I think I'd go for the OP's suggestions. As a new player with beta 3, I found the value of shards to be rather underwhelming. I had envisioned these would be the major sources of tension - the must have tiles, but it seems pretty easy to get along without them. To solve the tension between those that fear they would never have/find enough shards, and those that don't want to be guaranteed of finding lots, a setting on world creation on shard frequency (like some of the galciv settings) would seem the simplest answer.

I think the same solution would also solve for those who don't want to go the caster route - more shards would favour casters, less would not.

the problem is if  2 players dont get the trait one of them could still have a shard

yup the real problem in elemental is MOM magic system was awesome

well tbh its a huge advantage to start with a good armor/weapon, yes you will get them soon enough but to have them immediatly its better

Ars Magica for the win !

Animal, Aquam, Auram, Corporem, Herbam, Ignem, Imagonem, Mentem, Terram, Virtum

You have here anything you need. And each of those spell categories must be mixed with a way to use them : creo, intellego, muto, perdo, rego

You have almost any kind of spell you can dream of. Fireball ? Creo Ignem. Protection from fireball ? Perdo Ignem. Counter fireball and throw it back ? Rego Ignem. Transform the enemy fireball in a waterball (:P) ? Muto Ignem

More difficult spells ? Creo Animal Ignem will summon a fire elemental with an animal form. Creo Ignem will summon a fire elemental with no form.

Rego Virtum : control power --> counter spell, spell scrying, enhance spells(range, efficiency, duration)

Did I say Ars Magica for the win ?

I like the idea you've come up with.

As it stands now, even if i wanted to be a fire mage and chose fire magic, if there is no fire shard anywhere in the neighborhood, i don't get to use the good stuff. The shard resource placement on map generation does not compliment choosing what "element" magic your sovereign uses before the map is even made. If you want to be an ice mage, (assuming an even number of shards are created of each type on a map) your saying 75% of all shard you find, are WORTHLESS to you. Its just infuriating. Sure, you can use some basic stuff, but ya know, I didn't make a mage for just "basic stuff"! Thats what those "warrior" and "generalist" sovereigns are for. I sacrificed those other stats to use ice magic, and to pump up my int and wis. And then for all that the RNG says "U LOSE". Just to show an example here, imagine playing the Fall from Heaven 2 mod playing as one of the elves, and the game places you in the middle of the desert. Lucky for us those map creation scripts have come a long way, but it still happens occasionally and its pretty much grounds for an immediate new map.

With your system, even if I get heartbroken about not playing with fire, I still get to play with SOMETHING! Between wanting to summon a fire giant but not being able to, and wanting to summon a fire giant but having to make due with an ice giant...well no contest there. Plus you're giving the player more choices! And for some reason, those schools of magic just seem more focused than just fire magic or air magic. You pick necromancy and you know what your getting into. You pick fire magic and well...its just so general.

On the other hand, you need more points in movement and other combat stats so that you can rush the mage before he sends a titan and four air elementals at you.

I'd like to see one or maybe a few 'lost schools' of magic, like maybe you can find a rare book of Demonology, from which you can start learning spells of demon summoning, curses, etc....

And yeah it would make too much sense to let shards beef up spells of the appropriate element.  Would make shards more useful than just a resource for certain spells.  One shard could beef up that fireball, but it wouldn't beef up the volcano because the first one just allows you to cast it.  A second, however, maybe makes the volcano larger or spew more lava.

There was another post around here about making shards have effects on-map, like changing the terrain around them. i.e. fire shards would make the land immediately surrounding it dry and barren, earth shard would make the land green & fertile, etc.  Also have effects that would take place during tactical battles, i.e. earth shard makes causes tremors during battle.

We shouldn't have to sacrifice cool and specialized Sovereign builds because of randomized shards.

The shards could rather be generated in appropriate landscape and also the Sovereign starting location could be influenced by their focus in magic.

Your Ice mage could start on tundra, where ice shards would also be located.

I'm a fan of this idea - particularly after playing the Beta 3 for several games and feeling a total disconnect from magic and shards.

no thats definitely too much

but i like the above idea of having shards in their appropriate locations so if you want to go support your initial choice its not a total random mess

Why not have the computer come up with a bunch of possible starting locations, and let you choose between them, based on what you want to play (or what's optimal for your playstyle)?

How is it too much?

Would you rather start somewhere completely different and then have to walk all the way across the map before founding your kingdom?

