Sovereigns using essence to make land livable is a core aspect of the game

I want to prevent city spam as much as the next guy. I really would rather have a few well spread out cities with lots of undeveloped land in between. I think that's necessary for immersion. I agree a sovereign should be the only one to bring life back to the land, but build a city? I think that should be left up to the people.

Goddamn this game sounds great.

I have nothing more to add.

That's only partially true. If you're on the wrong type of land, essence has to be spent to make it livable.

But in the current beta, "livable" gradually radiates out from your city (and from dragon fountains). Over time, it becomes possible to build a lot more cities without spending essence, and those type of cities shouldn't need a channeler to found.

Really looking forward to this - if you can make tactical battles actually involves tactics, where terrain and flanking actually matters, I'll be impressed. Most strategy games, both turn-based and realtime, skip the "tactics" part in favor of "the guy with more/better units always wins," or at best "the guy who picked the right counter-unit wins." Not that those are bad things, but when that's all there is to combat it feels shallow. Here's hoping Elemental's tactical battles have more depth, a reason to actually direct them yourself, instead of just skipping them because you know the battle's already lost or won and your tactics can't really affect the outcome.

I had a few games where I founded numerous outposts without having to spend essence. Some were in the 'spread' from my original pair of sites, some were via dragon fountains, some were restored land left behind after an AI killed another AI, and once I just found good land early in a game with no obvious reason for being there. I'm also inclined to think some sovereign-free method of site founding makes sense, but I can't reconcile that with my desire to see cities become less common than they are in the current beta, not more common.

Maybe its a playstyle thing, and some excessive assumptions on my part based on a couple of dev lines & a screen cap. I'm not really advocating a return to multi-flavor mana. It just seems to me like possibly large parts of a given spell book will be useless to a player who is not following a standard expand & conquer pattern. I'd prefer to see shard requirements for casting reserved for Really Big Magic. Or maybe rather than having to maintain ownership of many different shards, a sovereign can 'activate' (make them learnable) basic and mid-ranked spells in book by spending a turn at the appropriate shard.

In a small map you shouldn' have much time to research the more powerful spells (the ones that would have bigger shards requirements)? Unless everybody turtles?

Overall the game play sounds wonderful.

I definately agree with GW Swicord that it would be a major weak point if it turns out that half of all spells (or even more) is unaccessible to you just because there is no such type of shard on your part of the map. I'm not against a link between shard type and magic, but how to do it in the best way?? I would rather prefer something like a fire shard giving your fire magic much more effect/range than if you don't have one. And maybe the highest spells are only accessible when you have that shard type. But not ruling out fire magic just because you can't get the shard. That is not a tradeoff, it's just having no practical choice. Also it would be extremely annoying to sit and read long lists of all the spells you should be able to cast if you only had the shard (when there is no such shard around so you have no reasonable way of getting it).

I'm also a little concerned about the proposed shard requirements (maybe for nothing, though, as we don't really know how stringent the requirements will be, or how broad).

But I would like a system where the majority of spells can be learned and used by anyone with the appropriate magic books (possibly modified by some randomness - don't really know where I stand on that). But in addition, the more shards you have the more powerful your spells of that type (or partially of that type) become. So IMO, many spells should have no shard requirements. Some spells should require X shards, but of any type. Other spells, but a minority, could require specific types of shards. I think such a combination would work quite well.

Additionally, possessing more shards than you need to cast a spell could boost the spell's power in some way. For spells that don't require any shards or don't require specific types of shards, this bonus should be relatively small. For spells that do require specific types of shards, the bonus should be larger.

What would make this even better is if you got to choose how that bonus is manifested. Let's invent a spell called Meteor Shower (not particularly original), and pretend it requires 2 Fire Shards and one Earth Shard. You possess 3 Fire Shards and 3 Earth Shards. This allows you to increase one "fire" attribute of the spell by one "interval," and up to two "earth" attributes of the spell by up to two intervals at most.

For example I could choose to increase the fire damage of Meteor Shower by A%, or the explosion radius of each meteor by B%. Simultaneously I could increase the physical impact damage by C% and, say, the total area of effect of the spell by D%. Or I could increase the physical impact damage by 2C%, or the area of effect by 2D%. Alternatively you could simplify it and not distinguish between having extra earth shards and extra fire shards and allocate your bonuses accordingly (so if you have 3 extra shards of the relevant types, you could improve up to 3 attributes of the spell by a total of at most 3 times).

You could have the spell cost increase for each allocation, so if you're concerned about mana you might not want to allocate all, or even any, of your 'bonus points' to keep mana costs down. The greatest thing about this feature is that it'd make spell-casting feel very personal - so that even when using generic spells, if you have enough shards of the right types you get to alter it a little, making it feel that much more your own. And, it could be accomplished easily with a straightforward and simple UI - you could even allow us to save defaults.

I like this idea. You could use it for spells that don't require a shard cost either, but having a specific type of shard can boost the effect (like a heaing spell heals 20 + 2*Water_Shards).

Most spells won't require any shards. Others will use shards as a "wild card".

Think, Magic the Gathering.

Thanks for the clarification!  That sounds great.

Angels.

What?

M:tG has 6 kinds of mana. White, Black, Red, Blue, Green, and uncolored. Mana comes primarily from land cards of those types. Most spells cost mana of one color type, and some uncolored. Some spells are just uncolored (usually artifacts), and a few cards cost colored mana of more then one type.

For many of the spells, there is an X component. Fireball for example costs X + 1Red. The spell does X damage, and the X component can be drawn from any type of mana. There's also effects that work on the basis of land (ie: shards). One green creature in particular has its stats as X/X, where X is the number of green land you control.

Hopefully that overview helps people understand.