I don’t know if I’d say the spell names are “licensed” by WotC, but many of them are the same, including the “vibe” each of the five colors of magic brings to the table (White=Life, Green=Nature). It’s all the same as it was before, nothing was renamed or changed. So you still have Drain Life, Fire Bolt, Weakness, etc. yeah, for sure!
I actually talked about this in the first video I had to scrub, but this came out the year I discovered MtG and it really helped make the game (MoM) click for me when I started playing it. It felt immediately accessible.
Oh, good, I find that stuff really interesting myself but you never know who is going to be yawning and closing the video to move onto watching cats or something, haha.
It feels great to me, but I’m maybe not the best subject to be testing it. More above:
It started off when playing that the AI would seem to gang up on you. Sure wars between AI would happen sometimes, but mostly it was all against you.
So what I started doing was picking a myrrian race and selecting the other AI players. I would pick ones that were philosophically opposite and they would be on the normal world while I had the other world to myself.
Eventually they would invade and then I could ‘meet’ the AI races and most of the time, they would all be allied. I did this a bunch of times and it was rare for this to NOT be the case.
This is what I would call anti-player bias.
Come to think of it, I was playing caster of magic when I did this, so maybe it worked a bit differently than the original game?
I just got tired of being ganged up on by everyone, every time.
Ah, okay I see what you were referring to, but that’s actually not how it works (at least in the base game). I was just skimming the Guide’s chapter on diplomacy and everything has a DP (Diplomacy Point) cost and value, like if you are playing with Death magic you have an inherent penalty to your DP value with a given faction. Giving them things or accepting requests gives more DP points, while having certain Global Enchantments active can reduce your DP levels with everyone, especially some of the nastier ones like Armageddon.
And then there is the randomized Personality that a given AI Wizard might have. If you run up against a Maniacal wizard (like I have done in my first game with the new version) you are just going to end up getting attacked or having to declare war on them as they take Nodes and land from you.
I don’t know much about the changes in Caster of Magic, but I am at peace and doing well with the other two wizards in my current game, now that I’ve banished the Red player (Maniacal). I’m a little concerned about Purple, he started on Myrran and has EVERY city down there (and several above land he took from Red as he was also at war with him - Red was at war with all three of us) and sometimes thanks to the Awaken spell I can see his stacks moving around and he’s got several full 9-unit stacks with enchanted units ranging from Golems to Hammerhands and I even saw a freaking Dragon. I’m hoping I can cast the Spell of Mastery before he does, because I don’t know if I can take him on the field.
Some of the other stuff on the map is defended by enemies that are so out of your league at the beginning I guess your just stuck waiting for awhile to come back and get them.
Is it just random how strong the defenses are on them or is it partially dependent on how valuable the thing defended is?
Yeah, tougher fights mean generally better rewards. I could have set the nodes and lairs to weak at game start and then have lower rewards but a faster start (and so would then the AI players as well) but I like the long game. Though for a 100 turn limit I should have gone with the faster start in hindsight.
In the original game, diplomacy did not work as it was supposed to. With the results you describe. I always thought that that was a late decision made to counteract the effects of a very weak AI, but I do not know that.
In Caster, diplomacy works, but it is tough. First, anyone getting a big lead does get ganged up on.
Second, you are in a bind when it comes to befriending neighbors. A non-aggression pact is necessary to build up the relationship – but that pact is complicated and comes with some disadvantages (I won’t detail them here because we are really discussing the new game, but the main thing is that it does not prevent the AI from sending units into your territory.)
If the new game’s diplomacy simply works the way the documentation originally said, I think everyone would be happy. Assuming the AI plays the game competitively enough.
I think it was just bugs. MoM had a bout a million on launch.
Shoutout to Simtex/microprose support though. I purchased it from Walmart (I was in college in a tiny town at the time, no gaming stores within a thousand miles) and despite the box being labeled “3.5 floppy” it had the CD version and Walmart wouldn’t return it. So I called support and sent them the CD and they mailed me back floppies and a floppy with a patch on it. Although the game was still really buggy after, the patch helped with a lot.
I finished up my final video taking me to turn 100, and I addressed several questions I’d been asked over the last few days at the start of the video. Otherwise, it’s rendering now and I had to get back to the office, so I’ll drop a link later this afternoon when I get back from the office and can upload it.
In the meanwhile, someone on Era asked if this has UltraWide support and it never occurred to me to try - I’d been playing exclusively in a 1080p windowed mode for recording purposes - but it does indeed support (and look amazing in) UltraWide. It can even do 144hz, though I didn’t feel the need to tax my video card for that much framerate on a game like this, so I kept it at 60.
You would think some day one of these games would ‘fix’ the issue by using the hit points or size stat as multiplicator for mana upkeep. What I am saying is, enchanting a human soldier to fly and enchanting a huge wyrm or dinosaur to fly shouldn’t be the same!
That creature is clearly related to Dragons and as such, only requires a slight magical push to actually take flight, while humans have no connection to flying relatives, and it takes a large magical effort to allow them to fly in defiance of the role the Gods have set on them.