True, some of us are complaining about dashed hopes from the pre-beta and early beta days. But you're doing some red-herring thing by saying "complaining about a concept." Software is fundamentally conceptual, and design arguments are about what concepts you want to see expressed in the given app or OS. The 'roots Essence' stuff most definitely had potential to be major game mechanics, but the erosion you describe basically threw that baby out with dirty bathwater. I've tried hard to keep up with the dev talk on these boards, but I still haven't seen a persuasive explanation of why that erosion was encouraged.

I was an early objector to the RTS-ish tactical combat talk (I forget the confusing euphemism that was in play back then). Demo versions absent, I'd be happy to submit to some click-fest crap like that if it could get a Return to the Roots thing going for Essence.

GW and Tridus, you guys make good arguments. What worries me though is how we got to where we are now in the first place. If two months after release we've ended up neutering a core mechanic (and whether it really had a future in the game is debatable) this leads me to believe that SD never really had a coherent design plan for a lot of the mechanics currently in the game.

For charisma and recruiting...does this mean regardless of what unit/champion is near the champion you wish to recruit the sovereign's charisma is what will be used in determining the cost of recruitment?

Hmm...magic socialism. I look forward to see how this will work

For charisma and recruiting...does this mean regardless of what unit/champion is near the champion you wish to recruit the sovereign's charisma is what will be used in determining the cost of recruitment?

That's the way it is now, right? The change to charisma is stationing in cities to generate prestige.

If we'd had a 'debate' about Essence mechanics that was backed up by a few contrasting beta builds, I'd feel far better about 'having lost' the argument. As-is, I feel largely betrayed by the paid-beta process because my greatest interest in the game was hoping to see a TBS with a coherent, milieu-based magic system and a solidly secondary role for mundane crafts/technology.

Mind you, I'm using "feel" there very deliberately; it's a predominantly emotional response because I have insufficient data to even attempt a formally rational one. I don't really expect the game to play like you're reading Wheel of Time or Song of Ice and Fire, or even watching Buffy or the Dresden Files. But I did expect the game to end up with a 'gamy' magic system that was at least as good as the systems Brandon Sanderson cooked up for Elantris and his Mistborn trilogy. And I type that as someone who read all the Mistborn stuff but felt a little gamy myself after doing it.

Fair enough.

But it doesn't do 1d30 damage, which some weapons in Elemental do. Doubling that would require a lot more then 20 STR in D&D, because the modifier is a flat amount. In Elemental it doubles anything you're holding.

"Continuous Turns" is the term you're looking for.

The erosion largely happened because the implementation of essence turned out not to work very well. First you had to imbue the land with essence to build anything, but "good land" would then radiate out from your cities. That encouraged city spam, because you could build a city for free on the "good land" which would then spread it farther. Trying to leapfrog and build fewer cities required more essence.

So that caused the problem of how do you capture a resource that's outside your cities without having to spend essence? Pioneers were toyed with as a way to do that, but at some point they changed to just founding settlements without the need to spend essence (probably because the engine doesn't have a "this mine is flagged to X without being in their zone of influence" mechanic, which AoW 2 does have).

There was also the idea of using essence to create fertile land and thus your food, but that ran into problems with how you could obtain more essence. As soon as it was something you could buy at level up, the best method to get around it was to start the game and immediately imbue some heroes. Pile them all up in a stack and go kill stuff (and at the time stuff in the woods was a plentiful target). Since all units in the stack get full XP, five channelers boosts your available essence five times faster then one channeler who tries to hoard it. That in turn lets you imbue a whole lot of farmland and massively inflates your population against someone who doesn't do that.

It also inflated your mana regeneration, since mana was "local" to each channeler and having five of them opened up a LOT more offensive firepower then one big channeler (due to lack of multi-turn spell cast times).

Over time and trying to deal with all those things, essence got whittled down to it's 1.09 state of being your mana cap, and for some reason called Wisdom on the character creation screen. You can look at each problem and probably come up with a solution that keeps essence around, but that didn't happen at the time, and the version we have now really isn't that useful. IMO, and I said this at the time, the mistake was in letting you buy it on level up. Essence as a one time use only pool is very different from something you can simply buy back.

I still want to see multi-turn spells, and essence could have morphed into a casting points type stat controlling how much you can draw from the global mana pool each turn. But it doesn't seem like multi-turn spells are happening in 1.1. (Which is kind of silly since the "you win" spell should really take more then one turn to cast.)

(Man, the fact that I can recite that so easily shows just how long I've been posting here. :P)

I don't want to drag up the "what went wrong" stuff again or restart the discussion on what "epic" means... so I'll just say that the original released "what is Elemental?" stuff was about a realtime combat game featuring "epic" numbers of units moving around at once, and essence as the heart of the magic system, with "dynasties" as an important feature.

