For me it was the options: there were so many different spells, dozens of traits you could assign (the one I could never do without was alchemy!) the races were so diverse, it just provided hundreds of combinations that kept the game fresh thru dozens of games!
So how is EWOM measuring up to it's spiritual predecessor? At first there was a large amount of disappointment in lack of race diversity, but other than graphical similarity, the dozen races slated for the canon game could easily provide the same gameplay differences (if not graphical ones). And there obviously will be a large spellbook even in the canon game, which will surely expand quickly as user created content becomes available.
The one area we have nto heard a ton about is whatever anaolgy of MoM's traits make it into the game. There will surely be pre-game setup of your channeler, but we have not heard a lot of details as far as to how many and what kinds of options there will be. If this can be done well, I think that is the foundation of what will determine if this is the game that future 4x games are measured against.
Bawhaw haw haw hawhaw. Darn if that is so. There's been plenty of polls over the years proving that MYTH wrong. More than 80% of the voters clearly voted for SOLO play over multiplay. They even had one poll at Age of Wonders Heaven website. More or less the official website for AOW! lol
Multiplayer sells RTS and FPS games it does not sell TBS games by a long shot. Main reason is 99% of TBS games just take too long to play out a game except for PBEM gamers. I can't recall the countless games of Civilization I tried to play online and people would come in play about 30 minutes and drop. It was a continous game of in an out in an out in an out (hrmm that sounds like something else fun in life, but, I'm so old I can't remember what it is? <scratches head>). Multiplayer didn't sell the Total War series by a long shot.
Multiplayer will never be the leading reason for sales in a TBS pc gaming world...never.
I'm also pretty sure you can ask Brad how many copies of GalCiv 2 they sold because of multiplayer out of the 100's of thousands of copies they sold.
I logged in to reply to this post. I am deathly afraid that this is the factor all of gaming is boiling down to, making your game 'balanced' so everyone is equal. This is not the world we live in at all though it is so shallow. America and France, for example are not equal, neither is one person and another.
I think we can see the quality go down as long as this factor is not addressed.
MOM was awesome because there was a feeling of real in that aspect of not so balanced. I absoutely cannot stand playing anything that goes down the cookie cutter balanced road. For example: Starcraft, is awesome because the zerg and protoss are nothing alike! of course there are some similarities, but I would love to see Elemental break out of this pattern and bring us truly unique styles. Balance is subjective. It is relative to whatever you are 'balancing' it against. What about instead of unit by unit balancing, the focus is on overall balancing.
Bottom line for players is that each person enjoys playing a different way, that is ruined by trying to micro-balance your game. If there is a super powerful enemy, fine, but dont tell me its unbalanced - Instead tell me what strategies would work to take that enemy down! If there exists no way, then it is more a bug then unbalanced because the point is to be able to overcome your opponent by strategy however if no strategy exists due to the system then fix it!
The problem isn't balancing, it's that many designers take a lazy approach to balancing -- creating mirrored sides rather than unique, yet competitive options. The reason for this is that the latter requires a greater, and ongoing investment in the game, which many developers aren't willing, or aren't able to provide. Starcraft is a good example of this. The game is balanced, despite the lack of mirrored sides. Of course, it wasn't always this way. Rather, that balance is the result of a decade of patches provided by Blizzard.
I'll go a step further and say throw out balancing all together. Have some factions that are so gimp it is ahrd to win single player on Easy setting. If it becomes a big deal in MP and they all want to be perfectly balanced, let them all play the same faction or their own customer faction.
Do not try to balance all the factions, neither unit by unit nor even over all.
Why, when challenge can be determined by the difficulty setting? Balancing opens up a range of viable options -- this is true in both singleplayer and multiplayer. 'Letting them all play the same faction' doesn't make for a very interesting game.
With 12 factions there should be plenty of variety, some that are well balanced and some that are gimpy.
I am with the people who feel that too much concern for balance absolutely kills this kind of game. It's kind of like socialism for entertainment = bland experience.
See above. That's certainly true of games which take a lazy approach to balancing. I agree that balance shouldn't be the only consideration, but it should be a consideration. I think there's some confusion about what balancing entails. It doesn't mean that every faction is the same, rather that every faction is competitively viable. Each should offer unique strategies, but still have a reasonable chance of winning. Balancing should make faction diversity worthwhile.
Oh I love this idea. I'd love to see gimped factions that could barely win on easy. I'd be happy with a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 type of faction balance. Where 10th is nearly impossible to beat, but, i could still play it if I had a mind to. When you have this type of unbalanced balanced you can find your middle ground that area that is challenging by YOUR standards of play. You might be a player who could take a level 2 faction and beat the game on impossible difficulty, but at least you would find that fun and challenging. Get my drift here?
It doesn't I guess you never played chess or checkers then eh?
Why not have difficulty settings instead? Then you can play with or against any faction at any difficulty setting you choose?
Pssh! Don't tell me that you don't appreciate the differences between white and black or black and red.
It's a bad analogy -- chess and checkers aren't fantasy empire building games. Expectations about faction diversity are much different. I guess you've never played any of the blander titles that came after Master of Magic.
Well you want variety but parity, and sure there should be multiple factions that are roughly on an equal playing field as far as viability but not being identical. And I guess there is always the option of creating a gimp faction. I would just like to see a few of the canon factions have the odds stacked against them. Out of the dozen factions what would be wrong with 8 being relatively balanced (but still with huge variety) and then having 4 factions at varying degrees of gimpness.
I am sure StarDock appreciates this conversation. Now if people complain about things not being balanced, they can say "by design!" or if things are too balanced they can say "by design!" Oh wait, all software companies say that anyway.
