I'd like to see the shards give more bonuses to elemental specific minor and tactical spells. For example,

1) Fire bolt's damage = (INT+(# of fire shards x5))/2.

Having 20 Int and 1 fire shard equals 12.5 damage. Having no fire shards equals 10 damage.

A solid and modest increase, but it  gives players more of an incentive to acquire shards for spells that they are basing their tactics around.

2): It can also modify Mana to Cast(MtC).

Quicken's MtC = 10 - (10 x (air shard x0.1)

Having 1 air shard equals 9 mtc. 2 shards equals 8 mtc. No shards equals 10 mtc.

Anyway, not sure how simple you want the formulas to be, but you get the idea.

At my advice, this original spell list + the content of all other « secret » books will allow us to have a lot of possible tactical choices for the version 1. Don’t forget that this game contains an incredible amount of systems, features and choices; more than any game that had been released over the last years.  We can’t ask for the moon (and 500+ spells) for the release, we will create our own spells with the modding tools, and receive more in the upcoming versions and expansions.  This game has an incredible potential, and it’s really designed to grow over the following months/years. We must take in consideration that the development team seems to have put all their effort to create a game incredibly customisable, so in the following weeks / month after the initial release, we will see a bunch of new spells, systems and mods.

My 2 cents, fell free to comment

Hint: Dominions 3. -> There are tons of unique & awesome spells in that game.

I think everyone with massive amounts of spell ideas should be sure to read this.

As for the direct damage spells, I think the easiest way to make them more interesting is add some situational use to them. Perhaps Spell A does damage to all in a line, while Spell B bounces from unit to unit up to a maximum number of hits. Adding effects like this don't seem too complicated for an AI to use appropriately.

There are some spells I saw missing that I'd like to see, though. What about City spells, both offensive and defensive? I see a lot about altering production and resource rates, but how about Wall of Ice protecting your city in a wall of ice, giving added benefits against Fire magic or something?

Overall, the spells above look like they'll be a lot of fun to mess with and I can see the potential for fun combinations. I have 2 suggestions I hope you consider, though.

Weather: It would be nice if we could throw a Thunderstorm over an area (Random chance of damage?) or cover a grassland in snow, temporarily hindering movement.

Items: Custom enchanted items. I haven't seen much about this, but I remember spending far too much time making nice equipment for my Heroes in MoM using the Create Artifact spell. Did I miss it? If not, please consider this. I'd love to be able to take my Sovereign and create the Naysayer Battle Axe for his daughter before she leads the army against their enemies.

Yeah, Dominions 3 have really good spells...

What is bothering me is the 1 per caster and things like that. And I don't understand the concept of Enchantment slots at all...

Yeah! And we know that Frogboy plays Dom3.  

Alas, as he said, the AI is the limit. Dom3 tactical AI wasn't very good and that's probably why they didn't let us lead the battles. But I am confident more and more of these spells with find their way.

Come on, Frogboy: we NEED to have Animate Dead in the game. Fighting with just 3 necromancers and their escort who can rise waves after waves of undead and launch them to battle (or a contrario fighting Ermor'Army at full power) is one of the greatest pleasures in tactical battles.

Even though I'm just a casual Dom3 player, I am amazed at the quantity of everything they put inside: all kinds of creatures, spells, items, lore.

In fact, if these 2 Swedes would make an Elemental mod with their Dom3 content and mechanisms, and sell it for 50$, I would buy it right now!

I didn't expect the Books of Life and Death to be practically identical. I can see why you wouldn't want the basic spellbooks to be wildly different, but I'm a little surprised that the only difference is the names of two spells.

I don't know if you're changing it from Beta 2B, but it would be nice if the Volcano spell actually destroyed the city rather than hid it inside a volcano crater. (For that matter, I'm expecting the earthquake spell to do damage and not just alter the landscape.) It was really annoying to be able create the volcano--thinking that I'd be able to bring death and destruction to my enemy--only to see the city survive and not be able to get to it to conquer it.

Also, will we actually get access to all our spells from all the spell books we know? For instance if I had a sovereign that knew all four starting books, I was only allowed access to usually two. The weirder thing was that which two varied by faction. Of course I usually only became interested in Fire and Earth because of the land altering spells.

Still, the game shows a lot of promise.

Quick question before my intentional double-post , I noticed that spells have been split up into tactical and strategic. Does this mean that players will not be able to use firewall on the actual map to help block enemy units?

There are great suggestions in this thread! I like that you will only implement spells that the AI knows how to use, but I would hate to see magic, of all things in this game, to suffer for insufficient AI. Frankly, if a game called "Elemental: War of Magic" is released with lackluster magic, with largely straightforward and simplistic spells, it will be a big disappointment and I imagine it'd have a significant effect on its reception. I would rather see Elemental delayed until Winter than be released with lackluster magic, due to lacking AI. I mean, if the AI can't handle anything but the most straightforward spells, how are we going to mod in our own, nifty spells? We'd have to mod the AI to be able to understand them, and that does not sound like a trivial task.

