Magic design flaw?

Yup, the low HP of heroes makes taking them into anything but a small skirmish suicide. I don't know what would be a better fix - scaling their HP up, or having some kind of luck or dodge system to give them a chance to avoid or reduce the impact of such attacks.

Probably give them some immunity, or inherent way to fight against magic (ie. not be impacted as much). They're heroes after all. Otherwise, they're just regular units with a name.

You're probably running into the shard spawning problem (which seems to be that shards are spawning on load).  I don't think that there should be that many shards hanging around.

it's a problem with the damage system and champion HP, not spells.

I mean I had a unit last night with 13 attack and 17 defense (and 9HP because I recruited him), get killed in one hit by a unit with 9 attack. He didn't even get to counterattack.

Damage scales up way too high relative to HP, and defense is unreliable. Fix those problems, and the spells scaling won't be as big a deal.

"Protect friend: Target unit becomes protected from offensive spells". Spellbook page one

That's awesome Stax.  Except for the fact that the overwhelming majority of the incoming damage is going to be physical...

yeah; have never taken this because i've never seen the ai target my at-the-back spellcaster with long range magic. and there's usually too many frontline guys to make picking one of them worthwhile.

and magic is really broken. there are some great threads in suggestions with ideas for fixing it. your main problem seems to be the number of shards. i've never seen that before.

the actual spells in this game are quite immaterial. they are just different skins for INT or 1/2 INT damage (though there may be others i haven't seen yet). this is part of the problem, in that there's no scaling other than through shards; this makes magic great at low levels and pathetic later on. the other problem is the massive randomness. and the fact that shards and attributes don't affect non-damage spells.

really, damage needs to be based on the spell, plus modifiers for attributes to limit the randomness. i'd actually use the shards to reduce the mana costs of spells in order to make the big spells actually castable on a regular basis. this would also remove the slow mana regen that always bogs you down in late game. of course, then you'd have to link everything to an element (which i have no problem with - game could use a tidy up like this).

But what about at-the-front heroes? I kind of wanted my heroes to be able to be something other than just casters. As it is, they can't stand up to front line troops.

I know too many people compare this game with Master of Magic, but lets be honest - its combat system worked. Heroes and normal units were fairly even at equal levels, but heroes could advance farther and got pretty awesome. Plus, each unit had a magic defense separate from physical defense, both of which levelled up with the unit. Finally, the attack/defense system was much more reliable. Each point of attack/defense had a 30% chance of hitting/blocking. That meant that you got a fairly predictable attack and defense rolls, with rare exceptions of high/low values. With the Elemental system, if I understand it correctly, a random number is rolled from 1..max, which gives very unpredictable results.

And, as far as the Protect Friend spell, don't you find it a bit tedious to have to cast a spell on every single hero you have to get them to be able to survive a magic attack?

I like the idea of this game, but the entire system needs a severe overhaul to be effective from early to late game.

You can EASILY make an over the top, front line sovereign.  BUT it does require you taking advantage of the various exploits (tons of packs, rings and amulets).  Blend that with a min-max melee build (15 STR, DEX and CON to start, take assassin as professional and any "melee" good traits) and go heavy into the adventure and warfare tree early... you'll have an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction in no time flat.

Hmm... 15 CON = 15hp, right? Even a slightly unlucky roll in combat or against a spell and you are dead. Plus, what about the normal hero units that you can't choose initial stats for?

btw, what i think the non-combat sovereigns need is "spells" which are not castable at all and just give passive benefits, representing them channelling their magic into themselves physically. of course, how you reconcile this with the global spellbook is another manner.

The Shadowrun pen&paper game had a something called adepts. They were magic-users who used their magic to enhance physical attributes rather than to cast spells. It was a passive effect, so it wasn't like a buff - they just became Bruce Lee-type fighters. An interesting idea that I have never seen implemented in any game.