As I said in another thread:
Those who do not understand Master Of Magic are condemned to reinvent it - badly.
However, the game does have significant design flaws that shouldn't be repeated. That it has lots of balance issues - things costing too much or too little compared to others - shouldn't surprise anyone at this point. So I don't see the point of discussing balance of individual spells, units, races. Please don't discuss good things of MOM here - there are numerous other threads. Let's focus on broader issues instead. I'll start.
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For my taste direct damage is too widespread and dominating in MOM. Variety, creativity suffers. Dominating, because you play against the AI, and on Hard and Impossible you spend most of the time being hit with them. Resisting it is one of main challenges. Player rarely has enough mana to afford powered-up spells the way AI can, time after time after time. This is especially aggravating because for most magic schools direct damage is available from only few spells. So you end up seeing the same few spells a lot. Life Drain, Psionic Blast, Ice Bolt (at least this one is uncommon), Fire Bolt. Even Life's Star Fires can be annoying if you use chaos or death units. At least these spells differ quite a lot - PB ignores armour, IB halves it, LD creates undead from units it kills. Arguably omnipresent direct damage is why the easiest way to play MOM is with strong heroes, high-end units or high-end summons (killer stack). Omnipresent direct damage is also why you can take ridiculous losses when pursuing isolated enemy units, which can retreat making things worse. Which brings me to the next point.
Retreating mechanic sucks. Basically there's a random chance for each unit to die, depending only on difficulty (much lower on Easy). You can attempt to kill the same Settlers several times and suffer direct damage each time. Fortunately this won't be a problem in Elemental - I hear it already uses my favourite mechanic, like AoW:SM. Units need to retreat to a designated zone.
Very low variety in unit speed. Most units move at 1 square/turn, sometimes 2. Even those with 2 movement points are often bogged by swamps, hills, mountains, rivers, tundra, forests which cost at least 2 points. Amusingly (or perhaps not), unless you move units square by square, they will use the same pathfinding algorithm. So units with 1 movement point, or floating spirits will avoid swamps and mountains even though they are not slowed. MOM is also guilty of having multiple units with 1 movement and Forestry/Mountaineering, which is totally pointless unless you have the Life spell called Endurance. To my knowledge it's the only movement booster which increases movement points instead of reducing the cost.
Related to the above - hordes of rather ordinary units, especially infantry, are hard to use. One of best infantry there is - pikemen - still have 1 movement point and 1 HP (direct damage!). Because of the way most boosters work, most units can only go from 1 square/turn to 2 squares/turn (at 0.5 MP each). Word of Recall is good, but it's Sorcery magic. Enchanted Road - again, Sorcery. Floating Island - Sorcery. Wind Mastery - Sorcery, and there's an error either in implementation or description. It says it doubles movement speed, but it grants +50%. Floating Island - again, Sorcery magic. And only few races have better (faster than 2, more capacity) ships. Oh, I just learned Orcs have warships - so in some ways they are better than nomads (shaman instead of priests are also an advantage if you need healing early). For most part "transporting units by sea" doesn't speed things up.The thing is many ways of magical transport are available in Sorcery magic, among them Word of Recall and perhaps Enchanted Road are so powerful they render the others redundant and obsolete.
That was movement of ordinary units. Now to the direct damage issue. Infantry and other low-levels are quite vulnerable to it. Most of +resistance bonuses are single target only, promoting single strong units. You can be fine if you find a hero with Prayermaster skill. You also want abilities like Warlord, and build Fighter's Guild and War College. Life magic for Crusade if you don't mind playing an overpowered school.
Early game is very boring, and can be frustrating. Your city is very inflexible, you have small vision radius (and need food so can't afford scouts). You have small spellcasting Skill so can't summon a few units quickly. Skeletons are great as a pop-up army, but hardly more efficient than Hell Hounds. There's little to do in the early game, for almost all races it's the same order: granary, marketplace, farmer's market, then +production. Granary, Stables, Wolf Riders is great if there's anything to conquer (only halflings can really kick your butt). I like gnolls, because they expand mostly by conquest and not settlers. This implies a military infrastructure and an army. The world is hostile in MOM and you need to protect your settlements. Phantom warriors, multiple hell hounds, a demon or an air elemental can appear quite early and raze them to the ground.
