skip to after the line for the critics, after the second one to how I would fix them.

Hi There! A few days ago I got the idea to find a magic mod, and this was the most recently updated one so I downloaded and played it in my game for the past few days. I want to give my feedback of the mod

Before anything else, I should mention that this is the first magic mod I have ever played, so I can't give any feedback on how it compares to other magic mods, only on how someone who has never played a magic mod before liked it. Also, I am going to mix up terminology because I haven't played in a bit, but I think i got most of it down. I'll tell you how my playthrough went.

To start, I did create my character. In fact I specifically created an overpowered character I had managed to make legitimately before in an ironman run of the game, just to give myself an idea of how the mod would feel in the hands of a late game character. since the magic is based on a skill tree, I added the genius trait and the eccentric personality trait for the quickest possible rush through the skill tree.

anyways the run itself was pretty normal. I went down the voluntas tree, became immortal, and went on to dabble in the other trees before getting bored. I tried out various spells, played around with magic, it was all fun. But, I do have some critics.

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Firstly, Mental fortitude and willpower. I had almost no way of measuring them. I figured out that I could use the incept will spell on myself to get mental fortitude, but to this day I have no idea how to measure willpower. Is it stress? is it its own mechanic? I couldn't tell. this ties in to the bigger problem of the voluntas tree as a whole; its weak.

The tree has two spells, incept will and steal willpower. expect steal willpower doesn't work. I captured some prisoners and couldn't steal their willpower because they "had higher mental fortitude" than me (which I know they didn't due to the incept will spell). that just leaves incept will, which doesn't work on anyone who took that one perk halfway down the tree. so the tree has only one usable spell that only works part of the time,, if at all.

actually getting back to the prisoners they had really high mental fortitude, which was weird. they were just normal people, while I was a mage specializing in mental fortitude. and this is even after I had tortured them multiple times, which felt weird. I soon found out that every npc had some sort of mental fortitude, which makes sense, but for some reason mine starts at zero and has to be built up over time.

anyways back to voluntas, the main purpose of the tree is to make spell casting easier, right? especially when fighting other mages. problem is that basically never happened, and I think I figured out why. see since magic is a skill tree, it has to be chosen as a skill tree by an npc for them to learn magic. but, because of the huge amount of time that needs to be put into learning spells, basically no npcs actually cast any.

this leads into my main critic of the mod; immortality. to put it simply, it takes too long and is too easy to get. let me explain.

You remember how I said my character was a late game one I had made before? one with the quickest lifestyle completion possible? it took that character a whopping 30 years to get to the immortality spell. That is a really long time in a game like this, where even becoming a mage is hard, especially given that is the quickest it can possibly be done. for any other character its going to take twice as long or even more, making it impossible for any character with neither of those traits to unlock the spell.

and even if you unlock the spell, your going to be an old sack of bones when you complete it. you might even have some of those really bad traits like cancer or infirm. who wants to play an immortal mage when their body looks like that?

and as for the spell itself, its far too easy to accomplish once you unlock it. iirc, there is 4 events you have to pass, or just tank a stress bomb to increase success chance. first is knowing an immortal. my character had never interacted with an immortal (not even that one that spawns with game start), but it still checked out for me so that's one event down.

next was the army of mages coming to stop me, which again was a free pass with the "just attack them lol" option, which I have no idea why I was able to pass. as an aside a lot of things in the mod are simply not explained, neither in this mod page or in game, so I have no idea what is being done right.

the third event was the one about being an arch-mage, which I just took the stress bomb for because I had no idea arch-mages existed! actually, I'd like to say on record that while I call it "stress bomb", it was actually a "spend 100 willpower" thing, but it only caused stress and since I can't tell how much willpower I had I don't know if that's intentional.

as for the arch-mage thing, turns out when I did the spell I was a master mage. from what I can tell this is either because I mastered the voluntas tree or from all the spells I had cast. if the former, then there is no way to become an arch-mage before casting the immortal spell, as you would have to get so many magic skill perks that you would be long dead before achieving that. if its the later, then its conversely too easy, as the only spell I had cast was the incept will, which was cheap and easy to cast, meaning it is lightning to get to arch-mage. either way, becoming arch-mage is a problem.

finally, there was the event that needed me to have 1000 gold. since I had been raiding the crap out of europe and had gotten the conqueror trait, that was easy. Problem is when I passed that event it doesn't actually take your gold, you just need to have it on you. really the event should make you lose all that gold, or even make sure prestige and faith are taken too. it is the culmination of your efforts for the most powerful trait in the game, after all. if you become immortal you can just earn it back, right? and if you don't it should take you a long, long time to get back to that place.

actually, when I went back and had the 1000 gold ahead of time unlike the first time I cast the spell and failed, it didn't tell me how much gold I needed to cast the spell, which means anyone who has all the events covered from the get-go would have no idea of what they did right to get to this point.

finally, casting the spell itself. if you had passed the four previous events, it is a 50/50 shot at immortality. not much to say on that, I like that set up at least. what I don't like is that if you fail, not only is there exactly zero drawbacks or penalties from failing, but you immediately have the option to cast the spell again! in other words, if you fail the first time, you have better odds at succeeding the second time since you now know what needs to be done.

becoming immortal through this mod takes too long, meaning you can't become immortal young or even middle aged, and when you can actually cast the spell its far too easy.

