More Spells Brainstorming

[WarKirby]

Iceciro has apparently volunteered to add more spells, so post some ideas.

ideally, things which are possible in python and xml only. It's probably not within his capability to mod the dll.



i spent far too much time thinking about this recently. Let's see....

Some general thoughts.
There's a distinct lack of elemental damage spells in general. Which really diminishes the usefulness of magic resistance. I think new spells should aim to correct this as one of the key objectives, possibly by duplicating some functionality across schools and changing the damage type.

The "one spell per level" rule is annoying and restricting. And a "two spells per level" rule would essentially just be a bigger prison cell. Ignore rules, and go with what seems fun, I say. Let one single spell promotion give 5 or 6 new spells if need be. Let some others remain at 1 if there are no sutiable additions.

There's rather a lack of direct offensive magic in general, one of the primary reasons why Amurites and Sheiam fail so horribly most of the time.


Since I have too many ideas to post at once, I'll do a lot of smaller seperate posts.


Death

I
----------------
Animate Dead
Would replace summon skeleton, and instead randomly summon a skeleton or zombie. Because just skeletons are boring.

Inflict Wounds
Affects living targets only, deals a moderate amount of Death type damage, to a single target only. Average 40%, Cap 75%, affects the first valid target within the surrounding plots.

II
-------------
Summon Spectre
Unchanged

Word of the Necromancer
Attempts to dominate all nearby undead. Is quite resistable. say, 60% failure rate or so, depending on target's base strength. Dominated undead will recieve a 2 turn duration and then return to dust. Does not work on Scions

Finger of Death
Attempts to kill a single nearby living unit. Chance to work depends on difference between caster and victim levels. Hero promotion doubles resistance against it. Should generally be reliable, and work on most things.


III
----------------------
Summon Wraith
unchanged

Call of the Grave
Instantly destroys all undead within 1 tiles. Cannot be resisted. Does not affect Scions.

Howl of the Banshee
Area effect Finger of death. Slightly lower success rate, but affects all living units within 1 tile.

 

[WarKirby]

Fire

I
------------
Blaze
needs work. Make it essentially a magical pillage command. Destroys improvements on tile, starts smoke in forsts. Casting on smoke creates flames immediately.

Burning Blade
Gives a promotion to all melee units in stack, which does the following.

• -3 Strength
• +3 Fire Strength
• +10% vs Melee Units
• 30% chance to wear off per turn.

Essentially, converts a part of your units strength to fire damage, making them much more effective against enemies weak to fire, but only a little stronger overall


II
--------------------
Fireball
----------
unchanged

Wall of Flames
---------------
Summons 3 invisible marker units. One the leader, the other two slaves. These are just for placing the wall. They have 1 movement and a 1 turn duration, so it has to be placed next to you. The Leader marker can cast a spell to kill itself and create flames on the tile. The slave ones can cast a similar spell, that requires Flames in one of the nearby tiles.
The end result, is that you'd get 3 tiles of fire all touching each other, creating a mostily impassable wall.


Combust
------------
2 tile range. Inflicts large fire damage on a single target. Top defender of the stack with most units. Average 60% damage, no damage cap/can kill.



III
--------------------
Fire Elemental
-------------
unchanged


Conflagration
-----------------
Massive indiscriminate AOE spell. 2 tile range, deals moderate fire damage to everything in the area of effect (friend or foe alike). Burns improvements and ignites forest within area.


Meteor Swarm
------------------
Summons 10 meteors which start as Enraged and Alwayshostile, and have 3 movement, forcing them to immediately fly into anything nearby (possibly including teammates). Some method would be needed to prevent them attacking the caster and his stack, but that's workable.

 

[WarKirby]

Mind
----------


I
----------------

Inspiration
-------------
unchanged


Clarity of Mind
---------------
Makes units in stack more resistant to mind effects, removes Enraged from affected units


Fear
----------------
Scares nearby living units, forcing them to retreat. Resistable. Clarity of mind halves the chance of being effected, Courage or Hero gives immunity. Cannot affect targets more than 2 levels above the caster. Chance of success is doubled against animals.



II
--------------------

Greed
--------------
City buff spell
Gives +40% and +5
removed when caster leaves the city, etc


Charm
------------
unchanged, except Clarity of mind halves success rate


Crushing Despair
------------------
Resistable, but has a high success rate. Affects living enemies only
Affected units get:
40% spell miscast chance
-20% Magic resistance
-20% Strength
10% chance to commit suicide per turn (simply kills the unit)
35% chance to wear off per turn
Heroes are immune



III
------------

Turncoat
-------------
Attempts to turn nearby enemies against allies. resistable. Affected units join your civ, but remain under AI control. 30% chance to wear off and convert back to their old team per turn. Loyalty makes you immune to it, Clarity of mind halves success rate


Dominate
----------------
As is, but if we still have it, remove that silly penalty of losing the promotion.


