A demo of me playing Master of Magic.
There’s a lot that game designers can learn from Master of Magic. In this video demo, I walk through a few of the mechanics of the game.
What I loved best about the Planes was the fact that if I was the only one with cities on one or the other, I could cast the spell to shut off Planar travel, barricade the towers that otherwise gave access across the Planes with a nice stack of troops, and I had an entire Plane to bustle in all by myself.
Your post looks as if sponsored by Denying the Antecedent logical fallacy.
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/denyante.html
That may be the case, but gameplay implications were much deeper than your oversimplification suggests. The two planes were parallel to each other, so if you traveled on the normal plane, your position relative to Myrror automatically changed. Later it could come into play with spells like Plane Shift, or even creatures which could switch at will.
A bigger map is just that. Try playing football (soccer) on an airfield or similarly huge open space without walls. The bigger the playing field, the more you have to run around. If you go too far you'll have a loong long time to go back. In Master of Magic, on the other hand, your position can be close to two differerent places. With its two planes, MOM had nice implicit shortcuts. Elemental with its huge maps won't have such shortcuts unless you explicitely add them. And because it was a fundamentally separate plane, you couldn't peak into it via high vision range and similar measures. Not without conquering a tower.
Finally, the idea of different planes is very fitting to a fantasy setting - or do you suggest they've come up with that to solve a (book's? author's) memory problem ?
I remember some of the more interesting spells - one in particular.... Armageddon.
For those not playing MoM:
It turned the landscape into volcanoes, slowly. (a random, small number each turn). This sounds bad. It was bad, for everyone. And it cost one heck of a lot mana to maintain. But, for every volcano, you got extra mana income. Can you say 'Unlimited power!' ? I bet you can.
And like someone else mentioned - yep, you did feel like Sauron.
And the heroes were great too. Gah. If I didn't know it'd be hell to get it to run, I'd try installing it again.
Got me so excited to play MoM again, I downloaded DOSbox, but I ran into a problem: My keyboard has a problem where I can't use \ or = in the emulator, which make it impossible to input DOS commands. I had read some info where several other people had this same problem and the solution was to change the keyboard driver, but I couldn't get the driver to change or update. Might try my laptop today.
I usually just drag the magie.exe onto the doxbox.exe and it would load up without using dos commands.
I stumbled upon Glenn's Guides on a google search for 'master of magic download'. It gives you step by step instructions and worked great. The solution to the keyboard issue, was to edit the dosbox config file in the windows environment to add autoexec lines with the backslash, so the game automatically loads when you load dosbox. Once your're in the game the lack of a backslash key hasn't been an issue.
http://www.glennsguides.com/2008/03/master-of-magic-pc-game-free-download.html
Ah, this is a great thread and so good to see that other people share a lot of fond memories of MoM. I'll be loading up DosBox tonight.
Out of curiosity, did any of you ever use the user mod/hack that allowed you to play this game hot-seat multiplayer? We had a TON of epic games between myself and my roommate at the time.
Just wanted to say that last week, thanks to these forums, I played MoM for the first time. What a magnificent game, so far ahead of its time in '95. I didn't get a PC until '98, so I completely missed it, but it has held up extremely well 15 years later. I stopped playing Mass Effect 2 when I got sucked into MoM and I might not finish ME2 for a while now...
On a side note, I'm not such a fan of the planar/underground maps seen in prominence in games like AoW:SM or HoM&M3. MoM does it a bit better I think, having different rules within the realm, but still... I'm more partial to one large map.
The only thing this did not cover is that you likely have to set cycles to max. This was the only thing that improved the speed for me. Before that, it crawled slower than it did in 94.
Trying to be optimistic here, but considering the Fall from Heaven I & II mods for Civ 4, I hope someonw does mod out Elemental to the point where its damn close to MoM2! If you haven't played them, the FfH mods are a massive overhaul of Civ 4 that's the next best thing a modern fantasy 4X fan out there until this game comes out. The downloads mor the mods are something like 450 megs!
