I'm still leaning to having single-player games end if you lose your channeler unit, and I think the idea is even more appropriate for multiplayer. If we do end up with dead channeler = game over for you, in multiplayer, I'd like to see something close to a MAD option where a channeler who has studied appropriate magic can use his or her dying breath to lay some seriously bad vibes on the channeler whose forces have dealt the deathblow, or perhaps on whoever you think is your greatest enemy.
Maybe a Death Curse would be simply an intense version of one of the landwrecking spells centered on the freshly-dead channeler's body. Or maybe Death Curses could somehow reflect the channelers' identities and histories a bit--say a slain good channeler being able to do a mega Turn Undead against his necromancer archenemy, forcing her to start from scratch with her undead forces.
My fuzzy idea here is basically to work up a magical corollary to the more traditional trick of trying to help your enemy's enemies when you know the game is over for you.
Me for one agrees with GW Swicord. I'd do stuff just because itfits my channelor (as long asn't cost me TOO much). After all: waht the fun in winning if it doenst get you any "feeling", its just mechanical?
Besides it COULD also work in SP en MP. One channeler "spies" upon another and sees "your opponents fortress holds an considerable amount of barely restrained raw power" as an indication someone might have set up something nasty. Or "[geoff] radiates much personal power but little seems linked into his surroundings" for someone who has little invested in death effects (or city enhancing magic or...)
You'd have to play with it in beta to see what works.
This way swicord could have its way: It's potentially unbalancing - both for the player maintaining the thing as for the world when it is finally released. Thus creating all kinds of interesting tension.
So I Partly disagree with kenken and 2xpigeon: If it can have a deterring effect (because of uncertainty) it might just serve enough in-game purpose to be worth it. Pigeons suggestion that death effect magic could be cheaper would also help with that: after all, it is a wellknown fact that if you do not require your own survival inflicting damage suddenly got a whole lot easier (again: balancing to be done in beta: you dont want infinite standoffs)
I know it works: I used the tactic often in Master of Orion 2. Being Psilon (or other creative race) if you got to a technological advantage you could scare the others by sometimes wiping out a fleet on his side with an obscene omount of overkill...leaving him to fear where else you might have such superships. While in effect you only had, and could afford, a measly few of them (simultenous assault on several planets might have very well destroyes you because that super-fleet could only be in one place at the same time)
thinking on: Perhaps you could death-curse with "unbound" magic. That is - the more power you keep tied up in yourself, not invested in other stuff, the more you go out with a bang (when you are no longer there to contain all that energy). It could be very disbalancing and cool - but you couldt keep it up all the time because uninvested magic does no good - again nice balancing options.
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