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[ductape]

OK so, theres this other thread which didnt really seem to be a thread meant for discussing the game as a whole, so I made this one. I will be a good OP and do my best to maintain this thread.

Anyway, I decided to start playing this. I never played it in the past but with all the mention it gets on this forum and other places around the 'tubes, I decided to plop down some money for it at GOG and give it a whirl. So far, enjoying it quite a bit though obviously there are some things we all wish were there like faster scrolling, map zoom-out, and battle auto-resolve for the easy ones.

I guess the question rolling around is why dont we have a remake of this game, a true spiritual successor, etc? Sure we have Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic and then theres Elemental by Stardock, I wont even go there. (let's hope the Fallen Enchantress is better) Lets not even mention how many remakes and clones have been cursed and failed miserably over the years.

What is it that makes any attempt to recreate the fun had in the original Master of Magic and dashes it upon the rocky shores of player expectations and standards? Nostalgia giving us rose tinted glasses? I am new to the game, so that's not the case for me. Maybe it's game balance and all the options a player has to create their own stories and bizarre situations with the combinations of spells and units. Not sure what it is, I leave the discussion up to us to hash it out. What makes this game great, or not so great and what would we like to see in a true spiritual successor?

ALSO

This thread is for discussing gameplay and such, so lets do that too. Whats a fun strategy you did or strange combination of spells, units, tactics, etc.?

Lets ask questions and answer them for each other. I have one to start: what game mechanics governs access to the higher level spells? In other words, how can I get those high level spells in my book?

Heres some Resources:

Strategy Guide:
http://faqs.ign.com/articles/372/372466p1.html
Various tips as well as some gamebreaking wizard builds

[Levi]

Ooh.  There was something good like this coming out in the future.  Lemme try to remember what it was...

Edit:   Ah here it is. Warlock Master of the Arcane.  I love those screenshots.  Mmmm, hexes.

I never actually played Masters of Magic sadly.  The closest I came to it was Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic.

[nenjin]

What is it that makes any attempt to recreate the fun had in the original Master of Magic and dashes it upon the rocky shores of player expectations and standards? Nostalgia giving us rose tinted glasses? I am new to the game, so that's not the case for me. Maybe it's game balance and all the options a player has to create their own stories and bizarre situations with the combinations of spells and units. Not sure what it is, I leave the discussion up to us to hash it out. What makes this game great, or not so great and what would we like to see in a true spiritual successor?

I only picked up MoM maybe two or three years ago. So I feel like I don't have the nostalgia glasses on either. I played maybe 6 hour of an easy game and felt pretty satisfied I'd seen how most of the game would play out.

And to me, there is something special about MoM, that makes everyone remember it and want to emulate it in their TBS games.

To me, it's the flavor and the completeness of everything. On flavor, the spell book had that certain charm to it that made learning magic feel special. The translating of the glyphs, the turning of the pages...that was just plain good. The spells I don't remember a whole lot of, but I do put them up against Dominions 3 spells, which break the mold for your typical "blast the enemy with shit" spells you get in TBS games.

And there was variety that actually mattered. Units and races were fleshed out, and the cultures were specific yet still broad enough you could fit your own imagination into them. (Unlike Elemental, where they were so bland and uniform that it eventually sucked the creative spirit right out of you as a player.)

I think MoM is just an example of a game where 80 to 90% of things were done well because it was a simpler time. Whereas today, I feel like 60 to 70% of a game is done well, and the rest falls way below my expectations of a professional, fully-funded dev house. Too ambitious, dick publishers, whatever.

Lots of games have gotten the formula mostly right, but it's always the lack of something really important that makes them fail to live up to MoM. Maybe their races are too specific or just flat out bad. Maybe their mechanics just aren't up to snuff to really carry you through a game and make you want to play again. Maybe their magic stinks. MoM is just one of those games that did so many things right to endear the player. No doubt someone with way more play time will cite holes in the game I never saw, but just from that first 10ish hours, I totally understood why people consider that game a classic.

[Sowelu]

White magic hobbits + warlord is totally hax.

Once you get the spell that makes a city always happy, you can max your taxes and nobody will care.  And those lucky slingers + warlord + white magic can get them up to Elite experience; they will *shred* things.

It's basically cheating.

[ductape]

I think..just maybe...that it might be that on one hand it is simple, and the other hand has some deep choices, but not too deep! There are so many way to build your wizard but its not overly complicated. Theres a good amount of spells that do a variety of interesting things, but theres nothing fluff in there, they are all useful for certain play styles, but they are not all useful all the time, its up to your build. And then theres a good spread of units, but again not too many, just enough to mix and match with your strategery and might I say, trick builds.

