Yes unfortunately.  I think the initial release is important, even if they aren't relying on it to pay the next bills.  I personally would have preferred a few more features in the near-launch version.

Best regards,
Steven. 

I really like the idea of global enchantments.

I hope that gets implemented at some point.

 They're not all carbon copies. You do get unique spells, like air having haste for example. The problem is these are few and far between. By level seven you might have two or three unique spells per book, three or four identical damage spells for each book and a whole bunch of generic non-elemental spells like protect city.

 Which gives you a couple of problems. If you take one of the pre-built sovereigns who have all four books, or create one yourself with all four books, around half your spellbook is filled with identical spells which differ only in name and graphical effect. Like I said, there's no reason for me to cast lightning over flame dart, both do INT damage so the effect is identical. When you have four such spells at each level it feels like half your grimoire is simply spam.

 Funnily enough, it's the same problem taking only one spellbook. Due to the generosity of early level generic spells a fire mage will differ from a water mage by perhaps two spells. There's no real sense that the magical schools are different in any way. Unlike MoM, AoW or even Lords of Magic, there's no real sense of "that guy is an air mage" which I think is pretty important when you're going for a spell list system.

Differentiating the schools in some way would help, even adding secondary effects to each direct damage spell (say lightning bolt has a chance to stun the target, flame dart might ignite them) would at least give you a reason to be packing these spells. Pacing out the more generic spells or perhaps even taking a leaf out of MoM's book and having a separate Arcane book for them might also be an idea; reduce the universally available spells to the most necessary (say the arcane armour / weapons, protect city and heal) and have everything else in a separate book.

 Another trick from MoM would be to offer different spells for focusing on one school or another. There's no spellbook levels, so perhaps the easiest way would be spell effects altered by spell books, so for example say a fire spell which does 5 x INT damage, with the multiplier reduced by one for each spell book above one (so if you have all four books it's 1 x INT, while if you had fire and water it's 4 x INT).

Finally, more focused themes would help, especially if adding spells. There's already a hint of them in there; it looks like Air has a tendency to manipulate movement for example, but these are diluted by the wealth of generic spells. It might be worth picking two or three aspects for each book and flavouring the spell list around these, so say Air manipulates movement and temperature, so 90% of air spells should affect one or the other, with 20% affecting both in some way. It could be secondary effects (damage might freeze or slow the enemy for example) or even simply cosmetic (casting blizzard turns the tile into tundra).

Id like to see the spell list from Dominions III added. But, I could be happy with MOM's too.

still the main problem is all sovereign starts with all books

thats VERY bad, i hope that can be hotfixed b4 the 1  or 2 month first patch

it ruins half the fun to have all sovereigns casting the same things

Well it doesn't ruin the fun for me as to me it makes it more like a chesslike game instead of he who gets there with the mostest firstest. A Queen piece should act like a Queen piece on all sides. Same with a rook or a knight or pawn or bishop. Remember their differences are in how you build their attributes and optimum building will be key in MP games I'm sure. High INT and Hit Points and Probably STR.

i dont agree

every leader shoudl be different and charaterized

like you say they are all the same apart what we do with them

bad

Depends on how hard missing spell books are to specifically get. I haven't played without all of them so it's hard to tell. But I wouldn't want to have to play out the whole game being utterly unable to get fire or water spell books just because they didn't happen to come up. I heard loosely somewhere you can research missing spell books. If correct then why not start with them all, you'll have them all anyway by the time you can use them effectively. It's just trading research time for stats or equipment and vice versa effectively.

Would would make it more interesting is if you couldn't always select any given spell to lean. Much like the technology system, certain techs (powerful or highly functional spells in this case) are only available at random on a brake through. Then each channeller will start winding up with different researched spell sets.

That's strange logic. If you are going to have +10 armor eventually, why don't you start with it?

I do think that different sovereigns should start with different sets of books, and researching new one should be a) expensive, b ) some conditions met, such as completing some quest, or researching all the spells in one book.

And yes, the spells in each school should be as different as possible, so that there is an attraction to have many books.

