Qt3 Classic Game Club #37: Master of Magic

Games
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I haven’t gotten a low food warning popup either, so it must be part of the patch.

I think the modern game that feels closest to MoM is Age of Wonders III. They both have minimalist city management. no worker terrain improvement, random spell research, tactical battles with spell slinging, ruins with powerful monster enemies and more similarities. Other 4Xs share these similarities, like Fallen Enchantress:LH but I still think AoW III feels the closest out of the games I’ve played.

I’m in the middle of another game where I think I have 4 cities I settled, 2 neutral cities I conquered + 1 AI city I conquered. My games have just been on the default settings. Unless I’ve missed some aspect of the game, it feels simple - not in an easy sense. It doesn’t seem to have the moving parts other 4X games have.

I’m surprised I didn’t enjoy this more when it came out. It could have been move Civ love was so great it was almost impossible to pull me away. In any case, it seems like a decent game but not one I’m likely to play much of after this. I think Aow III fills this role much better as does Fallen Enchantress:LH.

62

If I am not mistaken, the low food warning only appears the first time you have insufficient food.

I am not sure what your definition of random spell research is, but I have to select which spell to research as soon as the previous spell has been researched. If the randomness refers to which spells are available to be researched, then yes.

63

This.

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Finally able to get my game going late yesterday. Pretty easy installation from GOG and grabbed that community patch as well. DOSBOX has the annoying tendency to ignore my mouse clicks if I alt-tab out to another window, but if I position the mouse properly after bringing it back to the forefront, it seems to work most of the time.

Decided to play Hard since it’s been a while and I’m sure I’ll make enough mistakes that an Impossible win would be exactly that. Created my own custom wizard with all Life spell books - none of those fancy attribute things! Nice to start with the ability to Lionheart your early heroes, even if it does cost an arm and a leg in mana. Could have gone High Elves, High Men, or Halflings with pretty much equal utility - ended up elves by random choice.

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Starting position was pretty poor, with a bunch of high-difficulty ruins and only enough room for 2 cities on my island. I got Serena early on - her magic attacks and spells are a nice complement to a bunch of elvish longbowmen. A big continent with both Horus and Merlin on it was just a short distance away, once I’d exhausted my little island. I hopped over and took a few cities from them before getting all chummy, thanks in part to a Just Cause spell. Horus had already opened up a tower so I was able to get a foothold on Myrror before the peace treaty.

Spent the next hour or so of gameplay building up my economy and forces. Merlin killed off Freya before I ever met her, which is fine with me. Once I’d cleared off all the easy pickings with my heroes, I sent them to smite Horus where it hurt - his wizard tower. He’d left nothing but slingers as defense, and my guys have plenty of defense to survive all those little rocks, even without missile immunity. Ended up killing him since apparently he had no mana left for the Spell of Return. Eating up the rest of his cities puts me in a commanding position against Merlin and whoever the one other mage is.

At this point it’s pretty much a game win, and a bit anti-climactic to go through the grind of finishing off my conquest. I’ll probably finish it out just to see where my score is, though I don’t expect anything too high.

65

I’ve been playing but muting the Midi music. Instead I have my own instant soundtrack by playing this on Spotify.

66

Man, this has its hooks in me good.

Played most of a Beastmen/Sss’ra game. Was mostly amusing, but ultimately the tedium of endgame is kinda getting to me. Part of the problem is that I have no real endgame units to turn my giant piles of money and mana and production into reasonably quick death for my enemies. Beastmen are the generalists of Myrror, and they don’t suck or anything, but they top out at Minotaurs which are strong but very, very vanilla. My rivals all have either Ice Bolt or Psionic Blast, so I can’t really use heroes against them as I don’t have Invisibility or Magic Immunity or anything to protect them. Beastmen would be great in support of a stronger summoning or enchanting Wizard, I think, but without anything to really seal the deal as Sss’ra the endgame hasn’t paid off.

So I decided to treat myself to a cheese playthrough, and rolled up 11 Death for Wraith silliness. Man, this is way sillier than I even remembered. Death kinda sucks other than Wraiths (and Possession sucks to play against, for sure) but they’re just utterly unfuckwithable on turn one, heh. Check out the victory turn, hehehe.

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67

I’m finding one of the biggest decisions is to be how much mana to stockpile vs the spell power that controls how much I can cast per turn. I stockpiled a bunch and ran a deficit by summoning several chaos monsters (hydra) so I can go on a big offensive. It worked as I took over 5 guarded cities, but now my mana reserves are low.

