Spells That Pack a Punch
Published on November 17, 2010 By ScottTykoski In Elemental Dev Journals

Since launch, one of the major complaints about Elemental: War of Magic was that the last bit of our title (the "Magic" part) was found to be...lacking (to put it gently). Global mana addresses areas of cheese, but without a significant overhaul to the Spellbooks and Spells you’re casting, that side of the game would still feel weak.  We’ve taken the following steps to rectify this in 1.1....


1. Spellbook Re-evaluation: There were several problems with the way spells have been organized in Elemental thus far, the most damning being the selection of Elemental based spells when designing your Sovereign. We’ve now moved these out of customization and into the tech tree, so you can make the choice to grab those books as shards are discovered. In their place, players can select books specific to a given strategy. The “Mobility” book has movement and teleportation spells, “Enchantment” gives the players city buffs, “Combat” does damage and protects friendly units relative to the caster’s INT, and “Terraforming” gives players the ability to sculpt the landscape in interesting ways.

2. No two spells should feel the same: Spellbooks in v1.0 through v1.09  were filled with tons of spells that all felt the same: Lightning, Fireball, Hurl Boulder, etc.  They were various tweaks on the formula, but the end result was a magic system that lacked interesting (and cool) choices.  Our motto going into 1.1 was that each and every spell (and each spellbook, for that matter) should feel unique and tempting over the use of another.

3. Bigger, badder, more ballsy high level spells: When I get a level 5 spell, it better not be a ‘slightly stronger version’ of a level 1-4 spell, ‘cause that would be lame.  Instead, I demand serious L5 muscle to my magical might - uniquely awesome options as I conquer the world.  For example...

L5 Mobility - Call of the Titans
A unstoppable spell that gathers ALL friendly unstationed troops and lets you target them directly into enemy territory.

L5 Air - Tornado
Cast upon the army of your foe, this spell will scatter all units in the stack, making them easy targets to pick off.

L5 Life - Death Ward
Taking 250 mp and 1mp/turn maint., Death Ward will allow any champion unit to escape death at the end of a losing battle (even if the battle is fought on enemy soil).

At the end of every spellbook the player will be greeted by a spell that was worth the effort to learn it.


Most of the old spells have been stripped out, and the v1.1 beta will have 68 new and improved spells. While the final 1.1 build will have around 75 spells to help your rise to power, we’ll continue taking suggestions on how to best make the ‘Magic’ half of our subtitle really shine!

Enjoy!

 


 


Comments (Page 4)
8 PagesFirst 2 3 4 5 6  Last
on Nov 18, 2010

As soon as 1.1 comes out we will certainly get alot of modders going through the inde of game functions to create new spells I am sure. I get out of school by the 20th and can promise at least ten new spells I have been planning that could fit into maybe three of the books. I think it would be good to have some of the trusty modders work together on a spell expansion once we see the content in 1.1. Once we have the new version of all the xmls I can start preaching the good news of the gospel of modding to those who rightly note the lack of strategic variety in 62-75 spells.

I do thin we can agree that getting a core set of spells is the right move at this juncture. Set the tone for magic form and function and then let the gamers create the content.

Also here is just a few ideas I have had during school:

1. Spell that spawns a neutral but very hostile monster randomly in enemy territory (target a city and it will spawn ina  random zone based on inteligence, assuming calculate works now).

2. Spell that turns the battlefield to waist-high mud, causing all units to have a fixed speed that is very low (allowing heavy and archer units to even the match against very fast units).

3. Spell that reduces one's hit points to one but subtracts that amount from the targeted unit (great if you have a good healer working for you and a high Con).

4. Spells that allow units to specialize in healing (I would like to say that this type of spell will prevent one from attacking or perhaps will always cause a penalty for the duration of the battle).

many more to come...

The point is that 75 is very close to 500 when you count in modders.

on Nov 18, 2010

BoogieBac
What I'd love to see is the modders kick around the new GameModifiers and various tags added to extend spell functionality. If we've added a feature where, with relative ease, we can make it considerably more useful to modders, I'll be happy to get it in!

In the four posts starting here I have collected a lot of desireable spell mechanics. "Multiple spell effects" and "procs" probably being the most useful (to modders) among those but of course, these are probably the most work to implement because there isn't anything like it, yet. =P

on Nov 18, 2010

Raise volcano? Please? Prettyplease?

 

edit: Curgen's Inferno... gotcha! *KABOOM*

on Nov 18, 2010

Sounds good.....but there goes my spell contest entry "Immortal Army" sounds a bit to close to Death Ward, oh well back to the old drawing board I still have time to come up with something else.

on Nov 18, 2010

L5 Mobility - Call of the Titans
A unstoppable spell that gathers ALL friendly unstationed troops and lets you target them directly into enemy territory.

Am I reading it wrong or it is teleport-into-enemy-land spell? If so, that sounds like very bad idea.

