What's going on with Creation, Force and Dimensional mana?

[SwampCow]

Ooo, I've got an interesting dimensional 2.

Steal resource.

When your caster is on a resource, cast this spell and that resource is sent to your empire. Any player that was receiving the benefits of that resource no longer do. As long as you stay on the resource, you get the bonus. If you're killed or move along it reverts back to normal.

Useful if you were shafted during mapgen, or if want to deny an enemy access to the resource.

I could see this working in the same way Resurrect works. You have to stand on a hostile resource for X number of turns and if you do so uninterrupted, you can pluck it from them.

 

[JeffSteel]

Ozzy's ideas about dimensional are good. Also, I have no lore knowledge so what is here is based off what I have gleaned through observation of forum discussion.

Force: Sphere used to counter rushing tactics and enemy raides. Increases movement cost of enemies in your territory by one per connected force mana.
1 - Force Field: By utilizing electromagnetic forces, the caster can prevent units lower than his level from entering the tile on which he stands. Disabled if the caster moves. Useful for defending cities against hordes of fodder, or keeping resources from being pillaged. Increases in usefulness with time as caster levels. (yes, inspired by the FF archmage spell if you were wondering )
2 - Weight Manipulation: By manipulating the force of gravity acting on a person or object, the caster can add the light or heavy promotion to all units in the tile it is cast in. Utilizes two promotions I rarely if ever see used, and can allow role specialization of your units, or even enemies if the mage is invisible or something......
3 - Attractive Repulsion: By mastering the fundamental forces of physics, the caster can push units in surrounding tiles away one tile, or pull them onto his own tile. Units must be lower level/weaker than the caster. Useful for emptying cities of defenders, rescuing your own isolated units, getting something that's just out of reach, or getting by those blocking your path.

Creation - Assists in maintaining a healthy and productive society. +4% hammer output per city per mana resource connected.
1 - Craftsmanship: By harnessing the industrious spirit that powers a civilizations greatest accomplishments, a caster can give melee units in the same tile copper, iron, or mithril weapons based on already connected resources, exactly as a city does now. Saves having to go all the way back to a city to upgrade your armies equipment, if you cant afford or don't want to do so.
2 - Pioneering Spirit: By kindling the pioneering spirit which drives society to new heights and locales, a mage can found a new city by encouraging rapid immigration to the spot. Saves time building a settler, but if you spam cities everywhere you'll still need to find some way to pay for them.....
3 - Bountiful Harvest: By tapping into man's genius for keeping himself feed and reaping the greatest yields possible from the land, an archemage can negate the effects of starvation on a metropolis. Castes a spell which creates a building in the city providing whatever food deficit is being experienced by the city. Useful for when those fracking privateers plunder your fishing ships or the coming of blight as a stopgap measure against depopulation. Useless in cities which have a food income of 0 or greater.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

What would you think of a Creation III spell that causes a random great person to be born in a random one of your cities? Creation is the sphere of both Birth and Genius.

 

[Methuselah]

What would you think of a Creation III spell that causes a random great person to be born in a random one of your cities? Creation is the sphere of both Birth and Genius.

I'd attach a delay to it, maybe takes 10 turns if not longer to cast.

 

[JeffSteel]

What would you think of a Creation III spell that causes a random great person to be born in a random one of your cities? Creation is the sphere of both Birth and Genius.

Well, if your addressing me it would be fine, if it kills the caster. Essentially, the archmage retires from military service and uses his talents in a civilian capacity, or some such.

 

[Methuselah]

Well, if your addressing me it would be fine, if it kills the caster. Essentially, the archmage retires from military service and uses his talents in a civilian capacity, or some such.

Or that.

Although I do like your idea about being to end starvation in a city for a spell.

 

[algolly]

Things I would like to be able to do:

crush mountains into hills -- but only rarely and in the late game -- small chance that it backfires and causes a volacano? If volcano, cannot cast again on that square

Add even one square of land on a map -- again, only rarely, perhaps also causing a small local tsunami?

Launch magic attacks with a greater range on larger maps (but, yes, this becomes a "magic" missile)

Cause fear and unrest in enemy cities

Use magic to grow food, promote city health, and even fight the blight

summon something really big but have a cost for doing so (crazed promotion, naturally, but something more too). I liked the city riots from summoning the Beast of Agares but understand that it was a difficult play mechanic.


I find particularly good and flavorful: vampiric feeding, summon fireball, snowfall, the undead.

 

[notque]

What would you think of a Creation III spell that causes a random great person to be born in a random one of your cities? Creation is the sphere of both Birth and Genius.

5% chance to actually succeed

 

[MagisterCultuum]

An archmage retiring really doesn't fit the sphere though, while causing the birth of a child destined for greatness is.

Having a delay does seems appropriate.

What if I also made it so that it would cause the birth of a great person somewhere in the world, with no guarantee that the great person wouldn't be in the service of you enemies?




