Magic Items

[spleendamage]

Trying to come up with mechanics that aren't reproduced elsewhere.

I'll leave it to others to come up with fancier names

My five:

Divining Rod: Allows the "discovery" of user's choice of resource in one tile.

Portable Forcefield: Grants city defense of +75% which cannot be affected by siege weapons.

Singularity: Activate to destroy all units in a "fat cross" radius including holder. Might also destroy terrain improvements and "terraform" the land into desert or ice.

Frenetic Machine: Activate to generate 1 hammer and -3 gold, which doubles each turn until the machine is destroyed. Might not be a workable ratio... the possibilities to make the machine produce research or culture for gold exists also.

The Cards of Fate: Activate to give all military units of your civ an 80% chance of 15xp or one free promotion (whichever is better) and a 20% chance of death.

 

[25_Hour]

Luciaqua's Ring:
The idea here is that the ring contains the spirit of Luciaqua, giving the holder powerful and destructive abilities at the cost of Luciaqua slowly dominating its mind, and eventually reincarnating herself in body of the holder. Her spirit is immortal, and (if this works as planned) she should be constantly being reborn in the form of more and more powerful units as the civilizations get more advanced. Naturally, Heroes should not be able to pick up the ring.

The ring would be in a random location at the start of the game, being guarded by a moderately powerful (let's say Strength 8, move 0) animal unit to prevent its use in rushes.

Attributes:
+1 death strength, +2 fire strength. It also adds the promotion "Disturbed", which gives the caster a 4% chance per turn of gaining the promotion "Hears Voices", which has a 20% chance per turn of healing the unit, removing Loyalty and Immortal, turning it barbarian and giving it these promotions:

Luciaqua Incarnate (replaces the Hears Voices promo, +2 death strength) along with Hero, Loyalty, and Magic Resistant. (Removing Loyalty at first is just to stop the unit from dying immediately at conversion.)

"Hears Voices" makes the unit go rogue and gain the Luciaqua promos if the player tries to disband it. At no time after the ring is picked up can it be transferred to another unit without killing the current one. After the previous holder (Or Luciaqua Incarnate) is killed, the ring is dropped, waiting to be picked up by the next hapless unit. The cycle continues!

Strategic Advantages:

--Forces the player to trade off the benefit of getting an immediately powerful unit vs. the certainty of it going rogue at some point and wailing on its previous owner. The unit could be sent to a neighboring empire before insanity to have THEM deal with it instead, but this would allow that empire to send the ring against your own armies, should Luciaqua be killed.
--Scales with how advanced/experienced the armies are (since Luciaqua Incarnate would have the base strength of a player-built unit), and so both upside and downside remain somewhat potent throughout the game, but not overpowering.
--I personally like the idea of a powerful warlock hero unintentionally being incarnated by players throughout the game.
--The disadvantage (going rogue) ensures that over the long term, it won't terribly unbalance things.


Disadvantages:
--May be rather powerful in the early game, so the "guardian unit" would have to be balanced to make sure civilizations aren't getting knocked off by it too early. May be too weak in the late game, when mithril Champions are wandering around (though this would also make the staff's downside be lessened, so it may balance out.)
--Mostly good for recon or melee-based civs. Arcane civs would probably just want to get rid of it by leaving the ring guarded by powerful units in their own territory. Though this is actually also rather flavorful.

 

[Darksaber1]

Hmm, The Kazad seak the ring, not to use it, but do destroy it, or hide it away for ever, and forever remove Luciaqua's folly from the world. (Change Kazad to who ever, it just sounds so much like the Nemesis Crown that I couldn't resist.)