One issue I have is that all your elemental DD spells like Hurl Boulder and Fireball are exactly the same, besides their damage type. (EDIT: I just noticed that the mana costs are slightly different, too) Some should be stronger than others. Some should do little damage but have significant secondary effects. Some should just be downright better or weaker than others (while other spells in the category with the weaker DD spells would make up for it). The fact that Lightning, Fireball, Hurl Boulder, etc all have the exact same effect when cast on a unit with no resistances is a Bad Thing. Same with Ice Bolt and Arcane Arrow.

There are so many ways some of those spells can be spiced up, and probably many ways that the AI could handle relatively well. Hurl Boulder has a lot of potential, for one: boulders roll and bounce! The boulder can hit the main target, and it could continue rolling, hurting units behind the target for diminishing damage. It'd be particularly awesome if we could choose which direction to throw the boulder (who says the boulder has to originate at the caster?) - I'd love to watch my caster launch a distant rock into an equally distant enemy, at a skewed angle.

In my opinion, not all of those schools even need single-target DD spells. I'd be quite happy with none in the Fire Spellbook; it could have single-target DoT spells, AoE DD spells, but could lack a single-target DD spell. Even if the spells are largely straightforward and simplistic, true diversity between the books would go a long way to making magic more fun.

This problem is reproduced in other areas as well. For example, there seem to be a lot of different ways of destroying resource tiles. Would it really be so wrong to limit abilities like that to one or two spellbooks? What is the impetus in researching new spellbooks, or new spells, that do pretty much the exact same thing as a spell I already have? Some ~repetition here and there is fine, but based on that chart it looks to be rampant (though, as always, perhaps within the game it isn't as bad as it seems like it'd be).

Also, Life vs. Death. There is zero difference besides the type of land that you revive. I realize that you're using Life and Death to provide all players with the basic, core set of spells that everyone will probably need. But it would be nice if there was a little diversity even there. Maybe mix up mana costs (so some spells might be more expensive in one than the other, and vice versa). Maybe add a few exclusive spells to each, or have some spells that accomplish more or less the same thing in Life and Death, but in different ways or with small differences.

Subtle things don't have to be complex things. Subtlety can be very simple, and still very evocative.

One other thing, somewhat related: please consider changing your current "N essence means you can maintain N enchantments." Please make some enchantments harder to maintain than others. If you don't, then the less effective ones will never be used if the better ones are available. Implementing this, as someone else in some other thread pointed out, would be extremely simple: just make some enchantments require more than 1 essence to maintain.

So Life Magic and Death Magic are... exactly the same?

Thats... exciting?

 How about we give Life and Death the books of Ruin and Restoration so they have some flavor to them.

Indeed. Gameplay & Diversity >>>>>>> Gfx. The only problem with Doms3 is the AI, but it's an MP game mainly.

PS. I would also pay for that Doms 3. mod. Just imagine...all of the Doms 3. spells in EWoM...

Yeah I agree with this, and I think that even the DD spells or AoE could have more diversity, Chain-Lightning, Lightning, Ball of Lightning (whatever), like in diferente Tiers and diferent  damage potentials.

Also I would love to see tactical spells that modify the battlefield or add obstacles like Walls (wall of ice, fire or whatever) that could provide cover (damage on a Wall of Fire or "Firewall"). A minefield or Magic Mines spell that should put "N" concealed mines on the battlefield and things like this...

For a game that once aimed to be MOM 2, surely the logical inspiration would be Master of Magic? 

Support the general idea behind Hound post#35, especally we need many different ways to Categorize spells (acutally units/heroes/tech/etc).  The best ways is the use of "Tags".

Most, if not all spells need to scale well into end game.  Also my Ranking bonus and Acheivement based bonus idea should work well with spells too.  Maybe a the player that have achieved the lenghtiest peace, will be granted exta power for their "Protect (City)" spell.

Again, listen to PigeonPigeon say!

Just to brainstorm here.  Instead of restricting the canon spells to be those that can be used by AI, make available spells to players that AI do not know how to use, in both SP and MP games.  Let me call them "Secret Spellbook" that is not available to AI player.

When playing a "Normal" difficulty game with "Secret Spellbook" spells enabled, AI players can cheat.  To compensate this disadvantage for the AI players.    I cannot think of a good way for the AI to cheat, but the hivemind may help here.     Maybe the AI player will be granted with extra mana/essence/resource whenever any Secret Spells are used, maybe something else.

(For "Normal" difficulty game without "Secret Spellbook" spells enabled, AI players do not cheat)

This can retain the 'fun' factor for the SP games, by having fun spells around.