Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

-- Henry V, Shakespeare.

This is one of several games of Caster of Magic for Windows: Warlord that I intend to play through for my Let's Play. For more info, read here: https://talking-time.net/index.php?threa...mods.3126/



For the very first game, I roll this guy. He starts with 2 Sorcery books, 6 Death books and 1 Life book. Books determine how many spells the wizard starts with, as well as the spells they can access through research. As you can see, picking so many Death books also allows choosing which spells to start with, as well as which spells get guaranteed in the next tier. The default selection here is good enough, so I don't mess with it; I'll bring up what the spells do as I (or an enemy wizard/unit) use them.

Picking 2 Sorcery books allows choosing exactly one (1) Common spell from the Sorcery realm. While seemingly measly, it can still be fairly powerful. I pick Resist Magic to offset the bad resistance of Death's summons.

1 Life book doesn't offer any choice, but does add some Common Life spells for research. Considering that Life's Common spells are among the strongest Common spells around, this isn't really a bad thing.

Finally, let's look at the words on the bottom. These represent the wizard's traits, which offer unique benefits outside of their spells. They can be obtained at the cost of some books, and indeed, some powerful wizard builds sacrifice a bunch of books to rely on stacking the right traits.

Anyway, Channeler makes this wizard hurl spells for the same mana cost, regardless of how far the battle is from his capital. Normally, wizards pay a markup based on distance, which goes up to three times the original cost for distant fights! Naturally, this makes participating in distant battles more viable, and skirmishing more effective. This is actually considered one of the most powerful traits, and the game even acknowledges its power by having it cost 2 books!

Benefactor, on the other hand, is an interesting trait. It makes heroes and mercenaries show up for hire more often, and buffs any heroes under the wizard's hire. It also makes artifact merchants show up more often. Artifacts, to put it simply, are heroes' equipment, worn to boost their stats and grant them magical powers. Basically this is a very hero centric retort. I will try to use some of them in this playthrough, but they are a bit fickle by nature, and circumstances may work against them.



That being done, I pick a color, and let the game roll the wizard's capital's race. It picks Orcs, which, contrary to what most fantasy would have you believe, are just a jack of all trades, excelling at nothing, but not being poor at anything either. They're meant to be a "beginner" race, letting new players learn the nuances of city building and regular units with hands on experience. As such, they're a great fit for this game.

The empire starts pretty small, with just a capital, two spearmen, and two settlers. The capital itself is modest, supplying 7 gold and 16 food. Of the latter, each 1000 units of population, represented by the figures of orcish figures near the top, eats 2 food, and the four units currently available eat 1 food each, leaving only 2 food as surplus. Gold can be stockpiled, but food can't be. Presumably it rots when left for too long, and storage facilities can only do so much.

The capital also supplies labor and power. Labor simply depicts the amount of labor that gets utilized for any productive activities, like making buildings or units, and power is what fuels your wizard's spells, research and casting skill. The labor here comes mainly from the populace, obviously, and the power comes from the wizard's tower, which is part of every capital.



Now, let's look at how the power is distributed. As you can see, there's 20 whole power, which is roughly equally split between researching new spells, generating mana for spellcasting, and improving spellcasting potency to be able to cast more spells quicker. Right now, our power is too pathetic to support all of them at once, and being a Death heavy wizard means focusing on summons, which, well, need to be summoned via their respective spells, so I'll be channeling all of the power to mana production for now.

The Alchemy button lets you turn mana to gold, or vice versa. It's a pretty nifty and important feature, considering how much spellcasting is involved in this game, and makes it so that a strong "mundane" economy can support a wizard pretty well. Conversions have a 2:1 rate, so a fair amount of resources do get "lost" in the process, but mana is usually more important than gold, and with proper planning it's not too hard to raise a good amount of it. I convert my measly 80 pieces of gold into 40 mana to get my spellcasting going.



Here's our first glorious army - two Ghouls!  Ghouls are pretty strong creatures actually, with decent ranged and melee attacks, a whole slew of immunities, and, most importantly, the ability to turn their victims undead. Their major weakpoints are their speed, their low resistance (which does become a problem against the things they're not immune to), and their relatively high casting cost. It's hard to amass them, but if you can manage it, they're pretty powerful early on.



