July 24, 2010
MOO -- High Tech
It's amazing what you can fit into a medium hull if your tech is high enough:
How high? Computer 84, Construction 69, Force Fields 73, Planetology 70, Propulsion 67, Weapons 80.
Which was pretty much wasted. The best weapon the Sakkra had was Ion Cannon.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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1
Back to playing MoO? You successfully tempted me to grab MoM. It was money very well spent.
Posted by: metaphysician at July 24, 2010 08:08 PM (OLeXB)
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Sometimes I want to crawl in a dungeon, and sometimes I want to fire antimatter torpedoes.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 24, 2010 09:08 PM (+rSRq)
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What do you do when you want to fire antimatter torpedoes in a dungeon?
X-COM base raids with Blaster Launchers?
Posted by: BigD at July 24, 2010 11:45 PM (LjWr8)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 25, 2010 05:19 AM (PiXy!)
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X-COM is the other game from that era that I really hope GOG picks up.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 25, 2010 06:46 AM (+rSRq)
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Thanks for selling me on MoO; it's a blast!
Oddly enough, my most recent game (my first Hard level) ended via nearly-identical ships (Mediums with Tri Focus Plasma). And I was busy roasting Sakkra with them, too.
Posted by: Intrope at July 25, 2010 07:11 AM (ilrUS)
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X-Com is on Steam, so I don't know if GoG will get it.
Posted by: BigD at July 25, 2010 08:43 AM (LjWr8)
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What really impresses me about that medium ship is the cost -- only 105 BC for all that? Wow. Compare to what you can get for 105 BC in the early game....
Haven't played any MoO in a while -- I'm trying to figure out this MoM game I somehow got hooked on.
Posted by: haphazard1 at July 25, 2010 10:06 AM (xF0tu)
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X-Com is on Steam, so I don't know if GoG will get it.
Bummer. Steam scares me; I've heard too many horror stories about it.
To play any game from there, you have to have Steam's malware running in the background on your computer, right? And it does weird things to you? Takes over the HD and CD drive hooks? Stuff like that?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 25, 2010 12:28 PM (+rSRq)
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I haven't had any experience like that, but I also shied away from it at first due to the whole "what happens to my legal ownership of my games if Steam goes under/changes terms?" thing. I've had an account for like a couple years now, but only started seriously using it last Christmas, when they had a series of insane sales (including for X-Com).
So far, I haven't had much trouble. However, I haven't bought anything that I wanted to heavily patch or mod; that would probably be difficult at best with Steam. You can't (AFAICT) even d/l and apply patches from the developer yourself; you have to wait for Steam to add them to their db and stream them to you.
The game installs do include standalone executable files, and there's some kind of "Steam offline mode" that I've seen mention of, but haven't explored. I don't know how any of that works, though, or just how much freedom the leash gives you (I can confirm that you can install your games on multiple machines, but without using that "offline mode", you can only log into Steam and launch the games from its app on one box at a time). I haven't really explored beyond that. All I can really tell you is that I haven't had Steam cripple a machine yet, and the app doesn't seem to eat up a lot of resources or trigger reboots without warning like Windows loves to do.
I'm still somewhat cautious about it, but some of their sales have just been too good to resist.
Posted by: BigD at July 25, 2010 02:34 PM (LjWr8)
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Steam is pretty solid; they do require you to run the Steam application in the background (by associating your games with your account this acts as a light form of DRM), but it isn't malware, and it only uses about 13 MB of memory while in the background. The only exception is if you buy a game protected by some harsher form of DRM, like SecuROM, that has been known to cause hardware problems.
Personally I've been using Steam since the beginning of 2004 and I've never had a problem with it. I've got 107 (!) games on Steam; I don't buy boxed games anymore.
Posted by: John at July 25, 2010 04:22 PM (cR/Ak)
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Thing is, X-COM is a DOS game. Unless they've done something really strange to it, it would have to run in DOSBOX just like MOO and MOM. And so the only way that Steam could DRM it is by encrypting the executable(s), and decrypting it(them) during the load process and when pieces are used during play.
If that's what they're doing, with a customized/modified version of DOSBOX, I want no part of it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 25, 2010 04:31 PM (+rSRq)
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I have X-Com on Steam. I don't honestly know if it's DRM'd; I run it and it works, so I'm happy.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 25, 2010 06:01 PM (PiXy!)
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Well, you can get X-COM from Direct 2 Drive, and not have deal with Steam - that is where I got my copy. And yes, it uses DOSBox.
I have not seen any DRM in it.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at July 25, 2010 06:31 PM (E5PES)
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I got it off Steam, and it -doesn't- run well on my system. I get a lot of video lag. Can't be that I don't have enough power, heh...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at July 25, 2010 06:51 PM (mRjOr)
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I got the impression the version of X-COM from Steam was not as 're-engineered' as from D2D. I never played the Steam version, so I can not really say from personal experience the difference, though.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at July 25, 2010 07:02 PM (E5PES)
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I have X-COM through Steam, and have had no problems. It runs under DOSBox, which was set up automatically when Steam loaded the game. Performance has been good, and my machine is nothing special (about 6.5 years old at this point, and not anywhere near top of the line when I bought it).
Posted by: haphazard1 at July 25, 2010 09:26 PM (xF0tu)
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Works fine on Steam for me--who all has experience with D2D, though? It sounds like it's the same price with less hassle through them...
Posted by: BigD at July 25, 2010 09:38 PM (LjWr8)
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That D2D offer looks good. They have a seal that says "DRM-free", and I doubt they'd lie about that. It's only $5.
But I wonder if I've got the mental energy to play it any more? I remember it being very intense, and I don't do "intense" very well these days.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 25, 2010 10:36 PM (+rSRq)
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Just abort any terror mission if you see chrysalids, then.
It can get somewhat intense if you start caring about every individual soldier, especially before you have good armor.
It's not as bad in that respect as JA2, though; I hated losing people in that so much that I would save-scum as much as necessary to pull everybody through. X-Com's squaddies... not so much.
Unless my favorite high-psi super-marksman Colonel got Blaster Bombed... but at that point I was usually reloading anyways due to the morale failcascade.
Posted by: BigD at July 26, 2010 07:28 AM (LjWr8)
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I've copied the Steam-purchased copy of X-Com to another machine without, and it runs fine after some doxbox shortcut tweaking. I kind of regret buying it again, as I've got four copies of it or so lying around ...
@Avatar: the Steam dosbox.conf throttles the game to 8000 cycles, which is stupid. If you edit your \Steam\steamapps\common\xcom ufo defense\dosbox.conf file and change [cpu]cycles=auto limit 14000, it's considerably better. You can adjust that number to suit your tastes.
I just started playing this again last week. It still makes me jump in my chair when I'm moving in the dark and thing suddenly shoot at me out of the shadows ...
Posted by: bkw at July 26, 2010 09:49 AM (34O+x)
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It always amazed me that a turn-based game could be such an adrenaline rush.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 26, 2010 11:42 AM (+rSRq)
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Bkw, much thanks. Did the trick, and now it's working perfectly.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at July 26, 2010 09:42 PM (mRjOr)
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July 13, 2010
Master of Magic -- experimenting with different magic types
So I'm messing around with creating custom wizards. I tried 2 white, 8 blue, and Sorcery Mastery, and I did pretty well.
But blue magic turned out to be almost entirely useless for most of the game. Phantom Warriors did turn out to be useful for defending cities against raiders, who were generally pretty low level and therefore quite vulnerable to illusions. Plus Phantom Warriors only cost me 8 MP to cast, with Sorcery Mastery. But that isn't all that much better than fire elementals (chaos magic) or earth elementals (nature) and not all that much cheaper either.