It's just logical, much like providing every starting location with food resources because that's what the Sovereigns were looking for to found a kingdom.

An Ice mage starting on tundra shouldn't mean there is a shard right next to him. He would still have to search for it and overcome any defenses like a powerful cold aura and hostile air elementals.

SECOND! *thumbsup*

Maybe even a scroll that contains only one spell instead of a book with various spells. But only if there is some kind of possibilty to nullify or at least reduce the effect for the other players. Like in the case of Demonology the possibilty of learning a Banish spell or casting a Planar Seal. Also, especially Demonology spells should have a higher "go awry" probability. Like you didn't close the Pentagram completely or said the demon's name wrong or lost concentration while trying to bend him to your will.

Effects could be i.e.: He posesses the caster, turns on your people, curses the caster, outright kills the caster.

Otherwise game balance would be at stake if you sudddenly have such an uber unit at your disposal and no way to counter it.

Hound,

in MoM it was pretty much the same with nodes. Either you got lucky and started near a node that related to your prefered type of magic or it was leagues away.

One possible solution could be that at least ONE not overly hard guarded shard of your prefered type is located close to you and other shards simply add to your essence. OR picking up your idea: After you have conquered ONE shard the level of defense on the other shards' locations scales upwards.

having your own shard just near the start location makes the entire shard concept irrelevant

then why just not put the shard bonus into your sovereign at start?

shards shoudl be some minor random bonuses and also point of interest to fight for

thats bad too

like i said 142141 times, resources should be only less important, in a way that having 1 food at start is good but not gamebreaking

its just redundant to have powerful rare reseources and then give them free to anyone cause you cant balance them

just make them less important and its all solved

ok and what about hybrids?

if im a ice AND fire?

no, think about it and youll find out it just doesnt make sense

eh? what you are talking about?

in mom you didnt need any node at all

No, of course not. But it provided a good boost to your spell casting ability in terms of mana points per turn.

And if you wanted to cast more mana consuming spells you definitely were better off owning those nodes sooner or later.

yeah it was an advantage to have a close node but the you need really luck to have one so easy to be killed early

if those 2 conditions happened yeah you had a nearly gamebreaking powerup

We'll see where Stardock is in their essence philosophy this week, I hope.  With all the things that are changing, especially with mana being tied to essence, I'm hoping that essence is gained at a given rate independent of leveling, and that having shards increases that rate.  If not a rate, maybe you get one essence when you build a shard temple.  Essence is really important to mages (and much less useful for warrior type sovereigns), and it, by itself, would be enough of an incentive to make me want to take and own shards, apart from any bonuses to spellcasting they may give.  Maybe they give +5 to your max mana while you hold them, instead (like in MOM).

I dunno about devaluing the special tiles, ddd888.  Right now, you can get a men city to level 2 with just what it can build itself (and every other city to L3, because of the way gardens work).  To get L4 and L5 cities, you need to have a food resource in your domain, or choose to build a lot of little L1 cities and have them feed your L5 city.  Both ways work, but there's a pretty strong incentive to go and get the food resource to ease the building pressure (and monetary cost). 

I think the special resources are going to be the things we end up going to war over with our other sovereigns (at least for a conquest victory, and very likely for a spell of mastery victory).  Having them be worth fighting over is probably a good thing.

I like the boost idea.Not to many Books though. Dilutes their special nature then.

I buy my preferred Magic Books right out of Magician College, and have a Basic knowledge, power and control of those selected Schools and related Spells.

Then, as I explore the wastelands, for every Shard I find that matches one of my currently owned Books/Schools, I get some discernible buff to my control and Power levels accordingly.

As well. if I come were to come across a Shard from a different School, I can then capture that Shard, and begin research the related spell set. Thus adding that Book/School of Spells to my growing repertoire.

Currently though, even the Magic Research Tree is quasi randomized and you are not guaranteed to get the proper Shard type research pick to show up. Very piss offy type stuff that.

One issue I can for see is that if you make owning Shards a major requirement or make them to Powerful, while requiring a City built around them to gain that Power, especially in the early game, then the major focus will be to simply hunt down all the Shards and take or destroy any and all Towns that contain them, because if you don't, and say your a War based SoV, the other guys Magic power will become unstoppable, with even a limited Shards in their possession, given enough turns.

In my suggestion the shards are well defended and require advanced units and/or spells to overcome. You will have to invest time and resources into getting them. They are not for early game grabs.

Powerful rare resources should be well guarded even if their location is apparent. Same answer here.