Horror
---------------
Like fear, but better. 2 range. Ignores magic resistance. Courage and Hero give 50% resistance, rather than immunity. And Not limited to living units.






Might post more ideas tomorrow

 

[Vermicious Knid]

Air Spells

Flight-caster only
Flight- whole stack ("wind walk?")
Lightning Bolt - summons a lightning elemental
Gust of wind - pushes a stack, damages naval units
Tornado - Variant of an air elemental that causes absurd levels of collateral damage and auto-pillages, pushes stacks out of its way. Directable for the first turn by caster, then lurches randomly about until it expires.
Tornado v.2 ("dust devil?") - offensive spell, randomly teleports enemy units somewhere else on the map. Wizard of Oz effect.

EDIT:

If we revamp force accelerate could move here...or fair winds could be applied to a wider selection of units. I see air as being about weather and motion. Currently it is way boring.

 

[Quetz]

I'd vote for more rituals a'la an old thread on this board somewhere first.

 

[Machiosabre]

I love these ideas, i think call of the grave should affect scions though, with some lesser chance of succes maybe, theyre being called back to erebus, i dont see why you wouldn't be able to send em back (also it'd be nice for d'tesh in plus )

 

[Iceciro]

I've decided to also use this thread to collate my ideas as I work, and then you guys can see what I'm thinking and make comments.

Death needs to move more heavily towards necromancy IMHO, for both thematics and the sake of the Scion casters.

For example: I'd change Finger of Death - 30% chance to be resisted, does not affect Hero units. Kills a nearby living unit which rises as a Zombie with the same promotions it had in life, under your control. Perhaps for balance sake comes with a Zombie promotion that doesn't let it gain Mobility or Divine (zombies are slow and unholy) and makes it lose 30% strength. I'd just like the Death line to allow you to have a bunch of units instead of one skeleton and two units that are basically fireballs.

I'd also want some sort of "consume life" spell for Death II or III that damages an enemy unit and lightly heals the spellcaster's stack.

 

[Quetz]

I've been conceptuallizing a modmod of my own for like 2 years, to rework the magic system into 8 more traditional, but longer spheres by combining the FFH ones. EG, Fire would contain FFh Fire, Chaos, Entropy.. Death would be Death, Earth, and focused on Undead, Earth would contain nature/earth, and so on. Since I am apparently never going to do any of that, might as well at least get some suggestions out of it!

Wish I could find the text file I wrote out all the spells I wanted to do in.

Water:
Dessicate (moderate/low single target dmg, sucking water out of target, ineffective against nonliving/firebased units)
Hailstorm (AoE dmg in front of caster)
Quicken - Adds Blitz and Twincast for one turn, fatiqued after, autoacquires Casted promo next turn
Healing Shower - (good only?) very light AoE heal
Voice of Apsu -(ritual?) Reveals the coastline of the world
Rust - you know what this does
Mirror Image - Lowpower defensive spell for assassins and such, creates an illusory copy of the caster that cannot attack or cast, but has gaurdsman.
Whiteout - Creates a Blizzard

Death-
Dust to Dust - High damage to Enemy undead
Twiceborn- Oneshot immortality to target living unit, promo giving -20% strength or such and undead on return
Death Gate - Creates an airlift portal, unlimited use but 5% chance of death enroute
Rain of Toads - Diseases nearby units

Fire - Great Unbinding - Turns caster into a low power nuke, top end spell.
Phoenix Pyre - Caster explodes on death a'la Pyre Zombies

More when I hopefully find my text file! My idea with death was the same as Ice's above, mostly adding more junk undead for Death mages to control. But I also wanted to give Banish to all priests to cover that.

 

[odalrick]

Spirit III - Spirit walk
Adds a promotion to one random friendly unit level 4 or higher that is essentially a clone of Hero, only a limited duration, about ten turns. In other words, over a period of ten turns grants the unit 10 xp.

Law III - Unyielding Order
Screw the Order priests, Unyielding Order is an arcane spell. Darn spell thieves!

Mind I or II - Summon Dreamtwister
Low strength summon, gives random promotions to whoever killed it and has a chance to capture living units. The promotions it gives are mostly beneficial, but there are some bad ones as well. It wouldn't be a spell to use all the time, just when you can overpower the defenders anyway and feel that the capture chance outweighs the downsides.

Enchantment III - Permanency
Grants summons the ability to cast a spell that makes them permanent. That spell has a substantial gold cost (200-300) to pay for the rare substances, noble metal foci and baby sacrifices needed to make a summon permanent.

Life III - Lifespark
Permanent summon. I may have gotten the idea for this spell from somewhere else, can't really put my finger on where.

