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Can't you Dispel Magic on Summon Death?
Maybe a floor on morale is appropriate (especially as I believe there is a corresponding cap on morale).
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As I've said, my main issue is not so much with the Destroy spells, but with the impunity of a patrol.
So, I will make these changes today (for 3rd Cycle), as I need to wrap up spellcraft and get to remaining items like finalizing special orders for kingdoms.
1. Attack spells like Destroy, Summon Death, Kill Leader/Wizard cannot be done by a patrol: at least one brigade must be in the group.
2. The 3 Destroy Spells will be consolidated into 1. I'm still working on the formula that will have some base amount of damage and then an incremental amount per power level over 5. A PC whose defense is reduced to zero is destroyed - eliminated from the game.
Again, while the mechanics and many of the rules are the same as what we have been playing, 3rd Cycle is not an incremental change from 2nd Cycle, it is pretty close to a new game. 2nd Cycle will remain for the hard core traditionalists, but there are a number of changes and that is mainly why it is taking months to put 3rd Cycle together, along with my not being as productive as I was in my 20's.
I'm going to ask Mike to push back the start for the test game a couple days. So setups will go out when he likes next week, but I want the weekend to get the nuts and bolts of the setups ready, although they may not yet have the final look.
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Thanks Ry Vor for keeping the destroy spell I think one scaled spell is also a great idea. Always seems kind of strange to have a destroy city spell that failed to work on a town or village or even the other way around.
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Whew. We are now at 110 spells and 24 kingdoms, so just assigning spell lists by power level was making 2640 decisions. That doesn't include of course designing the spells, creating the text both for coding and for inclusion on player spell lists, etc.
As players may know, in 3rd Cycle we have established the concept of Traits to allow more systematization instead of hard-coding most abilities to specific kingdoms. So in in the future, or through the beta for that matter, it will be easier to add or subtract a trait for a given kingdom. There are 23 Cultural Traits, Terrain Adeptness, and Magical Prowess.
For Magical Prowess, a kingdom may be listed as having Supremacy, Mastery, Advantage, Standard, Sub-Standard, Disadvantaged, or Non-Magical. This defines their starting wizards, research costs, and the major basis of their spell lists. So first I assigned power levels required to cast spells to these magical categories. That was the default, and then from that, I customized those lists to fit with my perception of the kingdom, almost always making a given spell available earlier than standard when it seemed to make sense to do so, not so much raising the required power level. For example, the Sacred Order gets Destroy Undead two levels earlier than the default level for their Sub-Standard Magical Prowess.
As we list each cultural trait a kingdom possesses and what it does on the kingdom dossier (setup), I hope to include on the dossier which spells a kingdom receives earlier than the default for that level of Magical Prowess.
To circle back on the Destroy Village, Town, Damage City. These have been replaced with Meteor Storm that does a base of 4000 damage plus 2000 damage for each power level over 5, so a P7 does 8000 damage. A PC that has its defense reduced to 0 is destroyed - eliminated from the map.
The kill spells, Summon Death, etc, require at least one brigade in the caster's group. There are some new spell techniques. Instant Summon Phantoms allows a suitable caster to create brigades of Phantoms prior to the first battle of the turn, they "live" until destroyed or the end of the turn - all Phantoms return to the abyss at the end of the turn, but can be used in more than one battle. On the other hand, Raise Zombies converts destroyed enemy brigades into Zombie brigades at the conclusion of the battle that do persist, and a group can have up to 15 Zombie brigades. As I posted previously, all 22 varieties of Companion brigades and all Summoned brigades have some special ability.
