I’m sure such thread exist but somehow on lists of suggestions I didn’t see such(plenty of them so I could miss it). Sorry for this.

Mages in every game, regardless are they considered overpowered or not, have that one amazing ability to, among many, damage many targets just with one spell.

When army in elemental relies on attack/armor(+dodge) to damage a single target a mage can inflict a moderate amount of damage to a single unit but this number grows with number of targets caught in area of effect(i.e. single target=5dmg; five targets=25dmg). That ability can wipe entire armies out of a face of a world.

While I love mages I think they shouldn’t have to many or to powerful AOE spells. I believe the whole beauty about being a mage is intelligence. It’s how you prevent other to achieve their goals not just to wipe everything out of sight, of course many of you will say that destroying someone’s army does the purpose but I mean something else: freezing, charming, confusing etc.

It’s not only important to think of functionality of magic and spells but of relation of cost to gain. Not only when considering the costs of production of a decent army, researching needed technologies(which costs also resources to build needed structures) and achieving needed population but also when thinking of enjoyability, calculating time ignoring effects and time needed to train a decent spell caster in a face of an experienced foe(his ice storm*INTmod, yours*INTmod).

Imagine a system based on experience levels for damage spells. In this system when your major mage dies(or you don’t have one) you have absolutely nothing to protect yourself. Also, when making new mages(in case of Elemental children’s) they are worthless and game is running around a single unit in which case facing two allied opponents you are dead.

I suggest to make a system relying on proportionality – each spell effect strength firstly (talking of damage spells) takes in consideration targets HP (does 10% dmg of target current HP) and then caster lvl(for example up to INT/3). You can make spells basing on schools of magic unique like: [WATER]Freezing Gust dmg10%of targets total hp. Target must have **% of total HP in order this spell to work.[FIRE] Fire Bolt dmg10% of target currentHP up **%(…).

Making spells work that way you not only ensure that Mages will be always useful but they won’t be overpowered(a mage won’t kill anything by one spell) .

It’s simple to provide logical explanation for such spells like: “A Mage causes target blood burn. The more potent target is, the more is this spell” etc.

I suggest to remove AOE spells out from tactical combat and add them later to global spells pool. Making it work this way armies will have opportunity to heal or to retreat before engaged in combat.

Consider this: your army needs some turns to get to a mage, to that time entire your army is badly damaged and he has blink…

Relation gain to cost.

To make magic system decent you don’t need only to make it “fun” but remember of the impact on game enjoyability. It’s something like costs of work hours – a gamer spends two hours creating a great nation and suddenly loses some cities to someone who is using a spell which you can buy in an add-on.

It’s not only to calculate how many units you’d have to build to destroy a cheap-to-cast fire golem which is available in the same time of a game progression but also making magic challenging. By challenge I understand possible usage of spells and their costs compared to economy growth. For example you can produce an army of legionnaires, deadly as hell, however a cunning young mage posses powerful water magic. He can slow down your army. Who has now more armor and damage? You and your iron guys? Or maybe his light armored archers to which you can’t  get quickly enough?

So in this case magic by itself didn’t impacted economical growth(you neither produced or directly caused loss of production). This unnatural ability caused a loss dealt by units produced by economy.

What about of economy costs vs abilities of units? Every additional armor, HP, AP or movement point costs not only production but time and research too. Time, time you wasted and your opponent by simple assumption, maybe espionage, focused his attention towards different road of game progression and look how much a simple spell caused.

But if this system has to be good then you need to give us tools of premonition. Remember in turn based games advantage has the who moves first. If you make it random then God of random decides. We need something better. Make some spells base on our knowledge – I know(well here I should write from where but this post I huge by now…)he has water snares so I put this spell on my boys which will convert his enchantments into flame swords. That would be cool.

Well I wanted to write something about global spell casting and time ignoring effects but this post is already too long.