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.

must get into beta!

Goddamn this game sounds great.

I have nothing more to add.

"state of the art" client/server multiplayer

Over the past 3 months I've grown much more aware of server costs.  I'm very curious just how much is required to maintain these servers.

(did I already ask somewhere if the server software ran on windows or linux? )

Oh, "world class" suggests different things to different people.   To me it just means "among the best in the current world" which I think is obtainable.

edit:  *horror*   somebody else is using my current (crown) avatar   *grumbles as he goes and changes it*    -is watching that ghost king george guy-

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.

It's more restrictive because mana is less generic. Under this system, if you have 100 mana and fireball costs 20, you can cast 5 fireballs because "mana" is a single pool and you only need access to the two fire shards.

If every element type is its own mana pool, Fireball costs 20 fire mana instead. You've got 100 mana, but only some of it is fire mana. So the number of fireballs you can cast goes down until your fire shards restore your fire mana (meanwhile you can cast some other spells with your other types of mana).

I believe they also said in a twitter post that mana isn't tradable.

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.

All of this information is quite how to say... WOW

Tactical battles .. turn by turn... as the continous turn been dropped or?

There will be so much stuff in this game it will take a decade to play it all.

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.

I also wonder how it'll relate to map size.  If you play with 4 players on a small map, you'll have few shards, and large portions of your spellbook will definitely be ruled out.  If you play with 4 players on a large map, it should be less of a problem.  I like the idea of shard requirements in general, but I'm not sure how it'll relate to all of the other possible variables.

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?

You have no idea how badly I want this game to be finished.  I'm in the beta, and I have it pre-ordered, but this is sounding so good that I want to buy it again.

Seriously, if someone were to dredge my brain for "Top features to have in a strategy game", out would plop Elemental... of course, Elemental has a lot of stuff even I wouldn't have thought of that sound awesome.

Keep up the great work, guys!

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 like the idea that you need access to a shard type to cast that type of magic, but not that some spells need multiple shards.

it would be nice to see extra shards increasing the effect of the spell, something like:

Firebolt

Requires Fire Shard to cast.

Basecost: 5 mana

Damage: 10 fire

Boost cost: X fire damage per 2 mana (X= Number of Fire Shards controlled)

So in this example you need to control a fire shard to cast, it deals 10 damage and its power can be increased by spending extra mana.  If you spend 16 mana and control 1 shard it will do 13 damage, but if you control 3 fire shards that same 16 mana will get you 19 damage.

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.

Oh please bring us a Beta soon, and don't leave me out of it please.

My sanity is shredded, neither Blizzard or EA are being kind to me with their Beta's. The last Beta I got into was the damned awful Battlefield Heroes...Where is the love???

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).

It does seem that with the Shard requirement, grabbing up Shards will be something that "HAS TO BE" done early and often if your game plan is to make maximum effect of the Magic System.

So you want to be Diplomatic do you? Go for it! But remember this.

I conclude all Diplomatic Meetings with Lightning Bolts of Doom...!

It is early still but given the new 40 Tile max. city size limitation, I know where I will be dropping the bulk of my Cities. I will work on my APIARIES later.

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

Think, Magic the Gathering.

Phewww!Thanks for that.

Now I can downgrade my Lightning Bolts of Doom...! to Lightning Bolts of Cataclysm...!

Thanks for the clarification!  That sounds great.

I don't know enough about that to know what the hell hes talking about.

This is what I think when you say wildcard:

Google Spells

Search: "*firue*"

Did you mean fire? (you n00b)

Angels.

What?

I never played magic the gathering, but my cousin had like a million cards. When I was young I would sit and look at all the pictures. I was fascinated and disturbed by the pictures I saw all at the same time (some were very creepy to a 7 year old lol) But it always did look pretty cool, and I wish my cousin wouldn't have gotten rid of them because maybe he could sit down and show me how the magic worked!  

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.