Snowballing in the endgame in your average TBS game is very rarely a symptom of bad design and much more often a symptom of incompentent AIs or self-interested players. If a single player is so far beyond all the rest that they can't even gang up and take him down, then he deserves to win; if they refuse to gang up to take him down, then they deserve to lose.

Unless you're talking about 1v1, which is an edge case (and not, I would hazard, the centerpiece of the TBS experience for most people).

@ Sammual,

I am not sure that what you are proposing eliminates mop-up or prolongs the agony. I think there are already a lot of ideas on the table that SD has discussed to get rid of the 25% playing and 75% mop-up model. The fact that a very small army may be made up of extremely powerful  creatures, and this small army may have been being held in reserve. Various other things have been mentioned. What I don't like about it is it makes strategics losses and victories less meaningful - the imbued essense is really what makes that piece of real estate you are fighting over worthwhile, it is amethod to "soften the blow" of making a bad strategic decision of infusing your essence into a piece of land that is difficult to defend, or the tactical error of not actually defending a location that may have been strategically awesome. It's like having a chess game and saying 3 out of 4 times (using your 75% example) that when you lose a piece that you get it back.

Certainly there need to be options to make it possible for a channeler to fight back from the brink of ruin and be eventually victorious. That being said, there should NOT be cheese victories where a well played game ios beaten by a poorly played game that was kept alive by lifelines from the game because the downside of poor choices had the eonsequence softened in the interest of "keeping them in the game".

I would much rather take the lumps, learn from my mistakes and know never to do that again in future games.

I feel that once you imbue a piece of land with you essence you should never get that essence back. It would not be worth the attempt to take over territory, if the enemy could turn it back into a wasteland the moment he lost it for the essence.

After all, the use of essence should never be taken lightly.

I think finite essence locks you in thematically to a sort of traditional end of the age of myth story: gods and titans battle it out, but gradually fade away and are superceded by their creations and the rise of civilization and all that. This could be good I guess, I'm slightly tired of replaying that particular scenario though. Oh? The elves are part of a once great but now declining civilization you say? Never heard that one before.

In gameplay terms I'm generally in favour of permanent character advantages being acquired through a different currency, more or less completely separate and non-tradeable with disposable resources. That way you can have fun customizing your character even as you get your bottom kicked.

I don't think that any last man standing game can eliminate mop-up.  Multiple victory conditions can go a LONG way to doing this. 

I am a big fan of most ideas to get rid of the 25 / 75 model.

I don't want to take away all meaning from each strategic or tactical victory, just to grant options.  If I spent a lot of my essence imbueing the land the game is over for me if I lose it.  I want lossing that land to hurt but not end my game. 

I think that what is on that land should be just as important.  You aren't going to spend your limited essence imbuing land unless there is something there you need or you are going to build something you need there.  If the location was 'strategically awesome' then it has value over that of the essence in it.  As for the chess example its more like saying you will play 3 out of 4 games.  You don't have to add 30 sec to your clock every time you take a new squre in chess.

I agree.  I want options to make it possible to fight back from a bad spot.  I don't want Elemental Welfare that keeps poor players in the game permently.

If you lose 100% of your investment when you lose a square of land you imbued then the player who imbues the least land will just spent his essence on agression and win more often then not.

Sammual

I never thought of it in that way.  I like this way of describing finite essence.

So in MoM terms you starting character gen choices are you permanent character advantages and everything in game is you tradeable, disposable resources (Gold, Mana, and the things you bought with them).

Sammual

Master of Magic managed to dodge this bullet - the Spell of Mastery gave you control over all of the magic in both planes. I could definitely see one or more of the victory conditions giving you "unlimited essence". In fact that would be one motivation to continue to play sandbox after you win - to truly weild complete, God-like control over the world that you vanquished.......ahem I mean healed.

And I'd like to add that the above-mentioned belatedly understood bad mistakes are often good ideas based on the information you had at the time, and they're less of strategic mistakes than bad luck. Those are the things that I don't want to really decide the game (although they will always be there and will always have some impact).

I also don't like the idea of channelers regaining essence when their lands are conquered. The decision to imbue strategically valuable but also vulnerable land with essence should be a meaningful one. If you know you'll get your essence back if someone conquers it, then it's hardly a choice. And in that vein, channelers should get their essence back when their champions are killed, or their spells are dispelled. There is zero difference between all those situations, but if channelers get their essence back whenever their essence-imbued champions/spells/land 'expire' then using essence is hardly a risk.

