Some quick battle notes

Counters.  Good.  No, great. Now, if someone spams a unit type, or tech-grinds one type of spell to the max, you have a chance to counter.  But the protection armor gives, it just seems so, so, mundane. . . . .

So enchantment kits are a resource, then?

can these kits be applied after training a unit?

for example i have my little elite and expierenced army and they face an opponent who uses a certain damage type can i upgrade them or do i have to train new units?

This is a purely visual thing, but if you equip a swordman with a fire magic kit, will the his sword then look like a "fire-sword"? It's not really important, but visual changes when equipping magic kits would be pretty cool.

I must say, I'm disappointed that "electrical" damage is in as a replacement to wind. Electrical power in a pure fantasy setting is a bit of a stretch, IMHO.

How does "wind" damage something when its on a sword? Lightning is fine.

Just call it "lightning", not "electrical"

Sorry it is actually called lightning in the game. Not sure what I was thinking.

I disagree. Tridus touched on this a little, how does wind damage something? You need a heck of a lot of wind to do anything to a dragon, for instance.

Also, I think lighting/electrical looks way cooler than wind How do you even show wind graphically? If you do it realisticly, you wouldn't see anything, maybe just a couple leaves blowing. Highly stylized, it would probably look something like white lines across the screen. Neither of which, IMO, looks very good.

I understand fire, ice and lightning as classic elemental types, but why mystical?  Mystical magic damage seems both generic and redundant without some elaboration.  I would think nature damage in the form of plants, venoms, etc. would fit more with Earth and then you'd have the four elements.  Plus, you'd have the built in oppositions between fire and ice already, but how does mystical counter lightning?  They both seem rather similar by just the words involved.

I can see why one would want to avoid the cliche here, but 3 of the ones used everywhere, plus one standing out seems strange.

Glad to see mundane protecting against mundane, etc. though.  Since elements on weapons are rather obvious as to their effects, are we likely to see elemental armors that are more subtle?  Such as lightning enchants would increase speed, accuracy and/or number of attacks of a unit and a built-in resistance to whatever element naturally counters it.  Fire enchants could do a range of things such as raise the HP/stamina of a unit and/or its damage upon swinging, things generally dealing with the strength and vitality of life.  You get the idea I think.

Looks good.

Something I would suggest is that I'd really like to see some kind of hero ability like "Enchantment" so that a hero can pay the mana cost instead of me. I don't really want to do all that enchantment bookkeeping on my Sovereign :p

But game developement isn't about what I want, what does everyone else think?

So, you don't like the dwarf-kid in Dragon Age Rish?  En-chant-ment!

There are always so many "uncatagorizable" spells, they really do need that one "mystical" catagory, like Sleep, Slow, Far Vision, ect.

I have a friend that's a pilot, and I can tell you now, flying "creatures" are really affraid of wind damage "spells".

I'm going to make a de-buff enchant, put it on clubs, and call it "nerf bat".

Agree wholeheartly.  I'll like to see what's "special" about the mystical damage they have in mind.   To fit into the EWOM universe, maybe this Mytical damage type is related to essence?  Which is related to the construction/destruction of life/all material.

I'll have a slight preference to use terms like Physical Resistance, Fire Resistance, Ice Resistance, than protection.

Two points I disagree with:

Names of the magic types

Mystical Magic? Well, it's a renaming for Arcane Magic I guess. But Mystical Magic doesn't sound as good in my opinion. Also you have the 3 classical Elemental magics, but not Earth, which is kinda strange imho.

Furthermore, you have air and earth crystal nodes (and earth and air mana) wouldn't it be more fitting to change Lightning to Air (since Lightning is a sub category of Air), Mystical to Earth and add fifth all purpose category called Arcane? (Or you can call the fifth one mystical if you want. )

Since you'll have light and dark (or black and white magic) for the Fallen and Humans respectively, a fifth category to place their spells in would be sensible imho.

Types of magic

Now my second disagreement is the following. This system currently sounds like the system used in GalCiv2 with the attack types and defense types, now with 4 instead of 3 kinds. I didn't like it but I can accept that you want to use a similar system.

But what I wonder is, how easy will it be to detect the kind of kit enemy units use? One enchantment is easy to display, change weapon colour or armour colour to show the enchantement. What if there are two enchantments? (Is that even possible?) Also isn't there a likely chance, that enchanting your units will get too common, making almost every unit in late game enchanted (since the only drawback is a cost increase)? One of the design goals stated was, that magic should be something rare and not ubiqituous like in other games.

Thus I'd like two things to be added:

Add a magic damage counters.

I.e. Fire magic damage against fire magic protection does less damage like you've said above. But Fire magic damage against ice protection does increased damage. Making enchanting soldiers not always the best thing to do. Sometimes using your common soldiers against a fire monster is a better idea, then sending your elite frost riders.

Thus:

Fire vs. Ice

Air vs. Earth

Mystical (or Arcane) would always do lowered damage against itself and normal damage against the others. (Light protects against dark magic and vice versa, if you see light and dark magic as mystical magic.)