And theres strong opposition to any teleport spells at all, and they actually make sense sometimes.

on Nov 18, 2010

I think a lot of concern over L5 spells is because People fail to understand that you are going to have to save for a while and be very frugle with mana even to cast them once, you won't be casting an L5 spell every other turn.

on Nov 18, 2010

The number of spells should be increased over time but I think Stardock know that, and I have to agree with them if a spell is not unique it really shouldn't be included, it's pointless having a dozen magic books all with 50 spells in that are actually duplicates of 5 spells with different descriptions and partical effects.

What they've done is remove a lot of the dead wood and add a few new things to replace some of them, while fixing some core issues. I expect future patches to add more spells. It would be nice to have more spells in 1.1 but I don't want them bugged or meaningless so I can wait for more spells.

on Nov 18, 2010

luketan

75 spells is far too little. We need at least 200 spells (like MOM). But more importantly the spells have to be different! Perhaps the game mechanics in EWOM are too simple to support that amount of variety , I don't know.

The last part is correct. There's only so many things you can do with the current mechanics in other areas. You can't for example have spells that give units flight, wall climbing, etc, because there's no walls and no "flying" mechanic.

People need to remember that this is a long term project. 1.1 isn't the end of magic where nobody will ever add another spell.

on Nov 18, 2010

Looks good. I'm however hellbent on the spellcolors in Magic The Gathering and Master of Magic so anything else than that seems not as good. Might be wrong....

on Nov 18, 2010

L5 Air - Tornado
Cast upon the army of your foe, this spell will scatter all units in the stack, making them easy targets to pick off.

I love this one because it discourages lumping your entire army into a single "stack of doom" without feeling like an arbitrary restriction.

on Nov 18, 2010

Campaigner
I'm however hellbent on the spellcolors in Magic The Gathering and Master of Magic so anything else than that seems not as good.

You need some of these.

 

L5 Mobility - Call of the Titans
A unstoppable spell that gathers ALL friendly unstationed troops and lets you target them directly into enemy territory.

While I'm not fanatically opposed to anything that has to do with teleporting, I think that this is way off scale
unless it also gathers all AI unstationed troops to the same location, resulting in one well... titanic battle.

Then it would be a great "mop up" spell because it sucks chasing down the very last enemy unit.
It's no challenge to do so "manually", it's not interesting. It's just annoying.

on Nov 18, 2010

Another thing to remember at this point is that many of the Strategic Spells have little use because the AI does not use them against your Cities, thus using them, even just for shits and giggles, is a pointless waste of Mana.

When the AI starts devastating our cities with Magic, then we will see an marked increase in the number of spells that will need be used "all the time".

There is little point in having 200 Spells if only 75 might actually see any prevalent use. Not to say that more isn't better, but, quality and usefulness way outweighs simple Quantity.

 

on Nov 18, 2010

Yeah, the big thing we're going for in 1.1, magic wise, is to make sure spell options available are interesting, unique, and have little overlap, with the unterstanding that spells will being added throughout the process (read: the magic system will never stagnate). 

If the 75 spells in the final v1.1 are balanced, unique, and feel like they have a strategic use, I feel we've hit our goal (with loftier goals already being plotted for future patches).

on Nov 18, 2010

One important point on spell design:

Please keep the resist calculation in the Spell.xml instead of making it a hardcoded black box system.

The spells calculate their damage therre, they can also calculate their resist chance.

That ensures some desperately needed flexibility like...

Other resists:  Just because there is a "magic resistance" stat... that doesn't mean that every spell has to use it.
With a Throw Rock spell the projectile itself could be entirely unmagical and the whole spell could "resist" on the unit's dodge and defense stats.
Illusions might take the target's INT into account. Blood magic spells the total HP...

That would in turn allow adding vulnerabilities to certain creatures.

7 hidden "vulnerability" unit properties that default to decimal 1.0  if not assigned to the unit. (Fire, water... life, physical)

A fire spell would always factor in the Vulnerability.Fire in it's damage and/or resist calculations so a plywood golem would have a harder time to resist fire spells.
A glass golem would have maybe  0.7 Vulnerability.Fire but 1.3 Vulnerability.physical.

These vulnerabilities would not need to be displayed with the unit data. The generic "magic resistance" stat is enough information.

on Nov 18, 2010



While I'm not fanatically opposed to anything that has to do with teleporting, I think that this is way off scale
unless it also gathers all AI unstationed troops to the same location, resulting in one well... titanic battle.

Then it would be a great "mop up" spell because it sucks chasing down the very last enemy unit.
It's no challenge to do so "manually", it's not interesting. It's just annoying.

Anyone else thinking "Apocolypse" spell from Populous (or am I the only really old one around here)

other cool ideas from that (most of which wouldn't work in Elemental, but might spark some that would)

Baptismal fonts (a unit falling in them changed sides)

Swamp which propagated in the same way as John Conways "Life" http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

Flood - which raised the sea level one unit

8 PagesFirst 2 3 4 5 6  Last