Things you can't stand about Master of Magic

[slafochmed]

What I cannot stand is if there is a neutral city pledging allegiance to you by marriage and then you run into a food shortage and lose several of your lastly built units - just because the new town cannot feed their own garrison. I just lost 6 of my units because a small neutral town joined me. Arg. Too many of the hungry marriage guests?

Another one: If a node is corrupted - like by Great Wasting - the Advisor (F1) shows that but overwrites the information about what monsters you spotted in there. If later in the game you want to conquer these nodes you have to recheck again with a scout.

[robinh3123]

... favor using strongly buffed small number of units ...

Many players of MOM, think that the only way to win is to build a (small) doom stack, which consists of some powerful units, either units buffed by spells or heros by magical items. That's not true. My strategy of Sorcery based books + alchemy + archmage + conjurer + sorcery mastery => make your phantom warrior a great spell in the battle. The stack you need? Some magic spirits, lots of magic spirits, to withstand the shooters. Ya, the only purpose of magic spirits is to initiate a combat, and to withstand the shooters, then running around before you cast phantom warrior to kill your opponents. You may kill a stack of strong army by several stacks of magic spirits. We out-number them!

Of course, this "kill one-by-one" strategy won't work well for regenerating units...

I call it spamming spirits/warrior strategy. Yet you need to estimate how many spirits to attack a strong stack each turn: If you can not win in one turn, you don't want to waste too many spirits: You spent just enough spirits to withstand the shooter and to run-around the melee attackers, until you throw all your spells of phantom warriors. It's fun to do the estimate of how many spirits per wave you need to attack a strong stack. You normally wait for all shooters to fire all bullets on your spirits, then cast phantom warriors, as warriors are too vulnerable to shooters.

[Anthony]

Many players of MOM, think that the only way to win is to build a (small) doom stack, which consists of some powerful units, either units buffed by spells or heros by magical items.

Spamming small stuff works well enough, as long as it's the right small stuff (I've conquered many things by throwing hell hounds at them). Unfortunately, it's really inconvenient from a logistics standpoint, because a lot of the small stuff has low mobility.

Something I'd like to see is an actual 'capture ground' strategy, where you actually want to capture border cities and work your way through the enemy, rather than throwing your doomstack at the enemy capital and then capturing the rest of the cities while your opponent is casting the Spell of Return and can't annoy you with combat spells. In Master of Orion, you can't travel more than a certain distance from your nearest colony, doing something of the sort for MoM would be interesting.

[robinh3123]

Many players of MOM, think that the only way to win is to build a (small) doom stack, which consists of some powerful units, either units buffed by spells or heros by magical items.

Spamming small stuff works well enough, as long as it's the right small stuff (I've conquered many things by throwing hell hounds at them). Unfortunately, it's really inconvenient from a logistics standpoint, because a lot of the small stuff has low mobility.

Something I'd like to see is an actual 'capture ground' strategy, where you actually want to capture border cities and work your way through the enemy, rather than throwing your doomstack at the enemy capital and then capturing the rest of the cities while your opponent is casting the Spell of Return and can't annoy you with combat spells. In Master of Orion, you can't travel more than a certain distance from your nearest colony, doing something of the sort for MoM would be interesting.

That's an interesting idea.

[zitro1987]

Something I'd like to see is an actual 'capture ground' strategy, where you actually want to capture border cities and work your way through the enemy, rather than throwing your doomstack at the enemy capital and then capturing the rest of the cities while your opponent is casting the Spell of Return and can't annoy you with combat spells.

So far in my mod, I've been fairly successful at making it more difficult to just go for the enemy capital. Besides an improved and more expensive 'city walls' (+3-5 armor instead of +1-3), the wizard fortress casts a lightning bolt per combat turn. The lightning bolt gets progressively better as the strength depends on wizard 'skill'. Later in the game, this defense mechanism is more powerful than 'call lightning'. At its most powerful, the lightning bolt has 30 strength (9 avg armor piercing damage before shields)

I think in order to fully follow your wish, the lightning bolt may have to be tied with wizard 'magic power' instead of 'skill'. That way, it encourages conquering several cities and recapture nodes to weaken the lightning bolt defense mechanism so that conquering the capital becomes easier that way.

