Goddam song is stuck in my head. Thank you roommate, for playing it over and over and over and over as you practice your phonetic karaoke. I don't care that you got a great ovation or who you picked up at the bar, to quote Carl from ATHF: "I only heard your little song about a thousand times. Now I need candy, and I don't know why"

So since it is stuck in my head, I'm gonna fill my spoiler images with stuff from the many memes it has spawned.









I hope that got it out of my system...

Yup

Well, I finally decided to take the next step and play on extreme. I actually played halflings the first time since...a long long time ago. Warlord, Alchemy, 6 life + 2 sorcery. It feels good to really unload on the computer, no holds barred. I won't feel guilty about anything in this game. After getting Shuri with Leadership(!), I got Serena...with the best possible ability...

From GameBytes, issue 21. Click to read the whole thing. I'm just going to excerpt some parts I thought were interesting.

Quote:Master of Magic (MOM) is an introductory-level strategy game that takes place in a fantasy milieu. The plot is quite familiar: you begin as a humble leader of a small village and, over time, your megalomaniacal aspirations of world-dominance grow as you expand the territory and number of villages under your control. Of course, there are several other like-minded individuals that are involved in this story who will be competing against you for a place in the arcane hall of fame. Brought to you by Simtex, the group responsible for Master of Orion (MOO), MOM bears several similarities with its predecessor. While in some ways this is good, overall the result is a decidedly-deficient product, as will be explained below.

Quote:While there are a large number of spells available to research in MOM, the variety of spells is not that great. Many spells are merely duplicates of spells of another magic type (ie: the Fire and Ice Bolt spells), more powerful versions of easier spells (ie: Iron Skin over Stone Skin, or Herb Mastery over Healing or Mass Healing), or spells that counter the effects of other spells (ie: Healing of course, or Raise Dead). There are also a number of summoning spells that allow the wizard to call forth magical creatures of increasing powers. There are a decent variety of spells, despite the repetition, but it only takes a few games to see the bulk of spells that MOM has to offer.

Quote:One of the problems with MOM is that there really isn't that much to keep you busy. Honest. It sounds like a lot: building cities; researching and casting spells; building units; and engaging in combat. However, for most turns the only thing you'll be doing is clicking the Next Turn button.

Quote:You do not need to build a large number of cities in MOM - about 6 or so is all you need.

Quote:Building the various structures in a city is a process you duplicate indentically from city to city. It gets to the point where you don't even stop to think what structure to build next, as they tend to follow a natural order.

Quote:MOM lacks decent gameplay. It is very linear, with little variety from game to game irrespective of what options you choose at the beginning. This might have been forgivable, were it not for a dormant AI. In the following sections I'll describe how the AI makes a boring game a bad game.

Quote:The diplomatic overtures you can undertake in MOM are exactly as were seen in MOO, except that instead of technology you now trade or offer spells. Every other option replicates the options in MOO. This is fine but, as in MOO, the computer does not pursue the options available aggressively enough. I have only seen computer players request that I trade for a particular spell. They never request alliances, attempt to bribe you, or request your aid against their enemies.

As in other aspects of MOM, diplomatic relations exist as a tool used ONLY by the human player. The computer just doesn't use it save to declare war on you.

Quote:So far I've harped on the dismal AI as it pertains to combat, but there's more - much more. Keep in mind that the AI in MOM is actually much better in v1.2 than it was in previous versions, but this only indicates what a dismal job was done initially than how challenging the computer opponent is now.

As in MOO, you will find that the computer builds an excessive number of units in MOM. Up to 9 units can be stacked together in one square in MOM, making up a large army. Yet the computer doesn't seem to mind building weak units and leaving them on their own. The AI will often leave a unit or stack of units sitting around unproductively for large periods of time, all the while paying for its upkeep. Another throwback to MOO is that weak units will continue to assault a vastly-superior enemy repeatedly, so that the player is forced to go through needless combat sequences endlessly.

Quote:The AI seems to have a heavy leaning towards the building of vessels. Every computer player has swarms of triremes and galleys hugging the coastline and not serving any purpose whatsoever. How useful is a stack of 9 empty triremes? If the computer player had no ability to cross water and were using these triremes to link landmasses together, that would be fine, but we can only wish the computer was smart enough to do that. Unfortunately, the computer is only smart enough to build them and proceed forget about them.

Quote:Matters don't improve any if you should happen to bribe a computer player into being your ally, as they will continue to be just as obstinate as always. Even when computer players are at war with each other, it is difficult to determine just what is going on. You never see a stack of computer player A's units marching towards a city of computer player B. You never see destructive spells being targeted by one computer player against another. You as the human player will be doing this all the time, but the computer players seem to march to a different drummer, only attacking each other if their units happen to bump into each other by chance.

Quote:Winning a game of MOM is a certainty, irrespective of level of difficulty or number of opponents. All a game of MOM involves is building a handful of cities to generate enough magical power to research the Spell of Mastery in a reasonable number of turns (assuming this is the route you take). You'll build a few units to defend each of your cities with, a few more to use as your conquering army, all the while researching what spells you want until you are able to research the big one. That's it. Game over.

