Yes that could be fun.  And it makes more sense too according to the lore, why would 20 pieces of 1 Forge of the Overlord appear (to 4 different players), when according to the lore there was only one Forge of the Overlord?

Frogboy, would it be too difficult to arrange a competition for the Ultimate Quest?  Especially in MP this would be a hoot!       After all it is the Master Quest, why not require players to be Master of All?

Best regards,
Steven. 

Ahh, too bad then. Chasing after the same items as everyone else would have been a bit more exciting. Possession of some of the forge pieces would have been enough motivation to go to war over...kinda like how the Ascension Crystals did in TA.

You could imagine when 1 player starts the quest that word races throughout all the lands that someone has embarked on a quest for an artifact of incredible power...Sort of like an Amazing Race/Raiders of the Lost Ark type of deal. Except with dragons. And chain lightning  

But I seem to have digressed from the main topic. As MadMagnus said above, the magic tech tree should have other interesting things that are not directly spell related, and has been suggested, there should be 'blend' or crossover type techs that utilize 2 of the trees. I.E. Magic (at a certain level)+Conquest(at a certain level) gives you the ability to research magic weapons...add a shard in there and you can make, say a flaming claymore if you own a fire shard, frost weapon for an ice shard, etc, etc. 

Perhaps some one off bonuses can be researched this way as well. Magical ore carts to make mines more efficient or some other magical doodad to make your diplomacy better. There are a lot of possibilities in there.

I think these are great ideas.  Frogboy, could you implement some of them into the main game?

Best regards,
Steven.

I think the key to having a unique and interesting tech tree is to have the tree branch very early with a lot of options early on. Then you reward the player for investing resources in each one, and make it a little more expensive to try and do each one.

I guess the easiest example I could use for this is with warfare, where you could have research into the basic weapons and then go to basic types like it is now, then as someone suggested have things like "flaming swords" - swords with +3 damage when equipped and when you control a fire shard. Alternately, you could have different warfare paths that concentrate on different materials; some games, for instance, I end up having a ton of metal but not a lot of materials, so an iron-only branch of the warfare tree would be nice. Truly awesome would be for those small empires with three gold deposits but no metal/material, you could have a golden army.. if they could march under all that armor

Here is some of my Feedback. Its late here in germany, so i will only touch those aspects that come first to my mind:

Diplomacy

Caravans. The income from Caravans once you have some cities is quite ridiculous. This is caused by the number of caravans growing quadratically with the numbers of cities [2 * (N-1)^2]. Removing the ability to send a caravan from A -> B AND simultaneously one from B->A will slightly reduce the caravan impact, a limit of one caravan per city (that might be increased by diplomacy research) and should be capped (in endgame) somewhere around 3 per city will balance caravans i think.

The other aspects of Diplomacy are still a bit obscure. The availability of Diplomatic capital only throuth the embassy seems a bit limiting here. Some treaty opitons are not really available in 3C.

Warfare

Dependence on Metal: Not given, as Gildars are required in much higher amount. Therefore, the real army production (neglecting the upkeep) is more dependent on gildars than metal.

Weapons:
Right now the weapons are not differnt enough, this might of course change when special abilities are introduced and hopefully awarded, in part to the weapon of choice. While others oppose the idea to further divide weapons according to their strength I feel that technology should not provide within some turns as strong jumps as 3 -> 5 -> 8 -> 18 -> 30 (available arounf turn 30). The maximum weapon damage should be chosen lower and the damage of the starting weapons should be higher, so more along the lines 6 -> 9 -> 12 -> 15 -> 18. This would allow meaninful soldiers even at the beginning.   

Defense:
The cost balance of Defense vs. Offense is strongly screwed towards Offense.
a) There are no cheap defense tools available.

b ) Good defense is by a factor of 10 more expensive than compareable offense (while realistic this is a balancing problem) and
c) there is no need for defence when you can kill the enemy before he can even retailiate (which is possible due to the strong offense).
Solutions:
a) In Tactical Combat calculate retailiation simultaneusly with the attack. Defense is then also valuable to the attacker.
b ) Put a lot of the defense capabilities on shields and provide a shield that is initially available and provides a defense that is at least half of the inital weapon strength (about 4 or more).
c) Increase Health points of all units and heroes

Adventuring
One problem here is, that you willl not get additional heroes if you switch late to adventuring mode. Some heroes should spawn only for adventurers and should only be hireable by them (also higehr level champions hsould be available). Furthermore, at the moment adventuring is not viable on small maps, as there are simply not enough quest locations (and some of your goody huts are stolen by npc adventureres). This could be remedied by continously spawning new quests. Another disadvantage of the Adventuring pathway might be, that Heroes most probably will simply be overwhelmed by larger Army contingents later in the game. At the moment they seem quite powerfull, but this is only caused by the fact that they can kill nearly everything without fear of retailiation. Units within AI armies are usually killed with the first hit and therefore no damage is taken, strong monsters can be softened with magic well enough, to take them out without damage. This is caused by the high tactical combat speed and the fact that at the moment the player typically starts the tactical battles.

The problems with the available quest types have already been mentioned.

Magic

Combat Magic
A lack in magic is the availability of stonger damage casts. In the beginning of the game doing INT dmg seems also quite powerfull, hoever when confronted with real armies a caster uses up all his mana during the first turn of combat. Afterwards he is quite powerless, and that is for about twenty turns (on the main map) until the mana has come back. Therefore the best way to play with magic at the moment is to use the spells from the book of mastery and eleminate enemy armies and cities without entering tactical combat (which is also fun and reminds me of slpha centauris planet busters). The problems with magic are at the moment still not too obvious, because casters do not use up mana when auto resolve is used.

