Didn’t DOSBOX have also scaler option to improve graphics?
https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler
With the advanced scalers with filters it should improve a bit.
I think I have this on GOG because I never gave it a proper shot when I had it at release. I fired it up once and didn’t last too long due to its look. I regret not playing this in any significant way, but I think I missed my window of opportunity.
Looks totally fine to me blown up to full screen non-stretched. Interface holds up surprisingly well too.
I installed this to take a look. Is a city’s max food production defined by the terrain surrounding the city, but the actual food production is defined by the number of farmers?
The manual is pretty long so I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to read the entire thing. Is there some minimal amount to know enough to start playing? I’ve played a bunch of 4Xs before, but knowing how things work in one doesn’t always translated to others.
Also, from the little bit I saw it seems like you need a sizable army to attack anything. Is that true or just random based on starting conditions? I think I had 3 spearmen, 1 swordsman, and a hero and couldn’t find anything I could beat - even summoning some phantom warriors.
More or less. As you get closer to its max food production, you’ll see a dropoff in farmer efficiency, but in general you’re correct.
Played MOO2? That’s the closest direct comp, probably. MOM cities don’t get quite as exponentially more powerful as MOO2 planets do, but some buildings are pretty powerful.
Defense on units is extremely powerful. Each shield has the same 30% chance to block a hit when attacked as each sword does to roll a hit when swinging. So each figure has an even chance of doing no damage when attacking a unit with defense equal to its offense.
The stats you see in a unit card are per figure, so a standard Swordsman or whatever is actually 6 of whatever you see there. As figures die, the unit does proportionally less damage.
Each race (except Orcs) is restricted from constructing certain buildings. Low-tech races like Lizardmen, Klackons, and Gnolls get other advantages to make up for this.
It’s highly random, yes. But do yourself a favor and don’t build spearmen as anything other than garrisons - they’re pretty godawful at actual fighting in almost every case. (Every two mundane units in a city reduce unrest by one.)
Thanks for the info Adam.
I legit miss the '90s.
2012 and your site looks like that? C’mon now…my eyes…
Ohhhhhhhh, well then my apologies, that makes a lot more sense.
Having conquered both the worlds of Arcanus and Myrror…
Not the highest of high scores, but really score-humping is about leaving your last rival with a single city and pressing Next Turn a bunch of times so fuckit.
Overall amusing. MoM still has it. This game was amusingly not about uber-stacks or super-enchanted heroes or anything - I pretty much abused Enchant Road to drone-strike dirty Death insurgents with maximum Slingers.
And man, death death death. I ended up concentrating on Slingers even when I had access to things like Magicians and Wyvern Riders and Wolf Riders and Griffons and all kindsa stuff because three of the four enemies I smooshed were big fans of spamming Possession (which either can’t be dispelled or the RNG hates me even more than I thought it did). Possessed Slingers aren’t the end of the world. Possessed big stompy melee units are no fun.
I did eventually use flying/invisible/spell-locked/wind-walking heroes to speed up the final clear of Kali’s shitty, shitty Myrror empire. Honestly I could have just used Griffons (well, Wyverns b/c they’re faster) and it would have been just as effective. Shithead the Useless Bard and Nutsack the Utterly Pointless Dwarf did very little for me indeed. (Baghtru the Orc Warrior Who Happened To Be There When I Found The Bracelet Of Invulnerability did okay, though.)
Kinda want to do a Sss’ra playthrough now. Myrror is ridiculous and fun, and IMO Sss’ra is one of the weakest of the default wizards.
So my first game, going in without reading a manual, and I wind up on a roughly 5X5 land mass connected to another continent by an isthmus.
Problem is that there is a pool at the other end of the isthmus, with 10 units of spectral warriors. So, yeah, that is a bit beyond my pay grade.
I’ve upgraded my city. Put in some markets, and lumberyards, and libraries, and built a second outpost which I apparently can’t interact with early on.
I really don’t fully understand the mechanics, though have rough ideas. What is needed early? Not sure. But given that I have the mother of all defensive positions I figure booming is safe.
There is a very big resemblance to Master of Orion, probably no accident. The music especially reminds me, whatever music engine they use has a very distinct sound signature.
I also got a hero come knocking, mounted with a bow. He does well in combat.
I too played a game - kind of. I selected a wizard who specialized in one school - figured it would be easier concentrating on just one. He was an alchemy dude, so I could convert gold to mana at a better rate. It seemed like there were quite a bit of locations like chaos nodes that had guys I couldn’t handle right away.
