[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Jasper:

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Originally posted by johan osterman:
If the blessings need to be improved to be desirable I think it is better to lower magic cost rather than starting off blessings at lower levels. The blessings start of 4 for a reason, to encourage players to give their pretenders a decent magic score.

I suggested starting at 3, but at +1 bonus, so the effect for 4 would be the same. The main difference would be to increase the benefit for higher levels, and that you'd get a bonus at every level rather than skipping the odd levels.

I suspect simply lowering the cost of magic won't help this issue, but instead free up more points to be spent on scales/castle, and an increased diversification in magic skills. Even halving the cost of magic would not convince me to get more than level 4 in anything, except possibly a 6 on a pretender that started with 3.

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The main problem, it seems to me, is the increasingly higher cost of higher magic levels - it's O(n^2), which is really painful. Getting a couple of extra levels is not that bad, but you reach a point where each level costs as much as a scale, which is quite a lot. High levels of magic are useless for site searching too.

Hmm, I just had an idea to reward high levels of magic - what if high level mages automatically search every province they enter with their skill level minus 5? That way a fire 9 god would automatically know when there is a fire site present - he wouldn't need to take a month searching. This seems appropriate for the Lord of Every Flame.

Another option would be auto-searching based on dominion and god's magic skills, but that would be even more powerful, so an auto-search based on presence would probably be a better first step.


Even so, it still seems that high levels of magic go up in cost too fast. Why not a flat 10 per additional level of magic (after the first for paths you don't already have)? Or 10 + 2/level above base?