i would like to see gradations between life and death magic if possible, though i would like to see what spells are available to each first.

i actually like the shards though the idea of elemental power through controlling environment is interesting.

It all depends on what the basic spells for life/death magic are and how spell research is going to work. If you can specialize in spells from one element AND are not limited in research by the number of shards you have in each element AND it is a viable path to have just the basic life/death spells then it would be not much different from the MOM system. Just imagine that you get one free spellbook in either life or death magic.

But then again it might be nice that your research is dependent on what shards you posess so you have to adapt a to the environment differently each game. But I'll be happy to wait for the beta to see how the whole system plays out.

I'd like terrain accurate placement of shards, like having fire near a volcano, but I don't know about actually having the terrain type generate mana.  That seems like more work than it's worth, especially since you can terraform.  You'd lose a target for attacking, an objective to guard, all kinds of wonderful things.  In return, you'd get a complex mechanic that added detail to simple actions.  You plant grass in the sand, and your earth mana does...  Where would you even get air  from, everywhere?

The complexity haters will probably flip their lids over it, and I don't see the same kind of returns that come from a complex resource system in general, or itemized unit construction.

I'm going to wait until someone actually tells us something regarding the design of your initial character before jumping to the conclusion that life and death coming from channelers means channelers are primarily or entirely generating life and death.

What type?  It has to make sense or you'll turn people off because it's retarded.  How do you get a wind type terrain tile?  I'm seeing lots of earth, some water, and a little bit of fire, but no wind.  Unless you have lava flows all over the map, you're not really going to get much there either, they'll be exceedingly powerful locations, sparsely dispersed around the map.  Earth mana on the other hand will be unavoidably uniform.

If you end up with something equally distributed, it's going to be a counter-intuitive system that pisses people off.  Having to explain why you're getting wind from this or that tile type is going to get really old.

I disagree with the contrived part: the ancient Greeks thought that everything was made of the Big Four, and it apparently made perfect sense to them. In any event, I see nothing contrived about deaserts (with red sand) being fire generators, and ice areas being wind generators (I realize I said mountains earlier, but now I think ice would be better). There are options here, and just because this hasn't had the luxury of ever being play-refined (to my knowledge) doesn't mean it has to stay that way. Sure there are glitches, but in time, those will be ironed out, just like there are with any other game mechainc.

In short, we shouldn't run away from something just because it's new.

Well if you were to go with the classical greek elements, air is primarily wet and secondarily hot. Fire is primarily hot and secondarily dry. Earth is primarily dry and secondarily cold, and water is primarily cold and secondarily wet. Also note that they were heavily influenced by their climate, as anyone living farther north would not so readily associate air with wetness or heat - much colder and much less humidity in northern europe than in the mediterranean. I stole this from wikipedia, btw. Not to mention if you asked the greeks to classify all terrains by the four elements they'd look at you funny. All terrains contain some of each element, of course, except possibly the most extreme ones. I just don't see a terrain-based mana generation system being intuitive.

I quite honestly do not see how it would make much of a difference: whether the mana comes from the land itself or from a giant rock, what matters is being able to summon and channel it.

Please, stop making sense.

Now I'm fairly persuaded that what Scoutdog's onto is an interesting idea for a mod that begins with something like Composting the Shards.

The whole digression also reminds me that many moons ago, I was sincerly hopeful that basic options would enable us to set up a game with Shards as fixed parts of the landscape, really big but somewhat movable objects (like classic Egyptian obelisks), large but fairly mobile objects (roughly human-sized, maybe heavy as granite), or small enough to be in a sovereign or champions item inventory (basically a gemstone). But the complexophobes would probably hate that idea also.

Yeah. I tend to like points more. If your goal is to capture a lot of land to control a lot of mana, then simply capturing a lot of territory with cities becomes the priority. Given the advantages that a bigger empire already conveys, having it directly translate into more mana generation isn't also something I'm keen on.

Could be, yeah. Have to see how its implemented.

1. I don't see much being wrong with developing spells on your own: somebody had to develop them at some point...
2. A completely dungeon/hero-centered research system would REALLY skew the balence to going Gandalf. That's not saying that a little hero-basing isn't bad, but there need to be alternatives.
3. RNGs (even "quasi"RNGs) are a recipe for non-fun. Having everything dependant on some big celestial roulette wheel would REALLY tick me off.... talk about unfair!

Could you use just a little more punctuation?  It will aid me in my quest to decide whether you're just a moron, or an intentional troll.

The Warlords and Kohan series have luck based advancement from lair placement.  In some ways, it's wonderful, in other's it's hell on earth.  You can't do powerful boosts, he who lucks out ends up winning the game for no reason.  Magic or kaldunite weapons in Kohan were a perfect example of this.  Ceyah are utterly fucked against either, going from missile resistant to magic vulnerable.  On the other hand, it does add to the need for adaptive play.  I prefer just having plenty of options and an opponent that will choose from them in a less than predictable manner.