Don't get me wrong, I want a finite amount of essane. I just don't want the investing process to be irreversible. If I put X amount of essance into a city or sowrd or hero, I want to be able to return the object to its regular weak state, and get that essence back for something else.

You and I are on completely opposite sides of this discussion, Scoutdog I want to be able to gain essence throughout the game, and I want the investing process to be irreversible. If it is reversible, then the decision of what to use your essence on is trivialized, because you could always change your mind. There is no risk if you can always undo and reuse. That's good for Adobe Photoshop, not so much for a TBS...

I said reversible, but I never said easily reversible. The essence you invest would have to be locked in there for a number of turns before you use it again, and it should require a significant amount of mana, time, and maybe even money or production points to pull it out. Then there's the fact that you may have to completely destroy a magical item to get back your essence, and that a hero who has become Mr. Universe using your power is not going to want to give it back w/out a fight.....

Now, I think that your system would also work, and in my opinion it would be great to see in the game. I just don't think that it has very many other supporters in the community, or that it is where the devs are going.

(note to all: manna is a type of wheat. Mana is magical power )

And I half agree/half disagree with you both.

The thread title is essence should be essential. Hear, hear!

being able to gain essence, I feel trivializes it. If it is a limited, finite resource that is what makes it precious.

being able to recoup essence from your lands that are conquered, dead heroes (or living ones) trivializes it. Imbuing essence should be an irrevocable decision, and any ability to even regain a portion of it, in my opinion, jsut trvializes the decision that you made when you invested it in the first place (obviously the more you recover, the more it trivializes.

Essence should be essential. Why try to water it down? You've got mana as a renewable source of magic power. Essence should be investing a piece of your life force (or similar in gravity).

edit: after giving some thought I will say this - it would suck to get to end game and be 1 essence unit short of being able to cast some incredible world changing spell. So I would not be opposesd to some way - something that was prohibitively costly, would return a very small part of what was initially invested - of regaining a bit of essence. But it should be so costly, so painful and in all other ways obnoxious that the times that it would be used would be rare - as in "running into a dragon" rare.

Well, you just touched on another reason why I don't like the "what you start is what you get" way of doing things. The amount of essence channelers are given would totally determine how much channelers will be able to do throughout the course of a game, even if that game lasts for a hundred thousands turns. I don't like that. I want all my games, long or short or ridiculously long, to be dynamic, and having some pitiable predetermined amount of essence seems counter to that.

I don't see how having methods to gain essence trivializes it if done right. You yourself said you want channelers to start with their full essence, but have to research or put effort into using all of it, and pointed out that the difference between our two preferences is subtle. Subtle being the key word. In both our methods, the channeler can slowly increase his usable essence. In yours, that ability is capped out at some predetermined, arbitrary limit. In mine, it continues on and allows for natural progression of your channeler and kingdom for however long the game goes on. Game-limiting vs. open-ended.

It doesn't give your channeler unlimited essence (unless you intend to play a never-ending game), and it still forces you to use your essence very carefully because whatever essence you have, besides what you started out with, was hard-earned, and any essence that you might have in the future will be equally hard-earned.

It's still an undo button, even if it has some small print attached to it. I agree with whoever said above that essence should be totally separated from things like gold or production and maybe even mana. Investing gold to get back essence is silly and really does trivialize essence (it turns it into something that can just be bought). Having a good economy should not make it any easier to get essence, as the two are fundamentally unrelated. But yeah... I just really don't like the idea of being able to say, "whoops, that's not working as well as I thought," or, "hmm, that would be even better! Let me just wait a little bit and then throw money at it and get my essence back."

There's also a question of whether there is an experience/levelling system (seems likely), and how it will interact with essence.

I just don't like the idea of using up all your essence and having no way to get it back. You would wind up with a very long and boring wait while somebody finishes you off. There should be some way to either get it back or get more. It just shoudn't be easy. Besides, if you need to hoard the essence like that, you miss out on a lot of cool stuff, like spells etc.

Ah, so we actually don't disagree with each other all that much. You think there should be a finite amount of essence, but that it should be recoverable, while I think there should be no preset limit and that channelers can gain essence slowly and/or with great difficulty over time by various means. I prefer my way more because it's more open-ended and less limiting, and even though essence-spending decisions could be made just as important in either method, the concept of recovering spent essence still seems wrong to me.