Implementation of Death (debuffs) magic is a major design flaw. Life magic is just as bad, but in reverse. Both are examples how not to do it. You end up fighting many of units in the game. What is a weakening spell ? A chance to lower stats of one unit. Let's simplify, weakening spell has a chance to kill a unit (true at least for Black Sleep) and costs mana even if it fails ! There's one exception - Possession. Successfully enchanting a creature allows you to kill stuff with it, so it's more than single target really. Master Of Magic has lots of fantastic races and creatures, lots of targets with high resistance. And I've just established the game is about few vs many. You need to use either better units, or use them better, or both. You'll be killing swarms either way. In this scenario, buffing a single unit is better, because your single unit can potentially kill many enemies. So weakening spells are almost always worse by definition. In theory, your several units could benefit from weakening a single strong enemy. But there are few strong enemies with bad resistance ! Death (and to lesser extent - Chaos) has another problem, too. Schools which buff cities also benefit from few vs many situation. Until you have more cities (at which point you've probably won the game) that's how it looks. So it makes more sense to improve them. I play boardgames, and in some strictly harmful effects are unpopular. Dominion (the card game, not to be mistaken with Dominions) is a good example. It's essentially a race game where each of you builds a deck (during game, unlike M:TG). Whoever has the most points at the end, wins. When playing with several people, attacking one makes one player weaker, others unaffected. But you've just lost an opportunity to grow. Attacking people is what everyone hopes someone will do, but doesn't like to do that himself. In games of this kind it can be hard to gang up on a runaway leader because strictly speaking no one can benefit from it. Death and Chaos schools are similar in Master Of Magic - you damage one wizard, but you spend resources and don't help yourself. This is often bad if you intend to capture enemy cities - will there be anything left* ? Another problem of Death is that you have so few buffs. If you face counterspells (including nodes) you can't walk in pre-enchanted.
Ranged Combat could be a lot better. Regular bowmen are a joke - they start with 1 strenght attack and range penalties. Stronger units, like Longbowmen and Slingers don't really need to wait for enemies to get in range. Usually you can start shooting right away. There are no obstacles aside from city walls. Units with magical attacks (shamans, priests, magicians) have no range penatly and to make things worse only 4 shots. They'll be gone in a blink of eye. Worse, because any flanking attempt, killing ranged units before they deal damage, is doomed to fail. For a good implementation, see Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, or Dominions 3.
* One of games on my ToDo list: Revenge of the Klackons. Raze all other cities, and use Chaos magic to set the world on fire.
I don't really agree with all of your statements.
Ranged Combat was fine... yes bowmen are weak, they are also very cheap. You can walk right up to the enemy and fire point blank if necessary. Once they become elite, especially with alchemist's guild bonus, they are plenty strong. I agree that having an obstacle system like AoW does make it more strategic... but only if you get to place your units at the start of a battle. I just played AoW 2 and randomly starting with my catapult being obstructed by a house while my priest have a direct line of fire towards the gate is really annoying. Your complaints about death magic and life magic are balance issues... it would be easy to adjust the cost and effect of each spell (or number of targets) to make them equally useful.
I agree that having spells which destroy the cities you might want to capture is frustrating... but thats a symptom of having a focus too much on conquest. These spells unlock new strategies that allow you to decimate an opponent from the other side of the continent even without having any troops. If you layer these spells you can really screw over your opponent, and while its not usually a good idea, a few additional game mechanics or better spells might fix this. a chaos spell could make a city become neutral (revolt). A life spell could cause a neutral city to join you for a gold cost instead of having to fight them. Combined, this would allow you to steal a city from an opponent.