I put Flight onto one of my heroes (Whatserface the Healer), too, but that was more convenience than anything. Water Walking would have been nearly the same. (The only difference is that Flight made it so that walking opponents couldn't attack her in combat, but they never got near her anyway given that she had a bodyguard of 8 dragon turtles.)
Late in the game I did finally reach the point of being able to summon Air Elementals, and I called one when I took out each of my last opponent's last two cities. But I didn't need them. The stack I was using was fully capable of doing the job.
So it turns out that through most of the game, the vast majority of the spells I cast, in combat or overland, were white or gray. And I won the game mainly using conventional forces.
Other people are enchanted (ahem) with blue, but it strikes me (and I think it always did strike me) as being the least useful of the six.
Last couple of games I tried something entirely different: 1 white, 4 red, 4 green, plus Nature Mastery and Chaos Mastery. That worked a whole lot better. It was fun, and I got lots of spells from green and red that were useful. That game I tried playing High Elves, and my main combat stack that time was three heroes plus 6 elven archers, all of whom started with Heroism (until they no longer needed it) and Eldritch Weapon. That, plus the fact that one of the heroes was Volana who had Leadership +2, and those archers were terrifyingly effective against most opponents. Plus adding Shuri to the mix, and the stack also moved really well. (Aureas got rescued from a lair, and I said "What the hell". But he wasn't really all that important, and I could have done without him.)
Later I created a new stack consisting of 3 dragon turtles plus 4 high elf magicians plus Shuri and Volana, and that was the one I used to take out my last opponent, who at that point was nearly as strong as I was. Putting Heroism and Water Walking on all the mages, plus Invulnerability on the first one (which was invariably the target for all enemy Shamans) and they managed to kick serious butt without taking significant damage. The turtles didn't need any help beyond Volana's +2 bonus from her Leadership ability -- which was a lot.
I think the following would be fun:
...and what you get is a monstrous bonus on both collecting and on using mana. The disadvantage of this is that you don't get a lot of high level spells -- but you may not really need them. (2 rare and 1 very rare chaos, 3 rare and 2 very rare nature.)
I think that's going to be my next game. I just began it, and had five spell choices. So two chaos spells: Disrupt, Fire Elemental. Three nature spells: Wall of Stone, Water Walking, Earth Lore.
UPDATE: And playing with Nomads, I got killed early by Ariel (10 white). It's the first time she's been my opponent, and she managed to find my home city with a stack that was up-powered to the gills with white spells: heroism, holy armor, holy weapon. Those guys were tanks!
I kind of wondered what it would be like fighting against her. Maybe I'll try an all-white game myself some time.
UPDATE: Ubu has been playing the game, too.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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1
How long does a game run?
Posted by: bkw at July 14, 2010 03:20 AM (34O+x)
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Mine have been running 2-4 hours. But I'm playing at "easy" level.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 14, 2010 06:22 AM (+rSRq)
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Mine have been running more like 10-14 hours, but I'm on Normal, and Dr.Heinous can tell you that I'm a very slow, methodical player. Except when I'm a very slow, forgetful player.
Posted by: ubu at July 14, 2010 02:02 PM (i7ZAU)
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I am going to have to try this game. No idea how I missed it originally, since I love these kinds of games.
From reading here and at ubu's place, I am struck by how much some elements sound like Heroes of Might & Magic. (Especially HOMM 3, my favorite of that series.) Can anyone who has played both games comment on similarities and differences?
Posted by: haphazard1 at July 14, 2010 07:24 PM (xF0tu)
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I played HOMM, the original version. My take was: HOMM was prettier, nicer graphics. Master of Magic was better, in terms of play.
It was obvious that HOMM was strongly influenced by MOM, but they cut a lot out and changed the emphasis. I found HOMM really dull, and stopped playing it after a couple of hours. So I never got to the later versions.
The main emphasis in HOMM was on the heroes. Heroes in MOM are important, but they're not the most important thing in the game, and you can win without recruiting any heroes at all. Often I have only one.
I vaguely remember that the magic system in HOMM was much less impressive. MOM's magic is extremely rich and versatile.
Plus HOMM didn't have anything like MOM's bifurcated world. In MOM there are two strategic maps. One is called Arcanus. The other is called Myrror, and it's kind of the dark side of the world. There are ways to get between them, but for most players that's very limited. (There are six randomly-placed portals.)
Myrror has races which are different. On Arcanus you get High Men, Barbarians, Nomads, High Elves, Lizardmen, Halflings, Gnolls (boo! hiss!), Klackons (insect men), and Orcs. In Myrror you get Draconians (flying dragon men), Dark Elves, Trolls, Dwarves, and Beastmen. Myrror is also a more dangerous place, with more and better everything.
I also don't recall that HOMM had as rich a system for building the player avatar, either.
There are six kinds of magic, color coded. Arcane (grey) magic everyone gets, and there aren't all that many arcane spells (though they're very useful). The other five are where it gets interesting: Chaos (red), Nature (green), Sorcery (blue), Life (white), and Death (black). You begin with 11 "picks", which can be a spell book of one of those colors (except that you cannot have both black and white at the same time). Or you can spend picks on "retorts", special abilities. Most of those cost one pick but a couple cost two, and some have precursor requirements.
Examples of retorts are Nature Mastery, Chaos Mastery, and Sorcery Mastery, respectively requiring 4 spell books in green, red, or blue. If you choose one of these, you get double mana from nodes of that color and research and casting bonuses for spells of that color.
If you have more books of a given color, you get more and better spells of that color to research. But each of the colors has unique abilities, and if you spread your picks around then you don't get any high level spells. 11 picks aren't really all that many, and you have to make tradeoffs. So if you were to go with 2 blue, 2 green, 2 white, and 2 red plus three points for retorts, you'd have a very nicely balance wizard who wouldn't ever get any of the really powerful spells. Or you can concentrate on one color, and do without things the other colors have.
I don't recall that HOMM's wizard design was even remotely that rich and interesting.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 14, 2010 07:54 PM (+rSRq)
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Hell,
for $6 how can you go wrong?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 14, 2010 07:56 PM (+rSRq)
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The Heroes of Might and Magic games aren't bad, but Master of Magic is certainly a deeper and more interesting game, possibly the deepest in the genre.
For a different take on the fantasy wargame stuff, Warlords Battlecry is a heck of a lot of fun, and Warlords Battlecry 3 is available on GoG for $10. It's a real-time game though, not turn-based. One of the neat features is that your leader can assemble a retinue that persists between campaigns, gaining experience (and strength) all the time. It's really neat to be able to take on the goblin hordes with a squad of level 8 fairies.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 14, 2010 10:17 PM (PiXy!)
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Like I said before, Phantom Warriors are actually weaker than Spearmen (no shields = chopped up fast on defense). Their only real benefit are the Illusionary Attacks, which are essentially a super Armor-Piercing attack (instead of half shields, the opponent effectively has no shields). Using them to defend makes them look pretty lame.
The only thing that would have been nice to have in MoM is multiplayer. There was a patch that tried to graft on a multiplayer component, but it was buggy and the system handled it poorly, though probably about as well as it could have given the "players must take turns" nature of MoM. Honestly I can't see how something like Time Stop could really have worked well in multiplayer, without switching to a "simultaneous turns" format, which of course would have completely changed the strategic balance throughout the game.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at July 15, 2010 05:53 AM (TaHHC)
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Thanks for the comments. I will definitely be giving this game a try.
The later HOMM games added more depth to the magic system, but heroes did remain the focus of the game. It's right there in the name, after all.
Should be interesting to play and see what is similar and what is not.
Sounds like I should avoid Gnolls as my starting race, though.
