[baruk]

I think with the clam thing, what I'm getting at is that I have no problem with the "1 astral income for 10 water gems" dynamic. Its their invisibility (on power screen) and uncapturability that are slightly annoying (unlike with magic sites, for instance). Perhaps the addition of a magic item counter on the Power screen could be handy.

Local Labs

One idea I had was to have a new spot in the lab, for special, "commander free" items, that would give the province or nation as a whole a boost. Perhaps you could call it the "hoard", "cache" or "items of regalia", that kind of thing (perhaps someone could think of a cool name for it). It would have some interesting properties:

1. It would act as extra, local, magic item storage (for when the main, national lab is too full, and you don't want to lose track of items on random commanders).

2. The items within it would be captured if the province was lost to the enemy. So if clams, for example, were designed to be a "cache-only" item, it would make them more capturable.

3. Items would be untransferable directly from the "stash" to the main lab, a commander would be needed to transfer them (to make it a little harder to evacuate precious items). Some "cache-only" items could be cursed once they are assigned to a cache, so that they are unremovable (perhaps a specific ritual could exist that would allow them to be moved).

4. New types of magic items would exist that would provide benefits to the province or nation when stored in a cache. They would not necessarily confer any benefit to a commander, however they would be carryable in the misc. slot. For example, items could exist that would: push dominion (such as a holy relic), affect dominion scales, give benefit to the commanders in the province (such as research or morale bonuses), or provide gem income direct to the treasury.

5. (Optional, perhaps a choice during game set-up) The number of slots available in the cache could be dependent on magic scale and/or dominion strength.
Alternatively, the number of slots could remain constant, but the number of "active" slots could be dominion dependent (the active slots would be highlighted). An active slot would be one that allowed a special item to provide benefit.
A further option could be to only allow special items to be placed in active slots, where they would continue to provide benefit even if dominion dropped afterwards.

6. A new lab-based order would exist: use cached item. The idea is that certain cached items would require interaction with a commander before they provided their benefit. For example, if fever fetishes were a cache item, they would still require a commander to "use" them before producing a fire gem (the commander being diseased in return).

Gem usage in battles

Its a pet peeve of mine that the AI sometimes disregards my spell orders, when it feels that they are "overkill", such as wrathful skies on a call of the winds. The meddling AI is basically a result of the turn sequence. It allows several battles in a turn, meaning that it is important to conserve gems between fights in the same turn, as players can exploit the turn sequence by using remote summons to run enemy armies out of gems before the main battle of the turn.
I've been trying to think up solutions to this for a while, I have a couple of (I think) new ones, based on making it easier to have gems available in each battle on the same turn:

1. The gem wallet! This is a new magic item that provides the owner with magic gems whenever he is involved in a battle. There would be a different wallet for each type of magic gem, and perhaps various size classes of wallet available at different levels of construction, producing between 1 and 5 gems in each battle. The gems would be temporary, available for that battle only, disappearing afterwards.

2. A two tier system of gem usage. Certain battlefield spells would now have a partial gem requirement. Instead of becoming used up, the gems would "grey-out", becoming unavailable for use until the next battle. I thought this would be suitable for defensive and summoning spells, such as wards, storm, the lesser elementals, and howl, and perhaps for fatigue reduction. Offensive spells, such as wrathful skies, would retain a requirement for permanent gem usage, perhaps along with partial gem use. However, I think the permanent gem usage could be restricted to 1 or 2 for most spells.

3. Blood magic. I can't see how a blood slave could be "partially" used, or that an item could produce slaves in response to a battle, so blood would require a different approach. My idea is that certain blood spells would have a "virginal blood spillage" requirement, ie. the spells would become usable once a certain number of blood slaves has been sacrificed on the battle field, by either side. This blood spillage requirement would carry over between battles that occur in the same province, in the same turn. Some spells would retain a sacrifice requirement (reinvigoration, for example), and any spell order requiring a spillage of blood would allow the blood requirement to be met, if slaves were available. A new battlefield order could be introduced: sacrifice x blood slaves, for when you want certain blood spillage requirements fulfilled, but without spell casting. An additional effect could be that certain spells grow in power in proportion to the total blood spillage.
This system would mean on overhaul of all the current battlefield blood spells, much tweakage would be needed to get the relative power level right.

National Enchantments

A quick thought: the limit of 5 globals can be a little frustrating in a large multiplayer game, it would be nice to see an option to extend the allowed globals to 10 or 15 (like the hall of fame).
My other thought was to introduce national enchantments. These would comprise any global enchantments that only affect the nation that cast them, without being clearly intended to be unique, (eg. forge of the ancients would remain a global, whilst mechanical militia would be national). Each nation would have a limit of 3 national enchantments, and they would be available for dispel as with the globals. The difference is that multiple nations would be allowed to have the same national enchantment up at the same time (I am probably thinking in terms of the minor wonders in civ 3).