Nathikal

[Discussion] Magic - is it too weak?

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[Discussion] Magic - is it too weak?

from Elemental Forums

I have seen a few topics about magic being too strong (95% of the time, early on) and about magic being too weak (95% of the time, end game). I agree with both, personally, and figured that it'd be useful for whatever updates come to have a main list of stuffs.

So far, this is what I have.

  • Magic is based solely on your intellect for terms of damage. Which means that if you have 20 int, you can do UP TO 20 damage normally. Because of this, you can also do 1 damage, regardless of what spell you cast. Thus, magic has no value in combat - it is way too unpredictable. Casting a fireball can do 1 damage as easily as 20.
  • Because of this, you are forced to make a choice upon gaining levels - do you want to have spells that are effective (+intelligence) or being able to cast more spells (+essence). Essence itself is without value, because what's the point in actively trying to learn how to fight with a toothpick?
  • Holding a crystal shard effectively doubles the intelligence of the caster for spells of that alignment. Thus, the same fireball spell as above can do 2 to 40 damage. Holding three shards lets you do 3 to 60...etc. Certain shards affect other spells, such as an ice shard increasing the power of an arcane strike spell.
  • Thus, holding multiple shards means that your magic becomes more unpredictable. Further, unless you hold a large number of shards, all magic is fairly weak unless you are attacking a single, low-level, low-equipment enemy.
  • Summoning spells are easily the most powerful spells in the game. Instead of having a rough damage range, summoned entities can usually do a fine range of damage. Most have special abilities, not to mention that the mana expenditure is paid back almost immediately. One example is the Fire Giant, which begins with 3 mana, and has 3 abilities - a DoT, a fireball, and a firebreath, while regaining 1 mana at the start of each allied turn. Summoning one Fire Giant gets you infinite use of abilities, so long as you maintain mana. It also gives you a decently armored warrior who can fight without magic.
  • Enemies RAPIDLY become stronger than your magic. In my current game, I have a group of 4 Drath soldiers, whose health are around 312 maxed. Unless I have, following the 20 intelligence thing, approximately five shards (5-100 damage) I'll be doing little more than papercutting the Drath. My dragon, Sorag, has a single-hit fire ability that strikes for, on average, 97 damage. I'd much rather trust the dragon to handle magical killing than do it myself.
  • Magic is outdone by soldiers. It pays to have 1 team of soldiers vs. 1 Sovereign, because the Sovereign is not only a liability, but the soldiers are almost always more capable of taking out enemies.
  • There is little variety in spells. While good on one hand (if I have 2 ice shards and no other shards, I can still benefit from spells in the ice category) there is not a lot of value in pursuing other spells until you get a shard.
  • Magic spell books are also quite identical. Smacking an enemy with a fireball is the same as smacking an enemy with a lightning bolt as smacking an enemy with a rock as smacking an enemy with a shard of ice.

I've thought over a few solutions.

  • Spells would probably be more valuable if they each had a set attack value, which was modified by the caster's intelligence. Thus, one can select essence without making their magic less than useful, and those who sacrifice essence can gain greater power.
  • Holding a shard would increase the value of the intelligence. So, let's use an example - fireball has a base attack value of 15. You, the Sovereign, have an intelligence of 20. Fireball's coefficient is 0.5 - meaning that half of your intelligence is used to improve the spell. So, your fireball spell would have an attack of 15+(.5(20)) or 25. Holding a shard would double the power from your intelligence, so it would go from 25 to 35. Two shards would do the same thing - increasing the value by another 10, to an attack of 45.
  • Shards have additional value aside from just boosting spells. A fire shard lets you apply 10% of the spell's damage over 4 turns (for a total of +40% damage). Holding an earth shard lets you reduce the defense of the target. Air shards gives your spells the power to slow. Water shards can reduce mana. Casting a spell on an ally gives the opposite effect. Fire would increase attack, earth increases defense, air increases movement speed, and water can restore 3% of health over time. These effects would increase by 25% per shard controlled, to a maximum of 100% total (IE, if I have 2103 fire shards, my spells would still do no more than 80% additional damage over 4 turns; a maximum of 6% life can be restored over time from a water spell)
  • Holding a shard also gives a small boost to arcane research.
  • The end result of holding shards, thus, is clear. Fire shards are superior in terms of battle, but only over time - simply blasting away at enemies refreshes the DoT, and makes each spell less powerful than it could be (up to a maximum of 180% spell damage from fire). Water/ice spells can prolong the lives of your soldiers while freezing enemy spellcasting; air magic slows foes and makes your soldiers even faster. Earth can be used to fortify a team, or shatter the defenses of a strong foe.
  • Summoning spells would also gain the benefit of holding shards, increasing essence by 5 per shard, as well as increasing attack, defense, and health by 50%. Since summons are so much more powerful than normal magic, they will gain less per shard controlled.