As a whole the troops and monsters seem kinda boring. I mean some are much more powerful than others but not really much more fun to play. I guess my exposure to different ones are limited as I’ve been the high men for all of my games and only specialized in 2 different schools of magic so I haven’t seen a lot of summons.

My progress in taking this guy over has slowed because he has a wall of fire on is capitol and my area disenchantment spell hasn’t removed it in 3 tries. I was thinking of making a stack of catapults to soften them up and hit them with my spell that does like 15 damage to each creature.

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I could have gotten a higher score but I got bored.

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I have spent the past few days reading so there has not been much progress on my Freya/Barbarians game. My second city was razed, but I captured a High Man city from Raven.

Status is pretty much this:

My capital is fending off a constant stream of small stacks from all three. I had forgotten how much fun Cracks Call is. It only works 25% of the time, but when it works it is really an MVP. Well, maybe there’s more effective ways to spend that mana, but it is so fun to see those Fire Giants disappear into the ground.

I’m not making much progress on actually expanding, though, so this game is really not going anywhere. No luck getting any peace treaties either. I am not giving Raven Ice bolt for a peace treaty that will probably not last longer than a couple of turns anyways.

Edit; Hooray! I’ve been without a hero since my poor Bard ate a firebolt, but now I have a Huntress that can lead a guerilla band of barbarian berserkers around!

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First Jørn, thanks for picking MoM as I never got myself to play it to completion before today. I dabbled in it as release and let it sit in my Gog library for years.

It took me 4 times to finally win on the default settings. The first game I didn’t know what was going on. In the second game I think I finally started to understand the balance between putting points in mana, research and casting power. The 3rd I rage quit when wandering monsters sacked my city and caused my advancing army to starve and leave. I finally put it together in game 4.

In each game I specialized in Chaos magic. Most of my mana was spent casting Flame Strike (I think - the one that hits for 15 damage) in combat. I also used quite a bit of Doom Strike, summoned hydra and fire elementals. At the end I got to summon a drake which I promptly got killed by taking on a much larger army. At least the drake took down a lot of enemies before succumbing.

Back in the day it seems like this would have been a pretty good game. Today, while OK, I don’t think it will have a lot of staying power with me. Other than having a ton of spells - many of which I haven’t even seen since they are in other schools, the gameplay seems a bit light. Without much city improvement and no tile improvement (other than the bonus from the buildings) that aspect is pretty light. Even though there are different unit abilities, they just didn’t seem have a huge effect on the tactical decisions you need to make.

Balancing the magic points seems like it is one of the most important decisions to make

I mentioned above that I think Age of Wonders III captures this style of game while pretty much improving it in every way.

I’d love to hear what impressions I may have gotten wrong since I obviously didn’t see everything the game has to offer in my 4 games.

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So I’m playing “Extreme” difficulty (added in the community patch; seems like it goes in between Hard and Impossible but…) weirdo custom wizards.

Now to be fair, I’m playing shitty races (elves) with bizarro picks (4 nature/artificer/alchemist/warlord/charismatic/famous/uhhh…) but you guys. I am under siege like I’m Erika Eleniak in a birthday cake.

I abandoned one Dark Elf start when everyone started showing up with big stacks of flying shit and I was still trying to get anything off the ground, remembering how godawful Dark Elves are.

Started up regular High Elves (man, so much better than Dark Elves) a few times, got absolute nutsack bullshit for starts. Finally on my fourth I have something playable. Hooray! And even so, I lost my first expansion city to (naturally) Rjak surprise attacking me (is it really a surprise when you get attacked in MoM?) and Tauron is flying wings of Chimera around my capital.

I dunno if this is winnable; these difficulties may be mostly for wizards with picks that make some kind of damn sense and aren’t just some challenge mode bullshit.

e: Hahahahaha, yeah, nope.

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Holy crap, you guys! There’s a 1.50 community bugfix patch that I didn’t even know existed - I had been on 1.40n!

Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in.

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I ended up playing 1 more game on default settings, choosing a different wizard so I could see another spell school. I went with Merlin. My focus was healing troops to keep them alive, and buffing with invincibility and one other one that boosts the attack of each figure in the unit. I used a handful of other spells here and there too. I’m going to put this one down for now and play other things, but if I return at some point I can finally graduate beyond normal difficulty :-)

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Finished my tlaloc gnoll game on hard finally. Took some serious time given that I was razing every neutral or enemy city that wasn’t gnolls. My fame suffered a lot with all of the razings as well. Hadf a good setup with freya as the only other wizard on my continent, and it was a very large continent. Raven was on a small island on the normal plane and didn’t really make it off of his island. Sssra was on myror and took out the other m,yrran wizard before I even knew who it was.