------

By the way, I just tested the idea of having a spell summon a cargo-carrying ICBM type unit, and it works quite well. Without using anything but XML (creating a unit with DOMAIN_IMMOBILE, <iNukeRange>1, <bSuicide>0, and a cargo domain/capacity, and adding a spell to summon said unit) you can have the summon either directly attack just about any tile on the map, or carry cargo anywhere you want. I would need a tiny SDK change (which has long been part of FF) in order to stop the cargo from dieing when the summon's duration ends, but if you don't mind having to remember to unload your troops manually it is ready to go. I was a bit surprised to see that the AI no longer seemed to have a diplomatic penalty towards "nuke use," but I haven't actually tried nuking rival territory so perhaps it doesn't matter if you nuke unowned or barbarian lands and I just for got that. I'm thinking Summon Rift is just about an ideal Dimensional III spell. While I don't think the AI would understand that it can use these to move troops, it would have no problem using them to nuke the enemy.

I think the world shaking could be a nice touch, but the "___launches a ___, and it explodes!" text key should probably be changed. Still, that is still a very versatile, easy to use, targeted, and useful spell that requires no python or C++ work.


Also, I just noticed that you can use the nuke ability until you run out of movement points. This means that if your summoner has extension promotions you could summon a rift in your capital, send it half way across the world, and then have it pick up some units to bring them back all in the same turn. Now that I think of it though, I'm pretty sure that it won't let you nuke your own cities so your returning units couldn't make it all the way back, and the units your rift is going to rescue could probably be injured when the rift appears. I don't really have a problem with this though. Edit: You can nuke your own units and cities without any ill effects, but you are not allowed to nuke any tile within 1 tile of a unit or tile controlled by a rival team with whom you are not at war.

Units don't die if the rift takes then into the middle of the sea (if they unload there they would be pushed to the coast on the next turn, and if they don't they would die when the rift expires), but if the rift hits an occupied tile its extremely low strength would make having it or its cargo survive be extremely unlikely.

After testing some more, I found that people only care about you nuking them, not their friends.

 

[Methuselah]

An archmage retiring really doesn't fit the sphere though, while causing the birth of a child destined for greatness is.

Having a delay does seems appropriate.

What if I also made it so that it would cause the birth of a great person somewhere in the world, with no guarantee that the great person wouldn't be in the service of you enemies?

Much better.

Thinking about it, having the archmage retire would be too similar to the "wane" ability, so a delay and no guarantee of who gets the person would be a good alternative.

 

[Corlis]

I've always figured that Banish-type spells would be better in the Balance sphere, since apparently Dimensional and Balance are opposed spheres.

For Dimensional, maybe one spell could create a temporary building that connected the city to the capital, for the purporses of trade and resources? If that needs more power, it might also connect the city to all other capitals in civs with which you have open borders. Also, maybe +50% trade route yield, or maybe an extra trade route? It probably depends on whether it's a level 1 or 2 spell.

edit: As for creating GP with Creation III, maybe casting the spell could remove the Creation III promotion from the caster? That'd limit things nicely.

 

[cyther]

That could go badly if the Bals not even Keelyn got a Creation III archmage as one of the points of puppets was to allow units to cast promo removing spells without losing the promos.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Well, you could easily make only living units be able to cast it. (I would say those without duration, but I'm thinking puppets will be permanent summons in my version.)


I still consider Banish a Law spell. Unsummon seems like a Metamagic/Dimensional cross sphere spell to me.


I think implementing a temporary building as you describe it might be tricky, but letting them just make a temporary Obsidian Gate is quite simple. Now that I have ICBM type tranport summons working I might just go back to my original Dimensional spells: 1 Escape, 2 Dimensional Gate, 3 Summon Tesseract. A Dimensional Gate might be a bit much for a level 2 spell though, and could make the normal building less important. Perhaps something like Unsummon plus a promotion perk for summons would be best.

 

[Inkling]

i skimmed this thread and did a quick search of it and the others, didn't see this, but then i only skimmed. my apologies if its been suggested before.

just thought of something that struck me as an interesting and slightly unique spell. City barrier. probably work best as a force 2-3 spell, when casted it either completely (perhaps too powerful) or partially(more appropriate if level 2), protects a city from bombardment, allowing you to maintain your cities defensive bonuses against rampant catapult fire, or broadsides from battle ships, fireballs, etc.
as additional effects, or else other spells, protection against collateral damage for units not participating in the actual fight.

just a thought.

 

[renardargent]

Came into my thought, as I was reading through this thread, and not new ideas, but "how about..." for some already suggested ideas on Creation spells.

*Creates (or rather provides) random resources to a city, similar to the resources made by Aluminum Co. or Standard Ethanol in BTS; only available to the very city where the spell was casted.
*Creates free specialist for the city.

