What might make this more interesting is if the first city founded by the sovereign, which uses some (maybe not 5) essence would have some special ability, it is the first city after all. So it should be special.

As to what specialty the first city should have... I have no idea. It might even be something that grows over time with the city so it would make the essence feel as if it never disappears. (it is an intricate part of the world, or rather it should) 

What about this...

I find it hard to believe that magic, throughout the X centuries of existence, was ever just left at knowing the basic spell. Surely, someone out there had to learn how to manipulate magic in different ways.

I had a few thoughts that may help the system out.

• Spells have levels, that you manipulate freely. For example, the fireball spell. Let's say it does 10 damage to one target at level one. When I choose to cast fireball, I don't want the level one variety, so I move to cast it at the highest level, level X. At level X, let's say it does 100 damage to one cell and the neighboring cells, and applies a 2 damage/turn DoT to those cells and the third ring out. The cost scales exponentially - you can put more energy into the spell's max level, and get immensely powerful results - it's a trade off between a handful of godly spells and a godly number of normal spells.
• Spells have levels, normally. Casting a lot of fireballs will naturally make the fireballs stronger.
• Research upgrade talents. Instead of learning new spells, you could learn how to improve spells. These are basically D&D metamagic feats, and could be handled by casting prior to another spell. IE, cast Expand Magic before casting Fireball to get an increase in the fireball's area.

To keep factions distinct, have there be a limited number of possible upgrades. Also, I think that each faction should have one or two specific alterations that are theirs and theirs alone - these could be part of each player-made faction, too.

NPCs

I'd like to see NPC's have higher prices for opposing sides recruiting them.  I'd also like to see them leave if a player does a mission directly opposed to either themselves or their side.  *warning XXXXX refuses to follow you on this quest of folly and will leave your side if you accept/complete this quest*.

Adding in quests that directly affect the NPCs would be good too:

XXXX has a particular interest hunting down the Murderous Mamba Marmoset (It killed their father... prepare to die!)  XXXX gains +1 speed if you succeed in this quest!

XXXX has a deadly allergy to lobster, -1 to dex if that character completes the Shellacked Shellfish Showdown!

• I think essence should not be tied to leveling. Leave leveling to improving your sovereign. Make it simple and passive. Example: a player gains a point of essence each turn...something like that. Then the player can choice either to use that essence to build his nation or make himself into a mage god. Essence won't feel like a drag, but a resource that you must use wisely.
• I'd also like to see reviving land (and using essence in general) to be a bit more tactical. I like the idea of using essence to create fertile land, but also using essence to directly create revived land....instead of it just automatically being revived. It would make the player feel more involved in reviving the land. Currently, reviving land feels ho-hum and sterile.
• I agree, allow cities to be made on wastelands, and give buildings (or certain buildings) penalties if not on revived lands (such as farming and housing).
• This https://forums.elementalgame.com/380948...or something like it.

• It should simply depend on the NPC. Some men might be inclined to work with fallen...others not so willing...and vice versa.
  

• I'd really, really would like to see settlements where some act as the low populations "bread baskets" and others as the metropolitan powerhouses (supported by those bread baskets)..and other types too. I think once there are more options this might be the case, but I would like to see a building tree where certain buildings require others. So maybe huts won't upgrade to houses until you have a warehouse, for example. Certain high tier buildings need supporting buildings and such (some of which can be those 1 per faction/world). So a player can make a really productive farm towns, but must forgo the support structure to ever make it into a large city. 
• This https://forums.elementalgame.com/380948...or something like it.

Interesting Choices.

I think this is a step in the right direction.  But I feel like you want essence to be a resource, but implemented it like a stat for your Sovereign/champions.

- Have essence function as a global resource like food, metal, etc. Allowing you to choose where and how to invest it, your channeler is the only one in your kingdom who can use essence and that's what makes him special.

- Gaining essence should be limited to research, quests, and consumable items (ex: you find a gem and harvest the essence from it, destroying the gem in the process). Research gives all players a base amount of essence they can access if they choose the proper breakthroughs, while quests and consumables are fought over to give the player who gains it an "edge".

