[Idea] Magic Differentiation

from Elemental Forums

Magic (from schools, not research, and I only looked at single-school) generally falls into one of several categories:

City Buffs
City/Faction Debuffs
Damage Spells
Heal Spells
Strategic Buff
Strategic Damage
Summon
Unit Buff
Unit Debuffs
Other (Things that didn't have a clear categorization like cloudwalk, counterspells, etc)
 
I counted out the spells in each category by school of magic, and the resulting chart looks like:
  City Buffs City/Faction Debuff Damage Spells Heal Spells Strategic Buff Strategic Damage Summon Unit Buff Unit Debuff
Earth 1,3 5 3,5     2 4 1,2,5,5  
Water 1 5 4     2,4,5 3   1,2,3
Air 2   3,3     5   1,1,2,2,5 4
Fire 5,5   1,2,3     2,5 4 2,4  
Life 2     2,4 4,5,5     1,1,3,5 3
Death 3,4 3 4,5     5   1,5 1,2,2,4
 
There's some logic to it, but it looks like spells were created because they were really cool ideas and then slotted into one of the schools that they fit at a location relative to their power.  I feel like a systematic design would improve the magic system, and it should be possible without changing it too much.
 
My idea is that every school has some basic elements, and each school of magic will have Major and Minor specialties in categories.
 
So the basic elements that every school might have might look like

  City Buffs City/Faction Debuff Damage Spells Heal Spells Strategic Buff Strategic Damage Summon Unit Buff Unit Debuff
All Low, High   Low, High     Mid Mid Low, Mid, High Mid
 
Where
Low = level 1-2
Mid = level 2-4
High = level 4-5
 
Based on the current setup with some slight adjustment to even things out, specialties might look like
  City Buffs City/Faction Debuff Damage Spells Heal Spells Strategic Buff Strategic Damage Summon Unit Buff Unit Debuff
Earth Major   Minor            
Water           Major     Minor
Air       Minor       Major  
Fire     Major     Minor      
Life       Major       Minor  
Death Minor               Major
 
So how would that change spells in the game? Largely, it should leave almost everything that exists the same, possibly just changing the levels and scaling the effect of some spells.  But it would add in some missing specialties and really differentiate each magic school while giving them a common foundation.
 
Using Earth as an example (and my names and some of the spell ideas are terrible, but the general principle is there).
 
Earth is the element of Iron and Stone, of hammers pounding on forges and of war drums calling soldiers to arms.  A faction calling on earth magic will see its cities raise towering structures with a whisper and its enemies laid low under a barrage of stones.
 
Low City Buff: Enchanted Hammers (1)
High City Buff: Enchanted Production (5) - adds N production to the under-construction building city's queue
Major City Buff: Set in Stone (3)
Major City Buff: Enchanted Mines (4) - targets an iron or crystal mine, increases mine production by 50%, 1 mana upkeep
Major City Buff: Enchanted Materials  (2) - target city gains 0.5 material per essence
 
Low Damage: The throw stone ability that henchmen get (1)
High Damage: Fracture (4)
Minor Damage: Shockwave (3), but made more useful
Minor Damage: Chasm (5): target makes a resistance check or falls into a chasm that opens at their feet and dies.  Does not work on huge creatures (wildland bosses, maybe dragons?)
 
Mid Strategic Damage: Tremor (2)
 
Mid Summon: Earth Elemental (4)
 
Low Unit Buff: Nature's Cloak (1)
Mid Unit Buff: Stoneskin (2)
High Unit Buff: Giant Form (5)
 
Mid Unit Debuff: Mid level debuff, maybe something on movement speed
 
Missing but should still be somewhere: 
Diamondskin (5)
Earthquake (5)
 
A similar thing can be done with the rest of the schools (and, if I have time, I'll give it a try later).  It'll probably result in 3-5 new spells per school, but the end result will be schools with real differences from each other but a core set of abilities that won't gimp any faction that doesn't get that school.  
35,194 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top


I am all in for the magic schools being specialized on certain types of spells while completely missing others. And it seems you have done quite a lot of work about it!

My general comment is that your framework could be used - as you do - to check whether schools are well characterized, and spot what is not coherent with a school intended purpose. This should imply at least two types of spells missing for each school, and at least 2-3 types of spells that each school covers well, with one that it masters. But maybe, too structured an approach may be limiting.

Magic is certainly something that the devs shold make sure is fun and complete before going into Beta 5 for balance. The magic system can, alone, almost determine the sort of a game...