I focused on rapid expansion using armies of swordsmen to start, taking down the local neutrals and replacing them with gnoll cities. I found Freya’s capital and was ahead of her in expansion, but she had a unit of gorgons in her capital, so I didn’t even try to take her down ealry. I did summon a few units of sprites and had them take out all of her settlers as they came out of her capital, so she never got another city started. I placed about 15 cities around my continent, had tax rate at 45% so lots of cash to fund quick building, and when I was able to make wolf riders, I made two units of them to take down all of the magic nodes, since gnolls only get a library and temple to help with magic power and spell research. While taking down a node, I found the gorgon spell and changed from mass wolf riders to making half a stack of gorgons with the rest elite wold riders. I enchanted them all with stone skin, water walking, and giant strength and took down both freya and jafaar. Freya had a couple of gorgons and some paladins, and Raven had halfling slingers and shaman.

I was going to make more cities on the normal plane at that time, but Sssra came out of the planar towers and I had to go after him. Took the same stack of half gorgons and half elite wolf riders, used awareness to find his capital, and took down his defense of hammerhands and angels. Surprisingly, nobody cast the spell of return, despite both him and jafaar having plenty of cities to return to. I may try a new roll and play without the whole razing thing, as it seriously dampens the fun with how slowly development happens.

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Mm this part has awakened my curiosity

Note that the majority of AI changes have been optimized for the Caster of Magic mod, and some of them might be less than ideal for the
different pacing of the original game, however, these changes are still a major improvement over the original, where the AI was completely
incapable of doing most of the things the patch enables. Also note that a lot of detailed AI improvements made for Caster of Magic are not in
this patch due to incompatibility, either differences in the game code itself, or the absence of the related feature(s), like new or improved
spells.

And I found it here. Realms Beyond Forum - Caster of Magic
Seems promising!

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I’ve played a little with 1.50. The AI certainly seems to be expanding well and doing less unbearably stupid crap.

Diplomacy is massively different and better. I mean, EU4 it ain’t, but rivals actually initiate trades and diplomacy and stuff now. Neat stuff!

e: Because it’s not obvious where to actually download the thing, here’s the direct link: http://seravy.x10.mx/CasterofMagic/Master150Final.zip

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Played another bit with the patch. AI is much, much better. Naval invasions and shit. Madness.

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What?! Oh I need to try this.

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I’m also interested in the mod they talk about, Caster of Magic, because he looks like he worked a ton on AI. Here, and here, and here, and more.

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Well you can all go do things to make the game more difficult. I, however, must contend with an RNG that apparently hates me.

Next try (as Freya again, with half elves) I had a better start position. Was able to upgrade my starter city, and even put two more cities down. One thing I really like, once I discovered it, thanks to the quill18 series I linked earlier, was that you have different map modes, sort of. Pressing F1 brings up the cartographer, which spells out what the potentials of any tile are for new cities. What the max pop is, what the bonuses are, and any special features. That is an incredibly useful feature! The tax collector is a bit unwieldy, because I have to investigate my cities after adjusting taxes to see unrest. Would be nice if that window was extended and showed that without having to click each city…

Anyhow I got a better start. I’m on a piece of land that is, effectively, 4 fingers of land attached to an arm pointing south. I started on the west finger, my second city was on the top of the arm, and my third on the middle finger. There was a neutral halfling city on the east finger. Above my city, connected to some larger portion of the landmass that I have not explored, is a barbarian neutral city.

Problem is that most of the goodies by my area are guarded by super high level monsters. I have one ruin that is 2 squares away from my starting city with werewolves. Werewolves I literally have no way of damaging due to weapon immunity, and cold immunity (my one direct damage spell at this point). on the two middle fingers are nodes with a fire elemental and a demon lord.

The halfling city has a boat load of slingers, about 8 in total, which make attack against them impractical. The barbarian city is equally well defended.

So right now my options seem to be wait for 30-40 turns to upgrade my cities more and build a huge stack of units to throw away in order to take over the neutral cities. Oh, and defend my northern reach, as one of the rival wizards is a jerk who has posted a small army and hero on a node 2 squares away.

Question: how disposable are units? Outside of heroes, if I just build a big stack of archers and cavalry, assuming I’ll lose many of them taking the slingers out, how big of a deal is that?