Again, what's wrong with adjusting the traits and items and also spell costs so you dont get 1-2 mana for the powerful spells? Or simply saying traits and items have reduced bonuses for higher level spells etc.. Dozens of way to balance.. To throw away the mana system for some untested system that probably has even more flaws is odd...

I don't believe your thesis that there is "no great way to tune mana costs based on a variable mana income from shards and buildings", but say I do..

You play the hand you are dealt. Or should every game end with you being able to cast every spell with 1-2 mana? Some games due to the settings, the variability of the map will be high powered magic games.. some won't. In some games, some strategies will be better, some spells better.. I don't know why you think this is a problem. 

Your cool down system is to artificially force players to cast all spells..even the poor ones.. It's a interesting concept that not many games in this genre have. But I rather have many interesting spells I have to ponder and decide to use then a artificial system that forces me to use inferior spells that I don't want to, simply because I already used the better ones...

Of course you will never succeed in getting all spells equally good for it's cost, but I rather try for that, then throw my hands up and give up and say.. i let you cast each spell once so you will be forced to use all of them.... That's so "binary"... Just throwing it out there..i rather have "soft" limits so maybe casting the same spell twice in TC , the spell costs x% more? 

1. Each spell still wastes your turn.

2. By wasting your feats on cost reductions you missed on boosting your combat. Which means you cannot as easily slaughter everything via melee. And yes it is WASTING feats.

If you think casting spells is a waste of a turn, I'm not sure what to tell you. We'll have to agree to disagree

It takes two feats for cost reduction. One of which is mandatory to begin with - Path of the Mage, Affinity. Adding any magic item drops tac mana costs to a near meaningless degree (page of the mage/affinity alone makes many extremely powerful spells cost an inconsequential amount of mana already)

Of course you can easily slaughter everything with melee, this thread is about why the mana system is bad. (as you can slaughter everything with magic easily as well, haw)

1, Path of a mage is a waste. Take path of the assassin for better results.

2, Why would you need to reduce costs? The only spells ever worth casting in combat are haste and battle cry for the +2 to initiative each gives.

3. Yes you can kill everything with spells just as you could with melee... except that fire spells don't hurt things immune to fire and focusing on doing magic damage means not getting insane-ridiculous dodge/defense.

You have to actually micro manage every battle. With a melee sov you can actually perform auto combat. Sure it eats up ALL your mana sometimes because the AI is that bad. but you would actually win auto combat.

4. I agree that the mana system does need reworking because its godawful... but it isn't godawful because its OP. Its underwhelming... its ALSO badly designed.

Someone suggested multiplying income and most costs by 5 (I say go for 10x) and then finely tuning, that is a good idea.

The mana system is bad cos the feats and items are unbalanced. That's not something fundamentally wrong with the mana system! It's like saying taxing people is a bad idea when actually it's the tax rates that are unfairly weighted to the rich. 

@taltamir I wouldn't go so far as to say that mage talents are useless, though I agree they are measured unfairly (as it takes five level ups to max out the skill), some of which lead to spells that are not wholey useful. Most combat related abilities do not require that many and tend to get better as they get higher.

I'm also a bit perplexed at how you came to the conclusion path of the assassin is better. Are you sure you updated to .77? Dodge is at 1/4 dexterity now and you can no longer gain 1dex/level from acrobat. Do traits continue to reappear still? I mean can you choose dexterity like five different times or something?

lol

1 spell:

Please explain the "hard micro" involved in pressing one button to cast and then the done button, taking all of 5 seconds & GAINING 27 mana. Oh and if the enemy is immune to fire there are other spells than fireball you know, right?

Mage Dominates late game with the use of only four spells. What is a waste is that the game has so many useless spells. That is what's badly designed, the whole magic system doesn't quite exactly work with the current numbers. Tactical Battles are too fast, too small, too underwhelming. When I think Tactical Battles, I think Warhammer Table Top. Seriously, the developers of this game need to just sit back and spend about two weeks just playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles to get an idea on how the hell you do it.

I'd be more than happy to help with this! Heck, cheese it and download all the manuals and just play it online via http://www.universalbattle.com/ I'll even play with them if they ask!

Warhammer Fantasy sucks once you ignore the battle system. Cities? Suck! Tech trees? Suck! etc 

This is Sarcasm right? Because Warhammer Fantasy Battles Table Top is just a battle system, period.

Agree 100% OrleanKnight

Whole Magic system is unbalanced like crazy.