Living units in the same tile as a Lifespark gains a promotion that grant Immortality. When that promotion is removed, PythonOnRemove runs that kills one Lifespark if the promotion was removed due to saving the life of a unit.

The "one spell per level" rule is annoying and restricting. And a "two spells per level" rule would essentially just be a bigger prison cell. Ignore rules, and go with what seems fun, I say. Let one single spell promotion give 5 or 6 new spells if need be. Let some others remain at 1 if there are no sutiable additions.

A one spell per promotion could be fairly easily enforced though.

One could have the choice of Summon Spectre (Death II) or Word of the Necromancer (Death II) and then have a PromotionPrereqOr for Death III. This would quickly degenerate to a dependency nightmare, as each spell would have to list any possible prereq for that level. Probably impossible to do modularly by spell.

The way I would do it is have an intermediate (invisible) promotion, that is randomly applied by all spells and is in turn a prereq for all level III death spells.

If the chance to apply the promotion is 100%, the mage would have to wait one turn before buying the next level of a spell line, usually not an issue. By lowering the chance, a newly minted Spectre Summoner would have to wait a while before becoming a Wraith Summoner. Granted this is already represented by experience, but it might represent more specialized knowledge.

One can even give a mandatory cooldown period between spell-line upgrades by having the randomly applied promotion not be the required promotion for the next level, but rather degenerate to it and have a duration. I'm beginning to think that the promotion system is Turing complete.

 

[Iceciro]

Since someone mentioned Banish, what I'd also like to do is give priests of good players and neutral players a "turn undead" effect that makes them run off, and evil priests a control undead.
Ideally this would be based off the player's alignment and not the religion - so Evil Order would control undead.

 

[Divvu]

Mmmh ok, let's give a shot at it...

Body II

Unstable Mutation: Gives any living unit (single target) a +2 Base Str, the unit loses 1 Str each turn till 0 (Dies... Obviously)

Ice II

Ablative (sp?) Armor Protects the caster within a thin Layer of ice (actually a 75% or more withdrawal chance), permanent untill combat (could last more than 1 combat and lose effectiveness at each fight, an alternative to stoneskin to protect your mages)

Dimensional III

Word of Recall (shameless AD&D copy...) gives Immortal to the caster, can only be cast in cities with a mages guild, takes 3 round to cast, recalls to the city in wich is cast instead of the capital, small chance of failure (caster dies)

Oh, and btw, this:

Enchantment III - Permanency
Grants summons the ability to cast a spell that makes them permanent. That spell has a substantial gold cost (200-300) to pay for the rare substances, noble metal foci and baby sacrifices needed to make a summon permanent.

I LOVE IT!

 

[Iceciro]

I'm not really opposed to having Death II unlock all the death spells, for example.

I don't see why a mage learns only one stupid little trick each level - feels more like a parlor trick than a real mage. And it would be a HUGE boon to the Amurite units that randomly get caster-promos.

 

[ExMachina]

Life III - Lifespark
Permanent summon. I may have gotten the idea for this spell from somewhere else, can't really put my finger on where.

Living units in the same tile as a Lifespark gains a promotion that grant Immortality. When that promotion is removed, PythonOnRemove runs that kills one Lifespark if the promotion was removed due to saving the life of a unit.

Ooh I really like this idea.

I also like the ideas in this thread for more spells that cause direct elemental damage.

 

[Gedwyn]

First off, losing Mind 3 promotion because a Domination gets resisted is...well. I agree, let's get rid of that

There's a few lines that I never bother grabbing for my mages, mainly because they are either underpowered (Nature) or just confusing/not described properly...and I don't like to waste my promotions on the Adepts/Mages. So I never make nodes for Creation, Nature, Dimensional etc.

I suppose I could play around in the WB for a bit, but whatever.

Anyways.

I'm curious if a spell promotion could have different effects based on the unit it's affecting.

Let's take Nature II for instance, Poisoned Blade.

Great spell for recon heavy civs, they all get a nice +1 attack bonus. This does nothing for most of the civs however, who are busy spamming melee units, or since the latest version, it seems everyone is spamming archers.

So, is it possible for a spell to give different effects based on the unit type? Nature II could be changed from Poisoned Blade to...Enhanced Weaponry let's call it.

Recon units get the +1 poisoned blade, Archer units get a +1 special bow, maybe melee units get a +1 defensive strength with reinforced armor or sheild.

Failing that, you could always just turn the spell into a standard +30% combat across the board...but I like the first solution if its possible.

Warkirby mentioned Barkskin as a possible Nature I spell in another thread (Iceciro's Terraforming Marsh thread iirc)...which I like much more than Treetop Defense. Treetop is nice when you can use it, but it's way too situational.