PLEASE, tear my ideas apart, tell me how they are wrong. I really do feel that magic is underpowered, especially given the massive size of end game armies, and their high stats. If you think magic is overpowered, please tell me so - if I've just been doing magic totally wrong, let me know so I can fix it. I am really hoping that we can work this out.

-N

106,372 views 36 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Let's see..

  • As Robbie said, magic is a feature that made Channellers strike fear into the Titans, beings who actually managed to seal magic into the crystals. I do play defensively, and I use my magic in less subtle ways. However, I do not like the fact that if I want to fireball some insignificant peasant, he has the slightest chance of walking away. Furthermore, it makes my Sovereign less than useful later on if I want to play a pure mage type, which I do. I have no intention for my Sovereign to ever get into melee range, and I prefer it if he blows stuff up from afar. Since he can't do that reliably, there is absolutely no reason to involve him in combat.
  • What I'd love to see is to have D&D style feats added into the game. This was a major thing on Age of Wonders (the initial one) - each time you levelled, you got 10 points. You could spend them on increasing stats, or you could buy various abilities. My leader (a sorcerer type, naturally) always had a ton of magical power going for him and little stats - but he made it up by having some spells that were utterly devastating.
  • Some feats that come to mind...Battle Mage increases the attack (chance to hit) and the damage dealt of all direct damage spells. Fire/Air/Water/Earth Mastery adds additional effects to all spells of that type. Manastorm lets you increase the mana cost to deal pure, non-elemental damage. Empower Spells increases the base damage/multiplier and the cost. Lengthen Spells adds a duration to all magic you cast, while increasing the cost. Empowered and Lengthened spells are done like a toggle feature (IE, click it on the bar, and it affects all spells cast afterwards) and you can combine them (manastorm + empowered + lengthen = ouch time) to do sheer volumes of utterly rediculous damage. Mastery and Battle Mage represent passive powers, that are constantly in effect.
  • Other feats would exist. Disarm has a chance to reduce a target's attack after a successful hit. Whirling Blade lets your attacks deal AoE damage with a melee strike. Flurry gives a passive chance to strike the enemy for additional % damage. Deflect lets you gain a % chance to totally negate one attack each turn while wielding a shield, while Parry reduces your attack but gives a chance to block incoming attacks (Deflect + Parry = effective defensive soldiers). These feats let your levelling champions be MORE than just being single soldiers, and in fact these abilities could be 'bought' and trained into your soldiers.
  • It'd be nice if having powerful magic actually visibily changed things. Commanding vast amounts of flame sorcery lets you enchant your influence with sheer fiery power, slowly burning any foes who enter and passively reducing their stats. Air magic speeds up your troops and slows down foes, while possessing frost slowly freezes your domain, and makes anyone who enters you influence risks being frozen to death.
  • In fact, it'd be nice if we could further amplify shards, getting access to unique buildings and structures that grant us greater power. At the moment, getting a shard is a moment worthy of celebration. After that moment passes, life moves on. There is nothing to take advantage of these powerful things. I remember in the Beta, I built a city that had an Air Shard in/near it. The city was thus able to build the Temple of the Winds, giving a haste bonus.

 

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

Offensive magic is weak, unless you control a lot of shards (not normally a problem I control 40 or so in my present game), but mages are about more than damage aren't they? There are a lot of protective spells in that list, spells that shut down counter attack, 1/2 damage and slow movement and a lot more and those are the aggressive defense spells, there are a lot more that can drastically increase the security of your troops. I have a mage stationed in every city to go into battle with my troops and they kick large amounts of ass and overcome pretty harsh battle odds because the mage is using his magic for support instead of damaging an enemy they can damage instead.

