Don't understand MOM-love - game's AI was joke as was balance (what balance?)

revjwh

Join Date 02/2006

Don't understand MOM-love - game's AI was joke as was balance (what balance?)

Ok, I was 22 when MOM came out. I loved it. But, come on, the game was broken.

It had no balance. It had no AI.

Can anyone say: Highmen Paladins (I get the races over the years confused from other games - but these suckers were spell immune, on horses and kicked everythings butt).....

The AI would often have anemic amounts of cities and units on the hardest settings.

Any focused strategy AT ALL with any race spelled certain victory - no matter what.

Now compare that to GalCiv2's AI - it beats me. Still. Not a lot, but it does beat me.

I'm hopeful for the same with Elemental.

Would I like to see more real differences between races? Yes. More cool spells and effects? Yes.

But while I loved MOM, I think it is apples and oranges.

elemental

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Quoting markgil,

reply 50

the MOM license is still out there and it is possible that a company will eventually make a true MOM sequel someday. who knows, perhaps it is being worked on at this very moment! i wouldn't mind seeing what katuri (kings bounty series) would do with MOM2.

Licenses are just names, look at Orion 3. We need the games lead designer Stephen Barcia to return to making strategy games like Master of Magic and Orion!

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Quoting rossanderson48,

reply 42

You obvioulsy didn't play many games of MOM then because some games the AI was ruthless and it depended a lot on their intial placements just like any random map game does for the ai. I played 100's of games of MOM and had fun in the majority of them because of the relentless ai. Not balanced you say? That's one of the reasons MOM is still great today. I'm pretty tired of reading about balance in a PC game playing against an AI. There NEVER should be balance in solo single player games which MOM was and still is. It's not a multiplayer game and wasn't intended to be. When I got used to how MOM played I played on HARD & IMPOSSIBLE always after that and I had plenty of challenging games an even games where I got whomped on by the AI. Just because you beat the ai a handful of times doesn't mean it sucks. I can beat my little brother at chess 99% of the time but there is always that 1% of the time he beats me so you can't expect an AI to win every single game as I said because of placement on a random map. Plus you need to play with ALL the ai's at the same time not just 1 or 2 and you can also make house rules not to play with Life or Death Magic to make MOM even a better challenging fun game.

Note that pretty much everyone, even the biggest MoM fanatics, generally agrees that MoM is trivially easy even on impossible and that nobody is talking about playing against only one or 2 enemies. You can in fact trivially win the game without ever casting a single spell so forbidding life or death magic is not important. In some of your other posts you've pretty much said that you are not very good at strategy games in general (ie you refused to believe that it was possible to finish a game of Civ or any other 4x game in less then 72 straight hours of play). So that's likely to be the reason for the fact that the AI could sometimes defeat you. But the important thing is that you had fun with the game, and not what other people think.

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I usually play MoM on "normal" so obviously don't care about the challenge bit.
To me it's a colourful Sim City. With elves.

Sometimes I run out of time and have to start researching that stupid spell of mastery but owell. Time to start a new game...

Playing for the high score just isn't my game. I did that once or twice in GalCiv but the experience was too painful to repeat voluntarily.
(entirely too much minmaximg to get anywhere decent)
I'm all for someone else getting all that glory and ruling the meta-galaxy. =P

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