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I'll be honest, I don't know how to "fix" all these things. you said it yourself, you made the od because its fun and you like it, so its not like you have to take any of my "solutions" to heart. Just consider them.

first and foremost, make an education trait for mages, or a genetic trait, or even a book artifact you can call "grimoires" or something that reduces the time it takes to go through the tree. as it currently stands a character would have to spend all of their skill tree time on the magic tree to get anything down at the very end of their lives, and barely earlier if they have a little talent. no one wants to play through that when compared to the shorter but more compact and dense regular skill trees. make it so that its actually viable to fight other mages before turning 40 instead of waiting for stuff to happen. heck make a mage perk half ageing so that I can at least look young when I become immortal.

secondly, make it so that we actually know what is needed and what values are. I want to know how much willpower my character has, the same way I know how much prestige or piety renown I have. I also want to know what i needed for the immortality events or any other event even if I already have enough to pass that event.

third, the immortal spell. get rid of the arch-mage part or change it so that being arch-mage takes a decent amount to get to, not too long or too short. I actually liked that you had to take a stress bomb to become immortal, I would keep that. i like the 50/50 odds of winning at best too. But I would also like that if failing the immortal spell you get hit with all sorts of banes, maybe your characters mind is ruined, maybe the ruling capital and county gets burned to the ground with many buildings destroyed, maybe the bloodline gets cursed or something. make it hurt to fail at going against the natural order and trying for the best trait in the game.

heck reflect that in the one immortal character that spawns, or in some characters or counties which have these traits as a result of a failed immortal. and please put at least a small cool-down on becoming immortal again.

Finally, voluntas tree. not you, wouldn't know how to "fix" it. maybe add another spell or two, maybe make it more dense in what it does to you. at the very least If I torture I guy for 20 years his mental fortitude should be rock bottom and mine should be super high if I spent all that time practicing that skill tree.

and fix the steal will spell!

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I know a lot of this just sounds like complaints, and I know it can be nitpicked from me having created a late game character I once played, but I really do like this mod. It's fun, and that's what matters. I love the luck skill tree, and the other ones are fun too. and like I said earlier, you don't have to do any of these "fix's". It's your mod after all, you are the god of it.

anyways, thanks for reading all that, and thank you for the first magic mod I have ever played!

Thanks for constructive critic!

Immortality is a funny thing, in lore, It shouldn't be possible. Or rather keeping it should be impossible, Making yourself immortal is easy(in lore everyone after sometime and with enough mental fortitude can do that), But convincing world that you are immortal is trickier, I hope that was shown by events to become immortal.
But I added immortality because in lore there was theoretical way to obtain it, and even an example!(even though that is other story)
I have plans to rework whole immortality thing, since as you also stated, it is too easy for SUCH feat of magic

About time, Vita tree can increase your lifespan by some amount. Most mages are not supposed to be immortal, but either master their path and become master. Or use Vita to artificially increase lifespan to escape death for next few centuries before finally dying.

About Mental Fortitude, Your main way to know it is to use 'Inspect Will' spell. On yourself or others(as long it is possible). Everyone is born with some Mental Fortitude, and it is genetic, but you also can increase it by stress breakdowns and just living.

I will add more game concepts for Arch-mage(mage that mastered at least 3 paths), and other things to help in understanding what is happening

About education. On one hand, you don't learn how to do magic, you KNOW it. But on other, I can add it.

Voluntas Tree, I will make that you can steal mental fortitude from any imprisoned character regardless of anything.

About AI, I have plans to make few cheats for them

Hi
Thank you for the mod. I like the new ideas. But it's hard to decide if this mod is better than the Arcane 2 Mod.

I reached the end of the voluntas path and added some skill points to reduce the cost of my spells. After some time I recognized that the spellcosts got lower without investing in the spell reduction perk. At the end, all spells had the cost of 0. Maybe you could add a minimum cost of 5% of the initial cost so it is not possible to spam endless spells.

Improve Flesh doesn't give physique_good bonus levels if the targeted character has the spindly trait. So maybe you could add to the ALF_improve_flesh_effect these lines:

1 = {
trigger = { has_trait = spindly }
remove_trait = spindly
}

## Also add "has_trait = spindly" to this entry so the Spindly trait removes this option:

1 = {
trigger = { NOT = { has_trait = physique_bad has_trait = physique_good_3 HAS_TRAIT = SPINDLY } }
change_trait_rank = {
trait = physique_good
rank = 1
}
}


I like the idea of spells raising your stress level instead of lowering your "mana". So if your character has hard times/a lot of stress, he will less often cast spells.

Is it possible to open the Spellcasting window on the highest layer. Sometimes other windows overlap the window.

I see this as the successor to the old Ancient Magic mod from years back, and its not a bad successor. I like the variety of magic, though I admit most of them don't suit my playstyle but that's a personal thing.

I want to kind of focus on the Animalium though.

I like the idea of having unique 'MMAs', as I really did enjoy the Golems and stuff in Ancient Magic. But Animalium is really underwhelming... the capstones being Pegasi and Unicorns are kind of nice, but they also have 0 Toughness. In fact, everything you can 'summon' with it have 0 Toughness except the Wolves.

Which is a bit strange, as you gain +50% Toughness as a requirement to max out the tree, which does nothing for anyone but the Wolves. And all it does for Wolves is increase their Toughness of 2 to 3.

I can see it as an attempt to balance out the fact the Pegasi and Unicorns have otherwise super high stats, but they're hyper specialized.

I do like the idea of special MMAs, I'm just not sure the Animalium is the best idea thematically. Though I'm unsure on your exact vision for how this magic works. Maybe a magic path that instead gives you access to some kind of magically enhanced humans? That would enable them to follow the normal trend of MMAs, allowing them to benefit from Stationing and other MMA bonuses. It would also make any possible army events seem a bit less weird I guess, though I'm not too sure if CK3 has any of those. Just some rambling either way.

Keep up the good work!