Spread the wealth...I mean essence!

I wondered that as well.

When I first read about the essence system, I thought it was supposed to be a kind of limited resource that does not follow the standard exponential growth of power (with that standard I mean that when you expand you gain power which allows you to expand even faster and so on) and that how you spread it would determine what your strengths and weaknesses are and allow for replayability.

Yet if you imbue heroes with essence and they get more essence from it with each level then as you write you get exponential growth once more.

There are some things that might help though. A limited number of heroes restricts the exponential growth but then you would imbue every single hero which I think is against the thought that it is a hard decision.

What I assume though is that while you can imbue things, your heroes cannot. All they get from the essence in that case is casting ability which grows per level. If your heroes' spell casting ability is as great as yours though, then keeping the essence is not a good option either. Quite hard to balance in total but if the spells you have access to are more powerful than what your heroes get, then it works.

I guess this is one of those things that might change during the beta testing. If imbueing (sp?) a lot of heroes or heroes gaining essence will be too overpowered, they will probably put some restrictions on it in some way. Maybe the amount of essence a hero will gain could be decreased, or maybe there is a limit on the number of heroes you can get... The are numerous ways in which this could be changed so it wont be too powerfull...

I imagine that there will be benefits to all strategies.

The trade off here is short / long term.

In the short term if you imbue a hero with essence the sovereign is weaker, and has a weak hero who needs protection because they hold an incredibly valuable resource. In the long term you get the benefit of a higher essence income, and a strong hero with magical power. However you still have the slight weakness of having a sovereign who is a little less power than they could have been.

Since maximum mana is tied to essence and essence is only gained by leveling, this can be balanced by requiring a high mana pool to cast the "world altering" high level spells. It will be all about balancing.

I mentioned this idea before, but it applies here. How is mana from shards accumulated?

Since having less essence seems to also give you less mana, what if mana from the shards was accumulated per channeler? If you have a fire shard and one channeler, they get *all* the mana from that shard for themselves (up to what their essence allows). If you have 10 channelers, that mana is split 10 ways.

So yes, you have lots of channelers, but none of them have enough fire mana to do anything truly powerful. One channeler hoarding all the essence and mana is alone, but when he casts he has a whole lot more power to unleash (and his mana recharges faster so he can do it again).

That's compared to a more standard model of a global mana pool, where all your fire mana goes into one pool and any channeler can use it. I think my suggestion would alleviate some of the balance issue.

Excellent. This would add a nice little in-between between "going Gandalf" and city-building, where you yourself are weak and not that magical, but you have an elite cadre of heroes to do your dirty work.

It's been alluded to in an earlier post here, but there is a cost to imbuing heroes with essence other than essence itself: risk. Spreading it out across various heroes, who will all be weaker than a sovereign who hoards his essence, means if you lose those weaker heroes, you lose that essence investment. And you're far more likely to lose those heroes than you are your sovereign (at which point you probably lose, anyway).

That combined with the many other ideas combined in this thread could definitely keep this from becoming exploitative or the only long-term strategy. Denryu's point regarding world-wrecking spells is especially relevant. I'm sure this will be tweaked to hell and back during the beta to make sure the balancing is right, but I'm confident that it can be balanced pretty easily.

I'm going to spread all 20 points into 1 point heros. I'm going to name myself Supreme Being of Elementalaria and they are my chosen children, the Kesselites. They in turn will eventually spawn their own 1 point children. Only the Kesselites and their descendants, being descended from the Supreme Being, will be allowed upon the land. All others must be expunged!

Bwahahahahahahaaha!

Yes dear, that's very interesting.

Huh? No, no, don't listen to the voice from the kitchen. Expunged I tell you!

Now now, go play nice with the other supreme beings.

*sulks and mutters* I bet Sauron never had to play nice.

This is hilarious. I think maybe if you keep your essence in your channeler your channelers growth rate is higher than if you give it to your underlings. I don't know that for sure but if true that would certainly solve the balance issue...

I could probably quibble if I tried, but I don't want to try; again, I agree happily with pigeon^2. I'm a semi-pro worrier, but I'm not worried about champion spam becoming antything close to the Elemental equivalent of GC2's counterintuitive, All-X/focus-abuse superstrat.

He did.

After the fall of Morgoth (Sauron's old boss... a being that makes Sauron look like a Girl Scout...), Sauron was set upon by the Men of Numenor and allied Elves.  Seeing an opportunity, he fakes repentance and over the course of years gains a position of trust and ultimately serves as advisor to the King of Men.  Who (of course) folds under Sauron's subtle manipulations and wages war against Valinor.  Pretty much the analogue of waging war against Heaven.  Guess who wins?  Not Men.

Anyway, part of that mess was to guide his enemies (Elves, Men, Dwarves) to forge the Rings of Power, while secretly forging the One Ring to bind them all to his will.

Playing nice has it's advantages.  It's really just a matter of timing.

Anyway, more on-topic, I'm confused by the concept of Essence as described.  I look forward to seeing it for myself.

This is a non-issue.

On one hand, you have the extreme of a godlike titan, wiping the floor with everything all by himself.  He's going to be personally raking in massive amounts of experience, on account of being a godlike titan that wipes the floor with everything.

On the other, you have a comparable pissant, that can't kill entire armies all by himself, thus can't gain massive amounts of experience all by himself.  The targets of his imbuement will then make up for his personal impotence.

Unless you're a moron and you have a godlike titan sitting on his ass all game(which would apply equally to the moron with a bunch of heroes also sitting on their asses), the only thing required is competent balancing.  That's something you worry about later, not before you've even started beta testing.  The feature is just fine.