- Whatever essence gets used, can be extracted/recycled/reused.  If you spend 5 essence to make a powerful sword, you can destroy it to regain that 5 essence, or alternatively an enemy who loots it in battle can extract the essence.  If 3 essence was spent to make fertile land, someone can come and extract that essence subsequently destroying the fertile land. Obviously balancing would be important, but the idea is, each map would have X amount of possible essence available to be fought over, even if its currently used for something else.

- Essence and mana should be separate but related. Essence can be invested into unit to give them mana, as well as special abilities and higher stats, how that investment affects the unit is up to the player. Channelers and other units/creatures that can naturally wield magic have a base amount of mana without an essence investment.

In summary, make essence a resource, make it limited, and make it reusable. With that foundation, if its useful, essence is made important, desirable, and interesting. Obviously it may be too late to change how essence is implemented in this way, or perhaps you simply prefer your current system.

NPCs

What determines if an npc joins you or not, should be a combination of racial disposition, alignment compatibility (empire/kingdom), negotiation (diplomacy rating), charisma, and deeds/achievements.  Thinking about trying to calculate all of those into something that makes sense in the game, hurts my brain. I think flat out restricting the ability to hire champions based on being kingdom or empire, is worse then not restricting it at all.

Quests

Faction restricted quests can be fine, where they make sense, but not all quests should be kingdom or empire. Most quests should all either faction to initiate and complete them. What would be even more interesting would be to have many quests with multiple ways of completing them based on the traditional 3 gaming moral paths of good, evil, and neutral.

About city specialisation : have some specialist buildings share the same "slot" : you can build a market for more gold *or* a monastry/school for more reasearch *or* a military academy for a training bonus and so on ...

You could have several such buildings, or higher level buildings needing the lower level one (so to build an university you need a school)

Well, technically, it only forces essence to build a city that's not on "green land". This is actually good, since it prevents rapid resource grabs. How will it work if you remove essense cost and give only pioneers the ability to settle after the first city? Will they still need green land to settle? If so, then you've just made it more cumbersome since you'd still need a Sovereign to go there and revive the land, but now you'd also need a pioneer trailing him to settle the city. If you don't require green land for city, you open it up to fairly quick resource grabs (yes, I realize pioneers cost a lot but essence cost of founding a city trumps resource costs). Especially players who take a faction that gets bonus resources at start can get this going pretty quick. Basically, requiring essence to build a city off "green" land serves a pretty important purpose of making player expansion a bit more natural, rather than scouting all the juicy places on the map and putting a city down at each. Please account for that when you're re-designing this behavior!

Well, if there are "men" NPCs wandering around, it would make sense to have "fallen" NPCs wandering around too. In this case, recruiting them could require magic, but offset by the unique bonuses they may provide. For example, Men have their Merchant NPC that generates gold. Now, I can't quite picture a Trog merchant so it would definitely make sense if Fallen didn't actually have any Merchant NPCs. So, say, instead of making a deal for gold, what if cross-race NPCs required a maintained Charm spell? Essentially, they would be hostile until you charm them, at which point they join you, for no gold cost. Since Charm would be a maintained spell, they would go hostile and leave you if you ever stop maintaining, and since there will be a limit on number of spells to maintain, that should be enough of a "cost" to not require gold for them. It would also mean some more interesting choices for the player, if he wants to maintain more buffs on his army or maintain charms on unique NPCs that provide otherwise unavailable bonuses. Logical gameplay choices are great.