[Anthony]

I think in order to fully follow your wish, the lightning bolt may have to be tied with wizard 'magic power' instead of 'skill'. That way, it encourages conquering several cities and recapture nodes to weaken the lightning bolt defense mechanism so that conquering the capital becomes easier that way.

Would it be possible to give cities auras that buff nearby (where 'nearby' should be at least five squares, so you can have a city that influences another city) units?

[metalmat]

I just picked this up on GOG, used to play it all the time back in the day. Thought I might chime in on some of my thoughts.

1. Stack of Doom. Everyone seems to know the wash rinse repeat cycle.

2. A.I. Diplomacy. Ok... maybe I just don't understand how it works but my goodness is it goofy. When neutral the A.I. will freely attack my nodes being guarded, magic spirits and even random troops alone (like engineers) with no deceleration of war. However if I even get within a sniff of an A.I's city then its war. It seems like no matter what I do the A.I. is eventually going to go hostile on me.

3. Heroes under A.I. control. Not sure what items the A.I. is giving it's heroes but I have not once seen the A.I. field a powerful hero. The spellcasters are "ok", they will cast decent spells from time to time but the ranged damage has never been an issue. The melee heroes are a joke, especially later in the game when they are a glorified speed bump.

4. Races. Some races are clearly better than others. Klackons are utterly the worst and the A.I. will spam these cities all over the globe.

[Tiltowait]

1. Stack of Doom. Everyone seems to know the wash rinse repeat cycle.

It's an unfortunate artifact of how the game worked out. The effect is much less if you play ironman and don't reload. If you reload all the time, there's no way you can ever lose troops, much less heroes, from your Stack-O-Doom. There's a guy who does videos of his games and he never reloads, and he gets his stacks of doom destroyed all the time. I recently watched him lose Malleus the Magician, a good melee hero, and an entire stack of Ultra Elite Dwarven Hammerhands to a ruin he misunderestimated. Anyone else would have reloaded (I mean duh, Malleus is one of the best spellcasters in the game) and then had the nerve to complain the playthrough was no challenge.

2. A.I. Diplomacy. Ok... maybe I just don't understand how it works but my goodness is it goofy. When neutral the A.I. will freely attack my nodes being guarded, magic spirits and even random troops alone (like engineers) with no deceleration of war. However if I even get within a sniff of an A.I's city then its war. It seems like no matter what I do the A.I. is eventually going to go hostile on me.

If you RTFM a peace treaty just means you won't attack each other's cities, and agree to stay out of the 2-square city catchment area. That's all. Troops in the field are fair game. Although the CPs keep a running count of how many points of troops you've killed and if the number gets high enough they'll declare war (and tell you why in the declaration). CPs will also occasionally contact you to issue a warning for violating the 2-square rule and getting too close to their cities, and if you don't move away they'll declare war.

The CP (computer player, there is no artificial intelligence in this game whatsoever) will set destinations for troops and then only check again once they reach their goal. They will run into your troops if you leave them in the way. This will sometimes result in weak units like Engineers attacking a powerful stack and players saying "CP IS SO DUM LOLZ why'd it attack when it knows it can't win?". It's just an artifact of how programming had to be done when the target machine had a 80386sx processor and a 40 megabyte hard drive, and when RAM was sold by the 256 kilobyte stick. Make sure to exit Windows 3.1 and do not have any any terminate-and-stay-resident programs (TSRs) in memory before playing. Later in the game the CP turns already took forever, there's no way they could have checked every unit's situation, every turn, and still gotten the game to run at an acceptable speed. Try playing X-Com on an authentic period machine and be prepared to read a book while the Alien turn progresses.

Diplomacy is a step down from Master of Orion's though. I suppose it's one of the corners they had to cut to ship the game. I use diplomacy to trade spells and to get the CP to make a peace treaty after war weariness sets in. Once in a great while I will use tribute, but that's about it.