 

[hiphopin]

Well for one I would like to see wither done away with on the entropy tree and replaced with drain life which drains the life of your choice tile within a radius of 1 (increased by spell extentions 1 and 2) and gives an equal ammount of life drained per unit to units in your stack from strongest and most damaged to weakest and least damaged. For example you target a stack with 5 enemys and drain life on them doing 20% damage each. The units in your stack are each at 80% damage (6 units) so your unit with highest strength is healed with highest priority and then it goes down the list until you don't have any drained life left.

Okay here is my idea for creation sphere 3: Duhn duhnnnnn....... Immortalis: Makes all units in your stack gain a temporary immortal promotion with a +20% strength modifier, however upon death it gives the units the Drained promotion, as all of a sudden your undying power is taken away, making the unit unable to gain the promotion again for 30 turns and giving a -10% damage modifier.
The spell would have 15 turns before it could be cast again and gives the mage the held promotion for 5 turns after casting with a -50% damage modifier due to the immense drain casting the spell causes.

Since Kael is looking for new ideas, I don't think anyone had one like that so I thought I'd mention it.


Oh and for sphere 3, dimensional. Mass Teleportation (no duh): Takes 1 turn per unit in your stack to cast, when completed teleports you and the units in your stack to that location regardless of whether it is still revealed or not.

And for force 3, Force Push: Knocks back all enemy units within 1 tile of the caster and deals 10-20% damage with a 50% damage cap. Cannot move units out of cities but will still damage them.


And I don't know what to do for spheres 1 and 2 (which means im to tired to think about it)

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I think it is generally agreed that Dimensional III should be some sort of mass teleportation, but most proposals (especially the latest) don't provide any way to code it or give the player control over how it would work. I'm still thinking that summoning an ICBM-like transport unit may be the simplest and easiest to control implementation.



If we didn't want to have Dimensional III be used to transport units, what would you think about making it scatter enemy units within range to random places in the world, or maybe making an improvement that (like Maelstrom) would scatter any unit that moves onto the tile?


I still think that the Force sphere spells seem to close to representing the laws of physics of our universe and not the real theme of Balance and laws arising from mutual consent. While some force push or wall of force type spells could be fine, they should not all be like that. I see no justification for something like accelerate. I think there needs to be a spell that gives a bonus vs both holy and unholy, and something related to diplomacy. Hmm...would it be possible to make a spell extend the minimum number of turns that must pass before canceling a diplomatic deals with you, including Peace Treaties? A Force III spell that lets you stop your rivals from declaring war on you, canceling open borders, or stop giving you resources could be quite nice.

 

[hiphopin]

Hey, I just thought of this spell idea for creation, but found that maybe it should be for enchantment.

Imbue Weapon: Range=1 Targetable on only your own units. Must select one unit to cast this on. Once unit is selected another pop-up appears asking what enchantment you would like for your weapon. The enchantments work on different metals, some only on iron, others mithril, and some are only availible for certain classes. This spell cannot be cast for 5 turns after every use.

Ideas for enchantments could be. For mithril non hero melee units, Blinding Mithril, gives unit a chance (33%) to blind the entire stack of units for 1-2 turns (turn number is randomly chosen on a per unit bases).

For Non hero Archery units (no Arquebus either) Swift Iron: Enchants iron with swiftness, giving the possesor increased movement, withdrawl rate, and damage due faster rate of fire.

For Non hero Archery units (no Arquebus either) Imbue Creation on bow: Gives the Archery unit a 100% chance that their bow will magically double the arrow when fired, although the accuracy may be reduced, doing either additional damage on one unit or if more units are in the stack dealing 25% damage (scaled on strength) to another unit in the stack.

For Assassins and Shadows: Enchant Dagger, Unholy Possesion: Gives 20% chance (40 if shadow) to, after winning combat, possess the unit just defeated and give them to your side. However the unit is given the demonic and crazed promotions. (Can not work on units with Holy damage or with the angel promotion. Has a half rate of working if the unit is of the Order or The Empyrian religion).


Those are just a few ideas, for the AI they will just use it as if it were a normal buff and it would randomly give an applical promotion.

Anyways I hope someone finds this idea interesting.

 

[Grey Fox]

Force I
Magic Arrow - Str 1, flying, 1 movement, summon. No defensive bonuses.
Force II
Push - like the old Air II spell, but with a 2 turn delay or something.
Force III
Something like what Magister is suggesting (extended deals). Or a defensive promotion to all units in the stack, preventing it to be attacked, and makes every unit in the stack unable to move.

 

[Deon]

Dimension 2:

Dimensional pocket.

A caster teleports to his own small plane where he can heal his wounds and prepare his spells:

- A caster becomes unavaliable for 1 turn, whithin this turn he cannot be affected in negative or positive way.

Or

- This spell requires 2/3 turns to cast and the caster remains in his plane for some prolonged time or until you cast the spell again to return him.

Come on, guys, you know that every self-respecting mage has his own small plane where he keeps his familiars and artifacts.