Things you can't stand about Master of Magic

[GLWizard]

"...can't stand..."- well, that's probably a bit strong for me. Truth be told, MoM is one of my favorite games of all time, and I spend probably far too much time playing MoM games as it is, bugs and all.

Even so, I can think of a few things that have always given me pause about the game:

• Like Tjorin, I would love to see building queues in MoM. I can't help but sigh a bit every time I return to MoM after playing a game or two of MOO2. Granted, there aren't nearly as many buildings to worry about in MoM- but even a queue of just two items would be nice.
  
  
• I understand that some of the spells don't seem to work as well as they should- and in any case, there are many spells that I simply don't use. (Among Life spells- my favorite magic color- Righteousness, Holy Arms and Astral Gate come to mind. I can give similar lists for the other colors, though the list of black spells I use would be shorter.) I can't help but wish that every spell on every list had turned out to be equally useful.
  
  
• Book and retort limits. I get why you can't have more than 11 books of one color- but I do wish the game allowed for more than 13 books in all. Similarly, I can't help but wonder about the limit of six retorts: why? (Perhaps someone out there can illuminate me?)
  
  
• Personally, I wish a wizard could select both Life and Death books. Don't get me wrong; I do get the logic behind the decision to limit players to one or the other. However, from what I can tell, MoM is remarkably similar to the card game, Magic: The Gathering- which has no such limitation. (Still, that's just me. I can get around this one when I want to anyway, by taking an editor to my saved game before I start. Mind you, I don't do this very often, as I rarely play MoM with Death books- those positive city Life spells are too hard to pass by...)

[Asfex]

Every time i play mom, i must pause becouse: 1.i tied to check the city production. (Building queue with alerts will half-solve it).the 'lost of exess' food,production,e.t.s. hurt also.
2. Reach crush point ,and useless spells.(i found the chain lighting lead to crash, e.t.s.)
3.the useless artifacts.(i have lot of staffs and wands,but all my heroes are fighters) ,so,i must rebattle again.(pre-placed items will solve it,or the event 'replenish nodes')
3.wrong city places.(neytral nomad city cannot build
merchant guild becouse no river, but 1 square left...mmm!).

GLWizard
The 7 retorts have no place to write it,when you press F9- 'mirror'.

By disadvantage I certainly meant some sort of fatal delay and extra mana cost. So that you cannot dispel it in the next turn.

Something like this:

dispel is deterministic, it succeeds automatically after N turns

I afraid human is very expirienced to choose the moment when the spell will expired. But for AI this problem is almost unsolvable.
'Fatal delay' is fatal for AI.

[Twan]

My complaints are more specific.

Meteor Storm and AI Diplomacy

Meteor Storm used by an AI player and no AI player react. Someone blast everyone's cities and units and the other AIs keep pacts and alliances with him.

Even worse, they don't even seem to prioritize dispelling this kind of very nasty spell, and continue to move their troops around as usual, weakening themselves.

Means if you are not playing arcane or runemaster (to have a reasonable chance to dispell the spell despite AI advantages), and can't destroy the caster fast, you are screwed. Also when you finally banish the caster, the other AIs have so weakened armies and cities that the game is ruined too.


Area dispell usable in combat

I just hate this spell, as
a) it makes the two other dispell spells completely useless as chances seem to be as high as with a targeted limited dispell
b) in one action it removes a lot of spells on a whole stack you have taken an awful lot of time to cast
c) when you are fighting races like dark elves and have to buff resists to stand a chance to do anything it's a pain to have to re cast all the buffs before every fight


And finally a big / more serious / core one :

Walls of weak units + defender always casting first + mass damage (or area dispell) spells = defense is too easy

Defender casting first instead of a proper initiative system is a mechanic I hate, many games with magic share (it's what disgusted me of dominions for example).
The result of defender casting first is, once high level spells are researched and mana is not a problem, the weakest units, if they can block the opponent path, offering no other choice than to attack them are far too powerful.
Nothing scares me more than one enemy spearmen squad or settler on my way, because that puny unit is sufficient to allow the opponent to cast an area dispell or flame strike before I can do anything, no matter the quality and speed of my own stack.

By the way if you want to make the AI very efficient (I mean frustrating to the point most people would certainly stop playing), just learn it to place one cheap unit like spearmen or triremes on every tile around their cities (then on every other tile they can reach) as soon they get mass damage or dispell spells. Actually the only thing that makes mom playable despite the huge AI bonuses is the AI not always doing that, allowing to reach their cities without fighting.

[Iranon]

Braindead micromanagement: I'd like a production queue, production overflow and a reform of how buying production items works.

Predictable combat AI. It's not embarrassingly bad, but doesn't make good use of the ruleset which is actually quite rich.

Weak diplomacy that also feels rather artificial.

[IndirectCell]

Great thread.


Things I cannot stand (dumb AI aside) :

Concrete
- the Draconian animation, that fuzzes the unit identity, so you cannot tell Spearmen from Halberdiers
- the "sudden starvation death" when I misclick the warning
- the very existence of an ability that denies everything this game is built around (Magic immunity); a "contradictio in adiecto"
- Ai casting one spell ad infinitum

General
- when the "stack of doom" is formed, the game's over. As borsuk said, it is very formulaic
- the resistance spell mechanics which is absolutely unreliable and cost ineffective without -to save artifacts, then it can be suddenly superpowerful (aside from broken Confusion here)
- Slow pace: when I spend many turns walking somewhere only to see the route was useless - and I reload
- loooong battle manoeuvers, many clicks without sufficient strategic depth
- when, in the middle of the game, I look into the research book and see that I don't need anything that I'm offered to learn. Horrible moment. The lack of variety throughout the game: damage spells, same-ish monsters, broken and useless spells. The reviews say otherwise but the naked truth is: about a half of MoM features is pretty flat.

