I know many of us are eagerly awaiting to hear more news about Elemental so I thought I'd organize a list of spells which will probably be in the game based on screenshots. Feel free to allow your imagination to provide spell descriptions. Hope this provides fans with a temporary drug fix until the alpha/beta testing begins:
1) Rain of Fire
2) Shield of Life
3) Lingering Death
========Below are descriptions from a Developer Journal========
Beckon HomeA spell for the adventurer that just wants to get home to heal up. 'Beckon Home' sends any unit to a friendly settlement.
FlareA ball of fire burns away the FOW and gies you full view of a selected part of the map. Flare uses both Fire mana and a small amount of essence. Think of it as the 'Eye of Sauron: Lite'.
Sublime HarvestFeed your people with some magical rations! Sublime Harvest tops up a settlement's food supply, using both Earth mana and a pinch of your essence.
PyrostormBurn away a section of forest or any unused Fertile Ground with Pyrostorm.
P.S. ~ There's a new developer journal which some of you would find interesting.
Woooo! Alpha! Woooo!
Beta's sooo close... I can feel it...
I was almost thinking this was going to be some kind of full list.
I wonder if we'll even have a full list in the 1st round of beta. (probebly I guess)
I imagine the game is missing ALOT of content that will be in the final game.
The Fog of War is an actual fog?
Lol, I think it was a figure of speach, though who knows.
By the way stardock, there are already 4 spells and I don't see any involving summoning undead armies. I am seriusly considering with-holding my purchase until you fix this discrepancy.
/s
Dev's have already confirmed summoning creatures. I dont know if any of them will be undead or not but if the spell is already there then it would be really easy to mod. Dont let that hold you back!
Undead armies are a dying breed. If you want ultimate evil represented in your game world, ensure you cast your vote for spells that turn units of your enemy to do your own bidding.
That sentence is wrong in so many ways.
But I agree on your notion that to earn the status of Really Evil Overlord you need some kind of mind controll - or even "worse" just corporeal controll. It would do some nasty stuff to your mind if you had to watch your body do terrible things.
And to add insult to injury let them carry banners with slogans like "You don't need to be dead to be in my army but it helps".
But its totaly sig worthy.
Yes, it would be called the imperius curse
I just realized: One of the screenshots displays a spell called "bridge building":
Wow, if that is a spell I graduated in magic (known in our world as civil engineering).
"Undead armies are a dying breed"
I google searched that useing a few different placements of tags, I think you are the first person to say it, so you win:
A Internets!
Something like an Imperius Curse seems pretty hard for a TBS game on account of it being such an open effect, limited only by what the caster can order the victim to do. But maybe Elemental could include a geis spell that allowed the caster to choose from a limited set of quests and force a champion to complete it unless another caster dispelled the magic.
Hmm...on a moment's further thought, maybe a late-game 'world wrecking' spell could be a sort of mega-Imperius Curse that simply captures an enemy champion if he or she fails to resist the spell (still wondering if the game will have things like saving throws or magic resistance).
I cant wait to research the spells "agriculture" and "Iron working"
I remember a "Geas" spell from D&D. I'm making a lot of assumptions about what can or can't be modded in to Elemental, but I have to believe we'd be able to create custom quests. And the first iteration of such a geas spell in Elemental might be cheesy, but over time it could probably be developed into something very interesting.
For example, a first pass on a custom geas might be to create a FedEx quest to deliver some quest object between point A and point B. Or a quest to kill x number of y monster. Both of these take time to complete, which I'm sure would put a damper on any time-sensitive tasks the player of that character had in mind for that unit/character. The geas might curse the target unit/character by weakening it over some number of turns, little by little. It could be that it removes some hit points each turn. Or reduces the attack power of that unit a bit each turn. Nothing huge - but enough to motivate the player to do something about the curse of the geas.
In a multiplayer game, it serves the (very powerful) dual-purpose of 'forcing' the other player to try to lift the curse - while simultaneously making that unit/character take the time away from whatever the player wanted to have that character doing for the duration of the geas. It has the potential of being a very powerful mechanic. And I would bet that given enough time, the modding community might be able to flesh the basic idea out to the point where it may even begin to feel like you're playing a mini-game within the larger overall game.
I don't know why, but I'm really jazzed about that. It might be my first "world first". Yay me!
I was thinking about that old spell also; the alternative spelling I picked up when I was digging around the nets and found what is probably the mythological source that Gygax & crew drew from, and the spelling there is geis.
I woudn't worry about the spelling. I saw that both were 'correct' and both mean the same thing. I noted the alternate spelling because anyone interested in researching this for their own mod or what-not would find different resources in a web search depending upon which spelling was used.
Wasn't a worry. Just thought your comment with shudder quotes was an implied question.
I had to google 'shudder quotes' and found this:
Use and Mention
I think I give up now on trying to translate English for the English. In my comfortable little world, I use single-quotes to define special terminology or jargon. I tend to use double-quotes when referring to titles, as was the case when I was trying to refer to a specific use of the word geas in AD&D.
There is another, related, use of quotation marks among careful, serious writers. Sometimes writers will place (single) quotation marks around a word or a phrase to indicate that they are using the term in a specialized or idiosyncratic way. (See e.g. the quotation marks on the word "word" in footnote 25 below.) Such marks are often called "scare quotes", "shudder quotes", or "inverted commas". Again, the convention is often reversed in the U.K.: there the usual convention is to use double quotation marks for scare quotes.
I've learned two things about you, GW Swicord.
1) You are a careful, serious writer.
2) You are from the U.K. Or some other part of the world that thinks English is properly spoken by the English.
/sheepish grin/ I earn my living trying to write and edit boring marketing and technical prose and I had a brief career as an academic, so I have some weird language twitches even when I'm typing for fun.
But I'm a native Floridian, not a Brit (although I do have strong sympathies with the UK's Apostrophe Protection Society, own a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and have a strong desire to see a comma before the amerpsand in that three-item list).
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