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Things you can't stand about Master of Magic

Is there anything that particularly annoys you about Master of Magic ? Every now and then I try going back to the game, but the same issues repel me:

- So much fuss about unit retention. Countless game mechanics favor using strongly buffed small number of units. All other strategies are barely viable. You can't win by greater numbers. You can't win by offensive magic alone. Vast majority of summons are terribly inefficient cost-wise as well. Then you meet a wizard with Cracks Call or a pumpable spell and oversized mana reserve. A hero or unit stack, it doesn't matter, the strategy is the same. Pump as much as possible and keep alive at all costs.
- glacial city growth. It takes ages before an outpost can contribute anything to the war. During that time, the settlement is very fragile and can be wiped out in a single attack. Many races can't fight with early units, so you must develop late units.
- glacial unit production and movement speed. It takes ages to send reinforcements to the frontline. So it's best to just never lose anything, by far.

There are numerous interesting spells and strategies that might work on paper, but in the end it boils down to the same old trick time after time: create a single stack of DooM and keep buffing it. The best spells, artifacts, races are those which make the best stack of doom.
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Great thread.


Things I cannot stand (dumb AI aside) :

Concrete
- the Draconian animation, that fuzzes the unit identity, so you cannot tell Spearmen from Halberdiers
- the "sudden starvation death" when I misclick the warning
- the very existence of an ability that denies everything this game is built around (Magic immunity); a "contradictio in adiecto"
- Ai casting one spell ad infinitum

General
- when the "stack of doom" is formed, the game's over. As borsuk said, it is very formulaic
- the resistance spell mechanics which is absolutely unreliable and cost ineffective without -to save artifacts, then it can be suddenly superpowerful (aside from broken Confusion here)
- Slow pace: when I spend many turns walking somewhere only to see the route was useless - and I reload
- loooong battle manoeuvers, many clicks without sufficient strategic depth
- when, in the middle of the game, I look into the research book and see that I don't need anything that I'm offered to learn. Horrible moment. The lack of variety throughout the game: damage spells, same-ish monsters, broken and useless spells. The reviews say otherwise but the naked truth is: about a half of MoM features is pretty flat.
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City:
-NO BUILDING QUENE
-No production carries over to next project.
-unrest and mana in the same building (not enough mana from cities)
-Very strict and restrictive building tree
-tax and unrest (police effect in particular) and marketplace
-Ocean cities at disadvantage.
-Some nasty racial tension, some non-existent racial tension.

Research:
-Huge luck factor, you can end up with 7-8 arcane spell choices early on.
-11 books with a 'rare' spell.
-Not a huge incentive to research (unless white magic) when you can simply create a few stacks of doom from cities

Wizards:
-Some picks clearly better than others (alchemy is ridiculous)

Troops/Races:
- EXTREMELY UNBALANCED AND INFLEXIBLE troops in each race, especially later units: get your slingers, griffins, paladins, minotaurs, hammerhands, war trolls ... golems? war mammoths? forget about it!
- To make matters worse, races are clearly better than others

Movement:
-Either SUPER FAST (pathfinding/wind walking) or SUPER SLOW (no pathfinding)
-Mountaineer struggling at plains (WTF)
-Players using opponent roads, especially on combat.
-Water transport

Magic Realm Balance and Summons:
- Almost all non-death summons are surprisingly expensive for what they do. (why sacrifice 49 mana upkeep and well over 2000ish mana for 9 basilisks, when 9 elite stag beetles do a lot more and cost less?)
- Because of that, realms benefit from non-summon perks with life and sorcery being clearly best colors
- Some spells being clearly better than others. Some nearly useless, others ridiculous (lionheart, heroism)

Combat:
- opponent not moving and shooting.
- overabundant resistance.
- Experience System is simply terrible (regular and veteran bonuses are weak, elite gets everything)
- Walls

AI:
- Facepalm
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I agree with most of the stuff zitro wrote. But I have another issue I forgot about:

- AI seems to cast direct damage spells 90% of the time.

This limits the game so much. You must use units with high resistance to damaging spells. Forget gnolls, klackons. They may have highish stats, but low HP. This flaw alone heavily promotes high HP units. Or rather, it excludes everything else except against lairs and nodes. It's raining fire.
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I just hate to be a complaint-breaker, but I'm still quite happy with MoM. smile

MoM is very magic feature rich.
For such a game the AI is still one of the best I have seen up till now.
Civ 1-4 are certainly worse (IMHO), even though they are less feature rich.

Many annoying bugs and improvements to the AI have already been fixed or realized by kyrub.
Most of the complaints only tell me that there really should be more games like MoM, with the focus a little bit shifted.
It's a shame that there still aren't.
Apparently there are simply too few people who enjoy a game like MoM to make it commercially attractive. frown

And I wonder... if all of those complaints were really dealt with... would you really start playing MoM more?
Especially if you simply couldn't beat the computer?
For comparison, how much fun is computer chess, if you can only win if the computer has to be relatively dumbed down to the level of a monkey.

