Thoughts on the magic system

One thing I didn't enjoy about the heroes series ( 1 -3 ) is the magic sistem. After playing games like Kings bounty as a mage I realized why. Magic isn't ballanced,strong and strategic enough. I was never an amazing player, I'm sure some of them will disagree, but I believe with a little change in philosophy a lot can be accomplished.

What I appreciated ( mostly) about kings bounty is just how flexible the magic system is. I think this can calso work on H3 or sw mod.

This Is how I envisione it :

I) Categorize magic in form of utility not magic schools, each having arround 10 spells.
1 ) destruction magic : deals damage.
2) Enchantment magic : increases the abilities and heals your troops.
3) Curse magic : debuffs units and creates obstacles/traps
4)Adventure map magic: changes the movement and sight of the map.

This way you can specialize your hero. You will have to make important choices. Let's say magic bolt dealts 50 dmg for 5 spell points, lighting bolt 100 dmg for 12 spell points and implosion 200 dmg for 25 points. Now you will have to make important decisions, will you drag the fight out and deal more dmg, or attack fast with amazing power!

II) Make leveling up these skills increase only effectiveness. When it comes to dmg increase the number, when it comes to buffs/debuffs increase the power only!

III) The reason for this ? to add the following skills
1) Clever sorcery : reduce the cost of spells (affects all spells)
2) Increase the duration of spells ( affects all but dmg spells)

+ the normal spells from heroes
3) intelligence: double spell points (affects all spells)
4) sorcery : spell dmg (affects only dmg spells)

and you have quite the combination

Conclusion :
Of course, for this to work well you need a few new skills, things like "mass slow" having an aoe instead of of every enemy, this could make games a lot more tactical. Making spells much stronger (and harder to cast) gives them a huge impact, and with clever strategy you can beat your opponent.

This would increase build diverstity a lot ! With Destroction magic you could become a nuker, deal massive damage and hide from the enemy (if you have a weak army). With enchantments you could make a stack really strong, or use it to ballance out some weaknesses your troops might have. With curses you could outplay and punnish your opponent, casting slow,blind whily slowly chipping away at his army. And of course, adventure map magic could make you really sneaky, steal some mines, attack when nobody expects.

This is a long post, sorry for that...but I'm still not done! By now I hope you understand what my point is, but lets look at some combinations:

Destruction with enchantment : you can be sneaky, kill the ranged characters while being very mobile on the battlefield. Healing your units while buffing their defense and speed, you can outlast your opponent.

Destruction and curse: With enchantment you can deal some dmg with your units if needed, in this case you can't . Curse your enemies, make their range units useless. Cast slow and deal dmg whenever you can.

Enchantment and curse: the battlefield is yours! You might have a weaker army, but you will fight to the last man. Make your enemys units useless while you control chock points and fill the map with traps. Heal when needed so you can go on, buff your archers for even more damage and do your best to outplay your opponent, make each of his mistakes count !

What do you guys think ? If implemented properly (I'm just talking in a hypothethical way, I don't even know if it's possible to make something like this) Would you want to play heroes 3 succesion wars ( or normal h3) like this ?

That might be nice, but outta this particular project. We are not going to cancel the magic skills as well as add new skills - we already have Eagle Eye which is hardly useful by any means.

First of all, you're right about the fact that the magic system isn't flawless. I think that your solution sounds straightforward and I also think it would be an improvement. Sadly it's just a thought experiment, and testing it is essential for a final verdict.

I might have an extra idea which helps specializing your hero further: with each mage guild level upgrade you choose one category of which at least one spell will become available in that level, the rest of the spells (if any) will still be random.
This way you can really tweak your hero effective, because having a high level 'adventure map hero' with only the view mines spell would be a bit harsh  

You could also make this town dependent, if you know what I mean. For example: Sorceress always has one enchantment spell in each level, Warlock damage etc.

Orzie wrote:

That might be nice, but outta this particular project. We are not going to cancel the magic skills as well as add new skills - we already have Eagle Eye which is hardly useful by any means.

I know! just putting ideas out there, I know you guys have a particular vision.

This is a good idea! I would love to play something like this,but I have no clue on programming. It's fun having ideas but I think probably nothing will come out of it.

Still, maybe I will make a list of skills, i'm sure half of them aren't really possible to implement!

I suggest making 4 new specialities instead of old water air earth fire magic. These could be Illusion magic (map spells and some stuff like hyptnotize and blind), protection magic (stone skin, fire shield, protections and dispel, also buffs and debuffs), destruction (only damage spells) and summon magic (all summons from summon boat to elementals and removing obstacles) there will be problem with spells like visions and magic arrow, which should obviously go to illusion and destrucion, so I don't know, but it's just my idea. This way every school of magic will have good spells (not counting protection, where prayer would be the best spell. maybe add fly to the group?)

YhyJasne wrote:

spells like visions and magic arrow, which should obviously go to illusion and destrucion,

Some spells can still be in more than 1 category.
Natively Magic Arrow is in the 4 categories (earth air fire water). Is it possible to set a spell in only 2 or 3 categories? Or is it only 1 or all?

It's about approach and scripting right? M&M and HoMM followed the elemental doctrines (RP logicaly it's like whatever, as you could get even that Fire Witch spam water elementals if you wanted to, so bah), only later titles turned to school types.
But if you put spells in more than one schools you have to lay that the spell should use only the most developed school if more than one known. Which you see require even moar cross scripting, compared to leaving spells to their respective school only.