That makes sense, but it doesn't have anything to do with life and death being sepearte mechanic-wise from the Big Four. It just means they shouldn't be mutually exclusive, which I could definately see being possible and fun. What I was referring to in the original post was a system like MoM's, where life and death are "just another element".

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.

I kinda want to agree with you, but part of what I want out of having the game include a 'unified,' grey-area-friendly treatment of Life/Death is that I want values-based choices to be both more important and more interestingly complicated than they are in GC2. To me, the biggest weakness in TBS games has not seen much improvement since Civ1 and MoM--so-called AIs are diplomatic idiots and/or schizophrenic pseudo-nations with no ability to develop a sense of history within a given game. I want to see my actions as a human player leave lasting, 'logical' effects on how the AIs respond to me, and I want them to have the same thing going on amongst themselves.

Hmph. In a game named Elemental, it hardly seems like any element is "just another element." But I think I'm finally getting near some understanding of your four-elementer thing and I suspect I have fairly analgous hopes except that mine are focused on essenece mechanics and not mana 'flavors' or magic 'schools.'

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 agree, they'd all have to be pretty unique, but it's a matter of being "unique like everybody else", or being... for lack of a better term... uniquely unique.

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.

I don't think any of the devs have gone so far as to say "Life=good" "death=evil".  Just simply that the two forces are diametrically opposed to each other.  Just like you can't take both life and death books in MOM, and Life magic users and Death magic users don't generally get along...

Don't get me wrong, it needs a lot of tweaking, but I still think that something like this would work. There's no reason why we can't have mana shards in addition to this, if they were significantly powerful they would still have strategic value, and would still need to be defended. However, the system would not be as terribly complicated as some people say. The basic system is just that youy get mana from the terrein you control. Each terrein would have the mana type clearly listed.

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.

The best terrain for wind would probably be grasslands, but you're right it would be entirely contrived and not worth it.

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.

Wouldn't someplace with ice generate umm...water?

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.

The storyline is based on a crystal shattering and scattering shards around. Channelers are powerful because they can draw from those shards, which aren't supposed to be all that common. If mana flows freely from the terrain itself, it seems odd that the ability to draw from it would be so uncommon.

It also makes early land grabs more valuable because they translate directly into more mana without having to hold anything.

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.

That isn't quite accurate. I see Scoutdog's proposed system increasing the value of land overall. Right now with the shards you basically have strategic points that need to be defended opposed to actual regions.

This quote from Frogboy also points out why trying to capture as much land as possible wouldn't necessarily be a good idea. If you own almost all the land in the game it won't do you much good if you only have a small amount of essence left and can't cast powerful spells. Not to mention if you try to expand your nation faster than it is growing defense of the outer regions would be very difficult.

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.

If at all possible, I will try to make it. If I can't, I'm sure somebody else will, and I'll be sure to drop them a line.

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.

Well I myself would like to see the magic research system a bit more detailed than a structured book of magics one just puts their hand into and wallah you have a new spell to research. I'd like to see extra power in magics come from exploring and actually finding these scrolls/books in the game. In dungeons, crypts, abandoned castles and other places that heroes roam. This watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat spell research tree is old and unrealistic as well. I do like that it is semi random based on the number of spell books you have (ala MOM), but, as I said I'd really like to see things unfold in an adventure exploration type of way where you have to find your books and spells to research, sell the ones that you aren't interested in to other ai players or if multiplayer to those humans you are playing against. This would lead to many different outcomes and spell research gathering than any other game before it. HOMM sort of does this if I recall. You had schools of knowledge you found for core spells, but, it had a very simplified spell research system overall that I really didn't care for. Have enough money and build this building and wallah you can have level 5 spells blah boring.

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!

Life is unfair live with it.

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.

I can agree that Life/Death differ enough from the 4 elements to make them operate with their own set of rules.

I can also go with Life mana being generated by LIFE.

I am at a bit of a loss on the death mana being generated by the transition from Life to Death though.  Does that make Death Magic a form of Vampirism?  Kind of sounds like death magic drains life from living things to form mana.