I could see some quests being different, but not all. For example, this morning I found some ruin with writing on the wall that led me to some tomb with a demon. This kind of quest is pretty neutral, not requiring any character interaction, so should be available to both races. But those quests you get by walking into an inn.. well, "A wraith walks into an inn....". Let's just say humans probably won't be quick to ask it to escort their kid *anywhere*. On the note on quests, it'd be great to have more than just the "good" and "evil" ways of completing quests where such choices are presented. You can only ever either let the Dark Wizard go and take his money, or kill him. Help the wolf give birth, or kill it. Get the Knight's sword from the bandits, or take their money and let them go. These are boring choices. It would be fantastic if, for example, your quest doer's Charisma stat opened up more inbetween options - think D&D dialogue where you can Intimidate or Persuade. So instead of killing bandits for the sword, you can threaten them so much that they give you the sword, money, and run away screaming in fear.

Well, it should be a bit more indirect. Give all the different spell books more low-end spells, so a Sovereign that's more focused on Magic will have a wider spell choice selection, but someone who just goes with the Basic will still have just the necessary essentials.

Maybe, maybe not. Notification that you have the max spell points would be great so you don't lose production because you're capped. But you'd have to give the player control over the queue, which more or less means they'd be spending the same amount of time in the spells window, just more upfront to throw them in the queue. As for how to implement it? In the Spells window, make 3 (or however many) empty circles and label them something intuitive ("Spell research queue" or something). Clicking on a spell in the book adds it to the queue (FIFO). As soon as there are enough spell points for the top queued spell, it gets learned and the rest of the queue moves up. Clicking on a queued spell removes it from queue. Can do more fancy stuff such as if you have 3 queue slots and 1, 2 are taken and 3rd is empty, if you drag a spell from the book over 1, it becomes 1 and the existing two spells in queue get shifted to 2 and 3.

With fewer improvements you'd need to drop the number of build space available. Cities aren't just unspecialized because there aren't any 1 per faction or 1 per world improvements, but because you can build basically everything in every city and there's never a reason not to. There have to be more improvements than build space so if you really want to make a city into a military training city, you sacrifice gold production or food production in it almost entirely. Or if the city is in a food sweet spot, there would be very little room left for anything else, so on. Basically, it has to be balanced such that there are enough improvements for every main city "function" that doing it prevents expanding the city's other functions to their entirety.

• Interesting Choices. 

The biggest comment I can make on Interesting Choices when it comes to cities is Terrain. From what I can tell, Terrain doesn't affect the city at all unless it has improvements built on it. Somehow, the terrain the city is built on and surrounded by should determine certain factors. Maybe desert cities have a prestige penalty, grassland cities get a food bonus, forest cities get a material bonus, mountain cities get a defense bonus, etc. Right now, we can really make cities anywhere and they all function generally the same with specific resources being the only difference (by this I mean iron, horses, etc.). The basic resources (food, materials, defense, population) should all be affected by the area the city is built in. That's an interesting choice.

• NPCs. 

I love this. It made me excited. Quite frankly, I think certain races should always be hostile towards Kingdoms and vice versa. With that said, you would need to remember to make NPCs that are more friendly towards the Kingdom races. Your ogre camp video is a good example. There should be opposing forces from creatures like that so that Kingdoms can recruit non-standard NPCs. Maybe Fairies, Giants (standard human looking ones) and some kind of Mercenary NPC group would be nice additions. With that, there should also be neutral, impartial NPCs and NPCs that are always hostile regardless of faction.

• Quests.
  

Definitely have quests different for each faction. Although the quests are unpolished in the beta, I can see their potential for uber fun. To create a completely different feeling for each faction, these would definitely need to be different for them. I'd love to see quests with more choices, too. It would be nice if quests had 2 or 3 choices with 2 or 3 different rewards, and to go another step forward, 2 or 3 choices that lead to different segments of the quests (Meaning, if the witch told me to go an inn and at the inn was a guy who asked 1, 2, or 3, each answer would lead to a different second part of the quest. Like a tree, the quests could end up with 6 or 9 different results by the time we got to the end).

• Spells.

My biggest issue for spells is Shards. I researched all the spells I could and I couldn't cast half of them because I couldn't find a bloody shard. I have 2 suggestions for this:

Number 1: The Sovereign should be attuned to an element (or 2) through creation. This needs to mean something. I don't like how I went to create an ice queen but only found fire shards - that's not interesting. Maybe the Sovereign can count as a shard of the element they're attuned to, and reduce the needed shards for those spells by 1.