I agree with you about movement, one problem I had was that units with forestry didn't get their move discount during battles, only while in the overworld map.
I don't think there were too many direct damage spells except for chaos which had 5 different spells which were all very similar (basically you would always use the best one available). I think chaos should have had more combat spells that did random stuff, and more creative ways to deal damage.
I do agree that these spells were too strong, they should be toned down so they don't obliterate weaker units as easily. I also think there should have been more direct damage spells that use resistance instead of defense. One change they could have made was that spells like firebolt and ice bolt could only kill 1 figure. Spells like psionic blast could do confusion and vertigo in addition to damage.
Anyways... I think that these are legitimate things to point out but most of these are balance issues, not fundamental design issues. Creating new spells is probably much easier than revamping the whole mana system and changing how tactical battles work. I think that more focus needs to be on core concepts... like what are the differences in the engine of MoM compared to the engine of E:WoM.
I have 3 suggestions:
1) use AoW projectile system with obstacles
2) use AoW system that allows multiple stacks to fight in one battle... once you optimize it for more than ~20 units on both sides.
3) consider making a wider variety of movement abilities for units and try to make terrain and roads a large tactical asset.(in battle and out)
Actually, what when wrong with MoM was that it was too complex for AI of that time to handle. Leading to either too easy game on Hard, or too much cheatlike gameplay on Impossible.
Strategic + tactical layer = two opportunities for player to p0wn AI, instead of just one, like in Civilization series.
^Same applies to Elemental.
Balance issues become truly important only in multiplayer. MoM was not designed as a multiplayer game. The best, immersive TBS games aren't. Each race gave you a set of advantages and disadvantages (including relations with other races based on where your wizard's tower was located) which impacted the entire game. Your magic selection also impacted the entire game, including what items you could create. And there was a hard limit on total power in terms of how many books and retorts you could have, even including what you could find in nodes. Playing each race is a different experience. Playing each wizard is a different experience. The experiences are all enjoyable. The number of race/wizard combinations is astoundingly high even if you don't customize the wizard.
You mention sorcery being powerful. To an extent it is. But there is something of a rock paper scissors sort of effect between the various schools of magic which you can choose. How would you like to be Jafar on a continent next to Rjak and both of you have the same race and the AI is fixed? Weakness, a cheap death spell, has a great chance of making any unit not protected by resist magic an easy kill. Skeletons and zombies stand up very well to your summoned phantom warriors and are very cheap. On the other hand, life, properly played, trumps death. Life may be a bit overpowered given all you can do with it. Nature has a nice cheap spell, resist elements, which can prove very useful against chaos damage but is useless against sorcery damage or damage from most regular units. Life magic can expensively with true sight render one immune to illusion, the significant source of power for sorcery spells. The schools differ in the strength and utility of creatures which can be summoned in battle. But as previously stated this could be dealt with in spell maintenance. It's too bad the designers didn't use fractional costs to balance the schools.
I think one of the keys to a truly good fantasy game is to have rock, paper, scissors like characteristics of major choices the player makes. A beats B; B beats C; C beats D in some meaningful ways. Such as life having a spell, bless, which protects against Chaos magic and Death magic but not against Nature magic or Sorcery. True Signt, which would protect against sorcery, is too expensive to use on many units in combat due to casting skill limitations.
I also like to many choices. Invest in research or mana or skill. What proportion you choose will likely be affected by various aspects of your current situation. And by what race you have and how much you can get your cities to contribute to your research efforts. Where to build a city. Whether to build a city. Remember that after I think 9 cities your empire size negatively impacts your diplomatic relations.
My favorite spells in Master of Magic are: hell hounds, phantom warriors, confusion, and web (at least for early selections). Life magic doesn't have an inexpensive early summons and has no in-combat summons. So you are much more stuck with what the unit you have there even if the combat is important for, say, control of a node. I haven't looked at all the upkeep costs, but aside from some global spells such as Just Cause (another of my favorites) it may not be that overpowered if the AI were fixed.