Posted by: haphazard1 at July 15, 2010 01:07 PM (xF0tu)
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MoM is really more like Civ in most respects than HOMM; the one thing that is completely different is the tactical combat, which is more like Age of Wonders (which came later and was probably inspired by MoM) than the HOMM tactical combat. It's easier to just buy the darn thing and see for yourself, though.
Another HOMM (but *not* MoM) clone is the new King's Bounty series, which has more of a RPG emphasis (only 1 hero, on a real-time world map), but a tactical combat system that is virtually identical to HOMM).
Posted by: BigD at July 15, 2010 02:08 PM (LjWr8)
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There are apparently 2 different lines of game in the Warlords series. Warlords: Battlecry are the real-time strategy. The Warlords are more like turn-based strategy, though battles are even more abstracted than HOMM. Still, the Warlords (TBS) games are ones that I have to get into more, but I do not remember where I put my copies of the first two or my discs with the third. Maybe I will download the fourth whenever from D2D someday.
The entire Warlords franchise is, of course, originally created by SSG (From Pixy's area of the world.), who also created Reach for the Stars and Carriers at War.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at July 15, 2010 02:28 PM (2whzk)
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MoM is really more like Civ in most respects than HOMM...
I think Barcia consciously designed MOM to be "sword-and-sorcery Civ". What he directly borrowed was things like the fact that you have to pay for things in gold, and you need to keep your people fed, and you have to keep them happy, and you can't do that without building various kinds of buildings in your cities.
He dispensed with the whole business of government types, which don't make sense in the S&S motif (which by tradition is fundamentally monarchical). And there aren't any Wonders of the World, except for achievement of researching and then casting the Spell of Mastery.
Then he added a whole lot of stuff (races and magic), which is why it isn't simply a Civ me-too.
After the success of MOO, Barcia had money and breathing room to design his dream game. MOM is it. You can see that he put his heart into it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 15, 2010 03:54 PM (+rSRq)
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Got the game...only $5.99 as it turned out.
Civ is a huge favorite of mine, old or new. And Reach For the Stars...now there is a game I haven't thought of for a very long time. Good memories, though.
Now I just need to figure out what the heck I am doing. Guess I should check out that manual.
Posted by: haphazard1 at July 15, 2010 07:20 PM (xF0tu)
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I have to admit, I'm tempted. Not normally a huge 4X fan, but I sometimes like the genre. And since I finished one retro game ( Deus Ex for the curious ), I might want to try another. Especially for prices like that.
Posted by: metaphysician at July 15, 2010 07:36 PM (OLeXB)
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Just to point out: there are two manuals. The other is the spellbook, which describes the 220 or so spells available in the game.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 15, 2010 07:36 PM (+rSRq)
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Ah, question. Is the Spell Mastery victory actually feasible? Because I know in a lot of other 4X games, the ascension/technology victory ( nearest equivalent to Spell Mastery ) is usually one of the hardest to actually get.
Posted by: metaphysician at July 15, 2010 07:44 PM (OLeXB)
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Yeah, I've done it. It's fun to watch it being cast; they created a special animation for it. But yeah, it is difficult to get. It's like 50,000 or 100,000 research points, and 5000 MP to cast. But by the time I was ready to go after it that game, it was only about 40 turns to research, and about 20 turns to cast it.
In that particular case I had isolated my last remaining opponent into a single city which I was bombing regularly (with Earthquake spells), so the main reason I was hanging around was that I had a power stack exploring Myrror. Also I wanted to see what it was like casting the Spell of Mastery.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 15, 2010 08:16 PM (+rSRq)
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Oh man, SSG, Reach for the Stars... (Vision dissolves into wavy lines as Pixy goes to flashback heaven.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 15, 2010 09:46 PM (PiXy!)
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Spell of Mastery is really more of a taunting victory than a practical one. By the time you reach the end-game, the military balance has usually been decided one way or the other. It's possible to use it as a snatch-victory-from-defeat maneuver, but it can be interrupted by the sacking of your capitol (which banishes your avatar for like 50 turns), and starting to cast the spell is pretty much a "drop everything and attack me" flag. Theoretically, in a multiplayer environment, it'd probably see a lot more use.
Another use for it is to formally win a game where you have a massive military advantage but are tired of curb-stomping your enemies, especially if you have one whole plane left to conquer. That fixes one of the annoyances of some of the Civs; there are times when you know you've won the game, and have nothing really left to prove, but the computer refuses to accept it.
Posted by: BigD at July 16, 2010 09:57 AM (LjWr8)
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Oddly enough, Warlords (TBS) had an easy way to resolve the situation where you hold overwhelming predominance over the computer but do not want to have to grind your way through the computer players - Once you control half the cities on the map, the computer will come and offer to capitulate to you. Of course, you have the choice of sending back the envoys in pieces to show that you really are planning on fighting to the last trench.
Pixy: Sadly, my glory days of Reach for the Stars were back on the Commodore 64. The PC version of the original RftS was a step backwards, and the PC remake killed a lot of my good will towards SSG...
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at July 16, 2010 10:43 AM (2whzk)
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Spell of Mastery is really more of a taunting victory than a practical one.
Usually, but not always. I played a game last night where I was beginning to think the Spell of Mastery was going to be my only way to win.
I was playing an all-white wizard, which was surprisingly interesting and fun. But the big problem with White is, no flight and no water walking, and my last remaining opponent was on a different continent on Arcanus. I had completely pacified my continent and he'd pretty much taken over much of his. I was way ahead on mana income, and as a result my spell research was way ahead.
I had two towers with which to reach Myrror, so I sent my best stack across and started exploring, in hopes that I could reach one of the two towers which were on his land. Turned out I couldn't. On the Myrror side his two were both on islands.
I was looking for a while at a situation where the only way I could win was with the Spell of Mastery, or maybe by using a stack consisting entirely of angels and archangels, but then I realized I was able to get my stack under his continent on the Myrror side, and then use Plane Shift to get them back to Arcanus.
Anyway, I could see there being a situation where there was no way to reach an opponent to defeat him, in which case the Spell of Mastery would be the only way to win.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 16, 2010 11:26 AM (+rSRq)
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No ships, Steven?
The latest Civ has a "domination" victory condition - basically "you have X percentage of territory claimed and population percentage". Ironically, this means that you're unlikely to win a Conquest victory in the late game without having turned down a Domination victory (though cities that you've recently conquered take a long time to re-assert their influence over the countryside...)
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at July 16, 2010 12:55 PM (pWQz4)
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Ships? What are these things you talk about?
You know, it never occurred to me. I don't think I've ever built a ship in this game.
It would have required me to create a new outpost on the ocean and wait for it to grow enough so that it could create ships at a reasonable pace, of course. But I suppose it wouldn't really take more than one or two, since they'd just be acting as ferries.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 16, 2010 02:20 PM (+rSRq)
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Reach for the Stars: I remember playing that back in college about 20 years ago. I found a floppy a few weeks ago with a copy of the game on it. It doesn't like to run on XP or Win7. WEll, it'll run, but the character set is hosed or something. I was thinking I'd love to see a remake until I saw cxt217's comment. GOG doesn't have RftS.
Avatar: That Domination victory's interesting. The last game of Civ4 I played I had a Dom victory by surprise: I'd nearly eliminated the second-to-last enemy player and was re-positioning my armies to take out his last city when two of his ex-cities ended their rebellions the same turn, and the expanded territory put me over the top, heh.
Posted by: RickC at July 16, 2010 03:55 PM (lbzph)
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I have the PC remake of Reach for the Stars, within easy distance. Of course, given my feelings of anger and disappointment (And it was a Christmas or birthday gift too!) after playing the game, I have no desire to ever install it on a computer again. Given that I have Masters of Magic, Master of Orion, and Colonization for DOS (Which are copies of the installation I made on DOS machine from 3.5" floppies.) on DOSBox on my current PC, as well as having fiddled around with Imperialism, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, and Alpha Centauri until those Win95/98 games can work on the same Vista machine...