And you're right, the CP will declare war on you. I mean, all the wizards in the game ARE locked into a life-or-death struggle to cast the Spell of Mastery. The only way to keep peace for long periods is to have lots of Life books in common with other Life wizards, and have these Life wizards with non-warlike personalities (Pacifist, Perfectionist, etc.) Have Chaos or Death books, or an enemy wizard with an Aggressive or Ruthless personailty, and you'll be at war all the time. Chaotic personalities will declare war on you because they had a dream about it last night. Makes sense, eh? Nobody likes fireblasting, undead-using jerks or unstable weirdos for neighbors. But if everyone is on the same page, then it's all cool.

3. Heroes under A.I. control. Not sure what items the A.I. is giving it's heroes but I have not once seen the A.I. field a powerful hero. The spellcasters are "ok", they will cast decent spells from time to time but the ranged damage has never been an issue. The melee heroes are a joke, especially later in the game when they are a glorified speed bump.

Install the 1.4 Insecticide patch, and the CP will start casting create artifact to arm its heroes with weapons. Not only does this make them more formidable, but it also gives you nice treasure when you kill them. It's win-win!

4. Races. Some races are clearly better than others. Klackons are utterly the worst and the A.I. will spam these cities all over the globe.

Yes...and? Where did anyone get the idea that the races were supposed to be all equal? Where did the game say that? This seems to me to be a curious case of applying 2015 trends of game design to a game produced 20 years before they became fashionable. What is the gamer of 2035 going to think of The Witcher 3? Same thing.

They're basically the game's difficulty setting. Want an easy game? High Men. Want a challenge? Lizardmen. Want to prove you can win no matter what? Klackons. Master of Orion was the same way. Psilons = easy mode, Mrrshan = hard.

Don't want to run crappy Klackon cities after capture? The developers, using their 1994 insight into game design, included a handy mechanic for players just like you: raze them. It's what I would do to cockroach invaders from outer space.

[metalmat]

[quote='metalmat' pid='551236' dateline='1437683718']

3. Heroes under A.I. control. Not sure what items the A.I. is giving it's heroes but I have not once seen the A.I. field a powerful hero. The spellcasters are "ok", they will cast decent spells from time to time but the ranged damage has never been an issue. The melee heroes are a joke, especially later in the game when they are a glorified speed bump.

Install the 1.4 Insecticide patch, and the CP will start casting create artifact to arm its heroes with weapons. Not only does this make them more formidable, but it also gives you nice treasure when you kill them. It's win-win!

Ok so I just played with the 1.40n patch for the first time ever and I will retract this statement. My goodness was a wrong about this.

Just to go off topic on what happened on my last game I played an overall bad game by getting pigeon holed in a corner and limited to just 6 cities as the Draconians and going all Chaos while Sss'Ra kept getting crazy stronger and stronger. I kept trying to make an offensive push mid game but would always stall out after some initial success due to being overwhelmed by the 3 other wizards all attacking me. I was churning out ultra-elite adamantite Draconian units but they continually kept getting chewed up by strong enemy offensive spells during battle. Combine this with a poor selection of spells and I was just stuck in mud.

Anyways it was getting late in the game and Sss'Ra starts casting the Spell of Mastery while the world is literally falling apart due to my Armageddon and his Great Waste spells. I knew that I had to go for the jugular and take his capitol out for any chance of winning so I send my crack team in.

When I get there he immediately takes out most of my Draconian units with that fire storm spell. No worries though, Malleus was the ace up my sleeve that had smoked every clown he went up against to this point. I also have a fairly strong super fast DeathStryke to do cleanup duty

Being a little cocky I send Deathstryke to fight his hero standing at the gates, Deathstryke takes a blow and deals jack squat. I think "ah well, whatever" and send a ranged shot from Malleus expecting burnt toast but it does absolutely nothing, I was stunned. I look at the hero and sure enough its a suped up Torin the Chosen, might as well been some sort of DBZ "it's over 9000!" moment. At this point the fat lady starts singing and I knew it was game over

[GreyWolf]

This was a fairly epic mini-report.