The few vs many issue with buffs vs debuffs only looks like a principle flaw if it's not balanced.
A debuff should be far cheaper than a buff that your units can "use multiple times".And there should be some irresistible debuffs and/or irresistible resist debuffs to make a debuffing strategy actually viable.That's why my suggestions for the Death Book also include AE and resist debuffs as well as partial resists that would have some effect.
This isn't anything new. With MMO debuffing classes (I played an Everquest shaman for many years) there are cases where it's simply more economic to completely forget about debuffs. Buff your party and have fun tossing some damage spells.The ideal situation for debuffs is when facing few but strong opponents. That's something that rarely if ever happens in Elemental. So...
Respectfully, have you actually played Master of Magic? Or are you translating your experience with MMOs to Master of Magic? There are irresistable debuffs, such as mind storm, which is a sorcery spell. Magic immunity still applies. Resistance can be lowered by spells such as Black Prayer and the death equivalent to True Light (name escapes me).
What went wrong with it? It was too good.
MoM has been installed on my computers for the last 15 years or so. I played it last week.
And yes, there are global debuffs and even resist debuffs that help but don't scale very well. Using single-unit debuffs still isn't very cost effective so creating a shool of magic that relies on debuffs would require a different approach.
Playing it again now with the "new" 1.4f patch. Slightly different game, although couldn't pinpoint why. I'm stuck in a grind fest right now, I'm winning. I've taken out 2, but still have two left. They were at war, now they've allied which I don't ever remember them doing which is cool. With the amount of mana they get there is crazy attrition. Its tough to keep heroes alive at all. I used to buff up fang or the other flying guy and wreak havok...but didn't really get a chance to go ruin delving since I was in combat from the get go.
Agree on the movement.
Agree on the damage spells.
Somewhat agree on the debuffs.
Agree on the elite unit vs weaker unit. Pikemen are great, unfortunately they're only really good for city defense unless you got a pathfinder and you're patient. I'm running around with stacks of paladins, stag beetles and dragon turtles... and still lose 1-4 every battle with the rest damaged. sss'ra just started using flame strike. Sad. Still a damn fine game though.
The debuffs are very powerful, especially early in the game. Have you noticed the effect of weakness on spearmen and swordsmen at the first two experience levels? And it only costs 5 mana so easily used at that time. It's even useful on triremes you encounter with your magic spirit. And if you combine death and sorcery...confusion after black prayer is very nice.
Everything in Master of Magic has its uses. There are always situations where one class of spell would be better than another. Imagine you have 15 casting skill. It's early in the game so it's 3 newly recruited swordsman units on each side. What is the single spell you would most like to have? I submit to you it is weakness, the debuff you were mentioning.
I agree with KalGerek but look at king's bounty for example. If you are a wizard hero you can learn to cast multiple spells in one turn, but there is a limit on the casting cost of the spells if you do so.
So lets say there is a new trait at the beginning of the game thats allows you to:
1) cast one spell as normal each turn
2) cast 2 spells that each cost less than 25% of your max skill
3) cast 3 spells that each cost less than 10% of your max skill
This would allow you to use those cheap buffs/debuffs in combat and get closer to the same effect as one giant spell. Compared to the spells that enchant ALL units on the battle field, this skill could be more cost efficient if you or your opponent has a smaller army.
I just haven't seen a properly evil Death magic, yet.Save at -2 or die. *yawn*
But what about infecting units with a pretty harmless flu? Just 1 damage per turn! And 2 on the next turn. 4 the turn after...Well, sorry! MWAHAHAHA!
Direct damage is nice but really more suited for fire or earth. Watching the enemy die, wasting away every turn... And all that with some relatively small and fast casting spells because they don't need the direct killing power.The tiny battlefields in WOM aren't really suited for that. Another reason why magic schools can not be much different. But it doesn't necessarily have to stay that way.
Definitely Elemental needs bigger battlefields... at least 4x bigger. (appropriate for a 4x game...)
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