Their first fight is against a singular ghost in a ruined temple. I know, not very exciting. But it does give them an opportunity to destroy the lair before it can become a threat to the empire by spawning monsters, and also lets them pilfer its loot for the great glory of their wizard! Lol. Lairs often have substantial rewards and can be undermined with the right tricks for little expense, making them quite profitable. Besides, you want to take them anyway, why risk having monsters knock down the cities you worked so hard to build?



Speaking of! The capital is coming nicely, having built a marketplace for more money, a library for more research, a dock for the production of ships and also food, and now stables for cavalry and some additional productivity. Cavalry are rather brittle units, but they have amazing movement clearance, allowing them to work excellently as scouts and skirmishers. Not only that, they also strike first, meaning that, as long as they can do enough damage to kill their target, they will escape getting hit by a counterattack.

This is a pretty powerful ability, actually, as attacks and counterattacks normally are delivered at the same time, meaning most melee fighters are going to take some damage, no matter what. That being said, their frailty and poor stats mean that they aren't going to see much fighting, at least not in this playthrough.



It doesn't take long for them to find a inhabitation outside the empire. This is a small, sleepy village of Gnolls. With two ordinary swordsmen guarding it, it's not exactly a hard conquest, and the ghouls conveniently turn them to our side! Gnolls are a pretty good find though, excelling at creating strong military units which can deal oodles of damage. The defenses on them are a bit lackluster, and they are poor economically, but the capital, and later, the empire can easily make up for that.



Speaking of which, the two starting settlers have been settled, and have grown into small villages. Of course, they're not very productive, having very few people and next to no infrastructure, but with time, this will change.



Let's end this with a look at our first hero. He's an archer with healing spells who costs no money, grants 10 gold per turn, negates the penalties of movement tiles in the stack he's on, and raises the resistance of all units in his stack! This is pretty good, and a good sign of what you can expect from later heroes - he's actually one of the weakest heroes you can hire! That being said, he showed up this early only because of my wizard's Benefactor trait - normally heroes are extremely finicky about even showing up! I hire him because of course. Why wouldn't you?!

Alright, that's enough for the first session. A lot of time had to go into explaining the mechanics, and this early on you usually don't get to meet other wizards or fight memorable battles. But not to worry, things will become more interesting, and very soon. See you then!

I have been working on a new Master of Magic engine in golang for the past year or so. https://github.com/kazzmir/master-of-magic

You can try it online here: https://kazzmir.itch.io/magic

Or compile it from source and run it natively (its just 'go build ./game/magic'). The engine can now load original MoM save game files (.GAM). If you get to the game settings page you can drag and drop a .GAM file onto the window and it will load. I would be interested to hear any feedback from people that try this and note any inconsistencies/errors you find in the resulting loaded game.

The actual game is mostly playable, although the AI is not fleshed out yet and will not try to win the game. The AI just builds things at random and moves its units randomly. Saving the game is not implemented yet.

I also wrote this combat simulator thing: https://kazzmir.itch.io/magic-combat-simulator
Where you can create battles with arbitrary units in them.

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Don't know if this has been posted here yet, but Sullla's been posting game reports that he wrote up during Civ 4's test period on his website, in celebration of the game's 20th anniversary this month. (Wow, now I feel old).

https://www.sullla.com/Civ4PR/civ4PR.html

Reading the first game was quite amusing, as the graphics conked out on Sullla's machine, replacing the land on the map with an all-consuming black void. (Also, it's still funny booting up Civ 4 and seeing an Nvidia splash screen, long before their graphics cards became AI training chips.)

I don't think I've ever done a primary blizzard sorcie before, in large part because there are no secondary damage options in the other trees as good as Frozen Orb: Nova is mana-hungry and wants all the mastery points you can get, Fireball&co want their synergies + Mastery, and Firewall wants Blaze along for the ride, the latter working poorly with permanent mercenaries in the mix now. Lightning/CL have the same problems as Fireball, Thunder Storm is a joke, and Enchant... don't. I speak from experience.