Food resource for the starting location is just to give everyone an even start in that regard. Players who only want to build one city should not be forced to lose precious time by scouting around a random world.

In case of 2 or more equally powerful elements it's randomized between those.

I'm still hoping for MoM style specialization where you could have 5 books of Fire and 4 books of Ice. Basically equal but there would still be a primary element. Problem solved. Unless you want it random, that would be possible too.

well defended shards is a good idea, but right now the game doesnt seem to go in that direction, if they do i could agree with your idea

oh cmon it doesnt make any sense

they point of food is

- you have food ? you can buld towns to lvl 4 5

-you dont have foo? you have to waste essence or find food and research etc

giving everyone free food just makes everything useless

there is no strategy involved to grow your city or no exploration needed

you just get everything free, its not fun

yeah im saying it everywhere

i want to pick n books of fire and M of ice and have different spells or spells with different strenght

it was so cool

If you want to specialize as a fire caster, instead of worrying if you get fire shards near your starting area, you just allow this as part of the sovereign creation process.  So for example if we say that 3 shards of one element will allow you to cast the highest level of those spells.  When the sovereign chooses the schools he knows each pick the sovereign basically acts as though he had captured those shards.  So 3 picks of the fire element, the Sovereign acts as 3 fire shards, thus allowing you to cast the highest level fire spells once they are learned and you are not dependent upon hoping those are spawned near you.

In addition you could add additional strengths and weaknesses in the picks section such as Fire master will do x% more damage/range at the cost of all other spells being in the -x%.

I also like the idea of the TS. You would of course make sure, that there is a number of spells for each spellbook that are not related to elements (like the standard spells in MoM) and some spells that are kingdom/empire specific (so basically kingoms have life magic as a default "shard" and empires would have death as default "shard").

For mage souvereigns it is especially important that some basic direct damge spells like arcane missiles or something are available without a shard, while the more powerfull spells depend on the shards. So basically you would reorder the spells that are not dependent on shards to the respective spellbooks, and add severeal shard specific spells to each book. As I understand these would be minor changes to the XML. The question is, if the shard specific spells should be researchable without a shard? I think yes, but it might throw the AI off, as the AI than needs to focus on spells for shards that it posesses and will possess in the near future, while at the moment the choice of spells taken by the AI can be rather arbitrary.

Following this line of thought, it would be preferable if most spells would be independend of the shards available, and would get secondary effects with shards (which might be a much more complicated thing codewise). So, e.g., if you researched the above arcane missiles from your evocation spellbook it would gain on power per shard (eg. +10% damage per shard) and would gain secondary effects. The arcane missile would conjure a firebolt/frost bolt/lightning bolt/hurling boulder dependent on the number of shards and would apply a fire debuff/slow/stun whatever to the spell (similar to another idea that was presented in the spell-proposal thread, I think). This way your spellbook would not be crowded by combat spells which are only of use to your specialized spellcaster.

On a side note to make shards interesting also for warrior souvereigns, possessing a shard could also imbue your melee attacks with the respective effects, so fire damage for fire shards and so on.

One other thing is, that direct damage should not be a specialized spellbook, because every caster Souvereign would have to take it, so it would reduce the number of possible book choices. Therefore several books should provide direct damage spells. The same is true for summonings, which should also be spread out a bit further. Furthermore you could retain one or two of the spellbooks completely independent of shards like your former Ruin spellbook.  

A last point i want to raise is caster sovereigns early on. There should be an option to buy some simple combat spells from the souvereign generation menu, like buying weapons for warrior souvereigns. The balance would of course be that both things (weapons and starting spells) become outdated as the game proceeds, but might provide strong initial advantages. Alternatively you could also gain some combat spells for free if you use the evocation spellbook from the thread starter.

Shards controlling Spells/ Casters

Fire Shard-> +5 max mana, +1 attack for all magical damage spells, +1 attack for all casters

Water Shard->+5 max mana, +1 magical defense for all casters, +2 HP for all casters

Air Shard-> +5 max mana, +1 movement for all casters, +1 combat speed for all casters

Earth Shard-> +5 max mana, +1 defense for all casters, +2 HP for all casters

Alternatively...

Fire Shard-> +1 attack for all spells/ +5 max mana

Water Shard-> +5% spell success chance/ +5 max mana

Air Shard-> -1 mana cost for all spells/ +5 max mana

Earth Shard-> Summons get +1 awesome/ +5 max mana