Quote:The graphics in MOM are pretty good, for what you'd expect to see nowadays in VGA.

Quote:MOM, like Colonization, attempts to be a successful follow-up to Civilization. Many of the game elements are identical or very similar to elements we first saw in Sid's classic. However, MOM (and Colonization, for that matter) lacks the tension and sense of urgency to achieve that next level of advancement that was so apparent in Civ.

What is the correct, original screen resolution for MoM? I want to set DOSbox so it's corrctly proportioned.

The fireball on the SIMTEX logo when it loads is oval in mine, but it is round in the "Let's Play on Impossible with Kyrub's mod" videos. So I either need to make it less high or wider.


PS what is Kyrubs mod? I have MoM 2 but at the moment I am playing with 1.31 and Insecticide 1.4f.


Cheers!

~

I have Emagic, Grimoire and Momedit2, but none of them work with 64 bit Windows 7.

Is there any way to get these working, or are there 64 bit versions of them or a new editor that allows map editing?

I've been playing Skyrim for 6 months on my new PC and just got MoM set up on my 24" monitor with DOSBox 0.74 to run in full screen at the correct ratio (I always play at least once a year), but I would like to have more control over enemy Wizards, especially on Impossible Settings. EG, I'd like to edit the map to add resources, which Emagic could do IIRC. I also like to set Wizard disposition or choose which Wizards I fight.

Can anyone help?

Cheers!

I downloaded the stuff and had to install .NET 4 although I already had it. I have Windows 7 64 bit, so maybe I needed a 32 bit version of .NET as well?

Anyway, the game launches in a tiny window and I can't seem to do anything except click next turn. There's no terrain except grass and my settlement is called Village of Neutral.

What am I doing wrong?


Cheers

This is a greens/intermediate game. We need a replacement player for TheArchduke's civ.

This might be good for someone green that wants to get an idea of the time commitments of a middle-game PBEM. Looking for someone who can play daily and report occasionally.

Original timeslot for TAD was morning CET, but also would work for someone willing to play evenings anywhere in the US.

An Asian Australian player would have a pretty big window to play as well. The only timezone that may be troubling is someone in Eurozone who wants to play in the afternoon/evening.

Current Plan

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...DFFb2hhNUE


T35: A completes road on city2 tile. B completes road on floodplains. 0% tech this turn.
T36: A onto deer, road over next two turns. B SE onto grass, put 1t into a cottage. Back to 100% tech.
T37: B moves next to cow; settler moves towards city site. Occam's Razor starts a worker, working improved tiles.
T38: Settle city; B started deer (1/4)

T39: A, B pasture cow (2/4)
T40: A, B pasture cow (4/4) COMPLETE.
T41: A, B camp deer (3/4)
T42: Camp completed by B. A moves to gold. Occam finishes a worker © with 6 overflow. BW in, at reduced slider.
T43: C chop roaded plains hill forest. Occam starts a granary. A starts mining gold and will road it afterwards. B moves to cow and puts down half a road.
T44: B joins C and completes chop. Granary complete.
T45+: Occam's razor grows to 6 on grass cottages built by B and C, while building a warrior. Gold road finishes at just the right moment, keeping Occam happy. At size 6 we'll start a settler.




(stuff below this line was the original post)
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I'm going to make a new thread for this. We have a couple options for our workers:



Ok. First off, we have the worker on the floodplains. It has 1 turn remaining on a cottage built and 2 turns remaining on a road (we sunk 1 turn into road, it costs 3 on a floodplains). Settler is due in 4 turns. By my read then, we should be able to finish the cottage AND finish the road in time for the settler to move. We do have a road on the plains forest hill even though it's difficult to see. That means the settler would get 1S of the cows in one move.

Now for the northern warrior. Bunch of options here, and I'd like some input from those who are better than I am at this stuff. Few options I see:

1) Move 1N and road the city plant spot. This would mean the city could be settled the turn after the settler is able to move, rather than 2 turns after. It's trading 3 workers turns for starting this city 1 turn faster.

2) Start prechopping - potentially the forest 1S of the gold. This would mean we could settle the city and immediately get a chop into an EXP granary. That combined with the deer is going to mean a granary at size 1 which would be pretty nice.

3) Start mining/chopping the plains forest hill 1W of the deer in Occam's Razor. It's already roaded, so the worker can move onto that tile straight from here and immediately get to work. I'm guessing we would not actually use the mine though? So chop would probably be better. A look inside Occam's Razor:



Ok, I believe our T33 has not yet happened, which would mean the settler completes EoT36, and we start accumulating food on T37 (assuming we don't go straight to a settler/worker). A strong food surplus of 8 with 25F to go means Occam grows on T40, so we need some sort of tile improvement by T40 if we intend to grow. Grass cottage is best. It costs, what, 4 turns on normal? Our floodplains worker should be able to achieve that.

Any thoughts from more micro-inclined folks?