[In the specifics, I don't understand one thing: if Earth is specialized in Major City Buffs and Minor Damage, how come there are 3 spells that buff units?]

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting marionesi, reply 1

[In the specifics, I don't understand one thing: if Earth is specialized in Major City Buffs and Minor Damage, how come there are 3 spells that buff units?]

That's definitely an inconsistency - it's there now mainly because most schools have a lot of unit buff spells (4, 0, 5, 4, 2, 2), so in the "standard" each school gets 3 unit buffs.  Could totally go another way though, and just have the schools specialized in unit buffs get 3+ and the others get 1-2 each.

I also missed that water didn't have any, so some kind of "barred" specialty would indeed make sense.  

 

With a little more thought, it probably would be possible to merge some of the specialties (aka Strategic Buffs and City Buffs) and make things cleaner.

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

13 Spell Categories, of which a Spell can be in more than one:

 

2. Unit buffs - S&B

3. City buffs

5. Damage/Healing - S&B

7. Unit debuffs - S&B

8. City debuffs

10. Tactical - S&B

11. Faction buffs

12. Faction debuffs

13. Summons

 

(S=Strategic, B=Battle)

 

Balance between Schools is actually ensured by a combination of many factors other than the individual Spells within them.  These include but are not limited to: School Levels + Spell Categories + Combo Spells + Spell Costs + Research Paths + Faction Traits.

Waiting for Beta 5.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree that each magic school needs a common foundation that makes it interesting atleast, so I wont just be like
"Oh that hero just got level 1 air magic, I don't really care for him".

I do get lost when reading your post though, I am unsure of what it is exactly you are suggesting, best thing I could see is that you are trying to suggest that each school get a common foundation, meaby each school have a damage spell at level 1 so you can actually have a MAGE character instead of just a "I got a few buff spells, but am a sword-master" as are the common path of the mage heroes ATM (in my experience).

Thanks for taking your time writing a massive post, please elaborate to the experienced imbecile (me) what it is your post is aiming for in the endgame when the game should be released, what you want magic to look like.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I think if the magic schools had different play styles that would be awesome. I don't think spell category should be the path to get there but it should be part of the result.

For example some playstyles:

1. Fire: Mana and casting strategy. Fire cannot improve cities. Fire can't help the economy. Fire takes a lot of mana to run since you kill people with your mana.

2. Earth: Building strategy: doesn't help you kill people but it is great for buildings improvements.

3. Life: Unit strategy. Life is great for buffing units and has town enchants that buff your units. 

4. Death: deathknight, lifesteal, node corruption. Not good at buffing or building. Just active spells that debuff or lifesteal or poison.

5. Air: fast, your units are faster (city enchant, units built here are faster) you can teleport around, you can move faster. Single target damage spells instead of aoe damage spells.

6. Water: Mana and magic strategy: Your spells are better, you have more mana, maybe you can build caster units. mana production city enchant. best counterspell. Reduced mana cost buff.

This is just off the top of my head, but the general idea is think of different play styles or builds and design towards that so when you decide to make a different mage, you are naturally pulled into a whole new game experience. Try to make it fairly obvious what the core of it is and let people figure out the details and how to combine them.

Mike.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Sorry, went on vacation (and came back to a new patch notes release, woot!).

 

The general idea is that the different schools of magic need to be approached in a systematic way, and that, currently, they appear to be more a patchwork of cool spells placed where they make sense.  To elaborate - it's like several people brainstormed what some awesome spells would be (and, in my opinion succeeded) and then placed them into the magic schools where they seemed to belong.  Something along the lines of:

"A spell that cracks someone's armor and damages them would be awesome - that sounds like Earth magic, as it affects armor, so let's place it in the Earth school, and it's going to be level 4"  Is it a cool spell?  Definitely, I like using it against high level monsters.  Does it fit the vision for Earth magic?  I don't know, I don't know what the vision for Earth magic is aside from earth-like spells that shake stuff.

That's a spell-based design - come up with the spells, and grow the schools of magic by adding spells.  Even if it didn't start this way, as the devs added spells through the beta it turned into this.

What I'm suggesting is a School-based approach - where you lay out a vision for what each school will be strong at or what kind of play-style each school will support have and then slot spells into that school that fit the vision (plus some base spell types that all schools would get).  One type of vision is a major-minor-barred approach, where each school is great at something, good at something, and can't do something - that's what's described above.  There are probably 100 others that would also work though.  

Even now that we're at the cusp of Beta 5, I think that's still possible and desirable.