I'll go ahead and second this, magic is allready a finite resource in battle and when blasting somone with a litteral ball of fire is less effective than hitting them with a stick, then something is wrong.

It was so bad I did in fact scrap a magic spec'd character for more of an idiot bruiser last playthrough.

This.  Also, in the thread (titled "magic shards aren't working" or soemthing like that) the devs hinted to the damage calculation by giving a sample of what he did to fireballs.  If that sticks, shards will play a HUGE role and magic will be awesome.  In the meantine, shards reportedly have an effect on auto resolved battles, so try using those.

Yeah, as far as i can tell most magic is pointless.  It misses constantly and does very little damage.  Your mighty wizard is much less able to compete in combat that a peasent archer? WTF.  Why would channelers be in charge of anything?  Magic needs help, i mean really even if shards were working it is pretty silly that you have to get lucky on shard locations for your magic to matter in the slightest.  BAM my spell did 10 damage.... too bad that unit has hundreds of hp and hits for 50-100.

same, magic need a major overhaul

That's not true, the Enchant weapon and armor spells are great as well.

I just realized hoe biblical magic is going to be once it's fixed, especially those AOE spells.

Since magic is a finite and limited resource I don't know why they don't just go completely over the top with the spells. You could allow a sovereign to be able to wipe out an entire army with magic; it's not like MoM where you can hurl spells into every battle, until you get a dynasty started up you only have a single unit capable of casting spells. Of course, the AI would need to be taught to try attacking on multiple fronts rather than run lemming like at the same city in order to take advantage of the fact your casters can't be everywhere at once.

Plus, it'd make taking on the enemy sovereign a Big Deal, rather than the damp squib it is at the minute when you can run them down with a single unit of horsebowmen. Wiping the guy out can remove his entire faction - it should feel like a climactic life or death struggle, not duffing over a senile old bloke with a club.

absolutely right!

Sovereigns should dominate with their magic... heck, sovereigns should:

1. Very rarely use melee

2. When using melee, have it magic infused

3. Be the toughest unit on the battlefield

4. have int, wisdom, and essence combined into a single stat (essence) that massively boosts magic power, mana amount, mana regen rate, etc (aka, reduce multiple attribute dependency for sovs)

5. And magic should be massively more powerful.

A sovereign should be able to use magic to go toe to toe with dragons / armies and annihilate anything less. Attacking in multiple fronts is encouraged, and only the most powerful nations should be able to defeat an enemy sov using a mundane army (aka, without a sov of their own).

I flat out deleted all my mage sovereigns to make melee powerhouses that single handedly slaughter all in their path.

I agree it'd be fun to see the sovs and their proginy get the power to unleash ultimate destruction from their fingertips but right now it acctually feels alot like HoMM, direct damage spells suck but your buffs like flameing weapon and the like are really potent and make it worth haveing somebody that can cast in your stack.

For buffs i like deflect, it's ridiculously overpowered. It makes you immune to counter attacks soooo.

Deflect, Stab of ice, repeat.

In this way one of your kids (because they can have stupid mana regen) could quite easily solo a dragon.

Hyperbole aside, it would be nice if magic could do anything really useful past the early game.  Yes, sovereigns can THEORETICALLY be seriously overpowered at the beginning (though that's more than moderately debatable) it's completely neutered in middle to late...  shards being completely worthless in their current incarnation and the incredibly high rate of spell misses or very low hits (1 point of damage against a level 1 jerk with 4 HP and no defense with a spell listed as doing up to 30 before shards are factored in).

Well, the sheer randomness of the combat system is a little too much no matter who you are. I've been experimenting with different playstyles, I had a maxed-dex sovereign the other game with some absurd amount (like 130ish) of defense, and I winced every time some 15 attack bandit whacked him for 12.. it happens more often than you'd expect.

But it feels like the randomness hurts casters worse, due to limited mana. If your maxed-attack sovereign gets a bad roll and misses a 5 def enemy with his 100 attack, you can always swing again next turn, maybe you'll lose a few extra health due to the delay. If your maxed-defense sovereign gets a bad roll, you can lose a third of your health against an insultingly trivial enemy, but you can still finish him. If your caster gets a bad roll and misses a high level spell, you not only lose time and possibly health if your enemy attacks you back before you can cast again, you also lose a significant chunk of the very limited amount of total damage you can do before your mana runs out, and it doesn't take many bad rolls before suddenly you realize you can't finish this battle.

Honestly, rather than making spells into epic destroyers of armies, I'd rather see much more mana regen both in and out of combat, so a caster sovereign could practically match a melee hit-for-hit in a long battle, and repeat this performance every battle - it just seems more balanced. Misses would still be irritating, but not as crippling if you just had to wait an extra turn to get the mana back and try again. I mean, I don't want magic to lose its epicness - I wouldn't want casters turned into archers with fancier special effects - but I'd rather have a lot of sustainability (i.e. mana regen) than a little more power. What if wisdom granted mana regen in addition to the current effect?* It'd let players choose between more damage to wipe out armies with their initial mana pool (int), or the ability to cast continuously throughout every battle (wisdom).

Of course all aspects of combat, attack and defense and spells and everything, could do with a hefty dose of normalizing (i.e. making average results more common than extreme lows and highs), which would help everyone - but casters particularly, due to the reasons mentioned above (how much you have to count on those very limited spells not missing).

*Not even sure if the current stated effect of wisdom ("make spells cast for less action points") even works, but if it does, adding regen would make sense - casting more but not stronger spells lowers your mana efficiency, you'd need more mana to keep up with an int character if you focused on wisdom.