Teleportation sickness, where it loweres stats would fix it well, if you suffered 50% def, att and hp, that would really hinder or make impossiple using it as a strategy to defend all places with one stack. 

I don't like the line of sight, that limitation would make it somewhat useless.

I like the chaos factor, except I don't like the chance of the unit being lost, it's a cheap death and will just casue a reset. 

I really, really like the idea of the danger of the void, if I lose a unit due to teleporting, I at least want to lose it in a fight, and this might weaken the unit after the teleport, making that strategy a more dangerous one.

Puzzles to open portal?  Hmmm....not sure on that one.

I like the turn and cool down limit.  Maybe if we open a portal, it and the opposite end will stay open and anyone can use it, if it is canceled, then we can't open another one for a set amount of time, so it might be able to be used once to defend quickly, but not repeatedly ina short time and it can be used agaisnt us.

I liked that story.

I wouldn't want teleport to break the game. If it can't be done right, I'd rather not have it. But if the devs can figure a good way, it could make the game more exciting.

Istari, you forgot to mention "the fly" effect.  Thats when you teleport to a location where some other animal happens to be and your people turn into some half human mutation.

You guys are a bunch of frenzied teleporting - thread hijacking trolls!

Oh why not having frenzied teleporting trolls EVERYWHERE in the map by the way?...

YEAH! An army of portal destroying black knights!

(KEEP THOSE AND GET RID OF THE HIDIOUS SCI-FI DEVICE!!!)

By the way there was ANOTHER teleporting spell in the first AOW, which I didn't mention (the OP will forgive me if I go off topic) It was kind of fun, I forgot its name, it allowed to randomly teleport... good for escaping troubles... and getting you in much worse ones sometimes. It would teleport you  well, guess... RANDOMLY about 20 hexes away in a random direction... sometimes you would appear on an island and live there forever, (but that's what you deserve when you call up Scotty asking for the beam in a fantasy game). Anyway that was obviously something used only for defense, it was 'kind of' harmless... Meaning I wouldn't kill my mom to get rid of it... just my brother, maybe.

I can't really comment about all those ideas because of forum "politesse" policy (no curses: it is written just next the paragraph about hijacking threads)

Uh? And how many turns would that sickness last? Because I remind you that in this game units walk just 2 tiles each turns, by the time the attacking army gets to a town after they have been spotted the sickness of the goddamn teleporting klingons would probably be gone!

It just won't work. I can only see teleport as a spell for one unit, just the sovreign to escape troubles, not even the champions or one would make an army of champions and we would be having the same problem all over again.

In Heroes of M&M eleport had a range (I have seen them all yeah!). It was a limitation alright, but that is mostly a single player game, can you imagine in multiplayer when the enemy gets that and starts jumping around and slaying all your armies? You have build cities in strategig points, placed guards to protect sensible areas, researched and built a navy... and there comes Mario Bros jumping around killing the fun.

By the way you guys seem to forget that in age of Wonders AT LEAST you have to prepare spells before you can cast them, so that you cannot just teleport on a whim: it takes a few turns... and STILL they decided it was a game breaker... In this game if the enemy gets that spell before you... good luck Donald duck! So better research that and only that in every game!

With all due respect to Black Knight's sensitivities, there could be many types of teleport, and truly powerful ones not accessible until higher spell lever: blinking (in tactical and overland maps) for a single unit, a short range portal for multiple units; single use spells and long-term portals kept open by mana maintenance; a high-level research into this branch of magic could lead to portals into other dimensions/planes of existence where new creatures, items, settlements might be had (Myrror?).

We kidnapped the developer's children and we got that as an option, that's how much I can agree with you on that one.

I can address each one of the above points for multiplayer, regarding sinle player just remember: The more complex it is the more the AI will be exploited. (especially the random location thing which would be fun... except than the AI cannot save and reload when doesn't like the outcome.)

Regarding multiplayer:

It better be expensive because it is insanely game breaking

Why would the enemy use it? Why teleport somewhere when they don't even know where?

Sickness: not crazy about that one and 3 turns are not enough for the attacker to reach the city he was trying to attack, before the teleported unit is healed.

Random: the AI cannot save and reload but for multiplayer could be funny ok (if you don't mind losing after 300 turns because the other guy just got lucky)

Rift having to be set so that the attacker can run away would at least prevent some abuse, but attacking enemy territory would still become very hard and the strategy would still be all about teleport.

Rift distance should be 0

make the rift last 0 turns and I am fine

cooldown make it 1000 turns

With teleport in, the game will become ALL ABOUT THAT - I just cannot agree on any form of teleport ever, sorry, except for the sovraign to be able to cast a portal to run away from troubles ALONE. That's the only concession I feel I can make based on my experience with these games. Sorry if I sound too radical.