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at July 16, 2010 04:55 PM (ULJ8s)
26
This thread was supposed to be about Master of Magic. It wasn't about Reach for the Stars or Warlords or...
I'm going to close it now.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 16, 2010 05:13 PM (+rSRq)
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July 09, 2010
Master of Magic -- custom mage
So today I tried creating a custom mage. I haven't yet ventured into black, red, or blue magic; I'm still getting used to green and white. I had been playing Merlin, who has 5 white, 5 green, and the Sagemaster skill. My general frustration with it has been: too much white, not enough green.
So I created a wizard today with 2 white, 8 green, and Nature Mastery. With 2 white books I was able to guarantee that I'd get the Guardian Spirit spell. Next time I'm considering going for 3 white so that I can also guarantee myself the Healing spell, but maybe not.
By the end of the game I had found 2 more green books, one blue book, and a couple more retorts. It wasn't too bad.
Some of the races make good ones to conquer and add to your empire, but they aren't good ones to begin with. I tried one game using High Men, and it didn't go well. They have some excellent units, but you have to build a ridiculous number of buildings before you can create mages, priests, or paladins. Much better to capture High Men.
One of the reasons I like the Halflings as a starting race is that their slingers are not only really good, but also they can be created very early. Of course, having an Alchemist's guild makes them better (it makes all units better) but they're OK without that. So all you need is an armory, and you can create them.
The Halflings also have good morale; they'll put up with more taxation without rioting. And they're really productive, and have a good supply of buildings.
The booby prize race is Gnolls. When I find an opposing mage and see that his starting race is Gnolls, I know I don't have to worry much about him.
Lizardmen are another race I like to conquer. But as a starting race, they're just too limited. Too many important building types they can't create. But I love conquering them, because I love dragon turtles. And you get those as soon as you build a stable. I love dragon turtles because they move speed 2, they're amphibious, and they're tough as hell.
Slingers and Dragon Turtles aren't necessarily better than High Men mages etc but they're earlier and easier and not really any worse. And that's a huge advantage.
I finally found a way to fight against air elementals. You need the green "Call Lightning" spell, and once that's going it'll hit the elementals even if you can't see where they are. I managed to get that going in a blue node one time, which was lucky. But they still scare me more than anything else I've run into so far.
I fought a demon lord. I was using a very advanced stack, and in fact it wasn't all that hard to take him out. He summoned one demon before I nailed him, but a web took care of that.
I have fought invisible stalkers. I have fought against shadow demons. I have fought against doom bats. I have fought against fire giants (five at once!). I have fought against a colossus. None of them have given me anything like the kind of trouble that air elementals invariably do.
And when I finally get tired of green magic and move on to blue, the ability to summon air elementals will definitely be something I make sure is in my spell book!
In the mean time I have found that summoning earth elementals is a really good way to defend a city that doesn't have a lot of conventional units.
...but Call Lightning is even better. It's one of my favorite spells.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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It's been years since I've played the game (I haven't had a chance to play it since I bought it on GoG) but I still remember how awesome the dragon turtles were.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 10, 2010 12:17 AM (PiXy!)
2
I actually liked starting with the Lizardmen on higher difficulty levels. You can get to the Dragon Turtles fast enough to not be defenseless, unlike starting with some of the other races as you observe. They're not the best ultimate unit by any means, but you can get them early and crank them out and that makes up for a lot. Plus they're amphibious, at a time in the game when nearly nothing else is.
The other thing that is rarely worth it is starting in Myrror (if I remember the spelling correctly). It's too expensive for what you get. The one exception is if you are playing with a lot of opponents, but you happen to be the only one there. Especially if you're playing on a small enough map that you can plug up the towers, and leave them to fight amongst themselves while you expand freely. (Although I think the game tries to prevent this and since it's been a while, I may be recalling times where I took out my opponent on Myrror quickly.)
As I write this, the top rotation picture is a pic from Macademi Wasshoi with someone with glowing eyes and what appear to be wavy magic power lines. Very appropriate.
Posted by: Jeremy Bowers at July 10, 2010 07:28 AM (0aoV1)
3
I believe that high man mages can also target air elementals with their 1-shot Fireball spell. ISTR that's how I usually handled them.
Posted by: BigD at July 10, 2010 08:26 AM (LjWr8)
4
Personally, High Men is the easiest start race to have. I certainly never had any trouble with them (Admittingly, I will admit being biased towards them.), but you are right in that the best units require a lot of buildings in a city before they can be produced...
...But given the strengths of the Paladin units, small wonder that you need to build to the very top of the contruction chain if you want to build them.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at July 10, 2010 03:42 PM (azrE8)
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One of the nice things about this game is that there are so many approaches to playing it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 10, 2010 05:01 PM (+rSRq)
6
Are there any 'styles' that are notably weak/broken? Not just in the "needs specific usage" sense, but in the "does not work in any useful way sense".
( most likely because some component of the 'desired' strategy doesn't work as intended )
Posted by: metaphysician at July 10, 2010 07:49 PM (OLeXB)
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By "style" do you mean magic color? Several of the races are severely crippled. Most noticeably, you have to be suicidal to choose the Gnolls as your starting race.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 10, 2010 08:25 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: DavidVS at July 10, 2010 10:02 PM (+nsU1)
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"Are there any 'styles' that are notably weak/broken?"
Sure. Build nothing but settler units at your starting city until it has a population of 1, and send them all to attack a magic node until some enemy wizard comes along to put you out of your misery. Then complain because "real world settlers were tougher and better armed than these, so this game sucks."
As for a game breaker... 13 blue sorcery books + Conjurer + Sorcery Mastery. Start with 11 blue books and save scum whenever you get a spell book or retort anywhere until you get two blue books and the retorts, and you get a 60% + 15% + 25% = 100% reduction on the cost of sorcery summoning spells. Then summon 9 sky drakes per turn until you can't afford the upkeep any more.. or better yet, dismiss them after using a stack to conquer any enemy city or monster lair within 4 squares of your Summoning Circle (or enchanted road leading from it), then summon up a fresh set. You can do this with green and red magic, too, but sky drakes move the fastest, are part of the same school of magic that can cast Enchanted Road, as well as getting their sole weakness - slingers - covered with Guardian Wind.Â
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at July 10, 2010 11:34 PM (4njWT)
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Playing Jafar (all blue, Alchemy), it comes in very late, as does air elemental. And yes, they're nasty. There is a spell that will reveal them, True Sight. Then they can be targeted by ranged units. I think it's a rare white magic though; I've only ever gotten it once in about five games.
However, for sheer nastiness on the field, Elven Lords and their Armor Piercing ability (half enemy defense) can be... well, evil. Five of those, well supported, can ruin anyone's day.
Posted by: ubu at July 11, 2010 09:55 PM (wxR6Z)
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July 07, 2010
Master of Magic -- The best treasure of all
It hardly gets better than this. (I do remember once upon a time finding two spell books at the same time.)
UPDATE: Table of spell books and how many spells they enable below the fold.
more...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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...I'm afraid to ask what you had to kill to get that kind of drop.
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at July 07, 2010 05:45 PM (z9O1B)
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For the non-MoM player, what exactly does an additional spellbook do?
Posted by: metaphysician at July 07, 2010 06:05 PM (OLeXB)
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Douglas, I don't remember what it was. It was at least moderately tough. It was a node on Myrror, so the defenders would have been higher rank.
MP, it's like of like levels in D&D. With more spell books you can learn more spells of a given type, and have access to higher level spells of that type. This particular case it was even more nice because I was playing Merlin, who has five white books and five green books, so when I found that treasure it meant I could learn some blue spells. As it happens, none of them were really of use to me, but they might have been.