And that might be it, the trick builds you can do. Theres enough variety but not too much that it boggles the mind and looses its meaning. Its kinda warm and comfy, easy to get to know yet interesting enough to have some legs.

For example, I am trying this Death Troll thing I found in a strategy guide, Spoilered because you ma want to figure this out on your own. The guide is here: http://faqs.ign.com/articles/372/372466p1.html
Death Trolls!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Death Troll!  Trolls are not too bad in the early game time, but the troll's
  best unit 'War Troll' has no excellent skill, or other benefit, besides
  regeneration.  However, with Death magic, trolls have a good strategy.  Among
  Death spells, there is 'Black Channel,' which makes a unit more powerful
  with an extremely low upkeep (1 mana).  However, it also makes the unit
  undead, meaning that that unit cannot be healed.  This is 'Black Channels'
  shortcoming.  Now, if you make (WarTroll + Black Channel) all is good:  War
  Troll have more status, and its upkeep (4gp,1food) is reduced to '1 mana'.
  Since War Troll has intrinsic regenation, 'unhealing' is no matter.

    Merit 1: 1 mana upkeep
    Merit 2: 'unhealing' weak point is covered by regeneration.

  Now, I play 'Death Troll'.  I started with Warlord+Myrran+Alchemy+Death
  Spell.  Because trolls can't have alchemist guilde, Alchemy is a good pick
  (alchemy gives units magic weapons). With warlord unit can be champion. In my
  play, I wait until War Troll becomes a champion, then cast 'black channel'
  on it (12melee, 7defense, 7hit). This saves me money, food.

  Remember that Black Channeled units can NOT get more experience, so, black
  channeled unit can NOT level up.  Therefore, 'wait, and casting' and
  'immediate casting' have trade off.       [Dong-Young Kim ]

[Microcline]

I always thought of Dominions 3 as the spiritual successor to MoM.  It seemed to expand the areas that needed it and perform a few re-balances to make the game more interesting: namely, adding multiplayer and making commander units and item creation worthwhile endeavors.  The balance is still a little bit off and somewhat dependent on luck, but the best summary I heard was that it's less of a competitive game like Starcraft and more like a multiplayer Dwarf Fortress.

The only real loss over MoM is the lack of tool-tips.  While both games are complex affairs with manuals full of spreadsheets, I found MoM much easier to learn because of the better in-game help.

[nenjin]

The only thing that keeps Dom 3 from being the real spiritual successor to MoM, to me, is that it doesn't scale well in a SP sense. Large games get out of hand in terms of micro, small games get brutal very quickly. Maybe there's a sweet spot, but the things that make Dom3 so good also make it very unwieldy after a certain point.

But one thing both games did very well was they made territory more than just about where you build your cities. There was stuff to explore, points of interest to interact with. Exploring your own territory in a TBS game adds a whole 'nother level of fun. Lots of other TBS games try to do that. Elemental even did both (quests, resources to build on), but somehow managed to not get either quite right.

[Wayward Garden]

My favorite custom wizard build, though it seems a bit exploitative in retrospect, involved taking both the rune master and artificer picks. This combination reduces the mana cost of item enchanting to 25% of the base cost, while the return on smashing enchanted items into mana crystals remains at 50% of the base cost. I could devote all my power to skill improvement and still have plenty of mana for whatever. In fact, the higher my skill, the faster my mana income. Also, this build makes it practical to enchant seriously powerful artefacts of power to give to my heroes, turning them each into one-man (or -woman, or -dwarf, or -unknown) wrecking crews.

[gimlet]

Runemaster/Artificer was one of my favs too, because when you DID finally get around to making something to keep, you could crank out some pretty kickass stuff quickly.  And I loved buffing up heroes.

I tried all the races but kept coming back to hobbits - the food bonus was addicting to keep big armies in play, the slingers were damn useful and you could start cranking them out with very few buildings, and with even a few powerups (mitrhil, holy weapon, let alone something massive like Heroism or Warlord) made them brutal.  AND were very efficient at taking out the most common nodes (the blue ones, although air elementals could be a drag before your stack is super-buffed), so combine that with the thing that got you double mana from blue nodes and you could be off to the races pretty quickly.  To make it really gross go for node mastery too (double mana from all nodes and QUADRUPLE from blues).  And hobbits made great overlords for captured races - nobody else had so little racial unrest across so many races.

Or for a quick game take some white and a smattering of red, green, summon Torin, buff him up and crush everything in your path.  Team him up with the windwalking hero taxi and just take out capital after capital.

Although usually I hated to end the game quick, I liked to get books from nodes and learn the really uber high level spells - Crusade, Wind Mastery, etc.  Again blue was great for the awesomeness of Time Stop and the "Steal your opponent's overland spell" stuff.

