Fantasy Game

Resource Management:

The largest concern seems to be that making magic as powerful as it should be is game breaking – everyone just picks powerful mages and it becomes boring.

I think it should be possible to have magic feel powerful but potentially exhausting to the spell caster.  The mage shouldn’t be able to a hurl a massive fireball the other side of the battlefield and then straight away cause a massive flood on the right flank to wash away the enemy as they advance.  He should be pretty exhausted after generating purely with his or her will the large fireball that wiped out an important enemy unit.

So I would treat magic as a resource.  You have so much of it at the beginning of the game and once its all used up its gone.   Thematically for me that represents that the mage is well rested and mentally prepared for the battle.

Though the idea of gaining some amount back turn to turn is also interesting.   But I think I would stick with a fixed total amount (maybe a total amount based on the number of turns).

So you could have something like:

level 1 mage: 10 units of energy

level 2 mage: 20 units of energy

level 3 mage: 30 units of energy

I think this essentially becomes self limiting.  The most powerful attack by a level 3 mage is more powerful than the most powerful attack of a level 1 mage.  But you could have a level 1 mage pull off a pretty powerful attack but that’s it.  He’s pretty much done in at that point.  Or he does several smaller but still useful things.

So we then need to assign cost to each action.  For example if we have created a level 1 fireball and multiplied it to 3 fireballs then cast move on them, that’s 3 moves.  Though if you were targeting a single unit  I would create the level 1 fireball, move it and then multiply.  It would only be 3 moves if you were targeting three different units.