The retort was a different matter. First thing that does is make it easier for you to research blue spells, but that didn't matter. Second thing it did was to give me double output for every blue node I had captured, and that meant there was an instant stairstep up in my magic income.
...um... To cast magic you have to use mana. Mana can be acquired a number of ways. First, certain buildings in cities create mana e.g. a shrine gives you one per turn. Second, you can use alchemy to convert 2 gold into one mana. Third, there are special squares on the board called "nodes", which are either red, blue, or green. If you capture one of them, summon a Magic Spirit (or a Guardian Spirit if you have white magic) and move it to that square and then "meld" it, you get 10 mana per turn on Arcanus and 20 mana per turn on Myrror.
When I found that retort, the magical output for all the blue nodes I controlled doubled -- and that was quite a lot.
There are three things you can do with mana. First, you use it to cast spells. And some continuing spells require you to spend mana per turn. So, for instance, at one point I put "Invulnerability" on each of the six units in my all-star stack. Each of those required me to spend 5 mana per turn for maintenance.
The second thing you can do with it is to spend it on spell research. To begin with, spells in your books are written in runes. When you research a spell, you have to expend a lot of mana (how much depends on the spell) and having done so it converts to English, and then you can cast it. (And when you find a spell book, new entries in runes appear, representing additional spells you can eventually master.)
The third thing is to invest mana in increasing your own skill. That starts low (like 30) and increases as the game goes on. If your skill is 37, then it mean you can cast 37 points of magic per turn. If you're trying to cast a 100 point spell, then it would take you three turns. But if your skill was 150, you could cast that spell immediately.
It's less complicated than I just made it sound; you pick it up quickly.
The upshot, however, is that having lots of mana income is a Good Thing, right up there with having a lot of gold income, which you also need.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 07, 2010 06:34 PM (+rSRq)
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The top spell in the game is the Spell of Mastery:
Every player has it in their books but it takes a long time to research (and you don't get to research it until you've done nearly every other spell in your book) and it costs fully 5000 mana to cast. However, when you finish casting it, you win the game. That's one of the ways of winning.
Every mage has a citadel. If you capture the city that a mage's citadel is in, then he is out of the game. Do that to all your opponents, and that's the other way of winning.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 07, 2010 06:44 PM (+rSRq)
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I dug into the manual. Spells come in four levels: common, uncommon, rare, and very rare. Let's see if I can copy-and-paste a table from FrontPage:
spell books
common
uncommon
rare
very rare
1
3
1
none
none
2
5
2
1
none
3
6
3
2
1
4
7
4
3
2
5
8
5
4
3
6
9
6
5
4
7
10
8
6
5
8
10
10
7
6
9
10
10
9
7
10
10
10
10
10
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 07, 2010 06:52 PM (+rSRq)
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Evidently not. Let's try it a different way:
spell books
common
uncommon
rare
very rare
1
3
1
none
none
2
5
2
1
none
3
6
3
2
1
4
7
4
3
2
5
8
5
4
3
6
9
6
5
4
7
10
8
6
5
8
10
10
7
6
9
10
10
9
7
10
10
10
10
10
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 07, 2010 06:52 PM (+rSRq)
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I think that I'm getting caught by the aggressive anti-HTML filtering in the comment code. I'll put it at the end of the main post.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 07, 2010 06:53 PM (+rSRq)
8
Like most games of this genre, you build your character/ruler by spending 'picks' at game start to buy Good Stuff, like books and talents. Unlike others, MoM doesn't let you also take Bad Stuff to get more Good Stuff. 10 picks, no more.
That drop Steven posted is two picks..or three, I don't remember if the various Mastery talents are 1 or 2 by themselves. Either way, that was a HUGE drop in pure numbers terms.
.and now I'm curious to see if a few-books-but-several-talents wizard has a chance of success...
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at July 07, 2010 07:30 PM (mNd5t)
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Wait until you clear a tough node and find a retort of "Myrran". (Or was that fixed in the patches? I know version 1.0 of the game could do that to you...)
Posted by: Mikeski at July 08, 2010 05:48 AM (GbSQF)
10
I tended to start with the Warlord ability a lot, and focused on building super-stacks more than on casting battle magic. I don't know if statistically it was worth it, but I did enjoy elite magicians...
Posted by: BigD at July 08, 2010 09:12 AM (LjWr8)
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Interesting. I started a custom game two days ago, with Freya as my avatar, giving her 4 red, 4 green, 2 blue (a "red/green Magic:TG deck, with a splash of blue")
The result, per your table, was 40 spells. If I had gone 5/5 red green, which I seriously considered, I'd have gotten...40 spells. The difference is that I have 7 rares and 4 very rares instead of 8 and 6. But I have 19 commons instead of 16 and the same number of uncommons. What this suggests is that I've taken a hit in top-end power to gain more flexibility and additional "quick-research" spells for an early power boost.
On the Easy level, that's a valid strategy, especially given that I now control 2/3 of Arcanus and a quarter of Myrror. I don't know if it's going to work in the long run though...
Posted by: ubu at July 08, 2010 02:43 PM (i7ZAU)
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July 06, 2010
Master of Magic -- Runes
Note something odd about the pattern of runes on the left side? Turns out the first one is "Summon Hero". the second one is "Summon Champion". Notice that the last two runes of "summon" are the same as the last two runes of "champion"?
It seems that "runes" are a simple substitution cipher.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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The runes in the Ultima series were like that too. I thought it was pretty cool back when I was in middle/high school, especially seeing them in-game and on the cloth maps.
Posted by: ambulatorybird at July 06, 2010 05:43 PM (aM5Wk)
2
You didn't know that? I have a "cheat sheet" around here somewhere that lists how every spell in the game looks like before it's researched, so you can know ahead of time all the spells you start with. It's not all that important, since you only get to choose one of the eight spells the computer decides to let you research anyhow, every time the opportunity comes up. Other than formulating diplomatic strategies (only trading for spells you know you can't research yourself) and possibly formulating long-term strategies, the only real use of knowing what's in your spell book is when you save scum for spells you get from dungeons and nodes.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at July 07, 2010 08:02 AM (TaHHC)
3
@ambulatorybird: the rune design in Ultima was lifted wholesale from Tolkien, specifically the dwarf runes he uses in The Hobbit.
I used to be able to read and write with these, way back when ><
Posted by: bkw at July 07, 2010 10:26 AM (34O+x)
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July 05, 2010
Master of Magic -- second game
I'm playing again at "intro" level. Last time it was a "medium" world; this time it's "large". Still only one opponent, and it turned out to be Kali.
I actually have been way in the lead for most of the game, and I've been able to finish her off for at least 200 turns, but it's just so much fun to explore the landscape and attack lairs and nodes that I can't bring myself to do it. I'm playing Merlin again (5 white, 5 green) and I've been hitting Kali's only city with Earthquake spells. So far I've managed to take out a fighter's guild, a shipwright's guild, and a marketplace. I only settled one additional city, but I've been conquering all the independent towns I find instead of razing them. So right now I've got one Troll, one Draconion, about five High Men, one Orc, and about 6 halfling, one of which I started with and one I settled.
Kali turns out to have started with halflings, too, but if she's built any of the legendary slingers I sure haven't seen them. I've put in a road system connecting almost all of my towns (it isn't complete yet) and every once in a while she sends a couple of ghouls down, to bypass all the other cities and head for my capital.
Lotta good it does her. My capital has six slingers in it.
Halfling slingers are legendarily one of the very best units in the game. I also like lizardmen armored turtles, Trollish swordsmen (regeneration is sooo nice), dark elf wizards (though High Men wizards are good, too), and draconian almost anything.
The best summoned unit in the game is the red dragon, but blue dragons are nearly as good. I remember using a lot of those, but upkeep is expensive. This game I've been playing exclusively with non-summoned units.
