, but I really like how you took it.      A guy with a bunch of metal spikes in him and electricity running between the spikes creates a pretty exciting mental image, though honestly  the rods that missed would likely act as a ground for the ones that did (i.e. would do less damage than it sounds)   But there are ways to get around that, such as ignore physics (better solution than it sounds)    

A good spell that comes to mind (perhaps less powerful than the one unkown created, 2 earth, 2 fire, 1 water, 1 wind) would stick two pieces of metal in designated targets, than arc lightning between the two rods dealing heavy damage to everything in between.  The two "poles" would take the most damage, having been squered and electrocuted (I'd say they are pretty much dead unless something like a dragon) and everything in between taking a ton (enough to be a mid to high level spell)

Glass!    that is pretty awesome.   man, my brain is trying to think of some awesome glass spells.  I'm sure there could be some very bizzar results with such a spell.