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.

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

Raise volcano? Please? Prettyplease?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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

You need some of these.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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