As per Adam’s recommendation, I stopped producing spearmen. Built some buildings, raised an army with a mix of ranged and melee and took over two neutral towns. Then I founded an outpost in the other direction and started raking in some good gold. Got brave enough to tackle the chaos nodes and some other locations.
I was on my own little island, which I now filled up more or less. I was discovered by some AI players who decided to annoy me by casting a spell on my cities that caused my units some damage - so I killed them whenever they entered my land. I was able to come to a gentlemen’s agreement with one not to attack, but it didn’t take too long before they all decided to be hostile with me.
I was able to hold them off and got a full stack with some paladins, longbow men and others to go try and take over some enemy turf. I made some magic gear for my hero. I scouted with my warships and found a location not highly protected. Was moving my army to the ship when a group of wandering monsters seemed to appear out of nowhere and sacked a lightly defended city of mine. That knocked my food level down. I didn’t notice and when I went to the next turn half my army left. I rage quit and haven’t returned.
From my very very limited experience it seems like a pretty basic game as far as what you can do goes. City management is light. No terrain improvements - workers (engineers) only build roads. My understanding of the game isn’t very deep - so I’m sure I don’t see many of the nuances available.
I wish I played it in its day. I owned it. For some reason it didn’t click. I may fire up another game of it now that I have a somewhat better understanding then when I started. For someone learning the game are the default settings reasonable? I think that is what I used in my first game.
You can get really screwed in the early game if you attack a location that has monsters that are above your current paygrade. You’ve dished out money for a hero, spent X turns building up 6 troops or so, etc. There were come cockatrices guarding a location and I attacked it, not knowing anything about how strong they are. I wound out how much better they were then I was after they started attacking me.
Mostly my fault. I should have inspected them before we engaged and maybe fled. It would be nice it before you attack they gave an indication about how many enemies there were. 1 cocatrice and I would have been OK. 4 + a spider and I was not OK. I didn’t want to flee because you lose units sometimes. Instead I rage quit again. I had 4 cities developing nicely too.
So I’ve been ‘watching’ (listening with one ear while working) to quill18’s video series on MoM. Gotta say I’ve learned quite a bit. Enough that I’ll probably restart my campaign, as it seems my location really hosed me. Being landlocked from any features by a pool with 5 sword, 2 shield warriors, plus not understanding how to allocate taxes, mana points, etc. meant that a lot of excess went to places that were not needed. Currently tapped out on my military capability, having all units farming, which limits my production.
I done screwed up but didn’t know it. Maybe not unrecoverable, now that I know you can gold rush buildings, but enough.
Losing armies and heroes from lack of gold and food is really frustrating for me as well. I think newer UI’s have spoiled me with warnings – I don’t remember making such big supply snafus before.
It’s been a while since I looked at the strategy guide at that MoM-site, but I think it has some good tips on what to build early and so on, Another thing I remembered is that surplus food is sold for 1/2 gold each, so instead of producing trade goods it is possible to shore up small deficits that way while still building stuff.
I’m not big on watching streams but I’ll see if I watch the one you linked @CraigM.
I’ve been doing other vacation stuff instead of playing, but the weather is bad so I am jumping in again. The gods of random have given me the following task: Freya and her merry band of Barbarians.
I’m surprised you and others have had issues with this in MoM - the UI was decades ahead of its time, and still better than some modern games.
Even in my most recent game, I had a big popup asking me if I really wanted to end my turn with a food deficit, as armies would be disbanded if I did so. Between that and the big flashing red number on the right side of the screen, I have never had trouble tracking it.
(Apologies if the popup is an unofficial patch thing; I haven’t played a vanilla game in a long, long time.)
(Get the community patch though, seriously.)
Yeah, I don’t think I ever had problems tracking supply before, but it has been a while since I played. I’ve not gotten any warnings, though, so I think that is from the unofficial patch. But I agree that vanilla MOM has a lot of good UI for it’s time. I remember right clicking on stuff in a lot of games after it, wondering why there was no proper tooltips.
Having read a bit more about the Insecticide-patch I think I must have confused it with some other patch project that went all nuts on changing spell effects based on the maker’s preferences and views on balance. Seems like there is no reason not to install Insecticide!
I’ll finish this game first, though. I got a slow start, and have only settled one city except for my capital. The AIs have snatched all the close neutral cities. I REALLY am to reliant on combat summons for early conquest.
Might not be that long until this is over, though:
Seriously, there guys are some bunch of assholes. I’m producing Berserkers with magical weapons now, though.