Should essence be at least semi-renewable?

Published on February 5, 2009 By Philocthetes In WOM Ideas

As little as I know yet, I'm convinced that the essence + mana approach is a brilliant innovation and likely will be one of the main things praised when Elemental gets its awards speeches/posts.

However, we know next to nothing so far other than that channelers will be able to do those two fundamentally different forms of magic, the newer of which is worthy of the scary priest-kings of pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. Regardless of the special effects for imbueing essence, I'm very, very interested in seeing how the game will play differently in response to how often and how much you choose to imbue essence in lands or champions.

But I'm also seriously interested in the idea of Ludicrous-sized maps that take a ludicrously long time to play. And some talk in a few different recent threads has made me sort of hope that a channeler's starting essence is *not* all the essence he or she will ever have.

Maybe many, or even most, games will not have large enough maps and long enough calendars for finite essence to be a factor. Or maybe the starting amount will be large enough that my concern is completely misguided. But maybe, at the very least for Ludicrous maps, we should have some mechanics that can increase a channeler's essence.

It could be just a per-channeler, very slow analog to the way shards provide a mana flow, or only via quests, or some mixture. I like the idea of a mixture with 'passive' essence gains being very few and far between and quest-based gains being both darned hard to get and context-sensitive re the channeler's current overall strength.

Comments (Page 2)

pigeonpigeon

on Feb 09, 2009

landisaurus

reply 14

yes, I mean in early beta. Since obviously it will be in before the final forms of the beta. Specifically, I meant just the 2D map beta(s). (3D is a pretty major feature too which will be left out of early forms as to not mislead people to think it should be compared to finished products) I imagine the early beta being more of just an AI stress test (since we will have to be playing online against AI players that will be acting as players) and something like the essence might not come up. I figured it would be just the basic mechanics for building units and spells. I'm still unsure of exactly what essense does, we have some great ideas but nothing really confirmed. It may not be all that important in the end.

Well, if essence is a major factor, then developing the AI without considering it doesn't really seem like the greatest way to go about things. And we know that essence will be important; it will be necessary for creating new settlements, heroes, and it will directly relate to the power of your channeler, and maybe other things as well. It seems to me like it would be easier to take essence into account from the start when developing the AI; the part of the AI responsible for analyzing settlement placement would have to be completely altered if all of a sudden you throw essence into the picture... Not only would it add another resource into the picture, it's a resource that directly weakens your channeler, which means a whole new tradeoff it needs to consider.

Obviously I could be totally wrong and it might not be that bad to add it in later, I'll leave that to Frogboy. But I would be surprised if we don't see at least a limited essence mechanic in the early betas (except maybe the rumored 'beta-0').

Vordrak

on Feb 13, 2009

Of course, the answer to this question may well arise from the beta.

If essence is too limited (for example on large maps) we can doubtless give feedback.

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