Have to say I agree. Without ways to defend against those ultimate spells the late game will be all about who can get mana and cast the fastest. The first person to lay the smack down destroys everything/everyone and wins.

If we look back on MoM there was a way for one player to "Dispel" another's Global Enchantment. I want to say the same thing could be done during combat if you had the mana. What the player would do is spend a equal amount of mana to what was used casting the spell to create a counter-spell. If the player dumped more mana into the "counter" there was a greater chance the dispel would work.

There needs to be a similar mechanic at work in Elemental or balancing will be thrown out the window.

I like it. "Precast dispel" is how counter magic should work imo. Some of my favorite arcade fighters had counter systems that involved inputing the counter for a particular attack BEFORE the opponent had done it. IF you were quick enough you could input the counters for almost every move he could do. It was hard to pull of, put good pay off.

In elemenetal, you can have counters for very specicific spells or counters for a wider range of spells. Of course the specific counters will cost a lot less than the braoder ones.

If you see your opponent close to your city, and you know he has fetish for volcanoes, cast a counter volocano spell. It will punish predictable players and lame players that like to cheese by doing the same OP thing over and over. In single player, the AI can start casting counters based on which spells you like to rely on.

Good ideas lads....some counter spell system [like what you've mentioned] would be nice to have IF the AI would be able to use it properly. There is a more simple "AI friendly" solution: General protection spells for cities/settlements. There is a system like that in an old game, but I forgot that which one was it.

It would also be nice if we could reverse spells. There could be an option to cast a very expensive reversal spell that requires some massive ratio of mana, like 2 to 1, but allows you to send the spell back.

There should also be a chance of a spell going berserk. If someone dispells a strong spell, there could be a small chance that the total amount of mana simply explodes in the tile that the spell was intercepted in and does massive damage, or summons something totaly random and hostile to everything.

After all, these are two massive magical forces clashing, everything should not just get swept clean and perfectly canceled out. When two massive magical forces clash there should be a serious risk of some crazy disaster flying out of the mix that hurts both groups.

One of the core balancing mechanics in Master of Magic is the spellcasting skill stat. This stat directly determines how quickly you can spend your mana on spells. If your spellcasting skill is 50, you may spend no more than 50 mana per turn on out-of-combat spells (and 50 pre-channeling mana per combat).

Lets say you want to cast Armageddon, which costs 1250 mana, it will take you 25 turns to cast it (at 50 mana/turn). Anyone who is currently running the Detect Magic spell can see what spells are being cast and by whom. With this knowledge, players are able to stop the casting of Armageddon by casting Spell Blast at it.

Failing this, anyone may attempt to stop the Armageddon from continuing after it has been cast with either Disjunction or Disjunction True spells. Lastly, a powerful Sorcerer could cast Spell Binding to steal the Armageddon spell and make it his own, causing it to help him and destroy you.

The one danger with having a "general" counterspell is that it can lead to a nasty asymmetry.  While the other players have to divert their resources into researching a whole pile of spells to pursue their strategy and counter their opponents, the counter-magic guy has to learn ... counterspell.  What, you're buffing your army?  Here, have a counterspell.  What, you're raising a volcano under my city?  Here, have another counterspell.  What, you want to dispel my global enchantment?  Guess what I want to do...

That doesn't mean that I'm against countermagic, I just think it needs to be balanced very carefully, because it seems to have a particularly fine line between "too powerful" and "too weak" (and hopefully the beta will give them a chance to do that ).  I like the idea of having to learn specific countermagic for particular spells or classes of spells for the same reason.

I haven't played MoM since the '90s, but ChongLi's description fits my recollection. Unless my inner revisionist has changed things in my steel-sieve-like memory, one of the benefits of having an insanely fat mana bank was that your wizard's involvement in each and every tac battle was limited only by your spellcasting skill.

If it makes you feel any better, Age of Wonders/2/shadow magic works that way, exactly. Let's say you cast a spell that turns all terrain within your domain to wastelands except for your cities, and it costs.. 300 mana, and you have.. 50 casting skill.. it'd take 6 turns, normally. Each turn, you still have 50 casting skill to use in combat, but if you go into combat and using all 50 points, you'd have to take an extra turn to finish casting Deadlands, as you have no spell skill that turn to put any more mana into Deadlands. This might have been what you remembered, if you've played 'em.

  I echo ChongLi.  I would prefer Elemental had a few more counter type spells than MoM but not have counter type spells for everything.  It should have its own Book of Magic maybe?  I think that (IF) spells that are created by user in game should not have counter-spells.  Can we create our own spells ingame?  Haven't seen that yet..

There should be some basic counter magic that anyone can use. Then there should be specialized counter magic that you get if either you know a spell, or if you can do its opposite. EX. If you know the fireball spell, you can counter it well, since you know it. On the other hand, you should also be good at countering the fireball spell if you know the Ice Blast spell, neutralizing and all that.

Then there should be a set of super counter spells that require you to have meta-magic spell books. After all, knowing how magic works really well would help in countering any magic.

Heh, reading everyone's ideas together confuses the hell out of me. To those wondering whether MoM's system is balanced? I think it is, in a general sense.

To really appreciate the balance of MoM's system you have to realize the inherent tradeoffs in it. If you focused exclusively on sorcery (11 blue books) you had a very weak early game. Sure, you had a lot of different ways to counter the enemy's spells but that meant you'd spend all your time researching these instead of researching spells that actually do something. You also had to consider the possibility that your opponents' strategy might not involve a lot of buffs for you to dispel, negating the benefit of such spells. 

The other big balancing factor that mitigates against a guy who "counters everything" is mana costs. In MoM's system, casting Dispel Magic (or its counterparts, Disenchant Area, Disjunction or the True versions of all 3) is never guaranteed to remove any effect. The spell itself involves a calculation based on the amount of mana you put into it

For example, if you spend 100 mana to dispel a 100 mana spell, your chance of dispelling it is:

If, on the other hand, you spend 200 mana, your chance to dispel it is:

Twice as much mana, not a huge increase in result. Thus you are forced to make some very tough decisions about how much mana you want to risk, how quickly can you cast it (spellcasting skill) and how urgently you need to remove the spell.

As for the idea of making every spell have another spell which is its counter? I don't know if that would fit very well in this type of game. You can't really expect a player to learn more than 10-20% of all spells in the game on any given campaign.

You can't evaluate balance at all when looking at any strategy against MoM's AI. MoM is easy to win with 0 spellbooks. If you could play MoM in multiplayer against another player, phantom warriors would be easy to counter because they are so slow and vulnerable to ranged attacks.

Ahh, so pretty much a carbon copy of the 3rd Ed. D&D counter spell system. How would this work in combat though? Spells in combat are instant cast and therefore would not be counterable except by a spell like Counter Magic, which you must cast ahead of time.