@Black-Knight.

To be honest, if teleportation was implemented with the restrictions that I've listed above, I don't think it would ever be used, even by people who normally enjoy exploiting such things. I have to say though that I didn't expect you to agree to it anyway. 

I don't agree with what you've said about teleport being Sci-Fi only, but you do have a point at the core of this though, regarding it breaking gameplay and not being properly useable by the AI. I just don't think we should give up so easily on trying to make it work, as it is potentially a very fun spell that is used in a lot of fantasy fiction.

What they should've done is tied the teleport to certain spellbooks, or attenuated the effects based on teleport. Say for example there was a basic teleport that moved only one guy and an advanced teleport that moves a guy + army. Have something like this

Basic ............................... Advanced 

fire 3/20 (any) ................. 18/40

air 2/50 (any) .................. 12/100

earth 3/45 (land only) ...... 18/90

water  (2)3/(45)15 ........... 12(18)/(90)30

astral 2/70 (any)...............12/140

where we have mana cost/max teleport distance. any=any terrain type, land=lan only, water has water cost and land cost. Differentiating teleport a bit by effect & spellbook, thus making some books a bit more valuable by spell type would be a good idea in my opnion. Or perhaps making the basic teleport only available in the air & astral books. 

So what if Teleport were in Lord of the Rings?  Frodo teleports to Mount Doom, and tosses the ring into the lava.  There was a LotR parody on YouTube which was similar except they rode on giant eagles to Mount Doom and had the whole business taken care of in an afternoon.

Something that made traveling a little easier without making the game feel broken was Sidhe pathways in King Arthur: TRPWG, the ones on the strategic map.  You could research the use of stone circles on the map and Teleport from stone circle to stone circle.  Gateways could benefit the aesthetics of the game, rather than compromising them.

Lastly, I posted an idea about flying dragons elsewhere, but if mounting and flying on dragons were part of the game, giving the option of a "slow" teleport for advanced sovereigns, I wouldn't complain.

In Age of Wonders Shadow Magic you have teleport based in towers (optional). In order to get it you need to build a city then a tower, then two upgrades of the tower, then the tower gate. It takes a while. Still if you manage to approach an enemy area it is worth  bringing a pioneer, because it starts that whole process so that you can eventually overwhelm the enemy by instantly teleport hundreds of soldiers right in the middle of his country.

It takes a long time to build but still it has been agreed in that forum by many players that it is spoils the strategy. So you see that also in AOW teleport is theoretically defensive (from tower to tower) but it ends up being used offensively. And hoinestly if you don't do it it's the other guy who is going to, so that becomes the only strategy, instead than using the fleet and the roads you have been working hard to build.

I just can't see how in Elemental we could get a form of teleport which takes even more time to build or cast than that, and still they agreed that it was a game breaker. Crippling the caster for me is the only option that would make sense, but I repeat that it should be OPTIONAL.

I generally find these debates about teleport to be mildly amusing. Like most debates about the "flaws" of elemental, this debate has simply asked the wrong question. "OMG, teleport is OP, how do we make it less awesome so we don't feel like we have to make all our champions taxis?" How does nerfing one element of a game make the others more awesome? In general, it can't. If we step back from this line of questioning and really consider the underlying mechanics of the game, it becomes clear why it is so awesome to imbue champions which are nothing more than glorified taxis. Currently, it is incredibly easy to procure champions and even easier to get them to the point where they can start being taxi units. In fact for most champions, there is really no downside as there is so little reason to put points into anything but essence for the vast majority of champions. Since the units can't gain new traits/skills and most of them will never see combat, if they weren't taxis, they would just be sitting around doing nothing.

So how do you fix teleport? Firstly, do something that D&D has done for years, force spellcasters to only get access to x amount of spells per level, based upon those spells which you have already researched. If you want teleport, then you will have to sacrifice the ability to cast another spell for it. Secondly, expand the previous idea to make it that a champion/sov not only can select x amount of spells but could uses that x to select traits/skills. Now, if you want that level 3-4 champion to have teleport, you have to sacrifice some other skill or bonus. Thirdly, increase the base speed of troops. 2 move points are just too few for any meaningful speed of travel, when a fair amount of terrain takes 2 to cross a single square. Fourthly, create items/skill which give a small move increase to an entire party. The idea here is the creation of something akin to pack horses or supply caravans. Fifth, Create a worker unit which can simply build roads. While I like the idea of caravans improving roads over time, it sucks to have no control over the path a road will be created on between two cities. Sixth, Rework how roads are upgrade to make them simply count how many times a caravan has entered the square. At current, 6 caravans can regularly use a single tile for their route, but each will have it own upgrade schedule as long as none of them are moving between the same cities.