+Int is basically useless unless for some odd reason you wanna try to blind dragons instead on just killing them.

+Upkeep on spells is so high (1?) that no one uses them and just nukes everything with tactical spells

+Mid lv Mage Champions can cast super powerful tactical spells with unlimited mana even though they have horrible Int due to overpowered talents.

+90% of spells are useless

+There should be SOME mana cap like Int+Shards. Even if its just really high

+Unit groups are just wierd weaker versions of champions and monsters units that cannot protect themselves from spells because resistance only protects against curses and debuffs.

+Last two magic discipline talents and multidiscipline spells shouldn't just be talent dependant, you should research to unlock them. Having Archmagi running around without even researching magic at all is annoying and unbalanced.

+Rituals Suck Hard

And several board games, computer games, Role-play games and more novels than star-wars!

I don't see the problem at all!  Having a bunch of extra mana is no different than having a bunch of extra metal.  A smart player finds ways to spend it usefully!  Plus what fun is it putting a caster with every party if they can't cast one or two spells per combat?

This is one of those not broke so don't fix it things IMHO.  The only acceptable change I could see would be if the heroes had personal mana pools that they could "fill" from the main pool by praying at the shrines.  Otherwise it leeeches slowly from the main mana pool at 2MP per turn or something.

Maybe some hero abilities such as '5 mana discount on the first spell cast each combat' would help things.

This is pretty clever actually, it has some interesting implications - a few traits/abilities of this nature and you could cast spells even early in the game, but your ability to use them continuously would be dependant on your overall mana total. I like it, particularly in combination with some form of tac mana cap

Possible have  total mana capped. In my current game I have over a thousand mana.

Loads and loads of people in this thread are flinging words like God-awful, really bad, terrible, badly designed and such around - without suggesting alternatives, and without in many cases explaining why they think it's bad.

Honestly I think that much of it is down to people not having tested enough. Believe me...once you get into middle and late game, you really don't worry about mana - at all.

It needs tweaking though. For instance you can use path of the mage+affinity+Mantle of Oceans to cast tactical spells for free. But it's a BETA, and I guess this all just goes to show that it's called beta for a reason.

Seriously ppl....chill with the way you phrase your criticism, and try to be constructive, mkay?

Why is it a bad thing that mana is precious and rare in early game and plentiful in late game?

It is not that it is rare or plentiful, it is that it is too rare to make using a mage soveriegn a viable beginning strategy, and too rare to adequately enchant units. Late game it is too plentiful to the point of being exploitative.

There have been good suggestions. One of the best ones I've read so far is reducing mana consumption on the first turn/cast. This is expandable in a number of other ways. Enchantments could use fractional costs to better balance their use, overall mana pool could be capped, increased, use a casting limit per turn, etc.

Not all suggestions need to be specific either. People voicing complaints about various aspects of the games leads to discussions on how to fix them, or at the very least let the designers know there is something that needs fixing.

One thing that annoyed me a little in my current game was my big stack was rated at epic, so I started autoresolving battles, a few turns later I had no mana left.  I checked and for some reason my epic stack of heroes was wasting mana on weak stacks of chum.  In the course of a dozen auto-resolved battles I used up around 500 mana.  I'll have to check and see if there's a setting to turn casting off during auto-resolved battles.

The Mana system works. The issues with it are Balance... you shouldn't be able to cast Master level spells for 2 mana, that just seems broken. High level spells shouldn't be cost effective. If you want to Nuke the battlefield, should should have to pay for it, as oppose to nuking one unit which should be able to be kept up all day long.

I don't want to see FE turn into MOM or AOM. What they have is a good idea that just needs some balanced and tweaks.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you on that. If you are going to use words like God-awful or terrible, you better have a good explanation as to why you think it is so, or how you would like to see it redone. I'm not saying testers can't voice their distaste for something without suggesting fixes. What I am saying is, that if something is bad enough that you really feel the need to use the word terrible, you must have at least given some thought to why you think it's terrible.

*enchntments are too expensive to be worth casting and cannot be made cheaper

*At game start you have no mana and at game end thousands

*magic is only unlocked by exp talents so you can have god wizerds without magic research (Also gives no good magic items)

*Focus is a fire spell. Wouldn't a talent make more sense?

*Enemy Sov and monsters don't even seem to have spells.

Magic doesn't need like a complete overhaul but it needs some work.

I didn't say it doesn't need an overhaul. I definately think improvements can be made. Far cry from saying God-awful or terrible, though