But what about Hydra? It has two synergies, but they are the weakest aside from Frozen Orb's at 3% per point. It's a bad skill in LoD. Period. Blizzard, in their infinite wisdom, decided to effectively limit their numbers to 6 in the worst way possible: global cooldown timers, so they took forever to ramp up to their maximum number. At the same time, they gave the assassin class hydras, limited to 5, without any cooldowns, that shoot charged bolt, lightning, or even corpse explosion! And it never occurred to them to do the same (hard limit, no cooldown) for the Sorceress, until resurrected version 2.4.

So now we have a bona-fide trapsin option, shooting firebolts in triplets, that still take time to ramp up (as can be seen in the journey of Sullla's Lernie, who died the same place as T-Hawk's Starsurge).

My character was twinked. Softcore. Her run wasn't intended to be "one for the ages", or to even mean anything. It was to give me a blizzard sorceress who can farm Mephisto and Andariel for fat loot, and speed through p7 Lower Kurast without immunes getting in the way. The twinks were a sub-par spirit sword (still better than almost anything that rolls on orbs  ), Lore, and Glacial amulet of the Apprentice. That blue was a thing of beauty. Oh and a Skin of the Vipermagi with an Um rune. There was also a Harlequin Crest with a perfect topaz in it, because I've got my itching for loot to be excited over before inevitably tossing them into some refuse pile.

As for the run, I opted for a firebolt start to respec out of. Saves me from doing excessive chugging, and I'm already a fan of the leaf staff. Could have probably used Charged Bolt, then go static/nova instead, but I at least didn't have to chug, and Firebolt scaled better into higher player counts, even if weaker than Cinderella's, due to the need to pump pre-requirements. Blizzard took the spotlight as soon as it came online, especially once bolstered by Spirit+insight's mana regen. The respec happened at level 30, and although I had hydra, it didn't see much use until late nightmare, where my investment was starting to pay off against the cold immunes showing up in the ice caves, where it's long range let me scout and kill enemies from a safe distance.

Of course the real fun starts in hell, but I have to leave that for later.

After booting up the Endless Legend 2 demo, your computer will play a video of Derek “Kael” Paxton saying, basically, “Hi, I’m Kael. Remember how much you loved my Civ4 fan mod Fall from Heaven? Since that was free, you should buy my new game, Endless Legend 2.” In gratitude for the many hours of free entertainment that Kael gave me in FfH, I shelled out the cash for the “early access” version of Endless Legend 2. As a rule, I hate spending money for early access when I’m also meant to be a guinea pig, testing stability and balance. But like I said, I figure I would’ve spent money on FfH, so consider this a delayed payment.

And Chevalier and Pindicator’s demonstration games gave me the itch to demo a game myself. Have to keep some forum activity until the next Civ4 multiplayer game.

Chev and Pind are masters walking through their chosen games. I didn’t even get all the way through the demo for Endless Legends 2 (hereafter, EL2). I also never played EL1 and have minimal experience with the Endless Space series. Let’s learn together.



Endless Legend is a turn based 4X game set on the planet Saiadha. We will be playing as the Kin of Sheredyn, invaders from beyond the planet (and from the previous game, Endless Space 2). Each faction in this game series is designed as a narrative experience, with a unique unit roster, special buildings, powers, and quests. Custom factions and multiplayer to come later, Kael promises, now that he already has my money.

Here we set up our world.


We are met with our first disappointment. “Recommended for 4 players” is a euphemism for “cannot have more than 4 players.” No cramming in civs. The difficulty is somewhere in the middle, one up from the default the game gave me.

And we begin. The narrative is a little confusing, since the Kin have been on the planet long enough to lose their leader and for her legend to take on mythic status, and yet we don’t even have a capital yet.


The game encourages movement by granting a “Prepared Settlement” bonus of +50% yields for every turn that you move. I’m sure someone smarter than me can figure out how best to use this. Me, I just settled.



The eastern two hexes were the “Sid’s Suggestions” for where to build my city. They had more total yields than the western hex that I ended up founding on, but I valued combined food/production over the other more esoteric yields. This immediately seemed like a mistake, but some habits are hard to break.