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Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

Yes, because such support spells scale with the army units.

One Haste spell on a single soldier vs one Haste spell on 16 soldiers...

 

Support spells do scale with multi-person units and therefore they remain useful throughout the game.

This is all about scaling, not about magic itself being too weak or powerful.

 

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

ROBERT! You get karma! What you said made me figure out how offensive spells can stop sucking. Or at least one method of it.

One thing that irks me is how magic affects units. Robert compared two spells - fireBOLT and fireBALL. Instead of having AoE spells effect multiple tiles (at first) have them effect multiple units. So if I cast a firebolt, it deals X damage to a single unit in that stack. If I cast fireball, it deals X damage to all or most units in that stack. I suppose that such a method could easily change how magic feels at the moment, but only if spells themselves are still empowered by the end game.

Single target spells could have a chance to be multi-hit - that firebolt could do so much damage that it actually rips through one target and damages another. AOE spells (single tile) could possibly affect allies surrounding that square.

In such a case...single target spells need to be massively powerful. It should be mostly assured that if I throw a bolt of liquid fire at an average human, that average human needs to DIE.

Single-tile AoE spells should do X damage to all members of the units. One of the problems with the game now is that a lightning bolt on a 12-person company deals X damage to the company's total health - so if they have 200 health, 17 damage is simple taken out of that, instead of hitting each individual for 17 damage. So if each person has less then 17 HP, they all die - unless one happens to get lucky and escape the carnage.

Come to think of it, this is probably the best way to fix magic. Instead of magic affecting the GROUP as a whole, let it affect each individual unit of the group. In that case, magic in its current form (based on intelligence) is still a semi-viable method, because you are doing intelligence-damage to each individual, instead of each dealing intelligence-damage to the universal HP pool. I still maintain that we need spell power to be less shot-in-the-dark, but if spells can affect individuals it'll actually be able to lay armies to waste in a fairly reliable manner.

Further, it keeps spell strike zones from suddenly jumping from 1x1 to 3x3. Those multi-tile spells would scale in the sense that they can't do X damage to every single person, but perhaps only X damage to a certain number of units (perhaps up to intelligence?). This means that if you summon a blizzard, it won't be able to instantly lay waste to a whole army, but it will be able to lay waste to most of the people in that army.

This method also brings the fun fill idea of magical combat. Since spells in this case can very easily smite a small army, protection and defensive spells suddenly become more than a little viable. One thing I like about the Eragon series' magic is that, since sorcerers are able to basically one-shot anything that isn't protected, casters are assigned to a more defensive role of protecting units, because it is very easy to simply locate a few unprotected soldiers and snuff them out with next to no effort.

How to translate this? Well, there are the cliched resistance spells and basic shields. Boring, right? Right. In such a manner, it's easy to load up on protection spells and let your troops wail away. There isn't much about it that's strategic. Instead of just casting basic defenses, all casters can learn (CAN learn. Can) how to extend an essence barrier. When combat starts, a caster may place a barrier around X units (whole units, like companies, function as one - a benefit of their training. And to keep them viable in game) which travels with them. Spells that hit those guarded units act like they are under a mana shield - it weakens the defender, who is automatically under the effects of such a mana barrier (a permanent blessing from being an essence wielder).

Each spell that hits a protected unit takes half of its mana cost out of the defender, rounded down. So if I hurl a fireball casting 10 mana at a defended unit, it's automatically null, and the defending mage loses 5 mana. At the end of the day, it is not viable to spam damage spells on protected units, and at the same time it makes sharing your essence extremely useful when you are under attack by other casters. Furthermore, soldiers are still worthwhile - if you can't blast an enemy apart with magic, you should poke him full of arrows.

Sorcerers will eventually be able to cast an anti-weapon ward on themselves, which makes them extremely dangerous enemies and fabulous allies. These wards will be like the D&D Protection From spells (Protection from Normal Weapons, Protection from Arrows, etc.) and instead of being like a mana shield, these will simply function on their own, without costing additional mana to uphold - a cast and forget sort of defense. Some sorcerers of very great power (and with very much magical knowledge under their belt) can get a special enchantment that functions like a Contingency spell from D&D. I'm going off of Baldur's Gate 2 here, where casters will pop up, immediately be protected by some immensely powerful defense magic, and proceed to be painful. Sorcerers who can use a Contingency spell can save a number of spells and unleash them as an action. In essence, they cast the spells in advance (setting up the enchantment) and then they release the spells at no additional cost.

