Since you Sssra, you’ve got some life books. Do you have High Prayer yourself to level the playing field? You may want to enchant your war trolls. Bless them, give them holy armor. Add in a dose of invulnerability and lion heart. Cast these unit spells overland rather than in combat so that the full squad goes into combat buffed and you can then aid them with additional combat spells.
Well I was doing really well in that one, until the back capping computer ran into my capital with a bunch of summons after i stupidly left it relatively unguarded. I decided to keep trying since i still had a lot of forces, but every few turns I would get a message “Lo Pan’s spell blast canceled your spell of return” wtf is that, do I have to go find Lo Pan’s tower and take him down before I can come back?
In my current game, I rolled Rajak and Highmen. After founding a second town, I lost my main town and got banished. I have not been able to cast the spell of return becasue Jafar is constantly blocking it. It’s getting trickey with no source of magic.
-Hrnac
AdamB:
Sadly, I don’t have access to any Golems. No Dark Elves either, it’s just Beastmen, Draconians and Trolls.
War Trolls are a nice unit, but there’s only so much they can do against a High-Prayered enemy army. Which is, basically nothing.
Horus has High Elves as his main race, which means lots of Longbowmen and Mages - by the time the first Trolls reach their lines, more than half of my army is gone, and the enemy is High Prayered and oftentimes Invulnerable too.
I played on for a short time after my last post and I found some Sorcery books in a node I captured which will allow me to result in researching Sky Drakes myself - now I only need to get Spirits to all my recently captured nodes, it’s taking too long since the stupid things cannot use roads.
Like I posted, all I can muster DID in fact get hosed.
As for “let them spend all their mana” - would such tactics even work on hard? The AI must get a lot of freebies to even maintain such magnificent armies.
Tim:
No, I don’t have High Prayer myself. Like I wrote, throwing all enchantments I have and then some is what I’m planning next. Other than Lion Heart I have all you have listed at my disposal, which should help a bit. I need to get a bit more mana, though - like I wrote, Node capturing is in progress.
Thanks for all recommendations.
rezaf
Mana draining them with sacrificial units totally works on Hard. The computer gets bonuses, yes, but not infinite ones. If you right-click his portrait on the magic screen you can see how much gold/mana he has in reserve.
Oof, Horus has elves? That sucks, man. He’s gonna be a tough nut to crack. And you don’t even get magicians, which are the proper counter to longbows. Ouch. You’re chaos, right? Flamestrike should be able to wipe out massive swathes of his armies at a shot.
Also: Raise Volcano! If you read the spell description, you realize that it freaking wrecks cities if you cast it under them – something like a 25% chance for each building to be destroyed. Throw a couple of these bad boys under his core cities and you can really cripple his infrastructure. And if you can get Armageddon cast…oh man.
War trolls move fairly quickly (2 spaces like mounted troops). Endurance would boost the movement to 3. Attacking towns that have roads leading to them will allow your war trolls to get on the road during tactical battle and move 2 road spaces for each movement point. This might get your war trolls face to face with the ranged attackers quicker.
Beastmen and Draconians both have magicians, they’re just not quite as badass as Warlocks. But they’re still missile immune and therefore nice against longbows.
Ways to kill Sky Drakes:
[ul]
[li]Crazy buffed heroes with thrown or bow attacks[/li][li]Giant spiders and/or Web spell, then engage with hammerhands/paladins etc.[/li][li]Crazy buffed slingers or longbowmen[/li][/ul]
If you can’t do any of those, you’re going to lose a lot of guys to take down each sky drake.
Those guys get magicians? Oh, my bad. I rarely play Myrran races.
I started a new game, getting Raven and Gnolls, ugh. Then I realized Wolf Riders get a natural movement of 3. Now I have a stack of Stone Skinned Wolf Riders led by a Pathfinding Serena who now has an awesome axe that casts High Prayer and gives +10 to Spellcasting. She even survived an assault on a Halfling Slinger town thanks to the speed of the Wolf Riders. I really need to learn Guardian Wind.
I found Tauron’s capital (High Elf) with my scout Sprites, and it’s so early that all he has there is a couple of Longbowmen, Swordsmen, and Doom Bats accompanied by three heroes. He does have Wall of Fire up, but no city walls. I might just send in a full stack of Wolf Riders first. maybe led by Baghtu.
I think I’m going to have to try and bide enough time to cast the Spell of Mastery.
I’m pretty safe over in Myrran and assaults on my defenses are usually doomed to failure. Especially since I managed to obtain High Prayer from Ariel by now. But I need some means to capture the remaining nodes - I can summon Sky Drakes now, but I cannot afford to. I have a total of about 4000 mana and the suckers cost 1000 a piece to summon.
I got Arch Angel from Ariel (exchanged it for Detect Magic, heh), but I cannot summon any for the same reason.
Horus has a metric shitton of cities (at least two or three dozen), mostly highly developed High Elf and High Men cities. Full of units. Some have tons of Angels, but others (including the capital) aren’t defended quite that well. I’m gonna throw some stacks of Catapults, some mages and a small horde of my War Trolls towards it - we’ll see how it works out.