The thing about Master of Magic (and I still play it to this day) is that each wizard felt different. They had different strengths, weaknesses, and traits, yet each one is viable to win.
About balance... balance is nice in games, but balance shouldn't automatically mean the same thing on every side. Diversity is definitely the key to replayability in a game. If you can make each game "feel" different, while technically it's the same (like MoM), then you've got a winner.
I too would like to see a high level of differentiation between the factions and a great deal of balance however I don't think that's very realistic. Blizzard spent more than a decade honing and fine-tuning the balance of Starcraft, a game with only 3 (radically different) factions.
Doing that with 12 factions sounds like a nightmare project to me. I think we have to scale back our expectations for balance, unless we want to see a very bland game.
Well it would be different if this were going to be a major multiplayer game, but, it isn't. It's just going to have multiplayer ability and those that MP it are just going to have to accept it the way it comes as far as balance goes. They can make up their usual house rules to gimp someone or make someone more powerful.
Main thing is the main game must not be balanced to a 100% margin for all factions. I want to be able to overcome the all powerful from the beginning of the game not be the same as him.
Any of you familar with Lords of Magic SE? That was another kewl game I enjoyed (except for the real time combat and the path finding was horrible sometimes and it had no random map generator) as it had a Dark Death Lord in the beginning thay was more powerful than all other races. You had to build up over time a powerful army to defeat him and you couldn't play his race until you did. That is my 2nd favorite fantasy wargame next to MOM right now. Warlords IV in as a close 3rd.
Warlords IV post 1.04a patch is one of those games that starts off hard as hell, but, once you find 3 artifacts that pretty much prevent all damage and regeneration out the ying yang if you do take damage it becomse a cakewalk and pushover. This is what I DON'T want to see happen in Elemental that if a player finds 3 or 4 specific artifacts he becomes practically invincible. I had a Warlord just like this and I could basically just take him and march from castle to castle and defeat any and all things inside it as these 3 artifacts he had made him 99% invincible.
Man I miss Masters of Magic. I loved that game. Some of my fondest memories are of that game. I loved having heroes that worked for my main wizard. I had this one Death Knight who was nigh unstoppable. With the right magic items and a few levels he could whipe out whole armies by himself. Was he over powered as hell? You Bet!!! Still there were those times I would try to capture a resource full of monsters, my army would get whiped out, and then I'd send in my Death Knight on his own and he would mop the floor with the guardian. I would try as oftem as I could to emulate the "War of the Lance" from Dragonlance.
I also loved being able to build armies made up of different races because I conquered thier cities. I loved pairing the undead and the dark elves in perticular. Being able to recruit random monsters was a Big Plus in my book too. Sometimes a wandering monster would ask to join your army and this monster couldn't be recruited in any city anywhere else in the game. I surely hope Elemental WoM has this.
I also loved knowing there were two full worlds to conquer every time I played the game. Nothing was better then whiping out a hated enemy Wizard only to discover later he owned half of the other world. Then I'd have to plan a all new invasion strategy. Being able to cast spells from my wizards tower to help my armies in battle some time would mean the difference between victory or defeat. I'm 31 years old so I owned MoM on Floppy disk. Yes that's right. I know some of you youngsters are scratching your heads saying "Hey pops, what's this Floppy disk you speak of?"...lol. Man those were the days.
You act like you can't ever play it again?
http://www.abandonia.com/en/search_abandonia/Master+of+Magic
Surely you have DOSBOX or know about it right?
http://www.brothersoft.com/dosbox-(0.65)-config-editor-60516.html
Now you can play to your hearts content again.
This thread needs more links to pirate software?
It's not pirated it's abandonware and 100% legal.
Wow that Pnakotus is a real puss worse than me.
that might be true. However, Stardock has already made it clear that they cannot allow for it here.
Here is a quote from another thread where this came up.
quoting Zoomba...
I've removed the link from the top of the thread and locked the topic.
I know everyone's jazzed about Elemental and want to get in some fun with MoM before the beta comes out, but we can't have folks swapping download links on the forums. Sorry.
the other thread was locked. I'd suggest any links be removed to prevent risk of the same happening to this thread.
The magic that was MoM was the complexity on the setup which always made for a different game. You got the randomaly generated map and it was super fun to build those godly heroes. The system that allowed you to create your own magical items (at a cost of course) was yet not only another source of fun but definitely another tactical angle.
R,
nacho
For me MOM was not about Nostalgia (as I STILL play it to this day via dosbox, I own the original on floppy)
There's just something about the diversity and customization that gives personality to the game.
Sure the races are unbalanced, but the way the races are unbalanced leads to some interesting and diverse play styles.
Take for instance - the lizardmen/klackons/gnolls, they don't have a lot of buildings, therefore they don't provide as much bonuses as some other races . Some players may view this as a weakness (indeed the lizardmen barely have any production bonus buildings at all!), but personally for me - less buildings simply mean that I can quickly get to the race's end tier unit.
Dragon turtles, Stag beetles and wolf riders are overwhelmingly strong on the early game, as they can easily be cranked out in a few turns, while races like high men who starts slowly would still be stuck with their puny swordmen .
What I like about MOM is that I am not stuck with a particular "faction" or "race", I get a starting race and from that starting race I can conquer and assimilate races into my empire to aid in further conquests. So if I use the lizardmen, I will have a strong early game and if I conquer other races capable of producing strong end game units and bonuses, I will have offset the weakness of the lizardmen that I started with at the beginning.
Balance tends to be "relative", as some races fare much better on certain landmass size settings.
Ex: Swimming Lizardmen, Flying Draconians fare much better indeed add to their advantages when the world landmass is set to small. Other races would have to tech up to build ships to expand to other places.
One player's perspective of weakness is another's perspective of strenght is my 2cents.
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