FfH is great, too bad it's stuck with that terrible Civ4 combat system. Still great fantasy 4x for the time being.
Try DosBox frontend, like DFend
Actually one thing about 'Abandonedware' Because Atari dropped their support for the game and dropped everything involving MoM they own the franchise but not the rights to that game they do for commercial use but privately downloading it is totally legal and DOS emulator's are also legal.
Although mostly through loopholes a decent lawyer would get you out of it if they tried.
But no one would ever try to sue you for 'stealing' MoM if they did they'd have to be pretty desperate and even then it wouldn't win in an American court nor most european countrie's you'd have to live in a more authoritative area.
Edit: and in those area's i don't think anyone would enforce copyright laws lol.
God that brings back memroies of a simpler time when I didn't have to worry about rent or children or all the other silliness in life.
MoM is great, but got boring quickly when I figured out how to make a hero that was invincible. I slaughtered whole armies and captured multiple cities all with one lonely hero..
Yeah + the AI was horrible as well, but still..the game itself is a legend.
Yea I know. The mod is awesome but somethings don't quite fit well with civ4 combat setup. Units being able to summon other units for "free" every turn opens up a world of hurt. I discovered how powerful it was when the AI summoned a whole army of wolves and zerged the guy on the other side of my. Luckly I was on good terms with them cause they could or rolled me over with all those wolves.
Don't really need Dosbox. MOM runs fine on both my XP machines if I turn the sound off. No matter, I remember ALL the sounds anyway.
Just set up a shortcut. Then in the pif-file memory options, I have all the EMS / XMS / DPMI options at 8196 (but not sure if that is necessary.
Anyone know if MOM plays nice with Win-7 64 bit ???
Oh and incidentally Master of Magic is now for sale from the excellent fellows at GOG.com for a princely sum of a cup of starbucks. $6
There was also an element of strategy 'a la' fog of war or sensors. If your opponent could "pop-out" of the other plane, then the opponent could make strikes deep within your territory, or even watch what you were doing. The plane-walker summons and enchantments were key to this, but was, however, restricted to only a few combinations of spell books and starting race.
I don't mind not having the "planes" concept, but I would really love an elemental concept along the lines of "phase". Things in an alternate "phase" or "layer" can only see other things on that "layer". I would allow this to be an enhancement that could be applied to nearly any player unit or building. It might even be really to cool to allow for this "out of phase" state to be applied to areas, with a graphical depiction of a desolate wasteland (all the plants/animals/water/lava are also "out of phase").
The tactical aspect of hiding cities on a separate "plane" in MoM was a valid strategy, and really allowed the player or AI to exploit bottlenecks. Alternate planes are a clunky mechanism, but I'd really love to add as many layers to the strategic map as possible. Dominions 2/3 has a much better mechanism, and I'd love to have tricks like that in elemental.
100% agree
Yeah. I loved "planes" in AoW2 - SM as well. Not to mention that there are 2 "planes" in that game - Underground & Shadow. It's too bad that we won't have "planes" in EWoM. It opens opens up many strategical & tactical possibilities. Having bigger maps is very different from a tactical/strategical viewpoint than having multiple planes.
A lot of good ideas come from the limitations imposed on us though. And just because those limiations are removed doesn't mean we should abandon the idea as being "out dated".
I say that because I actually liked the idea of having another plane to fight on and so do others. I also like how some games used the other plane as underground cave networks connecting areas of the map. Well if the option to have other planes was still in play then players could potentially create explorable dungeons with entrances on the map using mod tools. Or it could even be an interesting feature of the game rather then the go on a map spot and monsters appear that you fight and the dungeon is clear.
The planes could even have different rule sets like all units move 4x faster in dungeon to represent that it is a smaller area then the over world map. Or maybe curtain hero abilities that only work in the plane (dungeon) area.
We're abandoning the idea because I don't like them.
No dungeon interiors to explore then?
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