How about a fantasy type railroad improvement but call it something else for FFH?

[Iblis]

In Master of Magic you could upgrade roads to railroads (i.e. roads with no movement cost) by enchanting them but only on the Myror world. This would indeed make sense in FFH (what with it becoming the apparent successor to MOM ) and I agree that it should be a spell rather than a worker improvement.

I'd be happy just for the movement bonus, rather than the hammers.

 

[puck11b]

Leylines:

That sounds like kind of a neat idea, maybe a no movement cost "airlift" between two mana nodes (you have to have line of sight on both mana nodes). One of the mana nodes has to be a dimensional node, so you could go from a dimensonal node to any other node, or from any node to a dimensional node.

 

[Quetz]

It's powerful, but we need to have more utility spells and less warfare spells.

Funny, I think just the opposite. Only Fire has any *good* combat spells, other than Tsunami - which will be weak again after .16 - as far as Sorcery goes. Tremor is only useful in holding a city, and I would rather have Meteors than be able to push some units back a space, especially since they are most likely mostly recon and thusly able to attack next turn anyways.

I almost never use any of the utility spells except Haste and very rarely, Bloom.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

Only Fire has any *good* combat spells, other than Tsunami which will be weak again after .16

The combat portion of tsunami isn't going to change, iirc, just the terra(de)forming part.

 

[upthorn]

A first post, and something of a hijack I'm afraid.

Don't think railway-esque works unless we're going Steampunk all the way.

But was no-one else made to think of leylines? Say an improvement that increases magic skill of one type while you're standing on it, only constructable between two nodes of the same type? For balance, only works once complete, and takes a long time to build (to avoid the tempatation to loop the line round your entire empire)

May not be feasible, but thought it's worth putting out there.

Now ley-lines soundlike a nice idea. Why should they have to be between nodes of the same type, though?

Usually in fantasy settings, ley-lines form naturally between mana nodes, and have been in existences since long before magic was discovered.

To implement this based solely on flavor, I would say that every raw node should have ley-lines running between it, and the nearest 3 or 4 nodes, in straight lines. Of course, seeing, and utilizing the ley-lines would have to require a tech. And perhaps nodes that have been altered (converted to a mana type) should be cut off from the ley-lines for a while, "until the magickal forces recalibrate". (which should only begin to happen a few turns after the tech that reveals ley-lines is discovered) Balance-wise, this would make it so that the first player to find nodes wouldn't immediately be able to find every other node on the map, unless they deliberately cripple themselves mana-wise until researching the tech. What the ley-lines would actually do is left to be determined, but I'm thinking what would be good is that, on ley-lines mages would have access to the spells provided by the connected mana-types. For instance, on a fire-water ley-line, a mage or adept would be able to cast scorch and spring a mage who already. On a fire-fire leyline, a mage or adept would be able to cast fireball A mage who already knew scorch or fire ball would be able to cast Meteor swarm.

But really, this topic should be pursued in a separate thread.

 

[Sureshot]

ya thats a neat idea, and maybe just in general if a mage stands on a node it can cast the spells of that type