Bay 12 Games Forum

What games have good or interesting magic systems?

Il start by saying what i think is a bad or uninteresting system - the system employed by the eldar scrolls series(and is probably the most popular system in rpgs cause its easy to understand). You buy a spell which is classed. If you have enough mana (energy) you can cast it (a die is thrown to see if you fail) then some blue/red/green crap shoots out of your hand and u do about a 5% damage to ur oponent if u hit em.

Im being a bit extreme in my description, my point here is that magic is basically reduced to an alternative to a gun with rainbow coloured graphics. There are other spells, summon characters, see through walls, move objects, boost stats etc.

are there any games (any genre rogue like, rpg, strategy etc) that have tried radically different systems? Or use different types of spells, so rather than lightning, a horde of rabid chimps attacks the target instead.


the only one i can think of is a hl1 mod called wizard wars, actually wizard wars uses a very unoriginal magic system (literally replacing guns with magic graphics, but it was funny.

we did that useing Unreal Tournament,some how just playing it broke there net work.

did you go to my school. We had the UT demo installed on our network (by a lab technician). When the teachers had had enough they deleted the short cut. So someone copied another short cut an emailed it to everyone. UT demo only has about 5 maps but everythings fully functional for lan play and the specs are low.

When i first started secondary school (at a different school to the one above) there was an old pc room running win 95 machines. There were disks circulating for doom, lesure suit larry, wolfenstein, scorched earth and some other games.

id recommend scorched earth or worms. worms can do hot seat as well as lan i think, (also hedgewars a new sort of remake).

also hardwar might be worth a look, you can download it free and its a spacesim. good multiplayer, only you might struggle for hard drive space.

i second defcon

also gang garrison - like soldat but teamfrotress demake

possibly the original avp, u can pick up gold edition pretty cheap but ud need to find a crack to get it running on multiple machines.

hard drove space and the baility to install will probably be more limiting that graphics/cpu. In the uk at any rate most even old pc rooms with be post 2000. which will mean 800-1000mhz cpu and 32bit graphics. If you and your colleagues can afford 500-1gbpen drives cost about £8 $13 each (maybe lessO you can install the games on the pen drives at home (aslong as the drive is formatted to fat32) then just plug em in alsong as the games are either cracked or have no protection you can run em off the exe.

also red alert, thats now freeware

and shogun total war

yeh, forum membership isnt necessarily going to be the best measure of forum activity, especialyl on places like steam where its mandatory, but its a method of comparison.

also 100,000 is alot, like half paradox

i too am watching this game with interests but have not yet buy maybe i should. Is it better than that pile of fecies known as Sins of a Solar empire?

Ive also got Swords of the Stars but have never managed to spend more than about 30mins playing it, not sure why.

Ive considered Distant worlds but detest its £24 quid asking price, this is £16 on gamersgate far more reasonables.

an then theres Aurora a game ive downloaded by balked at the interface and game guides.

my favourite 4x so far remains Ascendacy, although galciv 2 is pretty good.

Also i might considers Gratuetous space battles if cliffski impliments a campagne

ill finisha year of an Msc in a few days time, and possibly start PhD in October.. work work work work work work work.... enjoy school whilst it lasts

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/28/gordon-brown-bigoted-woman

this is a pretty good example of UK PCness. the ex pm calls a bigot a bigot............. out rageous

theres even a sound clip after the link

personally Gordon moved up in my opinion after this incident

Or Rugby Union.

I played as a wing a few times in league, pivot in league, and then went on to prop in union.

Now someone explain how that works?

in the UK league is the northern game, Union is the southern. Ive had the rules of league explained to me but i forgotten them because northerners are savages.

also im not from ausstralia but i know that assie rules is for pussies. Now Cricket is a proper sport.