Example: I want to set up my Contingency, so I cast Haste, Protection from Weapons, and Protection from Arrows. It costs me 2 mana for each spell and 10 for the Contingency itself, so I spend 16 mana then and there. Thirty six turns later, I get into combat, with full mana. So I whip out my Contingency, and voila - those spells immediately affect me, and I still have full mana.

The end result - casters are able to immediately become powerful with a measure of forethought. They can effortlessly lay waste to unprotected armies, and are easily thwarted by armies that are defended by another caster. When two casters end up fighting, it is a tactical, fierce thing - you can't just waste spells, but you can't not cast.

Thoughts?

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

Magic needs more spells and more diversity... so many are X spell = Y damage.  The spells should have more variety of effects on the target.  And summoning spells should be linked with magic shards for the summoned creature... thus someone with 10 air shards would be able to summon a more powerful air elemental as compared with someone with 1 air shard.

Reply #31 from Elemental Forums Top

My only qualm with making summons more powerful is that summons are already immensely stronger than normal magic. Not only do summons last longer, but they usually have nifty abilities to make things extremely painful for your enemy.

At the same time, I don't know if it makes sense, lore-wise, to have summons be powered just by holding some shards. If I incant a spell to summon a fire golem, I get a fire golem. Maybe the abilities can be magnified, if they draw on the shards, too.

Reply #32 from Elemental Forums Top

Goodmorning all,

I Agree with Robbert and Nathikal, 

Some spells need to be redesigned to hit multiple units within one square, thus scale with the size of the army being hit.

I took the liberty of extending the concept at https://forums.elementalgame.com/394023 by formalizing it.

Under that system Fire Bolt would have High Attack, High Damage,  but 1 strike and 2 rerolls.  and be treated like an archery shot (taking 1/3 or 1/6th of a target when it hit).
FireBall would have low-medium attack low-medium damage, but have a number of strikes equal to the number of unused 'targets' in the unit being hit, up to N (so dragons with 150 targets don't get taken out with a single fireball). The spell would consume the remaining targets(with type archery to prevent the unit from becoming engaged, possibly another spell could cause engagement,  wall of blades comes to mind.) of the unit being hit until it moved, attacked, or ended turn.

 

Other spells could also be easily worked in, so that they scale as needed.  some spells intended to lay the smack down on huge armies, Others intended for single targets. 

The only thing that this system doesn't fix without additional re-balancing is for direct damage is when you attack a single hero or sovereign.  Unlike dragons and trolls and the like Sov's and Heroes still have only 3 'targets', so late game spell power for one 'swing' spells would still need to be improved.  Still I think it's a good start.  Suggestions, comments welcome.

Robbie Price.

Reply #33 from Elemental Forums Top

You do realize the game is called Elemental: War of Magic right? Right now it feels like Elemental: War of wandering monsters and cantrips.

 

What a quote , that really sums it up.

Reply #34 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Nenjin, reply 20
I think what Stardock was going for is that they didn't want to have spells have independent damage values, modified by intelligence, because then they'd have to write a battery of spells to scale up and that was boring, considering they have, what, 6 varieties of damage sources to address?

So instead they hinged damage on intelligence, and made spells modify your intelligence damage. So there are "up to half your intelligence" "double your intelligence" "equal to your intelligence." traits on spells.

I suppose they figured then they could just focus on writing a handful of damage spells per element, and let the intelligence growth of casters balance it out over time. It seems like this idea wasn't tested for real balance, it looks good on paper...but most things do.

I think they wanted a very narrow power scale in the game too, but armies completely blew that hope out of the water. Sort of like whoever was doing items, and perhaps armies, wasn't exactly on the same page as the magic guy about what scale they were working with. It could all be addressed by balancing and time, but the core system isn't that interesting, and its reverse thinking and severe damage range has a lot of people scratching their heads.