Horus is ahead of me, he recently finished researching the Spell of Mastery and began casting it. But I have Spell Blast, so I discouraged the attempt.
I’m about halfway through researching the spell myself.
Enchanting a stack of my conventional units didn’t work out that well, the only thing I felt really helped was Guardian Wind when fighting against Longbowmen. The better enchantments cost too much support to be worth it, imo, at least in my situation. In ordinary battles, I just use War Trolls as much as possible because they regenerate, otherwise I use High Prayer, which is very effective, just as much as it was when Horus used it against me earlier.
What gives me some pause in Myrran is the remaining nodes - they spawn VERY powerful marauders, and I’m unable to get more mana. Gotta figure something out.
rezaf
It took me a while. I don’t have the same ability to stay up until a quarter to three obsessively playing Master of Magic like I used to.
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I got Sss’ra and halflings. Starting on Myrror allowed me to get my empire set up without interference from another wizard for some time. My initial forays often lost me troops The neutral beastmen weren’t too bad, but the dark elves were a total bitch.
Eventually, expanding to a separate continent brought me into conflict with Merlin. I slowly rolled over him with wave after wave of halfling slingers. Going topside was necessary to clean up the remnants of Merlin.
Casting Awareness, I found that Arcanus was basically Lo Pan’s playground. Sharee had some presence, and Horus had only two towns. I slowly ate into Lo Pan’s holdings. Very slowly. I decided that the Spell of Mastery would be my path to victory. I built every knowledge structure I could to boost research points, and pumped nearly all my mana into research. Once known, I started casting the Spell of Mastery. Lo Pan laid waste to the world during this period with Armageddon putting my economy into the dumpster. Converting mana to cash kept me afloat long enough to finish the spell.
I’m still clinging to it in my game.
My life saver unit in the heavily guarded nodes was the Airship - I created stacks of them and at the very least they’d manage to inflict losses to any node I sent them to - more often they’d manage to wipe out all opposition.
As soon as Myrran was reasonably safe, I began applying more pressure over on Arcanum. Horus frequently tries to cast the Spell of Mastery, but I’m just blasting his efforts to oblivion. The other two remaining wizards are fairly irrelevant, I’d wipe them out if they weren’t so much out of my way.
My offensive against Horus is currently consisting of five full stacks of War Trolls, a stack of Air Ships and - the spearhead - a stack of Paladins enchanted with Invulnerability, Lionheart, Holy Armor and Endurance.
It’s going a bit slow, because of constant large scale counter attacks, but leaving scars doesn’t cut it with War Trolls. I have to divide and secure about half a dozen cities before I can form a proper frontline. Oh, by now, I’ve captured about half a dozen cities and a few nodes.
It’s going slow, and I haven’t tackled some aspects of MoM gameplay much this time around (for example I’m not using any heroes on the frontlines and have never created any item), but it’s a great, epic game that once again has confirmed MoM as one of my favorite games ever.
rezaf
There is an unofficial patch that fixes some bugs:
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/master_of_magic/mom_unofficial_patch_thread_wip
It looks like he’s working on the patch, but it isn’t available for download yet. I couldn’t find it, at any rate. Then again, my search skills are flaccid and impotent.
Post #9 in that thread.
I’m having a blast with this, no crashes so far using the unofficial patch. Puts most modern TBS games to shame.
One question I have that I can’t find in the manual is how many power points does it take to raise your casting skill? Anyone know the formula for this?
Apparently, the formula is:
The third bar improves your spell skill. Mana from the third bar goes into a
pool, and when the pool gets to 2 times your current skill, your skill goes
up a point. Note: If the pool totals more than 2x, the excess is not wasted,
but carries over for the next increase. If your current skill is 30, you
will have to build up a pool of 60, to bump your skill up to 31.
Archmage gives you a starting 10 pt spell skill bonus, and a 50% bonus to the
mana added to your improvement pool. For example, if your powerbase is 60
and each bar is getting exactly 1/3, you are putting in 20 mana, but the
number added to your pool and shown under the bar will be 30. Also, the
starting 10 bonus points are in addition to the normal “pool” process. In
other words, if you are an archmage and your skill is shown as 30, that is
the 10 bonus points and 20 normal points. When the pool gets up to 40, your
normal points will bump to 21 and your spell skill will be 31.
[[email protected] (Dan Hite), BLJ]
Thank you Talorc!
I’ve read many descriptions of how spell skill increases, but that is the only one that has actually made sense.
Congrats, Tim! You’ve been added to the high score list at the #4 spot. You edged out Hawkeye by just 12 points!
Well, thanks to Jason for posting this challenge. An excellent way of finding out how good MoM still is.
The trap I’ve been falling into so far - after a couple of bad experiences failing to take nodes - is playing the game too much like Civ and finding myself in the middle game with a large solid empire but way behind in magic. When the other guys start hitting you with regular rituals and stacks of high-end summons it’s amazing how quickly the “solid” empire crumbles.