Things you can't stand about Master of Magic

[Blake00]

For me it was the music lol. I mean the songs were good but it only played 1 song repeatedly which when you're playing a turn based world conquering strategy game means you're gonna hear the same song for a LOT of hours! I vaguely remember different songs playing for good/neutral/evil races but last time I played I couldn't seem to trigger them. Just got the same song again and again. :/

[Tiltowait]

It's the same solution as any other game - turn off the music and put your own mp3s on.

[Hadriex]

Yep. Shame I've never found anything the really fits MoM's style so much as it's own music.

Though that's probably largely because I grew up with MoM's music.

[Tiltowait]

Well make sure to run the setup.exe program and change the music to Roland MT-32 or General MIDI. It helps tremendously, the tooty old soundblaster music sucks.

[Mortu]

Hi folks,
first post in this forum, I'm from germany and 37 years old and MoM is my favourite game. As you can guess from my age i could have been a MoM player of the first hour but actually i discovered that jewel about 5 years ago. That having said there are still many things i cant stand about MoM, thats probably why i ended up in this thread xD.

I think i agree with most of the things being mentioned in this thread, but what is really anoying me is the huge randomness in every possible dimension:

Lairs & rewards
Lately i was able to get a great wyrm spell by defeating a weak tower in the very beginning of the game! Why on earth is it possible to get a very RARE spell from a tower that was guarded only by UNCOMMON creatures ?
It is also ridiculous that you get the best magic items from merchants, and not by beating tough nodes. Last time i beat a node with 8 skydrakes and a djinn and i got a 3/3/3 chainmail and some other stuff like that.

Map
Ressources and Max population of the capital vary quite a bit although kyrubs patch improved that its still too random for my taste.
Sometimes other wizards start very close to your capital which is nice if they are weak and bad if they are strong. In my opinion there should be a minimum distance for enemy wizards to start.

Enemy Wizards
I like their random personalities and objektives, but their actual strength depends a lot from the spells they get and from the starting race. Once i was defeated by tauron in 1408, he had flame strike from the start and killed 6 slingers and 2 orc shaman with one spell in a very early stage of the game. In my opinion you shouldnt be able to get a rare spell from the start.
In other games wizards had very poor spell picks even in the mid game so they were easy meat.

Heroes
Summoning heroes can be quite disappointing if you summon 5 weak heros in a row. I think it would be nice to choose the summoned hero, the stats with wich he comes are still random.

Theres also lots of other random stuff such as events, raiders, spells in your spellbook, dice rolls in combats...
Dont get me wrong, randomness is part of many good games but in MoM things got a bit too exagerated for my taste, especially on impossible difficulty victory is much dependant on luck and less on strategy.

[Seravy]

In my opinion you shouldnt be able to get a rare spell from the start.

Agreed, I disabled that in my mod, everyone, both AI and player is limited to 10 books.

Ressources and Max population of the capital vary quite a bit although kyrubs patch improved that its still too random for my taste.

This one is a bit of a problem because if the requirements of the starting place are too high then there might not be enough appropriate areas and the game will crash. Even Insecticide crashes way too much for my tastes, and the Tiny land size I added was outright unusable, it never succeeded in finding starting locations.

Lately i was able to get a great wyrm spell by defeating a weak tower in the very beginning of the game! Why on earth is it possible to get a very RARE spell from a tower that was guarded only by UNCOMMON creatures ?

Bug. Towers don't use the treasure pool, they just stuff in a random spell regardless of any other factor. I fixed this in my mod, as well as spell treasure generation in general.

It is also ridiculous that you get the best magic items from merchants, and not by beating tough nodes. Last time i beat a node with 8 skydrakes and a djinn and i got a 3/3/3 chainmail and some other stuff like that.

Design flaw. Items marked as "special" which is an invisible flag are unavailable as treasure, you can only get them from events. Even worse, the highest value item you can randomly find is 3000, while the default item costs are quite high and most decent pre-made items are worth more than that.
On top of this, the game gave up on giving you a premade item and instead generated random garbage if it couldn't find an item of the appropriate value in a few random attempts.
Then there is the problem that over half the lairs generated have such a low monster and treasure pool value that any decent item is impossible.
Again, I had to change all three of these in my mod.
If this wasn't enough, 1.31 disregarded all of these and gave you a random item regardless of value due to another bug.

As for what I don't like, well...the list would be like 5 pages long, that's why I'm modding :D

[TwilightSparkletheAlicorn]

Well, towers MUST have a spell in their loot no matter what. Picked from the allowed pool, except the Spell of Mastery. Rare and Uncommon spells at start with 11 books are core for blitzkrieg strategies.

If you don't rush, then in the end one hero just wipes everything anyway.

Personally I cannot stand a large bunch of kitty spells just not working at all. Like Cloak of Fear, Evil Omens etc. It's fun when spells have non-noted side effects and exploits but it's not fun when a large chunk of a game you would like to have (as a kitty wizard for example) is not working at all.

[vicwaberub]

A lot of great and bad things are wrote. But the fantastic fast tactical battles not. So much games are in the wild with turn based word and turn or realtime based battles, but they are all too slow (like in the HoMM-, AoW- and TW-series).
Good design is it for me to have a lot of battles, so I can find out my best unit combination and the possibility to test my new spells in the game. That is fun!
And the world seems to be living, if there are walking hundreds of armys on the map. Middle earth is living!

[JustOneMoreTurn]

The first answer to the thread title that comes to mind is: Brax's picture! I absolutely detest that image. He looks like a little boy throwing a tantrum. Once I discovered modding, I removed him. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest!

Bad AI was the main problem with the game. Aside from that, what made me quit games was the rapid increase in tedious micromanagment without an increase in fun stuff. What is fun at the start--building things, moving your few units around--is not fun when you have dozens of cities and many dozens of units. The game developers need to keep asking themselves: "Will this feature still be fun later in the game?"

Another problem that would make me quit early was the snowball effect. At some point, fairly early, I knew I'd won, and there wasn't anything interesting enough to continue with the increasing tedious micromanagement.

There were some insta-kill spells that I hated (and modded out later), and some OP units. While they fit into "can't stand', they're easily modded, so I wouldn't complain too much about them.

There were other problems, but not quite 'can't stand', so they'll go in another thread.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

One more thing that probably qualifies as 'can't stand': stacks of heros. Having stacks of heroes decked out with items turns the game into 'bounce the superstack from one node to another, wiping out everything with ease. Boring. Yes, we can choose to not exploit this option, but that spoils the game because we're fighting ourselves every time we are faced with that sort of decision. We're supposed to be playing to win, not to 'win just slightly'. Besides, there's always the temptation to break those self-imposed rules 'Just this one time...". I'd prefer to set a bunch of optional limitations in the game setup phase.

I'd like to see an option at the start for 'maximum one hero per stack'. That should be simple to implement. Another possible option: 'one hero per stack only for the human player'; playtest to see if encountering AI hero stacks is satisfying or annoying.

While we're on the topic, maybe an option for 'no more than x of the same type of units per stack'. Stacks of 9 slingers or berserkers or whatever are kind of boring too. This option would force at least a little bit more variety in stacks.