What spells do you want to see in the game? You can rip them off from another game or just come up with some unique ones . I just got done with my first game of MoM (Yes, I know...Im a little behind the times) and I would love it if these spells would make it into the game: (...sorry if I dont have the spell names exactly right)
Flying FortressWater-walkingWall of Stone Create artifact (I know you can do this in the editor but I mean as an actual spell)Summon Basilisk (Those guys are so pimp!) Raise Volcano EarthquakeInvisibility
Hhhmm, I was just thinking about a spell that enclosed your entire city in a glass dome (like Simpsons movie). It would protect you virtually from anything but you wouldnt be allowed to expand or create new units to leave the city. It would be kinda cool as a last resort. I have a couple of more ideas but still trying to think them out logically. Let's hear yours!
Ah yes, I played one of those... My first online RPG actually. http://www.ishar.com/ hehe... The hardest part of learning the game is figuring out commands. If a typable spell sort of thing is done, make sure it has a really really big spell list... Nothing worse than having to reword your request to make the algorithm understand it. At least have a help menu which tells you how to word the spell. Something such as '(effect) (number of units) (unit) (duration)'. And have it filter out words such as 'on' 'for' 'to' ect. So someone could type 'Imortality on 100 elites for 30 minutes.' Heck, a dropdown menu would work reasonably well for most of it.
Yea, that's the impression I got from Shadowgandor's description--that the spell code actually understood how to improvise in response to a short natural language string. Unless it has some open aspect like that, it wouldn't deserve to be called a wish spell, IMO. And being able to wish a grand Lego something into your courtyard would be really neat, at least if you've taken your game down a silly route. (And I don't mean "silly" as an insult--one of the best Civ games I ever watched a friend play was the Beer Empire, which was all such good fun until someone lost an eye...or was that 'tossed a nuke?')
I meant old adventure games. Think Leisure Suit Larry, think... I can't really come up with any more right now. I blame the fact that it's a late Friday evening.
I wouldn't say easier... Often you had to sit in front of a thesaurus trying to figure out how many different ways you could type what you wanted. It didn't help that I couldn't spell very well back when I played most of my MUDs.
I miss old adventure games. What ever happened to sierra and Lucas arts!? They made the best adventure games! What do they make now? nothing! (fear and starwars games don't count. neither does that space shooter ala starfox that came out by sierra for xbox arcade, or anything else that isn't adventure games) Now all we have are like, runaway and longest journey. However they still are pale compared to like "Quest for Glory" or "Monkey Island" (longest journey 1 was pretty good, but its also pretty darn old now)
The typing old adventure games (like early kings quest, hero's quest, quest for glory 2) usually were made well enough that you COULD type what you wanted several ways and it would figure out what you wanted. Sometimes not though ;
I got an idea with a little help from landisaurus in this thread, that is far more fitting here. So I'm going to quote the only one worth quoting: Me!
Modular Spellbooks! Every time you research a spell, you can put it in one or several custom spellbooks that you define yourself. There'd be one big spellbook with all your spells. Going into it, you could define which other spellbooks it'd show up in.
Most people would likely only have two or three main spellbooks - World Spells, Battlefield Spells (if any), Buffs, etc. But with modular spellbooks, everyone could sort them however the hell they want! You could download that "800 Silly Spells, including Luckmann's Dancing Ferrets, Landisaurus' Thesaurus, Swicord's Archaic Stopsign, and Pigeonpigeon's Exploding Pigeons (not to mention Vandenburg's Flying Deathtraps)" without it completely cluttering every single spellbook, no matter how the game itself categorizes those spells (battlefield, etc).
The Sorcery spells from MoM and Magic The Gathering are grand. Would be heaps of fun to steal peoples global enhancements, unsummon their troops and disenhance their enhancements. When I'm done they would scream to their monitor
I am quite a builder and a roleplayer at heart, so often while playing strategy games i was very upset to see that you (the player) are able to wield enough power to cast something like an army- and country destroying armageddon spell, but are not powerful enough to turn this pesky swamp right at the center of your domain into something useful, like a plain or forest, let alone destroy a mountain.
This one resource you need desperately? Your arcane power rivaling the immortals cannot help you. Do not even try.
So i am going to suggest the often neglected non combat spells, quite a couple of them.
Since we do not know the terrain types, resources and city buildings yet, i will generalize and will be using some Civ4 and Fall from Heaven references.
Thinking about non combat spells i see different categories:
permanent, sustained, rituals.
Sustained:
Effects, cost mana/turn
example: Clearity of mind: as long as you are sustaining the spell your researchers are getting bonus points.
example: Bravery: your warriors know no fear, morale boni.
