Magic System Ideas

[Pillager]

I think that having 6 slots that can hold either items or spells would work fine. I think it would be fairly intuitive and obvious. Just looking at your hero (in the inspect heroes screen) would clearly show you what slots that hero had and what items that hero could use.

Another way to work class specific items would be to attach a gold value to each item. When a hero finds an item that he can't use, he gets the gold instead...sort of an automatic version of selling the item for gold.

[Pillager]

Battle Summoning

This mechanic would be for a class of spells available to magical heroes. However, it could also be modified for use as a hero skill or even a unit power.

Instead of being an instant spell that brings unit into play (ala normal summoning) a battle summoning spell would be a persistent spell that (at the start of a battle) brings an additional unit into the summoner's stack.

A unit summoned before battle could increase the summoner's army size beyond 8. The summoned unit would be placed in the front rank of the summoner's battle order.

The battle summoning spell ends when the summoned unit is killed, or when the caster chooses to end the spell. When the spell ends the cooldown begins and lasts for a number of turns based on the value of the summoned creature.

Summoning could also be a skill with restrictions like specific terrain (IE a ranger hero could summon an animal companion into battles in the forest)

Summoning could be a unit power... a 'Summoner' could be a very weak unit that summons an additional mediocre unit into battle..a 'Warchief' could be a mediocre unit that summons an orc into battle.