For a while I had a cash-flow problem, but now there are Prosperity spells on my four largest cities and cash flow isn't an issue any longer.
White magic isn't my favorite, but it's got some really nice spells. My problem in this game is that I've been coming up real short on battlefield magic. I've had Web for a while, but nothing much better than that. Finally, just a few turns ago, I turned up Crack's Call in a lair in Myrror. So now I can help with the fighting.
Of course, I can also help by casting High Prayer, which gives every friendly unit +2 attack, +2 defense, +3 resistance, and +10% chance to hit and to block. I had a battle I was sure I was going to lose, and I cast High Prayer, and my guys kicked serious ass. 2 sword units and a unit of spears in a walled city attacked by eight phantom warriors! Ack! But they won, and I didn't lose any of them.
Another White spell that's really useful is Guardian Spirit. Ordinary Magic Spirits can be used to take control of a node, but unless you garrison each one with military units, they can be replaced by enemy spirits.
In my first game, Freya kept trying to do that to me. But if you've used a Guardian Spirit, there's only a 25% chance of success.
In this game Kali hasn't been trying. Probably Freya (green, remember) had used Earth Lore and knew where they all were. Kali hasn't explored much of the board.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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Phantom warriors are actually weaker than spearmen, but have one special power that makes them death on wheels for most normal units: Illusionary Attacks. They essentially have a 100% chance to hit, ignoring all armor, unless the unit has Immunity to Illusions (cast True Sight if you have it, I think it's a white magic spell). They also have to be summoned onto a battlefield, and vanish when the battle is over, which means you won't see them coming. On the other hand, it also means there is a strict limit on the number that can be added to any one battle, and using that mana pool up prevents the casting of other, more dangerous spells, like Guardian Wind (or High Prayer).
As for the slingers... they'll become worthless if your opponents cast Guardian Wind (-100% chance to hit with ranged physical attacks), and it's an early Blue spell like Phantom Warriors. They're not a whole lot more powerful than Archers, unless you build them in a town with a Mithril vein and an Alchemist's Guild, in which case they become the stuff of legends (8 man units, +2 to hit, damage, and armor per man, can hit opponents with physical attack immunity). Or get a settler to Myrror, and put them near an Adamant vein for a unit that can bring down Red Dragons in two shots. The extra two men per unit Slingers get is their strongest suit, once the Halflings' weaker base attack and defense strength is compensated for with enchanted weapons and armor.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at July 06, 2010 07:41 AM (TaHHC)
2
Ahh, so that's the mechanic that makes them so nasty... unit size.
I love ranged units in MOM; with melee, it's always a matter of attrition, and you never know when your unit is going to die. But there's nothing like putting together a stack of wizards and healers led by Xarrax and Mystic X (with 30+ dmg from custom-built items) and 1-turn curb-stomping most enemies.
Posted by: BigD at July 06, 2010 10:14 AM (LjWr8)
3
Yeah, you have to be careful about going ALL ranged, though. Eventually some wiseguy comes along with an army of all unicorns (which teleport anywhere on the field) and eats your army. Happened to an army of cuddly and loveable Night Elf warlocks I had, once upon a time.
Posted by: DrHeinous at July 06, 2010 10:47 AM (/Y+Yb)
4
Regenerators can be bad news, too. After your missile troops have run out of ammo, the trolls regenerate and eat you for lunch. (I've done that.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 06, 2010 10:52 AM (+rSRq)
5
And
that is why I always use Night Elf Mohawks instead!
Seriously, I forgot how much fun that game is. I remember now, it was probably the one I hated losing the most when I finally jumped to Win'95. Whatever bean-counter convinced the Powers That Be that there was still money to be made in these old games, I'd like to thank him.
Posted by: ubu at July 06, 2010 10:53 AM (i7ZAU)
6
I think every magic type has some units that can teleport... Green mages can summon Great Wyrms (the weakest of the dragons, but still devastating), Red mages have Irfits, Blue mages have Djinn, and Black mages have ... Wraiths? I think... I'm pretty sure Blue can also cast Teleport spells, though that eats mana that could be used to summon a Phantom Beast or two instead.
One of the things I liked best about MoM was how they treated multiple-figure units realisticly... they often seem pretty underpowered, but their attack strength and hit points are effectively multiplied by the number of figures in the unit... until those figures start dying. One advantage single-figure units have is that their attack power remains the same no matter how much damage they take, until they die. Not to mention many low-level spells that subvert the usual "apply attack damage to a single figure till it dies, then apply the remainder to the next figure until it dies, etc." by inflicting damage to each figure in a unit, devastating units with multiple low HP figures but doing little damage to units with one or two figures with high HP.
There was a surprising amount of strategy involved in every single combat, in spite of the fact that the terrain was never really much more than a flat board that occasionally included a city wall on one side. I think the only other time terrain ever actually played a factor in combat was in "floating island" battles over sea, where the terrain would be half land (on the side of the stack riding the floating island) and half water.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at July 06, 2010 01:10 PM (TaHHC)
7
Blue mages also have air elementals. They don't teleport but they're invisible except when next to an opponent, and they're completely immune to missiles.
The one I fought was also immune to my champion who was using a magical weapon. I had to flee from the battle because I couldn't figure out any way to hurt the damned thing.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 06, 2010 01:25 PM (+rSRq)
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July 04, 2010
Master of Magic
I'm kind of getting burned out on MOO, so just now I tried playing Master of Magic for the first time.
The game didn't last very long. A wandering group of lizardmen destroyed my city. Umm...
I was playing Lo Pan, who has half green and half blue IIRC. All I know is that I didn't see any spells being offered to me for research that looked at all useful.
Even with that short experience, some things came back to me. Those of you who are more up to speed on it, check this please:
You do your first exploration using the spearmen. The swordsmen stay and garrison.
The first building you do is the armory. Then you create a couple more stacks of swordsmen. Once your city is more secure, you build a granary, a marketplace, and a shrine, in that order. Right?
I have vague memories that the first spell you research is "Magic Spirit", and when you can you create one and use that for exploration. But that could be wrong.
MOM has been described as "Civ 2 in a swords and sorcery setting" and I know that it's a very deep game. I think I spent hundreds of hours playing it, 15 years ago, but I hardly remember anything.
The one thing I do remember is that I never used any of the preset mages. I always did my own mix-and-match choices of spell books. I'm gonna have to peruse the spell manual to try to remember which spells were useful, and what the general character of each kind of magic was.
UPDATE: When all else fails, read the manual. "Channeler" ability sure looks like a winner!
UPDATE: No. The first thing you build is a swordsman. The second thing you build is a marketplace! Gotta get that gold flowing. Then you build a granary!
UPDATE: OK, I'm a long way into a game now at intro level, and doing pretty well. I'm playing against only one opponent, and I'm Merlin, who has 5 white books and 5 green books. (At intro level you can't customize your mage.) I'm playing as lizardmen. I've captured two lizardman towns, two halfling towns, and a barbarian town. I've got a major league stack now going around taking things out. It consists of one lizardman swordsman, one lizardman halbardier, four lizardman javelineers, Theria, and Marcus. All the infantry are now level 3.
Marcus was a rescue from a dungeon, and his "pathfinder" ability is definitely very nice. As soon as he joined the stack it started moving speed 2. Theria and Marcus are both wearing magical armor.
And, by damn, that stack has been kicking some butt.
The music says I'm in the lead. I chose to have only one enemy, and I haven't found him or her yet. The one thing I cannot remember how to do? I thought there was a way to get a world map on the main pane instead of the standard closeup, but I can't figure out how that's done. Or maybe it was full screen.
Likely it's a function key or something like that. I guess I should check the manual again.
