I sent the following email to ME Games. I would be interested in player feedback and opinion.
HI,
I assume you are still interested in player input about possible changes to the game, so here’s my few coppers. This is specifically about mages but I do have several suggestions for other aspects of the game if you are interested. These ideas are conservative because I believe that it is best to make slow and gradual changes to the game, since players already like the game just as it is. With this in mind I would prefer not to have any new mage orders added but rather to have lower-level mages made a bit more useful, and higher mages a bit more rewarding, by improving on existing orders and removing present penalties and restrictions on mages.
The following suggestions are meant to address the following problem: mages are too weak relative to the other character types.
It should be noted that one solution to this problem that has been made by others, notably by Tom Walton, is to allow mages some way of training up faster, such as through an ‘apprentice magery’ order that would allow one mage to train up another, in addition to the ‘prentice’ magery order. This is an interesting suggestion but I think that the difficulty of training up mages is more consistent with the Tolkien flavor because high mages become a rarity in the game, just as they are in Middle Earth. Adding an ‘apprentice magery’ order would increase the # of high level mages, and the # of mages in general, in the game dramatically, and this could significantly affect overall game-play and feel, which is at odds with my conservative leanings for game changes. I therefore favor the slow growth of mages.
General Suggestions:
•PrenMgy: Put this order on par with other similar orders for other character types (like GrdLoc), by making it in some way useful other than as simply a skill booster. I think adding a slight increase to the mages’ proficiency with his existing spells is in order. This would also the side effect of encouraging mages to learn spells at a lower rank because the consequence of learning the spell at a low casting rank would be mitigated since the casting rank would improve as the mage trains up. This is also more intuitive than the present way the order works because one would expect that a mage who studies magic intensely would improve a bit at his spell casting.
•Allow players to select their starting spells. Low level mages would then be immediately useful since they would presumably start with the spells that a player needs. This would also make naming muti-class mages much more practical. As it is, naming a multi-class mage generally is unadvisable because they tend to come with useless spells and can’t learn any new ones for a long time.
•Reduce the penalty for casting two spells. Being able to cast two spells without so much fear would make mages significantly potent. As it is, a mage that tries to curse/scry area on the next target, might die! Being able to cast two spells without so much fear would allow for a variety of interesting spell combos.
Suggestions to Make Mages More Useful in Combat:
•Allow Dark Summons, Offense, and Defense spells to all be cast under different orders, so that a mage with could combine two combat spells, making him/her much more useful in combat.
•Increase the probablity of survival/escape in combat for mages that cast combat spells. As it is, the probability of capture after combat makes one want to avoid using mages in combat.
•With combat spells that have a range of damage, allow the degree of success at casting to determine the result. So a very skilled mage would end up with a high-end result, allowing him/her to use a spell like Words of Death to inflict 2250 pts consistently, instead of getting a random result between 1250-2250.
•Consider allowing some artifacts to enhance the effect of combat spells.
Suggestions to Make Mages More Useful as Info. Gatherers:
Rather than introducing new spells as some have suggested, make some of the existing 940 spells more useful/practical. The following is a list of spells that are either fairly useless or could use some improvements. I have provide some suggested conservative improvements to improve each spell, which should be suffient to make the spell worth casting. A more radical idea that I like but did not include in the suggested changes is to allow the caster to increase the difficulty of the spell in order to extend the spell effects. For example, increasing the spell’s range, etc…
General Suggestion: Use seperate order #s for each list of 940 spells, thus allowing a mage to cast two 940 spells so long as they are from different lists.
Perceptions:
•Perceive Allegiance–In addition to the specified effect, notify caster of any attempted allegiance changes made by nations of the specified allegiance, or made by any nations attempting to change to the specified allegiance.
•Perceive Relations–Notify caster of attempted relations changes. Allow caster to perceive relations between other nations.
•Perceive Nationality–Allow spell to reveal character type in addition to nationality. An alternate way to make the spell more useful is to allow it to reveal the names of any characters that the target character has named.
•Perceive Power–Allow spell to reveal target’s challenge rank in addition to skill titles.
•Perceive Mission–Allow spell caster to specify which turn, present, past, or maybe even future for which to reveal the target’s orders. When specifying a future turn the spell effect would be delayed until that turn arrives. (Spell is canceled if caster dies first.) Degree of difficulty would depend on temporal proximity.
•Perceive Secrets–This is a great spell, but replace victory conditions with secrets that are actually useful: like artifacts held or character names or amount of gold in the treasury, recent encounters, stuff like that.
Divinations:
•Divine Army–Let the spell operate as a ‘scout army’ order (but w/out option to follow) in addition to described effect.
•Divine Allegiance Forces–Let spell reveal icon locations.
•Divine Army True–In addition to described effect, it could operate as ‘scout army,’ and an upgraded ‘divine characters w/ forces,’ revealing the presence of non-player forces like Ents. (Or are those already identified by Div. Chr. w/ Forces?)
An alternate way to make Divine Army/True more useful would be to allow them to act could act as army tracers, tracing the location of the army over multiple turns.
Artifact Lore:
•Research Artifact–Partially randomize some artifact special abilities. For example, some arties could have Spirit mastery 50% of the time and Dark Summons the other 50%. Perhaps add some special abilities to artifacts and require that they be activated by a ‘research artifact’ spell before they can be used.
Scrying:
•Scry Character–In additon to described effect, allow spell to also reveal: stealth score, challenge rank, nationality, and possibly even a limited character ‘history,’ if the spell is cast with high success. The extent and accuacy of the history would depend on the degree of success, and might reveal prior character activities and hex locations.
Hidden Visions:
•Reveal Production–Allow spell to reveal the exact production capacity of specified hexes.