I think Warkirby had wanted a straight combat bonus to Barkskin, but I disagree with that...going back to the old D&D days (old for me at least), Barkskin was a defensive spell in nature which you used until you got Stoneskin. We already have Stoneskin in this game, and I suppose it's fine as it is (though I'd like to see it changed as well)...but in reference to the old D&D spell, I'd like to see Barkskin give a simple +1 or maybe even a +2 defensive strength bonus and nothing more. (I'd also like to see Stoneskin keep it's first strike immunity but also grant the same defensive bonus that Barkskin generates).

The problem with this line - I'm backtracking here sorry - is that Vitalize really needs to be a first tier spell, just like Scorch and Spring.

So to recap:

Nature I: Vitalize. Just as it is.

Nature II: Barkskin (+2 defensive strength) or Enhanced Weaponry ( +1 attack strength for all units, and if someone can come up with a reason why Arcane units would gain a +1 strength from a nature spell, that would be great! )

Nature III: Summon Ent. Just like the other tier III elemental summons, but summons an Ent that is identical to the Ancient Forest popup guardians/March of the Tree units. That's a strength 10 unit iirc.

 

[Iceciro]

Vitalize as a first level spell makes Spring garbage, though - Vitalize does the same thing but better.
Unless Water I gets a new first level spell, though...

I like the idea of Barkskin. Plus a healing rate bonus (not granting heal-on-the-move so it doesn't step on Regeneration's shtick.)

EDIT: Thought of adding something to Spring - it gives all enemy units in the AoE the promotion "Doused". Assuming all of these are able to be done...
Doused gives -10% withdrawl rate (if doable?), -3 Fire Combat (so it only affect creatures with fire strength), and Pyre Zombies under the effect of Doused do less or no damage when they die.

 

[Valkrionn]

Honestly, I like Odalrick's vitalize in FFPlus. That's not to say the original vitalize couldn't be bumped down to Nature 2 of course, and then 'upgrade' with Nature 3....

 

[WarKirby]

I'd also want some sort of "consume life" spell for Death II or III that damages an enemy unit and lightly heals the spellcaster's stack.

I think this sort of thing belongs in the Body sphere.



Body


I

Haste
------------
As it is now


Vampiric Touch
-----------------
Deals an average of 30% damage to one nearby unit, and heals the caster by whatever amount is dealt as damage.



I have no lv2 ideas for this sphere atm

III

Strengthen
---------------
Grants Strong to units in the stack who aren't "Weak" Those who are, lose weak, and gain Strong after one additional cast.

 

[WarKirby]

Nature II could be changed from Poisoned Blade to...Enhanced Weaponry let's call it.

Recon units get the +1 poisoned blade, Archer units get a +1 special bow, maybe melee units get a +1 defensive strength with reinforced armor or sheild.

Failing that, you could always just turn the spell into a standard +30% combat across the board...but I like the first solution if its possible.

The problem with this, is that it doesn't fit with nature. That's kind of what the Enchantment sphere is for, I'd say. Recon units are most known to spend a lot of time in the outdoors, and know hot to make poisons, etc, so something that benefits only them is good in the nature line.

I don't really see the nature link for Enhanced Weapons. it kind of just sounds too similar to Enchantment I

 

[Valkrionn]

Agreed, although I see no reason the poison effect can't be expanded. Why can't melee use poisoned blades? Why can't archers use poisoned arrows?

 

[WarKirby]

Agreed, although I see no reason the poison effect can't be expanded. Why can't melee use poisoned blades?

Big Jim the Fighter is too dumb to correctly apply poison without killing himself

Why can't archers use poisoned arrows?

However, this would be good. I'd propose it should go in the Shadow sphere though.





Shadow

I
--------

Blur
----
as now


Poison Arrows
-----------------
Enchants archers in the stack to poison an enemy on ranged attacks.


II
------------
Invisibility
-----------
How the hell did we get a Shadow sphere without invisibility?
Simple application. The Caster becomes invisible. Wears off after attacking, when dispel or Revelation is cast on you, or if you choose to reveal via a seperate spell that's granted when invisible.


Shadowwalk
----------------
Just fix the help text. It actually ignores building defenses, but it says it ignores terrain defense (which it doesn't)


Summon Mistform
------------------
doesn't feel epic enough for a lv3 spell. Put it here instead, weaken a little if needed.




III
---------


Greater Invisibility
------------------
like invisibility, but applies to the whole stack. Wear off if caster leaves stack


Enshrouding Mists
--------------------
Creates a bassive 5x5 area of dark fog, centered on the caster. ALL units within the fog, friend or foe and even on the caster's tile, recieve a promotion that gives

-2 visibility range
Hidden Nationality
Immune to First Strikes
Marksman

The fog should expire slowly over time. and revelation should remove it