We ended up with a turn based combat system featuring a limit of 12 (I think?) units per side without essence at all and where your sovereign dying causes your entire civilization to vanish in a puff of smoke. You can take from that what you will.

1.1 is definitely heading in a positive direction, so the future looks positive provided you forget everything that was talked about in beta.

Yup. I'm starting to wonder if I've found a new path to the Great Disappointment that was MoO3. If magic remains the flavorless wreckage that it seems to be so far, I'll need to see the dynasty mechanics, quests, and diplomacy/trade mechanics become as valuable to the AIs as basic warmongering is. Otherwise, I can't see much point in playing the game other than hoping for GC3 to be a major improvement.

I'm not seeing what is lost in the switch from essence to a global mana pool.  I see only a change to the maintenance of a mechanic.  And a clarification of the lore.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the book and I've only been playing v1.09e [for 13 consecutive days and counting :~) ]

As I understand the lore, the raw material for the casting of magic has never been said to come from within the spell casters themself.  I could be wrong, but as I understand it...  Essence didn't mean that characters had a well of mana within their bodies, from which to cast their spells.  The mana comes from the world, not the people.  A sovereigns essence allows them to harvest this mana, and to harness it to a useable form.  A sovereigns essence is an aspect of nature not nurture... they don't learn it, they just have it.  And they can't give it away.  A sovereign can sacrifice some of their essence to grant the gift of spellcasting to others.  But these others do not have essence of their own.  Imbued champions do not harvest mana themselves.  They can however tap into the sovereigns pool from which to cast their own spells.  Hence, the global mana pool in lieu of individual essence.  Makes sense to me. 

Note: When judging an individual game element, keep the big picture in mind.  A mechanic which sounds good on paper might not gell well with other mechanics.  There are also engine limitations, software realities, and hardware parameters which must all be juggled to come up with creative workarounds to achieve the best possible implementation for feature XYZ.  In regards to the global mana pool, and with all things considered, I am content with the direction that EWoM is headed.

PS: I've had the game for 13 days now.  I have played every day.  This old PC I am temporarily using, limits me to the cloth map, and doesn't allow me to play all of the tactical battles.  Even with these limitations I am enjoying the game.  I look forward to v1.1 and beyond. 

I am digging the feedback from the developers.  More people are starting to respond with important and interesting information.

I've not read the Random House stuff either, but I've spent at least a few hours on every beta version and more than a few hours on post 1.whatever versions.

I'm also a part-time servant to an orange tabby cat, but he hasn't distracted me from the fact that the adoption of the long-missing global mana pool is in no way an either/or choice re Essence as a stat for sovereigns and/or imbued champions. IMO, both/and problems are the heart of both serious political theory and top-end TBS games that I'm waiting to buy when the modern info economy picks up enough to help over-educated workers like me earn more than a subsistence income.

I might agree.  So are you looking for a cool down/burnout stat?  ie: Champion casts an X mana spell, then must heal up before restoring their max casting potential?  I wouldn't mind this feature...  Spellcasters all draw from a common mana pool.   With each individual spellcaster being limited in how much mana they can channel over a given time period.  This would work for me.   But for now I am quite happy that the shared mana pool addresses the imbalance of over-bloating a nations net mana regeneration (in relation to per-turn offensive spell capability) through mass imbuing of champions.    

In the near future I will look for ever increasing depth.  For now I am happy with consolidating the baselines.  From there the EWoM and mod teams can expand.  I think the EWoM team is on a productive path.  I am happy with the current progress.   Some of things that I would personally like to see, are best suited for mods.  Such as spellcaster burnout... drawing mana past the casters normal limit... risking injury, stilling and death.  etc etc.  There is the core EWoM game, there will be the expansions, and there will be the mods.  Some things I will want, you won't.  EWoM provides a foundation for us all to find/create our ideal game.  All while becoming a great game on its own accord.  Elementals evolution has just barely begun!

My master distracts me as we speak...

Cats rule.  Dogs droll! 

LoL I don't subscribe to that.  I've got two dogs as well.  Here is Wookie being my designated driver ;~p

If there is casting time and cooldowns for abilities - as was the plan - which can presumeably also be used on spells since abilities are spells, then it's pretty close already.

Adding a temporary mana buffer to casters would just add one more layer for the hell of it.
What choice would that mana buffer add that a cooldown does not? Both limit the spells you can use in a certain time frame but the cooldown way is easier to balance.
Once a caster has "a lot of mana", the buffer system fails completely because it does not impose a tangible limitation any more. Cooldowns are more reliable.

I think that a consequent implementation of cooldowns is complicated enough... if magic spells will actually get some variety as well.

It's easy enough to differenciate the wizards from the warrior-adepts. An Int-based modifier to spell cost, casting time, cool down, special abilities/traits that can be gained above a certain level / Int...
There are plenty of possibilities without adding entire new systems.

Hmmm, I was just looking at the Off/Def functions.