The main complaint I have myself is the ridiculous effectiveness of a doom stack.
I don't mind that, but as an extra feature, it would be nice if there were alternative effective strategies.
--I like ILSe
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Mom have an unique-rich magic system. Only MtG have the best magic system,but it is not a computer game.
So, i am not expecting more from Mom.

Only things i dislike is game-crash bugs and the absence of "Play Vs Human" option. (i.e. multiplayer).
I like Serena Wrote:The main complaint I have myself is the ridiculous effectiveness of a doom stack.
I don't mind that, but as an extra feature, it would be nice if there were alternative effective strategies.
Whats matter? lets decrease the food upkeep for armies by half and decrease the casting cost (and rarity) of the overland damage spells,like fire storm,ice storm...
Zitro1987 Wrote:Mountaineer struggling at plains (WTF)
Its can be fixed easy.
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MoM's magic system is strongly inspired by Mtg, but it still managed to get a couple things wrong in the process. why is Wind Mastery in Sorcery (blue) rather than Nature (green) ? Because wind powers are in blue in Magic: The Gathering. No rational explanation.
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Things I love in Master of Magic:
- creativity of spells
- creativity in general, balance be damned. Enchanted roads, races with game-breaking abilities like flying, regeneration. Side effect of bad balance is the game has "oh shit" moments, which can be exciting.
- the sheer scale of the game. Build and capture cities, explore entire alternate plane, fight lair guardians. Raise volcanoes, change terrain. The first strategy game to have global enchantments ?
- The atmosphere, including unique interface.
- many nodes are punishingly difficult, but this ensures you have something to look forward for the entire game. I love the special rules and quirks of magic nodes.
- the game is composed of several subsystems and they fit well. City development, warfare, artifact creation, fighting for treasure, mercenaries and merchants.
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I was trying to stay away from this thread, since I can write a book about what’s wrong with the current MOM.
But since AI came up:
Compared to chess AI, MOM AI is far more difficult to make stronger than best human due to many reasons, but most importantly, there are too many options to choose from for a player. Chess AI is brute force with average branching factor of 35 (options to choose from). With today’s computers it is trivial, but remember that chess AI research goes back a good 50 years. It will be a mighty challenge to write AI which plays better than best human in MOM. Even if it is finished, it will be super-easy to dumb it down if desired. Making a dumb AI super-smart is very hard. Also, if we had a super-smart AI in MOM, that would not make a game boring to play against, since the game is very diverse and is partly luck based, so with luck and even collaboration between multiple players, a smart player’s advantage is greatly reduced.
Now the issue of why all the commercial turn based strategy games (which are more complex than chess) have facepalm AIs: first, see above. It is very difficult to write it. It takes way too much time, too much effort and requires deep knowledge in AI, and often becomes necessary to make them learn, since human players learn. Second, commercial software development is profit oriented. If by accident a commercially developed game would become too good, then how would they market and sell their next game? Third, since commercial development is guided by CEOs and MBAs, the quality usually succumbs to profit expectations. Programmers are given tight, unrealistic timelines and the games get published on promised deadlines, whether ready or not (usually not). After that, customer support of existing games quickly diminishes and marketing and development of the next game begins. Source code is almost never shared, not even after bankruptcy or takeover of game companies, which is very, very common. So games, like MOM stay in limbo until somebody buys the license to continue with the above mentioned business process.
This makes it necessary to develop open source code by enthusiast, since waiting for commercial games to meet (your) high expectation is like searching for the holy grail – you won’t find it.
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The popularity of multiplayer games largely stems from the fact no AI has to be written for it.

Whitemage, I think too few people try writing AI. I don't enjoy it for the same reason I don't enjoy optimization. It's working on and polishing what you already have.

As for people who publish games, it's tragic that they can be likened to drug dealers. They sell it, but they don't use it. They don't even understand games. These days, it's hard to even name a single individual that is good at writing AI. There's no John Carmack, Tim Schafer or Brian Fargo for it. Moreover, no one even tries to claim he's developing a game with challenging AI. Is it because marketing types don't understand the importance of it, or because good AI is considered hopelessly hard ?
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Both. Well, for one, please allow me to be a counterexample. Let me claim hereby, that I do try to develop a game with challenging AI. Someone else has to develop the game without the AI first though. Also, I can’t promise that I will succeed, but I try and have been trying for a while now. My current effort is on reMOM, but I want a stable, balanced game first. I only want to write AI, not a whole game. Writing AI for a non-existing game is not an interest of mine. Also, I have a real life too, so my time is extremely limited these days. This is also the problem for all other enthusiast led developments. They are all busy people doing this in their rare free time. Commercial games’ AI development is a joke. Did you know that Civ 4 has AI, which on the hardest level never declares war? This decision was made to give a better player experience to the common players who don’t like to lose or be interrupted in their divine plan by pesky little enemy AIs.
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