How many times have you remade the map because a certain mana type was not near your starting area? Have you ever designed a sovereign that specialized in Fire magic, only to have the damage you can deal be totally ineffective because there were no Fire Shards to be found?
I would like to suggest a way to increase the usability of magic, as well as encourage players to make meaningful choices to shape their gaming experience and strategy. This would be done in a simple way: make some or all mana shards untyped at the start of a game.
Currently, all mana is one of 6 types: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Death, and Life. What shards you as a player get are randomly generated at the creation of a map. I assume this was done to force a player to find many different shards and change their strategy to match what mana they get. The problem is, Fallen Enchantress has several design elements that do not seem to encourage that kind of play. The most glaring of these being that your sovereign has a limited selection, based on creation, of what elements he can use. The second is tying spell damage and buffs directly to the amount of shards controlled.
The game, as it is now, will occasionally ask a player what their favorite toy is, and then not let them play with it.
I would suggest three scenarios to make magic a more enjoyable aspect of the game:
- Make all mana untyped. As you build a shrine to collect the mana, the player would decide what kind of mana to get. Creating a later tech to get Death and Life mana may be preferable, although that severely weakens those magics early game.
- Create a tech that lets a player remove the type of mana from a shard and replace it with a new one. This requires the player to make an early game strategy based on what they have available to them, but lets them specialize later on. It also required more of an investment from the player to get the reward.
- A hybrid concept: Make 50% to 80% of all the shards untyped at the start of the game, with the rest having an elemental type. However, these shards would give TWO mana instead of one. For added strategy, let a player remove the double mana from a shard of this type and replace it with their preferred element, but reduce the mana given to one.
I think this would greatly increase the enjoyment of using magic in FE and make the power granted to those who can use it even greater, creating a better experience for the player.