I like your way. It is a lot like mine, in the fundamental mechanics. In fact, I like it better, except for the fact that the devs and popular opinion seem to be for a more limited system. Either one would work, I think. I just want to be able to SEE all the fun things you can do with essance.

Well we don't really know what the devs are planning to do with essence - they have hardly told us anything about it. And from this thread it seems to me like public opinion is also pretty split (maybe with a slight leaning towards the wrong side ).

Yeah, I think that there are fewer individual people on the other side, but they are a lot more vocal. I think I saw a post by Brad that mentioned not getting essence back easily, but I can't produce it for scrutiny. It sure seems like it will be finite, but maybe that's just bad phrasing.

Guilty.

I am 100% against there being no risk or penalty involved.  I just think that you should be able to change your strategy and get back a portion of the essence you spent.  Make it cost, in time, mana, gold, AND a percentage of the essence you imbued.  For mobile assets if you lose them the essence is gone, I'm fine with that.  For imbueing the land I can't see it being worth doing for any area other then you home city if there is no way to change you mind later and re-gain some of the essence you spent.

I don't want any essence expenditure to be a trivial decision but I want options to change my strategy when I get new information.

Sammual

I just got an answer on another post, although not specifically from the devs. Essence is finite. Apparently.

I have to stress how little I want essence and gold to have anything to do with one another in at any time, in any situation. Reclaiming spent essence, if they decide to make such a thing possible, should have absolutely nothing to do with gold. Mana, time, and less than perfect reclamation efficiency are fine, but not gold. Also, the only reason we know of to imbue land with essence is in order to make it habitable and found a settlement there. So unless you like to raze your cities often, I don't see how you don't see that as worth it.

And, I also want options to change my strategy to get new information, but I'd rather that my options come from the ability to gain more essence rather than reusing spent essence. And my main reason for supporting an 'increasing essence' model is that it's so much more open ended and is more adaptable to different games. If I'm playing a small map that ends quickly, it isn't really going to matter which method is used. But if I'm playing a huge map that is going to take many hundreds or even thousands of turns to complete, limiting the player to some arbitrary preset amount of essence is nothing if not limiting. Let's say the average 'huge' game takes 1000 turns to play, and so the amount of essence is based on that. Well what if, for some reason, my game lasts 2000 turns? Or even more? With a preset finite amount of magic, even with an inefficient reclamation process, I'd be so limited in what I could do with my channeler in the late-game. Maybe I could support having 10 champions. But if the game has gone on so long, what is wrong with being able to field 15 champions at once? Even worse, what if my first 10 champions die? What if the game is so chaotic that no one really gains a real upper hand and everyone loses most of their champions, and over time everyone's essence is exhausted? The game would no longer be a War of Magic and channelers would stop being particularly important. And, why shouldn't I be able to cast several world-wrecking spells in the course of the game if the first didn't turn out to be enough?

Being out of essence != no magic. So thorwing out a scenario where everyone runs out of essence (we have no idea if that is even remotely possible) but even if they did you still gots mana, you would only be limited from the most powerful spells that do use essence

To me, essence is equivalent to the queen in a game of chess. If only one player loses the queen, it doesn't mean the game is over for that player, ESPECIALLY if the queen was well spent in taking other pieces before being captured.

If both players lose their queens, it doesn't mean they might as well quit. I dunno though I am starting to come around a bit I guess, I do see your point sorta, I jsut liked the original idea as I understood it that you would have a set amount of essence, essence was probably the only resource that was not renewable, I thought it was a cool concept. Guess we will see what happens in beta. Hopefully just another month or so to wait.

Yeah, I know that even if channelers run out of essence they'll still have mana and their regular spells, but the versatility and overall utility of your channeler seems like it would plummet once all your essence is spent with no way to get more. I'm assuming world-wrecking spells will require essence, and I would hate to see myself arbitrarily limited to how many of them I could cast during the course of the game (even if it will only happen in one out of 40 games).

It just seems like preset finite levels of essence would lead to a fairly stale end-game. Whereas if you could get more essence, it could potentially be used as a way to make the mop-up process both quicker and more fun.

Having essence be totally non-renewable has its charm, but I don't really think it has any advantages over having it just be a unique property of channelers that is very hard to increase. There should be no essence-generating buildings or anything, for example. Quests, maybe channeler traits/specialization/focus, draining it from or receiving it as gifts from other channelers/magic beings could be the only way to get more of it - and maybe a very small but constant trickle of it over time. It shouldn't be tradable or mineable or any mundane thing like that. And I think it would be just as precious as if there were an absolute limit on it.