Mana and Magic

Each spell has an Area of Effect (AoE), which can be imagined as a circle with a radius. As illustrated in the picture below, the effect of spells such as The Samurai Sword and Ch'ih-Yu's Shield reaches a radius of 9 tiles. Across all spells, there exist only nine unique radii for AoEs [→ 6; 7; 8; 9; 16; 18; 24; 32; ∞] and priests are able to cast spells across 24 tiles or for some spells across the entire map. Effects always spread from the center of the AoE and apart from some exceptions, if spells are casted multiple times in short order, effects do not stack on top of each other despite mana costs. To develop an idea about the ingame size of AoEs, it is useful to know that a small tower reaches a radius of 32 tiles and an archer on the ground has a range of 15 tiles.

¹ initial mana cost
² radius of the Area of Effect
³ cannot be casted on soldiers belonging to a tower
⁴ can be casted on soldiers on top of the tower, at the door or attemping to enter the tower
⁵ can be stacked

For all spells, mana costs progress in the same fashion: The next spell costs 1.25 times the present one and the resulting number is always rounded up. For example, the initial Cursed Arrows costs 20 mana, the second 1.25 × 20 = 25 mana, the third 1.25 × 25 = 31.25 ≈ 32 mana etc. Overall, there are only ten unique initial mana costs and the following table lists the progression of the sum of costs. For example, five times Stone to Iron (initially 25 mana) cost 210 mana in total.

Note that rounding up in the fashion explained above leads to a rapid increase in cost for cheap spells such as Eye (initially two mana), but loses relevance for expensive spells and becomes negligible for larger numbers. That helps to approximate the long run of a hypothetical game under the assumption that players only cast the same spell or the same set of spells. It turns out that the amount of spells or set of spells one player is constantly ahead δ for each mana production ratio Δ approximately converges to δ = log 1.25 × Δ. For example, consider a 1v1 romans and it happened to be that you have five small temples while your opponent has four small temples, so that δ = log 1.25 × (5/4) = 1, which means you are constantly one convert ahead. But if you have four temples and your opponent has three temples resulting in δ = log 1.25 × (4/3) ≈ 1.3, you are constantly one convert and sometimes two converts ahead.

All cultures have the same consumption time in their small temples, but Brewery, Destillery and Meadmaker differ in their production times.

¹every barrel equals two mana

author: Suma with amazing help from Incinerate, Hirtenknogger, sennahoj, TSK, Mike, Sense, blazingstar, Xch4nGe & Feuerkelch.