Add a weapon triangle

Currently different weapons don't do that much, besides different stats.

Make it so, that

Swords/Daggers -> Axes/Hammers/Clubs -> Lances/Spears -> Swords/Daggers

(-> means left beats right; this could mean increased damage or other effects)

Armour is fine, you can add unit speed increases to leather and cloth armour, while giving penalties to mail and plate armour to balance their different protection values.

But to balance weapons they should imho be balanced against different weapons. A simple weapon triangle (or quartett is also possible but not really necessary) would give a lot more flavour to fights with mundane troops. Also it would make balancing different weapons much simplier while making the choice of weapons an interesting decision. (And yes, it's totally copied from the Fire Emblems series. But its a very easy system that leads to tons of tactical choices.)

That way you prevent the necessity of different kind of mundane damage categories while making mundane weapons still interesting without enchants. Imho an important design goal.

(Ranged weapons like archers and javelin throwers are good against any kind of weapon of course. No modifier necessary for range weapons imho.)

There is a difference between protection and resistance. Usually protection nullifies an attack while resistances do a percentage based... well... resistance to an attack. So it depends how it works.

/end wall of text

Looks fantastic to me, good work.

I wonder if it might be worth including poison as another damage type.

Also, I wonder if it might be worth having armour protect against the different types differently (as in Dominions). Hence:

Armour has full effect against Cold (though could be half to my mind)

Armour has half effect against Fire

Armour has no effect against Lightning

I think this adds some interest, as it gives different strategic roles for the different elements. In fact, in Dominions there is a general absence of symmetry between all aspects of the game, i.e. ice magic is not just blue fire magic. I think that's excellent and is something worth imitating. It adds a great deal of interest.

If one did want to go with the old rock-style Earth element, I'd think increased weight of weapons so fewer number of attacks, but much harder hitting would work.  Armor would be even simpler as Earth-enchanted would make it much tougher than the standard piece, but perhaps slowing the movement speed of the unit.

Anyway, I'd love to speculate more about the 'mystical' we're set on getting instead, but there's not much more to say until we get some more details about it.  Good to see a few others on the same page with me though.

Fully agree with that. The battle system in Dominions is great (too bad the game sucks so bad in different parts).

Asymmetric systems are lots of fun and give lots of options and choices to the player.

The reason I've proposed a symmetric system though is, it's easy to understand, easy to implement and easier to balance. Somehow I've got the impression that StarDock doesn't want the battle system to be overly complicated (or any single system of the game to be too complex, instead giving each systems equal vallue).

Hehe.

Just a question: Can we mod in new damage types? [..and of course protections.]

Frogboy how easy is ti going to be to mod in damage types and other charactaristics to "mundan" weapons?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?  I thought you had a brain and din't listen to screaming fans who want damage types. damage types and armor types are HORRIBLE GAME MECHANICS. This makes it basically rock/paper/scissors and is the prime reason why I don't play galciv anymore(or sins for that matter).

Now, don't hold back, show us how you really feel.

:karma:

What the hell? You can't be serious.

In galciv2 the 3 kind of damage are exclusive. They all do the same thing. I don't see any problem IF they can provide something else tacticaly speaking. Like fire damage can ignate target, water damage would slow target, earth damage would reduce armor, etc. INSTEAD of raising up the damage (or on ly slightly). The elemental defences would prevent the bad effects, not the damage (instead you're a pure elemental of fire, it will always damage you a little more)

Think how gratuitous space battles manage the damages.

I think the issues with the damage types in galciv are a few fold.

1. lack of tactical battles doesn't allow for mixing different ships in an attempt to thwart the defenses of a particular unit.
2. the most effective strategy in galciv is to load so many of one type of weapon on your ships that the enemy would have to completely neglect it's alternate defenses in order to protect against it.
3. Firing first in gal civ with enough firepower to prevent the possibility of return fire is the end all be all against the AI who never seem to figure out how to build an effective ship for their tech level.
4. The AI responds far to slowly to your design changes, usually resulting inthe game being long over before they get the opportunitty.
5. In the end,  damage types add very little to galciv other than a crutch to out power the AI's who don't manage ship design for beans.

I know referencing master of magic here can be a dangerous comment to make.  I do so at my own peril  When choosing your spell books you weren't just picking which color of damage your spells would cause.  They were entirely different play styles.  Blue focused on counters and dispels.  It did have psionic blast,  a nuke.  but it wasn't nearly as good as the stuff  red got.  Green got lightning bolt, but focused primarily on summoning spells.  Red got a wide variety of direct damage spells.  Some great against large units (fireball) some more effective against a single unit (fire bolt) and a more powerful one who's name escapes me, that nuked your entire army. (or maybe it nuked both armies?).  Aside from the massive damage red focused on destruction, and chaos / randomness.  White was all about protecting your units and healing them.  Black was all about undeath, raising dead creatures,  blights on the land.  and all that jazz.