[Scott Hebert]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Well, Magic Duel is the maker or breaker of Astral magic on a unit, and it DOES have a profoundly strong warping influence on the amount of Astral that is good....but whether this is an unbalanced thing or not, I dunno. Magic Duel is, however, a fairly potent attack against any astral mage that isn't ludicrously strong: It's totally accurate, and guaranteed to find the most powerful Astral mage on the battlefield and kill him if he isn't greater than +6 over the opposing duellists. Is Astral so powerful it needs such a hamhanded counterbalance? Hard to say.

My concern is that there is nothing in the guidelines that takes Magic Duel into consideration. According to the modding guidelines, all magic is created equal. A SSSA mage should have the same value as the AAAS mage, but because of Magic Duel, they just don't.

Some ways that the game could be changed to address this issue:

1) Remove Magic Duel. Simple, effective, but probably too 'not well-thought-out enough'.

2) Add a similar spell for each path. The flip of the above, this adds the same 'low-path' issue to all of the other paths.

3) Change the way the Magic Duel works. Perhaps make it less random. There are very few ways that this would actually work, though.

4) Change the outcome of the Magic Duel. Instead of killing the loser, you could, say, remove the caster from the battle and put them in the owning player's capital, a la Returning. This accomplishes the battle effect of Magic Duel (removing the mage from battle), without the penalty that makes it truly game-warping (death of the losing mage). This option mitigates the current issue but doesn't remove it (and this could be a good or a bad thing, depending on your viewpoint).