Why no level scaling for Dodge???

If you made it Dex/2 + Level, then you would much better simulate high level troops being better at getting out of the road.  Plus, it would give heroes/champions/sovereign a little better survivability since they tend to level a little quicker.

Although, with this adjustment, Acc still scales better than Def, so high level troops fighting each other wouldn't drag out so much.  It would be an important differentiator in high vs. low combat though.

Edit: Also, why would there be large strings of miss?  I assume (argh!) that you are keeping the separate roll for each soldier in a group?  There just wouldn't be as many hits, so you would see damage but not the whole troop would necessarily hit.

I would really, really, really, like to make a suggestion here and I hope you'll consider it.  Consider changing your qa process.  This was a pretty substantial problem on demigod and I'd imagine it will be a problem on Elemental.  Please consider adding another layer and have a group of community beta testers.  In demigod, we'd have a published change log listing everything that was "fixed", have it pass qa, have it released, and the quickly learn that the changes listed in the log were not implemented.  These are things the community very quickly discovered through our "qa" process.  Now, I very much understand that GPG was sending patches to SD for demigod, but it does paint a picture that things can be overlooked in qa with the existing practices.  If you engage some folks in your fan base, then you increase the odds of a successful release, imo.  Even if all you do is stage a beta release of elemental for 2-3 days and ask the fans to test things out, that would probably be in SD's and the communities best interests. 

I'm just throwing this out there because 1.1 does seem like a pretty big revision.  You can save yourselves some criticism, imo, by getting more folks to test.  After all, the community is giving their time for free, so at least its a cost savings.  :) 

Anyway, hope you consider what I've said.  Thanks. 

Good point

Perhaps Elemental should use the same mechanic as D&D. Instead of increasing the base damage from 1-8 to 1-13 the bonus damage should increase the base damage from 1-8 to 6-13. This would make Strength much more useful.

With the current stat formulae i would set Dexterity and Intelligence always to 5, because the small chance of evading an attack or spell is not worth the stat points and with every level this gets worse, because Dodge and Spell Resistance are not increased with every level.

Here's the formula in 1.1: Weapon Attack + ((Strength - 10)/2). So it will do something fairly close to that.

Right now I agree about DEX, it just doesn't seem to do enough. INT is also a spell damage modifier, so that one will probably get use on your casters.

Here's the problem with cooldowns.

I research the Spell of Making. I hit the button. Poof, I win the game. The spell has an infinite turn cooldown, but since I just won the game, who cares?

With 'casting points' or some kind of limit on what you can channel per turn, casting a spell that big will require more mana then one caster can wield at once. It'll take say 10 turns to complete the spell. It makes a real difference in how big spells play out.

You can do the same thing with tactical spells. I cast a big AoE. That goes on cooldown. No problem, next turn I cast another big AoE (there's several of them in the game right now). I just cycle through them until your army is reduced to dust, and anybody I imbue can also do that. With casting points, I can only use X mana for the entire tactical combat on that channeler, and have to build them up to be able to do something like fire off 3 big AoE's in a single combat.

Cooldowns work fine, when you have one or two abilities. Cooldowns don't work fine when you have 60 of them, some of which can radically tilt the field or flat out win the game. We really want those big spells in Elemental, because they open up a lot more variety in the magic system and change how the game plays depending on what spellbooks you get access to. But being able to fire off "increase harvest by 1 in a city" and "summon an army of all powerful death lords" in the same amount of time (ie: instantly) is silly.

Interesting post.

I agree with darklander0 that Intelligence should be renamed Magic under the new system.

I strongly dislike the "exception" that sovereigns don't need intelligence to cast certain spells but champions do. I understand the rationale is to allow channelers to have low int and still be able to cast spells, but then I think it makes int much less important. If you have low int, you should hire champions with high int if you want to cast spells. I confess I dislike the idea because it's an exception and I dislike these. I dislike that channelers are SO different from the rest, including from other wizards.

Will shields help with dodge (parrying being more of dodge than armor)?

I think there is a difference, because if the damage is increased from 1-8 to 1-13 (version 1.1) the average damage is 7, but if the damage is increased from 1-8 to 6-13 (D&D) the average damage is 9.5 and that is the reason why i think Elemental should use the D&D mechanic.

So is casting time for spells confirmed in 1.1? If yes, then any idea what is going to pass for the MOM equivalent of 'casting skill?'

You can do the same thing with tactical spells. I cast a big AoE. That goes on cooldown. No problem, next turn I cast another big AoE (there's several of them in the game right now).

Sometimes mmo's will have global cooldowns: after using an ability a few seconds will pass before any ability can be used. They could do similar, so that no spell can be used within so many rounds of using a powerful spell. The other way to do it is by requiring a charge time ala FFT, where you queue the spell up and then after some time it will fire off. That depends on the initiative system used, though.

No, nobody's said anything official about it. I'm just pushing for it.