UPDATE: Aha! Under "Info", it's the Cartographer!
UPDATE: OK, my opponent is Freya (swoon).
And she really got the shaft as far as her starting position.
Anyway, she has 10 green spell books. She was doing something strange that made a green sparkle happen on her island, so I cast the Detect Magic spell in order to find out what she was doing.
It's "Change Terrain". She's been converting desert and mountain into grasslands. But there's something wrong with the program: every time she does it, I get the "spell casting" sound effect, and then I get about 20 seconds of bogus crap in the sound. It sounds like it's playing a binary file by mistake. I wonder what the deal is? It's pretty annoying.
Regardless, I have the whole map explored now, and there aren't any independent villages any longer. I could either decide to attack her, or I could take my allstar stack and shift it over to the other plane, to see what's happening there.
I tell you; this game is even more heavily infected with "gotta play just one more turn" than MOO is, once you're past the initial learning curve.
UPDATE: As is always the case with the computer wizards, Freya is running it right to the edge. She's got like 40 GP and zero mana stored up. Me, I haven't really been doing much, so I've got like 3500 gold and about the same amount of mana in the vault. I've only got four continuing spells running (Detect Magic and three Water Walking spells).
Right at the moment, though, I'm doing an 1100 point Create Artifact to create a magic staff for my third hero, who doesn't have anything good.
Freya, on the other hand, is churning out spells as fast as she can cast them -- which is why she doesn't have any money. She's been using alchemy to turn gold into mana.
I saw her summon cockatrices. Then she cast water walking. I hope it wasn't on them.
UPDATE: One of the things that makes this game addictive is all the ruins and lairs and holes in the ground and abandoned temples. Every time you find one and send in a combat stack, there's always the two questions: will there be any defenders? And what will they be guarding?
I've found a lot of spells. But the treasure of all treasures is a spell book, and I haven't gotten any of those yet. That's why I think I'm gonna send my superstar stack over to the other plane. Myrror is a nastier place than Arcanus, but at "intro" level it shouldn't be too bad for a stack where all the units are at their top level. Who knows? Maybe they'll find a spell book for me!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
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*sob* I don't have the time to play, and I just shelled out more money for Steam games (ME2, Civ4) that I don't have time to play... but MOM is sorely tempting me. In some ways, it may very well be my favorite game of all time.
Posted by: BigD at July 05, 2010 08:10 AM (LjWr8)
2
What a timely post! I just reinstalled MoM a few days ago, for the first time since 2005 (I kept the save files for some reason; of course now I have no interest in continuing those games). I started playing on "Normal" difficulty and made the worst custom wizard I've probably ever made (without trying to make him bad): 1 nature, 1 sorcery, 1 chaos, 7 death, and node mastery (why node mastery? it was 1 AM when I was making him and I thought it was cool). I think I hadn't yet remembered how the spell system works.
I even found my original MoM box (copyright 1994!) downstairs. Pretty sweet.
So far I haven't learned much, besides that phantom warriors and elven lords are both awesome.
One cool thing I remember about Lo Pan is that he gets an extra spell book (he has like 5 sorcery and 5 chaos as well as the channeler ability, which normally costs 2 spell books but he apparently gets it for one); I always figured the ability was rebalanced and they forgot to update him.
Posted by: John at July 05, 2010 02:57 PM (cR/Ak)
3
I've been playing MOM again as well. It stands up surprisingly well.
My usual start is 3 Death, 3 Chaos, 2 Sorcery and Myrran/Dark Elves. If I remember correctly. I love the fast Myrran roads too much.
Posted by: DrHeinous at July 06, 2010 06:54 AM (/Y+Yb)
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I love this game, too. My usual is 4life+1+1+1, Myrran, and Node Mastery, any race but trolls (sometimes even an Arcanus race on Myrror... adamantium-weapon paladins are just silly). Node Mastery lets you use spells of other colors when attacking (or defending) a node. Very nice to be able to Web those sky drakes to the ground so your melee units can deal with them...
I never play for score... the scoring is far too weighted towards early victories. You can get a score 2-4x higher than anything else possible by playing "11 death books, start with the Wraiths spell, and flatten the world with them ASAP", or other "11 books of one color to get an early unstoppable summoned critter" strategies. Wraiths work the best, tho, as every unit you kill becomes an undead one under your control after the fight... free garrison for all the cities you storm. And the wraiths heal themselves when they attack things, so no waiting around to heal up. But after one game, that's about as fun as playing solitaire with all the cards face-up.
Score-mitigation is part of the computer's AI, too. Take over and garrison a planar-travel tower, and watch the same wizard attack it several times on one turn with stacks of 3 units, when a larger force might actually win. Why only 3 when the max is 9? Because defeating a stack of 4+ earns you one point of Fame, which is worth points at the end of the game.
So I always play for "how much stuff can I get?" Starting with 4 colors of books means you can trade lots of spells when you first encounter enemy wizards. (Of course, at non-intro levels, the enemy wizards gang up on you regardless of their "personality" or relative power levels, so you only get a few turns to trade before they're all eternally at war with you.) Try to settle all of both worlds, hold all the towers and nodes, etc. etc.
I once played a death/chaos/nature game right to the end, and let one enemy city survive, just to see how much cheating the computer did. Was pretty blatant at that point: city blocked on all 8 sides by my army, Earthquaked every turn to remove all the buildings, and Famined and Pestilenced to keep the population down to 10-12, all farmers and rebels. Pretty sure I had other city- and global spells messing with the place, too. And every productive square nearby was converted to a non-productive volcano. The computer still managed to garrison the place and cast spells... and would recruit 1 hero per turn if you killed them off.
Posted by: Mikeski at July 06, 2010 02:12 PM (GbSQF)
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July 03, 2010
Cheating at MOO
How to cheat to give yourself a particularly good start in MOO:
First, download and install HxD, a freeware hex editor.
Fire up MOO and start a game. Don't be afraid to restart a lot of times to get a good start situation. If you've explored all the stars within 3 parsecs and they all suck, bag it and start again.
Once you've got a decent candidate for your second colony and good long term prospects for more, settle the second colony and then do two turns of full-transfers from your main planet to the other. As a result, three quarters of your population will end up in the other star. You don't have to wait for the transports to arrive; you just need them off your main planet.
Then save the game. Hit Control-F10 to free up the cursor.
Run HxD and edit your save game. It can be found in the MOO install directory with the file extension ".gam". I have that slot set up as "save1.gam". (I'm pretty sure the save file will always be called "save1.gam" no matter what you put in as the description.)
Once in HxD, hit control-F and do a string search for the name of your home planet. Since I'm playing the Alkari this game, it's Altair:
Once you've found it, look in the hex section and you'll see a place which says "64 00 64 00 64 00". Those are 16-bit values indicating the size of the planet. You'll want to change them all. 64 in hex is 100 decimal. You can change them to "96" for size 150 and to "C8" for size 200.
2 lines below that are two more numbers you'll want to change. They're the current population. They'll be in the same columns as the first two of the three you just changed.
And on the line in between, two to the left, is the "minerals" value for the planet. It starts as "02" which means "normal". Potential values are "03" for "artifacts", "04" for "rich", "05" for "ultra rich", and "06" for "Orion-class" which means 4*artifacts.
Just in passing, the structure that's being iterated here isn't a multiple of 16 in length, so the values won't necessarily be in the columns you see here. But their relationship to each other will always be the same.
Now we're cooking. Save the file out of HxD. Go back to MOO and click in its window. Load the save game.
Sometimes the numbers will look a little funky, but they're right, and they get cleaned up when you click "next turn".
Here's another cheat: Ever accidentally hit "bombard" and wipe out an enemy planet when you have a landing force coming? Ever have a random event happen (e.g. your home planet getting irradiated) that you just don't want to cope with?