Number 2: Maybe we can choose or change the element of the shard when we first harvest it. Maybe they start off as a Shard of Magic and, when harvested, we choose their element and that's what it gets locked in at. That way we have more of a choice of what brand of magic to pursue.

• Spells #2. 

Queuing would be nice, but every interface component related to spells drives me crazy. Spells to research and spells Known should be two completely different screens. We shouldn't have to page through the same book to go between what we know and don't know. I also think Queuing would be good because the way it works now makes the spell research feel like a store. I like spell points, but I'd like to be able to already pick a few spells to move towards and just see the "You have learned Nuclear Launch!" screen.

• City Improvements. 

Agreed! Basic general improvements are okay - the new house vs garden change feels really nice. It was a lot less clicking and achieves the same result. Back to what I said about interesting choices, it would be nice if the city itself changed base off the terrain it was built on. Maybe a mountain city can get a specific style of wall unique to that Kingdom that vastly increases its defense (but is only available at city level 4).

Citywide "1 per" upgrades would definitely be nice. I think we should definitely be able to designate a capital city, as well, and that the capit city benefits should change per race. An example might be that Capitar gets more tiles for buildings per city level while the other race (sorry, name escapes me) gets bonus research based on population. If the capital benefit was tied directly to city level, that city would definitely become the almighty Capital city that looks awesome because leveling it would yield the maximum benefit. A single improvement could designate the capital - Sovereign's Keep, Tower, Palace, etc.

MadMagus - you're a man after my own heart.

I really like some of your ideas and think they would effectively solve some of my issues/pet-peeves (or replace my proposed solutions)

I'd give you some karma if the thread wasn't dorked!

Interesting Choices

Since we are talking about the Fractions 1st city and likely capital, how about using essense as a 'investment' in the area. This investment can vary from 1 to 5 points - which the more essense you invest, the more bonuses/better terrain options you get. This only happens for your 1st city. So when you find a area that you wish to build on you are presented with a dialog of choices, much like if you are creating your own soverign.

Revitialize the Land costs 1 pt, having a mine in the nearby area 1pt, fertile land 1pt, gold bonus, 1pt, research bonus 1pt, crystal shard, 4 pts - some picks might increase in cost when certain picks are already made. For example, if you pick a having a nearby mine resource, then perhaps having a fertile land tile now costs 3 additional pts. In this way, your primary city can be unique and you can ultimately control the amount of essense you cast (only from 1 to 5 points). If you pick good enough options, this can be a fun way to make your capital city unique. Here are some options off the top of my head (no costs though, that would be for others to decide):

Crystal Shard tile, Mine tile, Fertile land tile, Horses tile, Twilight Bees tile, Beach tile (if near water), Defensive bonus, gold production bonus, food production bonus, research bonus, prestige bonus - maybe even have a random 1 only type of item like Tree of Life, Fount of Knowledge, Dungeon of Dispair, etc.

Customization of your 1st city layout could be about as much fun as customizing your Soverign.

Just a thought. Perhaps someone finds this interesting, maybe it could be elaborated upon.

I am guesing it would be more difficult to leave the quests unkeyed to a faction, and instead allow multiple responses the player can choose from about HOW to respond to a quest (with different results of course):

Ex: Nobleman asks you to escort him to his castle.

a - Agree to escort him.

b - Hold him for ransom instead.

c - Rip out his entrails and feed them to the commoners, etc.  LOL

The idea of changing the shard was brought up a long time ago and at the time I thought this was a given.  I definitely agree we should have a mechanism for changing the shard type somehow but I don't really like the idea of only being able to do it when harvested.  Personally I think it should possible but hard.  Make a powerful (but shardless) spell, have it cost essence, or have it take a really long time and take it out of play while changing.  Without doing this specialists won't really be viable unless you want to rely on luck.