Spell Conjured Perminant Units like in MoM

I'd about bet money that plans for stuff like this are already on the books.

Didn't that sort of unit in MoM require mana every turn to maintain? That would be another good twist for the resource management layer. Summon a Horde of Doom? Sure you can--but your next fireball won't be much bigger than a lit cow-fart.

Most fantastic creatures had a mana cost per turn (Zombies had no upkeep cost).  A summoned hero had normal gold upkeep costs as if you had found them normally.

Fantastic creatures had a number of differences from normal units:

- didn't gain experience

- didn't reduce unrest in cities (no police functions)

- could be banished by some spells including the Great Unsummoning that would try to banish every single fantastic unit in the entire game.  Higher level creatures could typically resist these spells without difficulty.

- a bunch of other stuff.

There was a huge difference between focusing on normal armies (using warlord, crusade, enchanted weapons, etc) and fantastic armies.  Fun variety.

Giant Earthworm was my prefered unit in MoM.

Its stike from below was too powerful.

It was indeed too powerful. Those beasts should have a big big big upkeep (mana and/orgold/any currency (like sanity?) that can be in)

When you got a worm you were almost indestructible. They ate five or six heroes for their lunch.

I just had a interesting though on fantasical units in this game, maybe if they have problems implementing planes of existence, maybe fantasical units are not conjured maybe they are created.

This topic too may have been invalidated by the new dev journal saying players will design there own units.

I did feel a tad guilty summoning my own worms, but they were *really* satisfying to beat when I found them guarding a node. IIRC, I pretty much always lost a hero or two in battles like that.

I guess this would depend on how many built-in monsters the game will include, or how complex the spell design system is if we're also going to be designing spells (this forum heated up fast, I'm not sure if spells will all be written by devs or in-game moddable).

It's also invalidated by brad saying it's mostly going to be men, with fantasy creatures relatively rare, but quite powerful in the gamespot interview.

Well, a War of Magic without conjured beings is not worth its name. We want at least golems, elementals, demons/devils, angels, and a number of inventive extraplanar abominations.

You'll get them, judging on the words floating around in the trailer.

It's just so that you won't have civilications made out of fantastical creatures and that powerful units will be rare (and powerful ).

They are the Special unit, so regular troops are soldiers that are costomized with whatever a civilization can afford.

There is no doubt that some team will make a mod representing the Elemental before the Cataclysm with plenty of magic.

How about summonable creatures, limited to the Channeler's sanity rating? Research or Channeler levels could increase the amount of sanity a channeler has. If a channeler goes above his sanity, he starts loosing mana exponentially, and have a hard time casting spells.

And why not using the sanity system of Call of cthulhu? Each time you see a dragon, you lose a bit of sanity... And sometimes in battle or when casting a spell you have a sanity check. Lose it and you'll have a random choice of action .. or worse

And why not a "dawn" stat like in Ars magica (P&P). each time you cast hard spells you become closer to your "dawn".

As a programmer I would start the game with negative sanity to begin with, so I'm obviously not in favor

Well, don't take it out of context He said that meaning that regular armies will be composed of mostly men, as in you're not going to be "building" hordes of gryphons or whatever through a production building in your city.

He wasn't talking about spells and what they're capable of I would be rather surprised if there were no summoning spells

sleep, then post. Gotcha. I'd rather not have too much summoning, I'd much rather have to ally with the creatures and gain allies that way. So if I ally with a minor tribe led by something not all that threatening, I'll get a small number allied bears and normal non-magical animals to help my forces (and be bear cavalry), and if I ally with a bigger tribe, I could get a very very few powerful mythical mounts such as griffons.

Well it sounds like they're thinking along the same lines, at least as far as the ultra powerful dragons are concerned You'll note in that same interview Brad talks about how dragons are neutral and you'll actually have to negotiate with your channeler in person to recruit them to your side

Twilight in Ars Magica is a great mechanic for the setting in that it is cool to have the characters become less and less tied to the mundane world and more and more tied to the realm of magic over time.  But what it does in the game is add one more reason why elder magi don't find it worth their time to rule the world (because if they are forced to cast in a hostile environent, any  slight miscalculation can end their exisitence).  From what I understand of Elemental, this dymnamic (where more powerful characters have to use their magic with more caution) may conflict with their goals for the game (the player earned this power let's let them use it!).

That's not to say that there isn't some excellent flavor to be taken from the twilight mechanic but it's underlying purpose would eed to be altered.

Actually there is no better source for cool ideas about magic than ars magica.  While I'd love to see a spell creation system in some way reflective of Ars (or perhaps Hero system), I don't think that it is practical to create a game with that much freedom.  The Mystery initiation system on the other hand would be both practical and fantastically cool.  I might start another thread on that.

Oh hell yes !! The mystery initiation !!! You wouldn't start as a channeller. You would become a channeller

EDIT: And the twilight mechanism would be great with a successor system don't you think?

see now, I think the idea of having summoned custome usits would be amazing!    I would feel like one of the chaos gods.

I'm wary of too much spell creation though.    I'd like the game to have some awesome pre-made stuff in it.  Its like scripted TV to me I guess.   Sometimes I like other people to do the thinking for me.