Finally, in the custom sovereign creation each spell book should be EXPENSIVE! So, that it should not be realistic to take all the spell books (right now it is like 1 point per book, which is way too cheap).

I do suspect though that SD decided to first produce generic spell-books and kingdoms, and later make an expansion that really have different technology trees and real difference between books. This is what they did with GalCiv II, it took them 2 expansions to get there.

Overall I am salivating over the game, but mostly not what it is, but what it CAN be.

That's part of the choice you have to make. Are you going to start with excellent armour, forgoing spell books and focusing on arcane research. Or are you going to start with the spell books and research armour (You don't usually have enough character creation points to actually do both). The main difference is weapon and armour research can b used by your troops as well, where as spell research can't. So it's no ideally balanced. Any sensible person given the choice would start with the spell books and devote the research time to armour.

But more overly the spell books are just access to the spells, they aren't the spells themselves. By the time you can effectively research any powerful spell from any given book that might make the book unique, you can have all the books available by that point easily anyway. So my point was starting with them or not doesn't make that much of a difference to how unique the channeller is. That's why I suggested a better solutions is limiting (and perhaps randomising a bit) which unique spells they can get their hands on in each book.

You want to talk about uniqueness and individuality... Even specialists in a specific school of magic should have different styles. Having the book of fire and not having the book of fire shouldn't determine uniqueness. Two or more fire mages should be able to have different play styles. Again limiting spell access a bit is probably the best way to achieve this. Lets say there are 4 level 10 spells that represent the peak of a fire mages power. To make the mages unique you'd limit each mage to only being able to pick one of them initially and make each subsequent one increasingly harder to acquire. While you are at it don't just make it harder, make it uncertain when and even if they will acquire it. That way each spell they choose will be unique to their preferred play style. Four fire mages of equal power, but one summons volcanoes, one summon meteors, one has the ability to grant entire armies flaming weapons and one can make large groups of people spontaneously combust.

That's the kind of variety I think we should be aiming for. Now when you consider the channellers, aren't just limited to fire magic, but actually have to make these selective decisions with 6 or more spell schools... You'll start getting much more unique spell compendiums. Even with all the spell books at their disposal players will specialise as well. If they look though the Air spell book and think to themselves "hey that spell would be cool, but I don't like the other spells of that level and I can't be certain the one I want will come up any time soon... But all of the Water spells look cool...", then they'll start to specialise as result of priorities.

Something else to consider is even if you have all the spell books, you can't research spells from all of them at once. You have to pick one spell at time. If you pick one from each book one after the other you'll take a damn long time to reach the high level spells from any book (ideally). So you'll get people specialising as water/life mages and Earth/Air mages... Even if they do have all the spell books and one or two spells from different schools in them in their arsenal.

Limiting which spell books are available isn't really going to solve the problem. Especially the way things are now with each spell book having a huge section identical to each other one with it's own elemental tag attached. I mean look at the book of water: Summon water elemental, Summon frost giant, hurl ice for up to INT damage, freeze 9 squares for up to INT damage. Now look at fire: Summon fire elemental, Summon fire Giant, Hurl fire for up to INT damage, burn 9 squares for up to INT damage... This is not strictly speaking a bad thing, it means each book is balanced so someone who does choose to specialise in water magic isn't gimped in combat compared to a fire mage. Now I have not played the current version long enough to see all these spells and I'm possibly representing them wrong... But I think my point is clear that saying you can only have the water spell book and you can only have the fire spell book, currently is not going to make either party all that unique.

I mean your entitled to disagree with me but my opinion at the moment is changing and limiting how spells are obtained would be much more effective then changing and limiting spell book availability.

I cast magic missile!

As they have stated for quite a while.  This is really not that big of a secret.

I think that the tech tree does alot of things that spells might do. When you look at the functionality of the tech tree, there's not alot of room left for useful spells. The two paths are incompatible. It would have been nicer and more flavorful if 'spells' and 'tech' were together in one mechanic. As it is the game doesn't know if it should be MoM or Civ.