More Magic?

Many posters have noted the relative rareness of cast spells, and requested the ability to cast more frequently.

I'm looking forward to the patch, and hoping there might be some undocumented features. Or the artifacts could interact with spell cast speed, maybe.

I can't imagine an overhaul of the spellcasting system would take place in this iteration of the game. That would be a lot of coding. They can probably tinker with casting times and such, lower the minor spells that only affect your individual units to 0.2 or something, so you can at least squeeze a few of those off at once.

Honestly, I'd be happy if they just alphabetize the spell list.

Spells that take more than one turn generally requires you to be at peace, as the AI will counterspell most of them (including Agile Mind). Once you get Agile Mind try to end all your current wars if possible. If you don't get Agile Mind quickly enough, maybe you are not building enough research buildings?

To me the spell casting is all about the one turn enchantments. Damage and healing spells only for special circumstances.

I haven't had the option to research Agile Mind and I'm nearly 150 turns in

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You have to invest more in research buildings. They are expensive in upkeep but you just have to do it. Problem solved...ish.

DeadDireWolf said:

One thing that bothers me about this game is the spell casting. You're supposed to be this uber wizard but you can essentially only cast one spell per turn. Even some punk early starting spell you can still only cast once per turn later in the game. I haven't had the option to research Agile Mind and I'm nearly 150 turns in. I just feel like you should be able to cast more spells. I have 4000 mana. No way I can burn through that much. Then these really cool spells all require two turns to cast but Punchy the Lich has had counter spell since about turn 50 and has thwarted me the entire game with it.

Of course, I'm pounding him and the others with my units but it feels like Magic is secondary in this game. I can hardly cast any spells. Kind of frustrating and dumb at the same time.

I really like the game but more I play it the more this aspect seems to displease me.

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I completely agree. This game compares favourably with the classic game Master of Magic in most areas but not in its magic system, which is sadly lacking. This is particulary unfortunate given part of its name: Master of the Arcane

Some time ago I started a thread here which attempted to deal with the problem by allowing great mages to cast several spells at the same time, say a damage spell, an enchantment, a summon spell and a counterspell all being cast in parallel. This sort of parallel casting was what occured in MoM which allowed global spells and separate battle spells up to the limit of the great mages casting ability each turn.

There are several ways increasing the rate at which spells could be cast. Simply speeding up the casting times could create problems, with for instance a deluge of damage spells, unless some other limitation is introduced. Maybe a cooldown time can be added to damage spells, so if a fireball spell is cast (say) then no other damage spell can be cast for (say) 4 times its casting time but any other spell could be cast.

JJ

I've found keeping research equal to the turn number (+ or minus 5) insured I had cleaned out the spell research tab by around turn 100. I also explore the portal worlds however, and get a spell or two from each via Monster Den pops (and some from Ardania dens as well).

Just throwing that out there for comparison purposes.

Sorry for the bluntness of my last response, in my head it was not so brusque I guess. I assumed you did not know the importance of doing research because some "Let's play Warlock" on youtube and various comments made on the board have coloured my thoughts and led me to believe a significant proportion of people don't consciously go out to improve their research rate so it goes up very slowly and also the fact that you had not completed the research tree by turn 150 which I think is do-able.

I also choose the perk which slightly speeds up the casting rate. It doesn't seem like much but when I haven't chosen it I do miss it. If you want to focus on getting agile-mind then temporarily skipping the god spells and just researching the vanilla ones may reveal it quicker?

I agree with JJ, spell casting times can't really just be speeded up, as he mentions perhaps a limit of what types of spells can be used per turn might be a solution.

Sorry for getting your back up, it was not my intention.

There are a lot of ways they could improve the magic system without needing to tweak spell casting times. The main problem is not being able to use your spells at a fast enough pace and here is some of the ways they could improve that.

1) Buildings that automatically enchant new units - This way you don't have to waste your turns gearing up new units with enchantments but still cost the mana and upkeep to do so. Here you are trading off a building slot so that all new units in that city have a specific enchantment at start.

2) Buildings that allow summoning units - Train summon units at their normal cast rate in your city for the cost of mana instead gold like normal units. The trade off is they appear in the city instead of anywhere on the map you can see like normal casting but saves on casting time.

3) City casting - Allow individual cities to cast spells with range of 2-3. The spells they can cast could be unlocked by curtain buildings. Say Caster guilds unlock Bane and Damage spells while the Healer guilds unlock the Healing and Enchantment spells. In all of these the mana cost, upkeep cost, and casting time of spells remains unchanged so you will still need the mana to support all this casting.

The main advantage of the Great Mage casting spells now becomes the fact that he can cast it anywhere on the map. But a lot of the more tedious spell casting of getting your empire up and running at peak efficiency is done on a local level. Also with cities able to cast in addition to the great mage it can become more dangerous to attack a city with a caster guild in it as they can hurl spells at your advancing army. I always thought it was kind of lame the city defensive ability remains unchanged regardless of what is in the city.

I like all 3 of your ideas for being implemented as capital only.(In addition maybe 1 race dependant special building for cities of size 10+.)
I think the capital cities should offer several special buildings which should vary from race to race offering things like you mentioned.
This could include some defensive Buildings as well like a non death magic tower for the undead capital.