Permanent:
example: Vitalize: you envigorate the land, desert turns to plains permanently, no follow up costs.(FfH2)
example: Wall of stone: you cast it, get a stone wall in your city, end of story.
example: Spire of brilliant thought: building, grants "Clearity of mind" to the city it is created in. (mana + essence)
Rituals:
can be permanent or sustained, require production, can require additional ressources, sacrifices etc.
example: Vitalize Land: ALL tiles in your empire are vitalized (get one step better) permanent
example: Time Stop: Only you are able to take turns, sustained, massive upkeep.
example: Summon undead horde: sustained/permanent, as long as you are sustaining the spell the massive horde of undead you summoned is under your control, the dark energies are even healing them for a fraction of their HP each turn, as soon as you are not sustaining the ritual any longer they begin to crumble, losing fraction of their HP each turn.
So far my concept, Now, on to some more spells:
Permanents:
Please, please, please give us some GOOD terraforming!
The whole vitalize line: ice/desert through tundra, swamp, dead terrain, hell terrain, whatever to plains and merry meadows!
If base terrain and improvements are different let there also be spells for that too! Even for boni, but they should be costly enough to be a severe investment, but we have essence - non renewable resource- exactly for that!
Terraforming:
Vitalize land:
/ice/hell terrain/dead terrain/ to /tundra/desert/ to /scrub plain/ to /plain/
Curse Land:
/plain/ to /scrub plain/ to /tundra/desert/ to /ice/hell terrain/dead terrain/
Raise Land
deep water to shallow water to plain to hill to Mountain
Erosion:
Mountain to hill to plain to lake to sea
Create vegetation
young Forest/Forest/ancient forest
young Jungle/Jungle/ Jungle thicket
Destroy vegetation (the reverse)
Create bonus:
Motherload: you create a in a nearby mountain (massive costs + essence)
Teleport bonus:
Living Gold: as long as the gold resource is in your sphere of influence you can move it (near a city f.e.) for massive mana cost.
Buildings in the cities which would permanently grant otherwise sustainable effects:
Fountain of life: big reduce of unhealthiness in the city + extra food + extra healing.
etc.
I will stop for now, the post is too long already, please write what you are thinking about the idea so far.
Maybe thats more a quest thing: I'd like to have a unknown spell. You have to find out how it work and what it does.
Example A: You know that there is a spell and it summons something big. You have to talk the spell somewhere special. But it may happen, that it summons Cthullu and the whole Map is destroyed and everyone lost. (Maybe you could find out before, what may happen...)
Example B: There is a spell, but you first have to find out, if you have to cast it on a person, a legion, a hill, the whole enviroment, an animal, does it summon something? A Weapon? Shield? Shoes? Can it only be cast on people without wearing shoes? You have to try and find out. And after you find out, that you can cast it on a person, that you have to find out, if you want to cast it on an enemy person or on a friendly person.
Unknown spells shouldn't be standard. I always like to know, what spells I research and cast. For some really mighty spells that might be very interesting.
And for MoM:
- Awareness: See every city in the world (or more: Nature Avareness...)
- Regeneration (It's very funny, to have legions which are alive after dying, if you win the battle. Especially, when cast on items for heros)
Tenchifew: there were a few spells like that in MoM, with land-altering abilities for the good and for the worse.
GreatVolk: your regeneration comment reminds me of the undead ability in MoM. In fact it's funny how much things we all bring up that were already implemented in some form in MoM, no wonder it's been the "standard to beat" for so long By the way, building on your idea of unknown versus known spells: how about an additional spell research tree (next to a rather standard one where you know what you're researching) where there is a random element involved and you never know what to expect? Especially if you could do both in parallel, e.g. you research the standard spells and some expensive building (mage school) or high-maintenance hero researches the random tree.
Sounds nice. The random research-tree could hold more powerful spells, but you don't know what to expect... So you have to decide. powerful and don't know OR standard and known... (If there are not that many spells per faction, maybe the randomtree could hold random spells from the other factions, or "similar" spells, which are changed by random)
Here is my list ...
(i) Land altering spells. I think these should be general, irrespective of school or at least possible to obtain in most games. You should be able to alter the landscape to suit.
(ii) Chaos Channels and Black Channels. In MoM you could use Chaos Channels to create winged, living boats.
(iii) Flying fortress. I liked that spell too.
(iv) Regeneration. (As in MoM, grants HP regeneration in combat and also grants resurrection of the unit if the unit is killed but you win the battle).
(iv) Call the Void. (A lot like a Civ style nuke)
(v) Eternal Darkness like in Dominions 3. Eternal night, loadsa undead.