Spell resistance Works, it just doesnt work whit Level scaleing, and the work arounds used in the game like Call of crack that spell resistance for a flat % to kill a ground unit, doesnt reflect well on resistance itself.
Seeing as most of the spells are about Equal to a regular attack (exept some focuses on 1 unit, others focuses on Groups)..
Problem is when units has higher than their base resistance ie gaining 80-90-100%, then they pretty much reliably Block Magic, even tought that Magic attack does as much as a regular melee attack most of the time, i mean halfling base resist is 70% so 30% chance of that aoe spell that kills the Whole crowd to work (vs 1 stack to as many as Your "skill" allowes).. this might seem like a fine tradeoff, til you relize, you cant cast the spell more than 1-2 times early game at best, and lategame most units have 90-100%..., id say when resistance Blocks a spell, it should work... well as a resistance, Blocks like half the damage, or if not successfull Block then take full damage, then one could probebly implent something like when resistance is over 100% then those % goes towards blocking the full effect instead, like 110% resistance = 100% half damage from spells and 10% chance of blocking, that would make those early spells effective, and heroes could be unique that they ignore this (because we all know how fragile those heroes are early game)

[IndirectCell]

Also i find the ai also lackluster but one has to remember the time the ai was created, they probebly didnt have too many programmers working on AI or in a general sence, most ai's i saw back in they day was gombas in supermario :P, simple walking patterns, and strategy games just gave ai ability to move units towards Your citys and produce random, unit here.

Im sure the ai in mom does tons of stupid suicide missions that you cant see against nodes to try to capture those :P whit their infinite Resources on impossible, til they get a working stack of units (too bad they dont have ability to learn what Works against what, and wont blindly send the old unit compositions against the enemys they were unable to defeat earlyer.. and so on and so on..

Also imagine the horrors if a AI was actualy good in combat, useing cloaking to the fullest in defence (if they only have 1 unit, og hide for 100 turns :P), and imagine the troll's.. hit and run tactics til unit is full of Health again :P
Not to mention when Your units are fewer but stronger in melee, but if they save their ranged attacks til you get into their good % hit range before wasting them.. instead of what theyr doing now, where you just run out of range, wait til a buncha turns have gone by then they get steamrolled by you.

[WhiteMage]

Also i find the ai also lackluster but one has to remember the time the ai was created, they probebly didnt have too many programmers working on AI or in a general sence, most ai's i saw back in they day was gombas in supermario :P, simple walking patterns, and strategy games just gave ai ability to move units towards Your citys and produce random, unit here.

Im sure the ai in mom does tons of stupid suicide missions that you cant see against nodes to try to capture those :P whit their infinite Resources on impossible, til they get a working stack of units (too bad they dont have ability to learn what Works against what, and wont blindly send the old unit compositions against the enemys they were unable to defeat earlyer.. and so on and so on..

Also imagine the horrors if a AI was actualy good in combat, useing cloaking to the fullest in defence (if they only have 1 unit, og hide for 100 turns :P), and imagine the troll's.. hit and run tactics til unit is full of Health again :P
Not to mention when Your units are fewer but stronger in melee, but if they save their ranged attacks til you get into their good % hit range before wasting them.. instead of what theyr doing now, where you just run out of range, wait til a buncha turns have gone by then they get steamrolled by you.

It saddens me that today’s AIs for TBS games are not much better than 20 years ago. AI research and computer capabilities got stronger, but have not transferred over to TBS game development yet. RTS game however finally got the strong AI. They kick ass now as they should. TBS AI is orders of magnitude harder to develop and program. They did not have too many people programming AI then or now. Also, little time and little knowledge of such programmers. And little budget and little to no corporate interest due to targeted short-term sale then moving on to next project goal.


I see no horrors in AI getting strong. Weakening strong AI is far easier than strengthening dumb AI. I hope to see a day when MOM type game will have an AI that is far better than best human. Kind of like Chess since 1996. No, it won’t kill all fun, only some people’s ego.

[Anthony]

Im sure the ai in mom does tons of stupid suicide missions that you cant see against nodes to try to capture those

The AI uses quick combat, which has odds quite unrelated to what would happen playing it out.

[Iranon]

The things that really bug me are all related to how production is handled.

No building cue. Would like the option to do this manually per-city while having having an empire-wide one controlled through an idiot-readable plaintext file.

Terrible instant-buy system that needs gamey and braindead micromanagement to be efficient. I'd prefer if production sunk into one item wasn't transferable.

Losing surplus production after completing an item, again encouraging braindead micromanagement.

*

Apart from that, nothing really bugs me but I see some missed opportunities. For example, most save-or-suck spells are overcosted or too easily resisted, a shame as having them worth using would make for more colourful combat.
Orcs seem deliberately made unattractive - a high-economy low-tech-military race is fine, but it's a shame the low-end units were nerfed (expensive shamans, withholding all-but-standard abilities from halberdiers and cavalry) . Other races are weaker overall, but at least they have their theoretical niche.

[GreyWolf]

The graphics are very old, but the aesthetics of the game is, in general, not that bad. However, one thing bugging me about the game aesthetics is the "default" housing graphics - the ones all races that are not elves or primitives have. They look like modern American suburbia.