It's kind of like they tried to do the exact opposite of the common spell formula.

Most games have the set damage for each spell and the extremes are scaled to the level of the game you're at, and they control for and adjust damage variance. Intelligence (or THE mental stat) usually contributes secondarily to the overall calculation.

Here the stat is the core and really the spell just modifies what raw damage your intelligence can deliver, modifies its delivery AND goes for 100% uncontrolled variance.

Yay for trying something new but...I think the whole model needs to be more in line with what's tested and proven. Unless there is some serious balancing coming and an absolutely innovate way of thinking about spells...the latter of which hasn't been shown so for.

I really think Stardock looked at the dominant way of handling magic today in video games, knew they wanted to do something different, but didn't commit to the time necessary to design something really new that also gelled in a live game. There are times when I can kind of see what they were going for, where spell power is more driven by the character than the spell per se....but it's just not working now, and it does sap a ton of flavor out of magic.

 

 

this.

 

i would also like to raise a few more objections:

- intelligence and shards have absolutely no benefit for spells that don't deal damage. that's a biggie.

- (on an almost unrelated note) their seems to be no reason not to equip your sovereign with armour, which goes against immersion and what i expect.

 

i believe the solution is to tie abilities and damage to the spells themselves, but then use shards and abilities to

- improve the performance (ie, damage, where possible)

- reduce their mana costs so they can be used more often (or even at all)

 

ideally i'd tie the latter to intelligence, the former to shards and retain essense for total magica for the sake of continuity.

this makes learning spells a big deal, as that (rather than stat improvement) is the prime cause of damage. limit who can cast spells by level: ie you must be level 3 to cast level 3 spells, so then you can't just spam casters.

it also offers a solution to the magica drout that a lot of people are complaining about, by giving characters a means of reducing mana costs.

 

whatever they do with spells though, the whole systems needs a total redesign from the ground up. don't just throw a load more spells at us, or a spell creation tool so we can "fix it ourselves."

 

i'd also introduce a range of items (robes, to give people a meaningful choice between casting and combat) that increase mana regen rates.

 

finally i'd like to raise my grievances with spellbooks. why do all the default sovereigns have all the starting spellbooks? i can see why they've done it (to prevent characters not having spells that match their shards), but if that's such a big problem, then why allow the player to make the same mistake? with my first sovereign i focused on magic and took 3 spellbooks, only to later find that i had less potential spells than any other character in the game!

just do what everyone else has been saying and remove inventory (and spellbooks, giving all the base ones to everyone) from character creation entirely. it's just a pointless pointless potential pitfall for new players. if you have items you really want to give to sovereigns for lore reasons, then have these tied to factions, so that whoever controls the faction gets them.

edit: i also agree with the comments saying that AOE spells should affect all units in a square. in any other game attacking these large dense groups is exactly what these kind of spells are for. however, i still want them to affect multiple squares; otherwise they just don't look right. if this is too much to be balanced by mana costs/level, then perhaps consider AOE only effecting squares adjacent to the centre (in a cross) rather than a whole 3x3 square?

Reply #35 from Elemental Forums Top

While I love AoE spells, the problem in Elemental is that an AoE doesn't do anything useful unless you're fighting individuals. If I have 20 int, then that means that a bunch of units can get up to 20 damage...and late game, an AoE spell isn't useful in that dealing up to 20 damage to a bunch of units is not worth putting my sov in danger. Or any other caster.

Not to mention, since essence doesn't come back, it's stupid to waste it on making champions stronger when, ultimately, they can't do much.

The biggest issues:

  • Each spell book is almost entirely the same. This needs to be fixed, because I want fire magic to FEEL different from ice magic.
  • Spells are copied. Said that already, but let's spread it again: make spells unique. Not just the books, or trees, or whatever, but the spells themselves.
  • Magic doesn't scale offensively.
  • There is no way to specialize, or be unique in any way. My fireball is the same as one cast by any other Sov in game.
  • Certain spells are very strong. Buffs and summons especially - much as I like a summoned army of buffed soldiers, I'd rather still have the option to blast an enemy off the face of the earth.

What do you all want magic to DO, exactly? That's another problem we're running across - it seems to me that everyone has a different opinion on magic's use in the game.