[Edi]

Originally Posted by Ighalli

Can you choose fewer than 3 spells prepared for a level 2 caster? I just played my first games of COE2 and was pretty frustrated when my Necromancer would cast Finger of Death (target resists!) instead of lightning storm against a stack of swordsmen. It'd be really nice to tell them they can only cast the spell you think is most useful in the battle coming up instead of picking 2 less useful ones too.

Is it going to be rows of people COE2 style? Can you choose which rank your officers & soldiers go into, at least?

How similar to COE / Dominions is the recruiting?

You cannot choose less than the maximum number of spells to memorize, but you can choose which spells you memorize. Mages will cast random spells from those memorized, but not completely useless spells (e.g. fireball against fire elementals, which are fire immune, or fire ward on own units if the enemy is entirely spearmen who have no fire attacks).

This is intentional, because otherwise the magic system would be wide open for abuse and many, many things would have to be severely nerfed. There are spells there, which would be instant, automatic "I win" buttons if they could be specified as the only spells being cast. That could vary situationally somewhat, but in general, the randomness factor is a good thing.

Think for example of the druid, who unsurprisingly has some spells to charm animals. A very large portion of independent monsters on the map are animals. Druid sets Command Beasts or Domestication (both aoe charm animal spells) as the only one being casts, then goes looking for large stacks of animals (who also have low magic resistance as a rule) and WHAM, instant army, I win, thank you, good night, hope you had a nice game.

There are other things which could be even more severely abused if not for random spellcasting. To the point where you might as well quit the game the instant an enemy mage shows up with that spell in his spell list.

The armies are largely rows of units in the same style as CoE2. Pure spellcasters are in the rearmost ranks. Missile units/spellcasters are in the rows second from the back (some monsters can cast spells, but count as ranged units instead of pure mages) and melee/ranged/spellcasters (units which are primarily classed melee, but can cast spells or also have missile weapons) are in the front ranks. The placement of commanders follows their classification (e.g. barbarian warlords lead from the first rank while captains, despite not having missile weapons, are grouped with the missile units).

Spellcasting from the first rank is very difficult, because the unit is engaged in melee. From the second rank they can cast spells as normal, the difficulty is only if they are in the first row.