Special Materials to make enhanced unit "pieces"

The dev journal on economics and unit building sounds wonderful.

This may already be in the design, just want to make sure:

- have uncommon map locations that yield special materials; say metal from the crater of a massive magical explosion in ancient times, or wood growing in an enchanted forest.
- the special materials can be turned into mildly-buffed equipment, like armor with 10-20% resistance against fire damage, or bows that shoot 10-20% further

Nothing that would rival enchanted items, just strategic materials used to outfit medium-to-large armies with improved stuff.

I like the idea because it would add more flavor to the map, strategic importance to the location, etc. Would require balance tuning in that the special materials should probably be guarded by relatively nasty NPCs, the bonuses shouldn't be too big, etc.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Keith

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Yeah, sounds good to me. Things like this that add more flavour are always nice additions, as they add variability and unpredictability to each game. The "common" resources will always be important, but most empires will eventually obtain them one way or another. A rare resource which isn't critical to have but which provides unique bonuses adds a nice new angle to it all, and one more thing to fight over.

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A possible variation is to have the special material itself just be a "mix-in" for the normal ingredients. So you wouldn't build the entire set of plate mail out of unobtanium, just use it to make a 90%steel-10%other alloy that has enhanced properties.

But I'm not sure how complicated the "recipes" can get, or should get.

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Special resources sounds really cool. I would especially like to see:

- meteorite metals

- adamantine (= the hardest stone in the world, harder than diamonds, perfect for arrow tips and armour)

- mithril (or it's non-Tolkien equivalent, but hey, this is Silmarillion, no?), could also be called noble silver, true silver or somethink like that

- white gold (for channelling magic, he he he, all Covenant fans ...)

- star fragments / star ashes

- natural artifacts, that you dig up from the ground much like a resource (but maybe only one time off), like the Illearth Stone in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The game is called War of Magic after all, give us what we want!

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You've got the idea

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