Custom Factions? Custom Channelers? Custom Heroes? Custom Spells?

I mentioned this in another thread, but I want SD to take channeler customization to a whole new level. The MoM/AoW way of determining your wizard's skill in magic and essentially what kind of end-game wizard they will be before you even start the game always bothered me. I want to be able to evolve my channeler's proficiencies and skills throughout the game, and tailor them to my needs. Choosing before the game starts forces you to choose a large part of your strategy before you even start playing!

I also want to be able to improve my channeler indefinitely, beyond just being able to cast more spells per turn. If I'm playing on a big enough map, my channeler should be able to master as many magic schools as he has the time and skill to master. There should also be no ultimate master level - you should always be able to improve your channeler's efficiency in a school. This way you can choose to be all-powerful master of earth, or a very strong matter of earth and water, or even a minimally masterful channeler of all the elements. There should be much more to evolving your channeler than just researching new spells every few turns until you run out and collecting magic shards.

I also am keen to hear about the customization for the channeller. I would hope that there are some things that you can choose at the start, and then some choices to make as you gain experience / essence.

I also think that some of these choices should be permanent trade-offs - perhaps something like a perk-feat system. I always thought it was a cop-out that you could get extra spell books and traits from the magic nodes in Myrror. I think it's a mistake when games allow you to max out your character.

I think I agree and disagree with you here, but that's because I think you're sort of contradicting yourself. pigeonpigeon's interest in what you might call 'ongoing customization' made me think first of the extra spell books you could score in MoM. But Kuloth's point that "you guys ARE stardock after all" made me want to see something like that, but with more sensitivity to both player game preferences (settings) and relevant player behavior (stuff like 'alignment' choices).

On customizing spells - If Elder Scrolls can do it, so can StarDock.  If you can customize point-based powers in Champions (a pen and paper game), you ought to be able to do so with spells in Elemental.  In fact, this lends itself VERY WELL to campaigning.

Instead of flat values, I propose that Effects, Range, Duration, Casting Time, etc. have values that MULTIPLY to determine total difficulty of the spell.  This way, I could specialize in one or two elements of a spell, but it is prohibitive to have a single spell dominate on all points.  For example, maybe I can only channel 12 mana of Fire spells this turn.  Do I cast a long range spell that hits all units with minor fire damage, a long range spell that severely damages a single enemy unit, or do I *RISK MY CHANNELER* to get close enough for the BIG fireball that will turn the tide of battle (if the enemy doesn't kill me before I finish casting it).  Or, do my scouts see the enemy far enough away that I engage in ritual for three turns, and greet them with MASSIVE IMMOLATION from the safety of my castle?

It would also be nice if there were rituals to attune to a specific element, at the cost of my ability (or part of) to channel all the others.  Naturally, I shouldn't be able to cast while re-aligning my aura.  So, I could easily adjust myself to fire spells, like those listed above, but at the cost of not being able to magically produce bumper crops, domesticate my bears, or raise the fallen as Pyroskull Skeletons.  Maybe such attunements require adventures to learn?

Yes, I agree. I wouldn't want all channelers to start out identical at the beginning of every game. You should be able to customize your channeler at the start, but that shouldn't be the only customization you ever really get to do. It should be a continuous process that lasts until you win or lose.

Definitely. For one, I don't think there should be such a thing as being able to max out the channeler. There should be no limit, no such thing as a maxed out channeler - because you can always be more. On the other hand I completely agree that there should be permanent trade-offs. For one, deciding to master an additional school of magic means that your other masteries will not be as strong as they could be. Or you could choose to focus on one school to the exclusion of all else, resulting in one supremely powerful mastery, at the cost of the versatility that competency in other schools would provide.

Based on dev posts, there will probably be opposing aspects of each magic school. So even if you are a grandmaster of life magic, you aren't going to be granting your citizenry perfect health and raising armies of skeletons. Same with the other schools (although what the differen't 'aspects' of the other schools will be, who knows). This way even if you're playing a ginormous map and decide to master all the schools, you won't be able to use every spell. At least not very effectively.