Rest assured: even if you don't think you have a save game to retreat to, you do. The game auto-saves its state every few turns. So when something happens that you wish hadn't, immediately hit Control-F10 to gain full control over the mouse pointer, and then click the "x" in the upper right corner, killing the window off.
Then restart the game, and choose "Continue". It'll load from the magic save game, and you'll probably have to replay three or four turns, but the random event is highly unlikely to be repeated.
(I think I mentioned that I'm a wimp, didn't I?)
UPDATE: If you hit Control-F9 instead of Control-F10, it kills off the window. AAAARGH!!!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
05:48 PM
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1
Nifty! It's been ages since I've done something like that. Now I need to figure out how to do the equivalent in MoO II. I had a game I was running last night where I would have definitely liked to go back a couple of turns a few times.
Posted by: David at July 03, 2010 07:46 PM (rlE2m)
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Heh, I just found the old MOO2ED file in my game archives. Right next to where I reinstalled 1 and 2 and MoM after getting them from gog.com Next thing ya know I'll be looking to reinstall SMAC...
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at July 03, 2010 08:08 PM (mNd5t)
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Is "MOO2ED" a custom save-game editor?
I want!!!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 03, 2010 08:22 PM (+rSRq)
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I found a bunch of MoO II editors
here. Haven't tried any of them yet, though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 03, 2010 09:09 PM (PiXy!)
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and some MOO 1 editors
here. Note that I couldn't verify them--they all refuse to run under Win 7 64 bit. Oops!
Posted by: Douglas Oosting at July 03, 2010 09:22 PM (mNd5t)
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Oh, wait a moment. That was "MOO
2 ED". Don't want after all...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 03, 2010 09:37 PM (+rSRq)
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Now THAT takes me back. My first 'hack' was twiddling character stats in a Wizardry I save game file on a Franklin Ace 1000 (Apple ][ clone.)
Posted by: madwilliamflint at July 04, 2010 06:43 AM (GD0yd)
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Aww man, I spent a few hours last night figuring out how to modify planets (size, attributes, location). These editors are considerably simpler, but they destroy my drive to figure out what the rest of the record means, even if it is a heck of a lot of fun.
I remember decoding the save game files for Ultima IV back in high school. What I can't remember is where I got the hexedit program. I still have it -- HexEdit 2.0 by Mike Graham, Feb 1991. Written in turbo Pascal. In his notes he mentions being gobsmacked by being able to compile it into a 57k executable, and that his program doesn't autocreate backup files "and there's no bloody way I want 4 megabyte .BAK files kicking around." He thanks a BBS sysop in the docs, so it must have been through a local WWIV BBS...
Poking around 20 year old software is hilarious.
Posted by: bkw at July 04, 2010 08:21 AM (6X1gQ)
9
Also, two of the editors linked by Douglas appear to work (at least on a 32bit win7 machine); Oreo is not a valid win32 program.
Posted by: bkw at July 04, 2010 08:27 AM (6X1gQ)
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June 27, 2010
Master of Torpedos
I was wrong about torpedos in Master of Orion. Used properly they're really neat. I beat the Guardian one time with 17 large ships each of which carried 5 Antimatter Torpedos. It only took one shot.
One reason they're nice is that they're a great intimidation weapon. Enemy ships quite often boogie immediately if you fire torpedos, even if they have a chance of winning. Another reason is that they're a reall good planetary bombardment weapon.
I've been trying to play using different races. It really changes the game. The Silicoids are probably the biggest challenge. Their advantage is that they effectively start the game with "Controlled Toxic Colonization" and "Industrial Waste Elimination", so they never had to spend money to clean up pollution, and they can colonize any planet using a standard colonization base.
That makes them more productive than anyone except the Klackons in the early game, and of course it means they can grab any planet they see.
That's most important early in the game, of course. Their big disadvantage is that they reproduce half as fast as anyone else. Fertile and Gaia planets don't change that. You have to be very careful with your colonists. You can't afford to throw away 150 of them invading some enemy planet; they aren't that easy to replace.
To win with the Silicoids you have to colonize like mad early in the game, in order to create as many places as possible for colonists to breed. But if you succeed in doing that, especially if you grab some rich or ultra-rich hostile planets, you can kick ass.
The Sakkra, on the other hand, breed like rabbits. That is their racial difference. You can afford to toss lots and lots of them into tough invasion fights, because they're easy to come by.
I just now tried playing the Alkari. I can't get over the fact that their characters all look like Sam the Bald Eagle -- but the +3 defensive bonus in tactical fights is really very nice. I'm used to cringing when I attack an enemy planet armed with Hyper-X missiles, let alone anything even more advanced, but my Alkari fleet was hardly touched by them. It was amazing.
Anyway, now I try to include one bank of torpedos in my advanced ship designs, along with one bank of a streaming weapon (Graviton beam or Tachyon beam) for fighting swarms of smalls, and one or two banks of some good beam (Auto Blaster etc) for everything else. If you do it that way you don't need to include a bank of bombs; the torpedos serve that function.
UPDATE: Introducing the "Hellfire 6":
Type "Huge"
Mark V computer
Class VI shield
Class V ECM
Andrium armor (1500 hit points)
Weapon bank 1: 6 Hellfire Torpedos
Special 1: Battle Scanner
Special 2: Automated Repair
Special 3: Repulsor Beam
This has been a fun ship. They don't build very fast (they cost 4437 BC) but it only takes one to dominate an enemy system.
I had to get a clue from the "auto" combat on how to fight this ship. It's very straightforward: it never moves. The Hellfires have range to hit every square in the tactical map, so the right way to handle it is to sit there and shoot at everything that looks like an enemy until they're all gone.
My enemies are pitiful anyway; I think the best weapon any of them have is Hyper-X missiles, and none of them have a large enough fleet to even make one of these bruisers break into a sweat. Because they'd have to not only hit this ship hard, but to keep hitting it. The Auto-repair fixes 225 points of damage per turn.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
03:14 PM
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I'd love to see MOO, MOO II and MOM re-released with updated graphics and sound (and no other changes).
Even without updated shinies, I've wasted a good few hours recently on MOO II. Nice to see that these games really do stand up after all this time.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 27, 2010 03:42 PM (PiXy!)
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I bought MOM a while ago but I haven't even tried playing it yet. It's probably about time, though.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 27, 2010 06:04 PM (+rSRq)
3
Just consider when MOO was released, 1993. This is the heart of the 486 era, with the first Pentiums just being released, 33-66 MHz, maybe 4 MB of DRAM, VGA displays, etc... MOO should be ported to Android and iOS! (and Windows CE, I suppose...) Play MOO wherever you are.
Posted by: Kayle at June 27, 2010 11:11 PM (ZEid4)
4
It'd be a perfect game for my iPaq!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 27, 2010 11:13 PM (+rSRq)
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June 16, 2010
MOO graphics
This post is for Toren. The rest of you are welcome to look at it, but probably won't find it too interesting.
I told him by email that I was going to post some frame grabs from Master of Orion to show how well they were able to use the primitive graphics of the era. So they're below the fold.
more...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at
12:20 AM
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I was doing ray-traced fractal landscapes back then, 1024 x 768 in 24-bit color. There was no hardware that could display it at the time (except in movie studios), but with proper antialiasing and histogram-based color reduction, I could make an animated GIF that looked like a Boris Vallejo painting.
I always wanted to make a game out of them, but Myst beat me to the punch, what with Macromedia providing them an animation framework us indy developers who couldn't afford the licensing fees had to write from scratch. By the time I had anything playable, there was no way it could have competed with all the Myst-alikes.
Oh well, it's more fun to play video games than to write them, anyhow.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at June 16, 2010 10:14 AM (TaHHC)
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