Isn’t that what made sprites and Nightmares overpowered in regular Master of Magic. I thought they fixed that some how. Especially when stacked with Call Lightning.
I tried wyvern riders but when they attack the wyrms the worms appear to counterattack because the wyvern riders take major damage and the wyrms suffer barely a scratch. I clearly have not found the right combination yet.
Yes, the restriction on hitting fliers doesn’t apply to counterattacks. You’ll need something flying and ranged to do the trick.
Wyrms are nasty. It’s not just you ;)
Eh. Powerful yes, overpowered? Compared to what you can do with a similar amount of mana (Sprites) or production (Nightmares) invested in various other things, not really.
Does call lightning still attack every round randomly?
There’s a limit on it, and/or max combat rounds is much shorter.
Humble Unleash Destruction Bundle (pay what you want and help charity) (humblebundle.com)
You can get Master of Magic Classic for 1 dollar. Perfect for those that are waiting on the expansion on the next sale.
I was led to believe that Caster of Magic for Windows had:
- Borderless Fullscreen support and freely resizeable game window, not locked to any specific aspect ratio
But when I try it, it just stretches everything to fit the window, not maintaining the art or interface’s aspect ratio. Is this what they mean by ‘support’? While technically true, it’s kind of disappointing…
Yeah, it just scales the sprites. Still much better than being tied to 2x DOSBox rendering ;)
Reading through Dev Diaries for the remake:
Dev Diary 1
Dev Diary 2
Dev Diary 3
It’s pretty clear that they are having little to nothing to do with Seravy and his Caster of Magic. The remake will look tons better (I don’t really care, but know I am in a very small minority there) and the quality of life improvements will be welcome. This will include highly customizable difficulty.
They claim the AI will be better, but honestly, I do not see how that could go very far. We might remember the original as a 4X, but going back after long sessions with Caster, I see how the original was as much CRPG as 4X. It was all about great ideas for character creation that assure you could become invincible. And the main struggle was against the baddies in the various dungeons, caves, towers, and nodes, where you’d find loot to make yourself godlike. You ended up with a variety of unanswerable powers… so if the remake were to have competent AI, AI wizards would end up with unanswerable powers. Which would pretty much be the definition of no fun. Since I am certain they will do nothing of the sort, I suspect that improved AI in the remake will be a surface thing.
I tore myself away from Caster for a short while, but I am back to it again. And still blown away by the genius of this game. Been playing it for months, but I am still getting that great-new-game syndrome where I better not think about it during the night, or else I will be unable to sleep and have to slink out to the computer and play for a few more hours. I can only hope that the remake is eventually modded to include the Caster improvements, because at this point, the original MOM gameplay is striking me as pretty weak shit in comparison.
Patch yesterday too!
Anyway you’re absolutely right about the original and what made it fun with its hilariously shitty AI. I don’t know that that means you can’t successfully create something else that is also fun with the same basic design but with the obvious win buttons sanded off.
Also the win buttons mostly do have counters available to a human player that the AI just didn’t know about. The only things I think probably have to go are OG Magic Immunity (Torin, Paladins), turn 1 Wraiths, and flying invisible Warships. The rest of it you can mostly deal with.
Couldn’t you cracks call those paladins? I seem to remember the ai doing that.
Cracks Call is about the only thing that works, yes, because it bypasses Magic Immunity. But you’re still talking about a rare combat spell to on average kill less than half of an (admittedly expensive) unit. It’s a bad counter, we just remember it because it’s the only one.
(Very Rare creatures with their 20+ attack strengths can kill Paladins, but even then you’re still looking at the Paladins being immune to half or more of the damage because most of those summons have significant specials that the Paladins are immune to.)
isn’t one of the features of the new Caster edition the much better AI, praised in this very same thread?
It seems a bit hypocritical to say now that shitty AI is a good feature of MoM.
CoM is a very different and more interactive game than MoM.
CoM is a competent (I’d argue it’s well north of competent) 4X.
MoM is largely a CRPG with 4X window dressing, by modern standards, once you figure out how easy it is to exploit the AI.
Sure as hell CoM seems the same game as MoM, in the same genre, but with a few new features and some improvements…
It’s also the same game as Empire, or Civilization, or Age of Wonders, or or or…
Any time you want to actually engage with the discussion, we’ll be here!
I think that’s an unnecessarily snarky response! Has TurinTur been following the CoM discussion? It would be easy to think it’s more or less the same game of you haven’t been paying attention to the seemingly drastic under the hood AI changes that don’t really make good bullet points.
I think that the difference is in what the player is mainly engaged with doing. Games of this sort, the usual assumption is that your concern is in overcoming other players who are playing substantially the same game, and pose a threat to get ahead of you and beat your down (or meet some win condition first).
CRPGs – quite apart from the original idea of role playing – have the player focus on character creation and the complex combination of powers eventually available in that build. And then go face increasingly difficult dungeons and such to build up power through experience and powerful loot. Bosses and mobs might be difficult to overcome, but they do not start the game like the player and develop like the player – they just are just obstacles created to make it a challenge, and they are always defeatable. In fact, it’s generally considered cause for criticism if they cannot be defeated by a wide variety of builds. While, of course, the player character is allowed to develop into something that cannot be defeated.
The original MOM had the look of the former, you had four opponents. But I really don’t think that anyone with any experience with the game was much threatened by those four. It was all about the interesting character creation and the challenging locations to conquer as you gained incredibly powerful loot. And, in fact, there were quite a few available strategies that could make you nigh on invulnerable. Not only did the AI never use those, I think I am being fair in saying that most people would have rage quit if the AI had.
COM has changed this. The AI opponents can give you a lot of trouble now, and as far as I can see, no spell or unit or strategy that you conceive at the beginning of the game will overpower everything you will face. Lots of very strong stuff, but it all has a counter, and it has an expiration date. And the AI is able to use those strategies and counters.
So in my mind, at least, the charms of MOM had a lot more in common with CRPGs, while COM has a lot more in common with 4X games.
I would just say that the original MOM with strong AI would mean that opponents could do a bunch of unanswerable things to you, and most players would hate that. Just as an example, there was a global enchantment that shut down all chaos spells. Players loved it because Chaos wizards could really piss you off with their endless vandalism. But can you imagine if you were playing as a Chaos wizard, and a rival did this to you? Very few players would say that that was fun, any more than people would accept that the final boss in a CRPG simply cannot be defeated, or cannot be defeated unless you chose one particular build.
Fine, explain things with words instead of gifs. I guess you can do that too.