And, if they decide to make an involved spell-upgrade system, that would be another place where you'd need to make trade-offs. Do you learn every earth spell you can? Or do you focus on a subset, resulting in fewer but stronger spells you can use?

And personally, I don't want a MoM-style system where the game chooses which spells will be available for research at map generation, and that's it. I'd much rather see a form of magic research tree. It could be fun if a set of 'default' spells are chosen at the beginning that you can easily research, as well as a way to research the ability to research non-default spells (thus getting non-default spells is harder and costlier to do).

@Rhishisikk, YES! I am pigeonpigeon and I approve Rhishisikk's message!

At the moment, I'm on the 'less control' side of the debates about tech/magic progress, and the last line in the quote above sounds like a great mechanism to at least add variety (replayability) even if there's also a traditional always-visible, fully-controlled tech tree. At the very least, we should have some spells and/or skills that you just *can't* research and can *never* assume you'll get somehow during a given game.

I'll try to explain why I didn't like winning spell books from nodes in MoM, but it's going to be a bit woolly. My example: D&D 3rd edition. You have skills, which are a numerical value that you can put points in to increase at level up. You also have feats, which are flavour aspects you can add every few levels. Which is great, except that many of the feats are +2 or +3 to a couple of skills. And that is just bad, because they confer little long term benefit*, and are no longer so flavoursome.

*Except that you're really expected to keep a few skills at the maximum allowable for your level, in which case +2 over the maximum you could have otherwise is more appropriate, but the skills system is horribly broken. They've fixed this for 4th edition. Ars Magica actually has a better version of this whereby if you want to increase your basic attributes to extraordinary levels then you need to spend a virtue.

So how does this fit into MoM? Well I'd have done it so you can pick a limited points value of traits at the start, and then say 3 spell books, and you have to win the rest of your spell books, but your traits are fixed forever. Or maybe there is some other levelling up system for wizards where they occassionally get to pick extra traits.

Basically I'm saying that permanent character features that give long term special benefits need to be kept separate, and they need to be rationed out carefully and fairly. Minor bonuses, by contrast, can be scattered all over the place and picked up off the map or earned in a variety of ways.

If my channeler can take part of the same battles as my units, obviously he needs scores similar to them. If he can get some extra ones tied to non-combat parts of the game, that would be logical and nice. If he is allowed some customization in the perks/feats/flaws department, even better. If there could be some skills (no useless ones, please), sweet too.

Heroes should work like channelers, same system just that with fewer options as they are not channelers after all. Hopefully, we will get heroes that range from pure specialization in a field (be it warfare, economy or politics) to a more wide range of skills that would allow to use him as a "joker".

In MoM, i like to play (often) with only 3 books plus warlord, alchemist, famous,... and if i feel like i want more magic, i'll start in Mirror. Altough usually, i'm the less magical mage of all the MoM focusing more in my dear troops...

thats funny.  I was always the exact opposite.  I usually focused in magic wondering if warlord actually did anything.  I usually would push for heavy research buildings early game and try to get powerful summon and the summoning circle spell.  I would usually raise an army, but not until late game, until then I would live off summon units with trained units only used to garrison towns (summon units sucked for that because they still drew the same amount of mana)

I also tried the Warlord thing in MoM a bit, and ditched it in favor of focusing on magic. But that was in no small part because of "my dear troops," who needed support from summoned units, strong hero units to lead them, and strong magic items for those hero units.

This is a good example of how you can agree with someone in principle but perhaps never settle on the details. IMO, the spell books you could win in MoM were "rationed out carefully and fairly" because they were not common and any node that held them required very serious forces to take.

But I'm almost never aggressive when I play 4/5X games, so maybe I had a very different impression of MoM spell book acquisition. I usually had a long early stretch where I left the scariest nodes alone. Maybe someone better at building and spending units would have gotten those books much earlier, and that might not have seemed as 'fair' to me.