[ThtblovesDF]

Well I'd shell out 60 $ for any slightly smoothed dom3 clone atm...

[xeniorn]

Lets ask questions and answer them for each other. I have one to start: what game mechanics governs access to the higher level spells? In other words, how can I get those high level spells in my book?

Exact numbers you can find somewhere in the last part of the manual which you can also download from GOG. IIRC if you have 10 or 11 books in one realm of magic you'll eventually get all the spells from that realm. Otherwise, the higher the number of books, the more total spells you'll get from that realm. I don't remember correctly but I think you need 5 or 6 books to get one ultra-rare spell from that realm (and the number is not random - you'll always get exactly one). But the choice of the spell itself will be random, you won't be able to choose which ultra-rare spell will it be.

One of the greatest moments of happiness are when you beat a large node or a lair and get spell books as a reward.

[LoSboccacc]

there is also an unofficial patch somewhere that fixes the spell values to match those of the manual 

oh, awesome game. One of the few where I did themed plays instead that simply power playing to the end.

I liked the drakes with only fire, or the barbarians with only chaos.

the nature books also was awesome, combined it with archers (any goes, just pick a race that doesn't have ranged malus) and it was very fun to rotflstomp enemies at first turn of combat

[etgfrog]

I think the reason why MoM was such a gem was that you could almost make anything overpowered if you put some thought into it where as the modern remakes try to balance everything...

[LoSboccacc]

I totally agree. multiplayer games of today are all about careful balancing, but I enjoy way more working hard and getting overpowered within the game rules like in the good old single player games of the days.

[ductape]

I think we may be onto it, it is the ability of overpowered or gamebreaking builds which make the game. And maybe they are only gamebreaking because you opponent isnt doing it also. So if this was multiplayer or the AI could do the same, then we wouldnt be calling them gamebreaking builds, they would be trick builds or simply the right way to play.

This is interesting indeed, a game mechanic someone should consider if trying to make a true spiritual successor, the ability to make trick builds that have some interesting play styles involved.

While browsing around, I did find a patch being called MoM 2.0 and you can find that here at the bottom of this RPGCODEX thread: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/master-of-magic-starting-out.31386/

I DL'd it and it has a nice PDF that explains everything it changes, I did my best to paste the sumary from the PDF, thers much more detail if you DL it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The changes in this version were primarily motivated to 1) balance
races, units, heroes, and magic realms; 2) edit out or around the
various bugs in the game, including many spells; and 3) fix a wide
number of text mistakes and ambiguities.

The end result is that there should be a reason to make every kind
of unit, at least in some game circumstances, making combined
arms a little more common than in the basic game. In so doing, the
AI “should” be a little better, as their inefficient choices are better
rewarded.

Some of the notable changes:

· Chaos Channels was way too powerful for an uncommon
spell, so it has been all but eliminated from the game (save
for a side effect of Call Chaos).

· Animate Dead1 and Life Drain have been replaced with some
non-resistance oriented combat spells – Contagion, Chill
Touch – somewhat uncharacteristic of death magic, but that
realm could use a boost particularly given a good many spells
have little or no effect against the AI.

· Cloak of Fear and Subversion have been replaced with
combat summoning spells: Zombies and Demon, which
greatly improve the realm’s capabilities against roaming
death monsters and nodes.

· Barbarian bowmen and shamans don’t gain racial thrown
attack bonus, which motivated the development of three race
specific units – marauders, striders, and witch doctors. This
also gives the race a much more interesting flavor.

· Draconian bowmen, shaman, and magicians don’t gain racial
breath attack bonus, which motivated the development of two
race specific units – shades and burning hands.

· Klackons now have missile immunity. This race has no
middle range unit and causes a lot of additional unrest in nonklackon
cities. The change makes them much more
competitive with other races.

· All races can now take advantage of mithril (etc) deposits.

· Almost all races now have swimming settlers to assist the AI.

· Missile immunity has been added to all “wizard” type heroes.

· Item powers such as Invisibility, Chaos, and Cloak of fear,
have been removed from the game because they were
ineffective.

· Spell of Return has been slashed in cost, thereby reducing the
effectiveness of raiding AI fortresses.

Summoned units were particularly in need of modifying:

· Fire Giants were increased in power to make them more
comparable to Stone Giants and Storm Giants.

· Efreet are now more comparable to (stronger than) Djinn.

· Almost all rare and very rare creatures have seen their
defense increased.

· Summoned creatures generally have significantly more
special abilities (immunities, plane shifting, etc).

· Demon Lords are now more comparable with Sky Drakes
and Great Wryms, let alone Death Knights.

· Fire Elementals have immolation.

· Upkeep and casting costs for most summoned creatures have
been reduced.

Aureus December 19, 2008