I tried my above proposal and found myself asking this: if spells are this weak, then why bother casting them?
It is better for me to use summons since:
- Summons can kill.
- Summons' strength are increased by mana affinity, making them somewhat useful until mid/late game.
- Summons can get promotions, which increase their strength and abilities further.
- The only drawback of summons is that they can be killed.
Summons are better investment for spending mana, imho.
What do you think?
Thanks for putting that much effort into trying to balance this out. As I can't test your modified version, I have no way to judge the fun factor for myself. But of course I'll believe you when you say it sucked the life out of magic. That was never my goal, I love the supernatural part of this mod.
But at the moment the flavor text from the GP Averax the Cambion sums it up for me: "They march down our roads in brave, glorious columns. They have drilled their formations. Left turn. Right turn. I have spent a handful of minutes preparing magics which shall end all of those years of practice."
That's the problem, magic is too "easy" and too effective compared to regular combat. That's also the reason why in basically any fantasy setting magic is mainly used as support, otherwise all you'd see would be mages hurling fireballs back and forth over the battlefield.
Maybe a complete overhaul is overkill, why not just start with the 50% reduction on Sorcery Discipline and the "can't-kill-units-in-siege-mode" change, maybe that'll tilt the scale already. Making the mage a national unit and limiting it to 8 or 12 might also help, then it would be adept (unlimited)>mage(8)>archmage(4). You could still bring those 8 mages for a siege, but your homeland would be kinda vulnerable against stacks of doom then.
EDIT: In order for the unit limit to have any effect, you'd of course have to restrict the more powerful spells to mage/archmage, otherwise you can just mass-produce adepts and still cast tier 3 spells. At the moment, only "Meteor Swarm" has a Channeling III requirement, any other (researchable) spell can be cast by any arcane unit.
Summons being able to aquire promotions always confused the hell out of me. How do you teach a slab of molten rock something about tactics and discipline? Imo at least half of the summons (mostly the elemental type things) should be lacking the mental capabilities to learn anything. And the more advanced ones (angels and the likes) should come with predetermined promotions, they should not be able to become a swiss army knife like the regular units.