It would be nice if the city buff spells / debuffs had graphical effects in the city screen like Chaos Rift or Dark Rituals in MoM.
I'm not sure I want to see spells at all. In keeping with the mantra that Stardock seems to be pursuing of "build using basic building blocks for maximum customization", I think I'd rather see us research spell effects, rather than spells.
Effects, like spells, can be grouped into spheres of magic. Effects like heal, target (self, other, ranged, AOE), damage, bind, free, vision, summon, create, destroy, lift. Combine these together (at various levels of effect) to create new and unique spells.
Damage+other+fire+ranged=fireball
Heal(greater)+aoe=Heal your army back to full.
The effects would have costs to cast, and adding multiple effects would increase the cost arithmetically. A simple 2 effect spell, once "created", would go into your spellbook and probably not cost too much to cast. Lightning strikes at range to an opposing army would likely kill the caster due to the amount of mana cost. Various levels of effects could be made, with higher research costs for each level, as found in GalCivII's weapons tech tree.
So, how do you balance this? Well, with casting time, cost of the spell, and maybe even a counter that makes it harder for you to add a given effect each time you try to add it into a new spell. So, the first time you add "heal" to a spell, it costs a little, the second spell you create with this effect costs more, and the third time costs significantly more. Maybe you can only use this effect in three spells, and then you "forget" the effect, requiring you to research it again (at a significantly higher cost the next time around). What strategic depth does this give? Well, do I gin up a simple heal early in the game to make my motley crew more effective, or do I do without it until late in the game where I can add it to a much more powerful spell (but lower the spell cost overall, since I've never used a "heal" effect before in a spell).
What'ya think? I'm pretty sure Stardock is way far down the pipe in this area, but I wanted to put it out there for folks to kick the tires.
Winnihym (yes, THAT Winnihym)
Your idea sounds a bit like asking for a Hero/GURPS model for the magic system as opposed to a 'traditional' spell list a-la D&D or MoM. I definitely prefer that around an RPG table, and I'd like to think that the engine side of magic in Elemental will work like that, but I'd be pretty surprised if the game shipped without some built-in spells.
Researching *effects*, though, that would seem really fresh. Perhaps the toughest trick there is that they have to do something thematic re the 5 elements. How would you integrate an effect-based magic system with a 5-element framework? Would you exclude some effects from some elements, or would you have any channeler able to learn any effect and keep the element stuff limited to how nodes work as mana sources?
One possible way to do an effects based system would be to separate effects into the five elements, along the lines of what the spheres have influence over. Heal based effects could be in a "life" sphere, levitation in air, root/snare in earth, and so on (I get to say "and so on" like I know what I'm talking about, but really, I'm a little fuzzy on this concept myself, so I'll use it to hide my lack of knowledge.
The innovation I was really hunting for was to be able to combine effects together. In principle, I guess you could also just allow for spells to be combined together to combine effects. The root of the discussion would be "why bother with this, if a spell does the same thing?" From a strategy standpoint, what makes this more fun than set spells. I don't have a ready answer for that. Certainly, it can be encouraged if the combined spell would, for example, take longer to research, but end up costing less mana than the individual effects cast as separate spells. My hesitation comes from never having been a game designer, and so I'm wary of balance; I know it's a brute of a challenge to get right, and game breaking to get wrong.
Let's see, I didn't really answer your question. Yes, I'd exclude effects from certain spheres. The fire sphere wouldn't have a heal, nor would it have a "water walking" effect. I think your mages would have to research two spheres if you wanted to combine effects across spheres. That would (obviously) take more energy from you, and more time from the game to achieve, as opposed to sticking to one sphere of effects, and limiting your options for spell creation. Or, perhaps it doesn't take longer or more energy to research, but the cost of casting spells which draw effects from more than a single sphere cost more to cast. It could also be that you can only draw effects from a sphere you control, and the time to incorporate effects from that sphere scale as you control more nodes of that type. If you could change nodes to other types of nodes, the strategic effect would be one of having several different spheres represented in your holdings, increasing your options for spell creation, or to have all the same type of node, allowing you to quickly research, create, and cast spells from the particular sphere you've chosen to concentrate on.
So, in principle, you could have a heal/teleport/firewall/passwall/root thine enemy/nuke 'em spell in your repertoire, but it would take a long time to collect the nodes, research the effects, combine them to a spell, and then cast it. In that time, I might have a very servicable little nuke that I'm using to enhance my army and move it across the land. As I've said, getting the balance right would be key, and I'm not very savvy at that. But, I'd like to get the idea out there and chewed on, to see if it has enough merit (or if there's a fatal flaw) for Stardock to consider.
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