Welcome to Garin’s Rest, capital of the Kin of Sheredyn.


EL2 takes Civ6’s sprawling cities mechanic. Here you can see that for each tile, you can build an improvement. (As far as I can tell, there are no improvements constructed with workers or anything outside of city production.)

I only have 3 “districts” available. Others are unlocked by technology. I can also build an “improvement” in the city center. These are not tile improvements but at first glance look more like wonders.


7 turns for +3 production from a Works district or 8 turns for +4 production and a host of other yields from "respecting nature"? That seems like a no brainer.

I know literally nothing about the economy of EL2, but here’s why I think I overvalued production for my city site:


Following Endless Space’s lead, EL2 represents population as pop points of different species, here working different jobs. For each pop point of Kin working as Artisans, I gain +6 production & +2 gold at the cost of -3 approval and -4 food. Why on earth would I build a building for +3 production instead of doing whatever I can to get more population for double the bonus? Caveat again, I know literally nothing about the game yet.

Like any good Polytopia-like, this game has a tech tree. Techs are lumped into eras, with further eras gated by a certain number of prerequisite techs.


I had collected a goody hut, so I had most of the first tech researched. I chose Currency for the flat +8 gold bonus on the capital. (They call it “dust” rather than gold, but if I call it dust, I have to talk about Endless Lore, and my typing finger is tired.)

Sharp-eyed readers will note that I talked about pop points of different species. The Endless universe models multi-ethnic empires in interesting ways. Throughout our map there are “minor factions,” unremarkable savages to be dealt with. (Yikes.) These can be talked into submission with a quest or we can practice lance-point diplomacy.


(To be honest, so far the minor faction mechanics don't seem as interesting as Endless Space's. We'll see.)

We attack the “Foundlings.” We are given the option of an auto battle, but we choose to deploy our units.



Damage ranges, terrain features, activated and passive abilities. It’s all good stuff, but every time I see one of these “tactical turn-based battles within a strategic turn” systems, all I can think is how impossible it is for multiplayer. We’ll see what happens, but I suspect that, like the Age of Wonders series, multiplayer relies on autobattle. As an aside, these battles are much, much less flashy than Age of Wonders, but so far EL2’s empire-building side hasn’t given me the same paint-huffing, glue-sniffing moron feel that Age of Wonders 4’s has.

We win!



I don’t yet know how to value a unit. We lose a scout here but gain 160 gold and a couple hero items.
Here’s our hero with a little more oomph.



Again, compared to the big competitor in the market (AoW4), this is very subdued. Kind of surprising, actually. Time will tell if I like it or not.

The auto-battle interface suggested I’d lose the scout, but I figured it would be worth it. Remember the 160 gold we got? Do you see where the UI says “Buyout Cost”?



I figured saving 7 turns on this building was worth the scout and the 205 gold. Don’t ask me how worth. This isn’t multiplayer. I don’t do math for single-player games.
And that’s where I’ll leave it for today. I’m playing through live, so anything can happen, including game-ending losses, bugs, or life events. Stay tuned.

Any interest for a 2nd CIV VI PBEM on Earth Map?

I would love to try that one out. We could do true start locations.

Hi all,

we are looking for two players for Old School v4 Pitboss. The Pitboss is planned to be a game for two-player teams sharing research. Teams are balanced by perceived playing strength so If you decide to join you will likely get a teammate from among the existing players (mostly Old School v3 players). There will be open diplomacy only. The game will likely be played a modified Europe map.

I've been playing CoM/CoM II for a very long time and just ran across a completely new and weird error.

In the middle of a playthrough, I saved after beating a ruins and my game closes. Oh well, stuff happens. Then I notice that the executable is nowhere to be found AND Malwarebytes has the cryptic message that it had been removed due to "Malware.Ransom.Agent.Generic".

Has anyone seen this before? I'm assuming false positive, but rather concerning that it popped up out of nowhere a solid month after I installed the 1.5.9 update.

I completely forgot that i managed to sign up for another game. It's a pleasant surprise though.