Combat spells are overpowered

I completely disagree. Once you play more I think you will start to disagree as well. The problems with spells are:

1) Int scales spell damage linearly, Str scales damage by a percentage (meaning with a 20-damage weapon 1 point of STR will give you a bigger bonus than with a 10-damage weapon).

2) You get new weapons that drastically increase in power.

3) Spell damage rolls against armor. You'll start coming up against units with 30+ defense easily (I have in the campaign). The 0-15 roll with Intelligence doesn't compete with that at all.

4) For all practical purposes, you can cast one spell per combat turn. I think later on you might get stats to cast more than one, but a melee attack always takes 1 action point. A Sovereign with even 3.1 action points (not very difficult to get) can attack 4 times in a turn. The same Sovereign can only cast once/turn.

Spells are only "good" in the beginning of the game when your only weapons are 2-damage clubs. Once you get fancier creatures and fancier weapons, they completely nullify spells. In the campaign I got my Sovereign to 66 attack power with only 20 strength. He also had 16 int, and could do up to 16 points of damage with arcane arrow that he could also cast once as opposed to attacking 4 times. Yay?

early game i agree

late game they can be weak

did you proceed in the game?

i got attacked by a pack with 3 multi ogre all with 100+ hp

and my spells did like 20 25 dmg max

also ai of enemies seems pretty better in the management, i see a LOT of strong troops around later in the game (consider only sovereign can cast and some other champion in case)

Yeah all games the magic is more powerful in the beginning but later on it takes both to be successful. Even playing MOM I remember wanting Sky Drakes and Paladins a lot more than I wanted some spell although Power Drain or Drain Life were some pretty powerful spells in the later portion of the game but so was Counter Magic that could stop them all.

Wouldn't controlling Shards help make spells compensate a bit more in the late game?

That brings up another point about shards they should be protected by strong beasts in the early game so they aren't so easy to get or at least by difficulty level of the game like MOM did it. Remember the mana pools in MOM? All of them had something protecting them and you had to fight to get them not just walk on them and press a button and wallah they are yours.

Possibly, if you can get shards. You don't need anything fancy to get weapons, Iron is much more common than shards (and after you research them you can just buy the weapons from shop for your heroes without needing any iron), while you have  to try and capture the shards which may or may not be nearby. They do increase spell damage by 100% per shard, but I'd much rather have better scaling damage to start with (like base spell damage roll + int modifier) and a smaller bonus on the shards.

Yeah in should be a percent modifier like strength... Really though I would prefer an opposite balance with magic being underwhelming in the early game and totally thrashing everyone in the late game.

My impressions are from a random match (small map with 4 opponents) not from the campaign:

Instead of an Intelligence based base damage spells should have a base damage that scales by a percentage, too. Lower level spells should have low base damage and higher level spells should have high base damage. This would increase the number of high level spells, too.

It is very easy to kill the first enemy cities only with area spells, because they hit multiple units at the same time, which increases the total damage dealt with a single attack (spell).

My area spells inflict 0 - 57 points of damage (Intelligence 19 and 2 shards) which is very good until the end game where the enemies have high hit points / defense and with the berserker spell i would change Constittion to Dexterity and equip my character with a bow.

It sounds like there's a a very broad variation on the kind of things that players can encounter. Were you doing any Adventuring research to make all sorts of crazy creatures pop up on the map?

Shards definitely push spells up there in damage, but it's still pretty bad scaling overall. As you say, it would make much more sense for spells to have a base damage with an int modifier.

The other thing is it sounds like the AI just isn't equipping its stuff very well. Admittedly if you luck out with shards you could get high damage spells faster than someone who isn't focused on Warfare could get armor.. another reason to have the shards give a decent bonus, but not be the bulk of the damage.

I had Adventuring at level 4 and the others at level 12 - 14 at the end game, because i thought it would help me to defeat the other opponents faster.

Yeah, i think every shard should increase the Intelligence of the character by 5 points for that type of spell.

Well, as special as magic-users are in this world, the magic needs to be powerful. Like a previous poster said, the fact that the sovereign can only have one finger in the dike balances this.

RE: magic power, I think it is underpowered. My fireball should NOT miss--three times in a row! Damage spells like a fireball should automatically do damage no matter what--the enemy should have a resistance based on constitution to save for half damage or to prevent burning on successive turns.

I am very excited about the potential of the magic system. To me, that is the most attractive part of the game, so I hope it gets plenty of attention in the weeks to come.

Keep it up everyone!

In my opinion, rather than rolling against armor, the target's INT score should just be used as a form of spell resist. Perhaps a function of INT and Level, such that you need to bump up INT occasionally to maintain the same resist percentage as you level up.

Constitution is already in effect when getting hit by spells, since that's your HP buffer - it just needs to scale better and Sovereigns/Heroes should get some hp based on CON on each levelup, and the benefit of upgrading CON would be more hp/level. Basically how D&D works, even though Frogboy isn't a fan of that.

Normal trained units just have base stats and don't level, so they'd just have a base chance to resist a spell, as long as it's low enough, that'll be okay I think.

It seems to me that INT should scale spells the same way that STR scales weapons. This is the model I'd like:

Spell has a base damage, say 1-10.

Each shard you control adds some amount, like +10 if it's the same element as the spell in question or +5 if not.

INT scales the same way STR does.

Shards then become the equivalent of bigger swords, and the sovereign's stat scaling factors work the same way.

That's interesting.  I find combat spells to be pretty weak even from the get go.  I was hitting spiders with fire bolt for like 3 damage.  Yippee.  My summoned bear was worth a heck of a lot more than a bunch of firebolts.

Single target spells are ok, but area spells are very powerful, because the total damage is based on the number of targets.

why not wis?

its way less useful

also having the same stat both for attack and defense its usually not the best balance wise

Yeah, I mentioned earlier that spells should have a base damage with a non-linear int modifier, so a 1-10 damage spell gets less bonus per point of int than a 10-20 damage spell.

I just didn't include that again in the thing you quoted since it wasn't directly related I still don't like spells rolling against armor, though, I'd much rather have a separate resist for spells that's based on INT (and would then allow equipment that modifies spell resist, too).

Wis is a good idea. It's been so useless for now that I completely forgot about it. Since spell resist would be useful to both melee and casters, you'd have Melee needing STR and DEX with WIS and CON as useful, and casters using INT and Essence with WIS and CON as useful.

So far the spells seem weak and bland to me.... I am sure they will tweak the balance in the future.

I think Wisdom is very useful, because Wisdom is Essence as soon you leave the character creation and if you play Empire you get your maximum mana every turn (is that a bug?), which makes Wisdom very powerful.

I have started a new game (Empire this time, small map, 4 opponents, challenging) and my favorite spell is Melt Touch, because it inflicts a base damage of Intelligence x 2 points at a range of 2. With Intelligence 17 and 2 shards the spell inflicts 0 - 102 points of damage for 2 mana and i can cast this spell 3 times per turn (mounted spell casters are nice).

Most stats should be rebalanced:

CON: Base Hit Points and CON / 5 Hit Points per level beyond the first

STR: Is balanced

DEX: Is balanced

INT: As STR, all spells should have a base damage of 5-15 and every shard should increase the INT by 5 for that type of spell

WIS: Base Mana and WIS / 5 Mana Regeneration per turn

CHA: Should change the gildar cost of all units (100 % +/- 5 % per point CHA below or above 10)

That's why it's not useful though, it's not really a separate stat as such. Once you leave character creation, there's no Wisdom. The heroes you recruit don't have Wisdom, either.