Overland Magic and the Feedback given by the Game
Furthermore the magic part of the game needs some more spice. Of the large amount of spells on the main map only raise and lower land and the spells of the mastery book really stand out, because tehre are visible results. The impact of the other spells is not visible enough, so most often one does not bother to use them at all.
I will give one example: When you clicked on a enchanted unit in master of magic you saw the buff spells that were casted by you and you saw their direct effect upon the units strength (the swords on yellow background). You furthermore saw a aura in the color of the element of the spell around your unit. Therefore the game gave direct feedback what your spell did. In elemental such information is not visible at all (furthermore the power gain of units through magical buffs is rather low, and the number is low as well).

Summons
the limit of summons to one per type does not allow to use an entirely summoned army as executive force (ok that is also caused by the bad placement of caster souvereings in front of their summoned minons in tactical battles). Therefore the caster has to perform the things himself. With the current balancing the souvereign is either dead, before his minons did the task, or has killed the enemies himself.

Civics

Civilization is the most research oriented tree but unfortunately you cannot research a lot of things within the tree right now. The food and gildars come from caravans, and the other resources are not used in meaningfull amounts. Therefore the civilization aspect is a bit underwhelming at the moment. This might get more important through when caravans are balanced, and the cost of Warfare is moved more towards resources instead of gildar. Also the items buyable for your heroes could require resources instead of gildar (at least in part).

More better thought out feedback will follow after some sleep.

It's better than what we have now. Now every side is pretty much identical. There needs to be choices and differences between each side.

I really like your thinking. Diplomacy should definitely offer lots of underhanded awesomeness to inflict on unsuspecting victims.

Perhaps the hydra has too many heads.

I fully agree.

There is one more important topic, with which I'am currently am quite concerned:

how can a small kingdom survive against a large kingdom.

The current resource based economy system, gives large kingdoms a great benefit.

Unfortunately I also I have not yet seen a well thought of approach for this paradox from stardock.

Sins of A Solar Empire had a try by increasing the support costs based on the max. number of points you had available for ships. But those support costs were still up, even so you lost your fleet, so that it was very hard to rebuild a fleet at this stage (which mostly was a problem for the AI).

1) First of all, I am loving the ideas you guys are putting out here. There are so many excellent constructive ideas for balancing the game.

Re: Magic research, I agree. It needs to be streamlined to look more like the technology research--that is, keep the spellbook format, but present us with a few options for research each time we can research a new spell, showing which are common, uncommon, rare, and "unlocked" spells based on quest, resources, technology, faction, etc.

This will vastly improve replayability. I want to keep playing to see what spells I get. Ooooooh! The rare genocide spell! Lucky!

2) Someone mentioned somewhere the need for a "eureka!" moment when a new spell or tech is unlocked. I agree. Even if it is just a short little jingle or something.

3) Make the spellbook in combat only show those spells that are actually castable. I don't want to see what I am currently researching, etc.

@ Frogboy, et al: You guys are really bringing this game to life! The last two beta releases have been really great! Keep it up and thanks for all your hard work!

I would also like to see a useful and powerful diplomacy tree (not more powerful than any other tree, but stronger than in most games like this). But as many people have pointed out, multiplayer is an issue (especially small vs large kingdoms).

One option is for diplomatic strength to give penalties to other players (AI and human) if they go against what the strongly diplomatic kingdom wants. E.g. if you turn down a trade deal offered by someone with high diplomacy, you suffer production penalties in your city nearest their kingdom for a time. Or if you attack a high diplomacy kingdom, they can use their diplomatic power to pressure other kingdoms into breaking agreements they have with you. This second example would require trade agreements to be important and quite common though, which seems unlikely. The other downside to this point is that players might resent being forced into something by what feels like a very 'gamey' mechanism (though you could explain it as something similar to cultural domination in GalCiv II).

A second option is more conventional, and basically like the ideas above about espionage. The diplomatic tree would unlock special units (assassins/saboteurs) with useful abilities that damage an opponent, through killing his powerful leaders or destroying/disabling important improvements (being able to deny someone all of their metal income through a well planned sabotage campaign would be quite neat). The problem with this is how do people counter it (though you could probably have security techs in civilisation, and spells in magic, so it might not be too bad).

Finally, you could make diplomacy also work as a kind of defensive tree. So with high diplomacy, your units fight much better in friendly territory, or you can built units with 'partisan packs' which allow stealthed movement and ambush attacks within your own borders. This would allow small nations to fight big nations, but only in a defensive capacity. It would also make a strong diplomatic ally very valuable, because they could help defend your land very well, but if they turn on you, their attacking won't be as strong. This suggestion doesn't really focus strongly on diplomacy that much though (it could be justified as foreign people sending aid or whatever if you are attacked + a strong national identity).

TL; DR:

a ) Diplomatic capital allows you to force other players to do certain things or suffer penalties.

b ) Diplomacy gives espionage techs to attack enemies.

c ) Diplomacy gives strong combat bonuses in friendly or allied territory.

IIRC, you need to control at least one of each elemental shard to cast the Spell of Making.  Not an easy task. Only the Master Quest can be 'poof'.