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The Master of Magic Thread

Zeus

Cipher
Joined
Apr 25, 2008
Messages
1,523
Hi, I'm Zeus, and I'm a MoMma's boy.

Master of Magic is one of ze best games EVAR, etc., etc., but since it doesn't have a proper thread anywhere I can find (other than a depressing, "Why are MoM clones always canceled?" deal), people keep discussing it in places like the "Elemental: War of Magic" thread.

Anyways, I guess I'll get the ball rolling: What was your favorite custom wizard setup?

I usually picked the Merlin portrait (yeah, no shit ;)) and green spell books. My favorite games of all time were straight green, on Myrror, with Dwarves. I'd cast Nature's Eye, my favorite spell -- seriously, I lub my Lookamancy -- to eliminate fog of war, transmute all the crappy mineral deposits to gold, and raise a dwarven army so well funded it was unstoppable. By the end of the game, "Next Turn" was taking a full minute or two, the game was pushing so many troops around.

That was fun.
 

Trash

Pointing and laughing.
Joined
Dec 12, 2002
Messages
29,683
Location
About 8 meters beneath sea level.
Dead and chaos all the way. I also enjoyed playing with the insects (Klangons?). Little young trash thought it was cool that they put a race from MOO into a fantasy game.

It was also awesome to send my bug eyed tainted and mutated little undead creepy crawlies all over the map fighting all that opposed them. The meta spells for dead were pretty neat as well.
 

kris

Arcane
Joined
Oct 27, 2004
Messages
8,836
Location
Lulea, Sweden
Life and Halflings. that is the only parts that I remember well. Well, I also remember you could summon that awesome hero with life magic, he owned.
 

Azira

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 3, 2004
Messages
8,519
Location
Copenhagen, Denmark
Codex 2012
Only took a vanilla wizard for my first game

Took the portrait from the black-haired guy with a goatee, because he kinda looks like me.
4 life books, 2 nature, 2 chaos and 2 sorcery books. Human civilization.

Paladins rule due to their resistance against magic. Torin's chosen is one mean hero.
When clearing nodes of the highest difficulty, you could get more spellbooks of the corresponding school. In essence, if you were lucky you could end up with 4 of each nature, chaos and sorcery together with the 4 from life, enabling you to get all spells available through trading and looting.

At least that's how I remember it. Loved the game, haven't played it in years though.
 

Captain Obvious

Scholar
Joined
Jan 29, 2009
Messages
166
Location
/gd/
1 or 2 nature, 1 or 2 chaos, 6 to 8 Sorcery, Node Mastry and perhaps Archmage.

Node mastery is extremly powerful, and having books in several realms gives you the opportunity to trade a lot.

Sorcery is just plain fun. Phantom Warriors, and later Phantom Beast, are incredibly useful spells for clearing out lairs and early city defense. Timestop is a game winner, Flight, Invisibility, Spell Lock & Phantasmal weapons are essential for heroes. Aura of Majesty makes you friends even on impossible.

I've dug it out recently and am now experimenting with 11 life books and high elves. Starting with Stream of Life gives you taxes and a power-supplying population quickly.
 

Jasede

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 4, 2005
Messages
24,793
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
All of them. No, I'm serious.

As a kid I liked Death best, and then switched to Life because it rules. Nowadays I try to make them random and quirky.

Hm. You know, I haven't played this game in five years...

Also, invisible flying warships...
 
Joined
Dec 29, 2006
Messages
372
I usually try a bit of everything. It would have been cool if there were the ability to generate random characters. However, more often than not, I won't take any spell books and go with only special abilities - Myrran, Warlord, Alchemy, Channeler, Artificer and Famous (I think that's it). As for race, I'm partial to Nomads for Rangers. Pathfinding is awfully nice.
 

Seboss

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
947
I played this game a bit at release on a friend's computer and never played it ever since.
All the love for MoM around these parts made me pick it up again. I put up a little let's play thread on some French magazine forum.
If anyone is interested in "what not to do" in MoM and can read French:
http://forum.canardpc.com/showthread.php?t=34598

Definetely need to read the manual thoroughly, as well as the HTML strategy guide floating around.
 

asper

Arcane
Joined
Nov 14, 2007
Messages
2,207
Project: Eternity
Just fired this game up again, after not having played it for more than 10 years. What a shock. It is SO playable, and SO much fun. A lot of old games have a very clunky interface; not this one. I haven't had so much fun with a game in a long time.

It really baffles me as to why no proper sequel, or at least clones trying to build upon it, have ever been made.

Fuck, you could just take the ancient code from MoM, tweak it a bit so it runs on modern machines, take a good-looking 2d or isometric tileset, and you'd have a hit!
 

Seboss

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
947
Right, I've been playing this exclusively the whole week and I think it's the best 4X game, if not the best game, I've ever played. How could I miss that one for so many years?
I always thought it had monstrous complexity and was aimed only at hard core armchair generals, but like you said, it's very playable and very easy to get into.

I think my only gripe is the lack of auto battle resolution. The turn based combat is all nice and good, but after the thirtiest wandering ghouls attack against my capital, it becomes a little tedious.

Oh well... back to getting pwned by Myrror monsters.
 
Joined
Dec 29, 2006
Messages
372
Seboss said:
I think my only gripe is the lack of auto battle resolution. The turn based combat is all nice and good, but after the thirtiest wandering ghouls attack against my capital, it becomes a little tedious.
There is. In the center of the area down at the bottom of the screen, there's a group of buttons. One of them is 'Auto'. Click it once to turn it on, click it again to turn it off. Granted, you still have to watch everything happen, and you can't cast spells, but its a lot faster than if you did everything yourself. Or, were you looking for something else?
 

Seboss

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
947
Yes, I was more thinking about an "auto resolve" prompt before the battle.
It would have been nice for sure win battles. Battles sure are excruciatingly slow, at least with DosBox.
 

asper

Arcane
Joined
Nov 14, 2007
Messages
2,207
Project: Eternity
Hmm, if you up the cycles in DosBox, and use the auto button, a battle with a few units doesn't take very long (1-2 minutes?) in my opinion. Are you running the game slower than "normal speed" because of a low cycle setting in DosBox?

This guy is playing with a faster cycle setting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPnUd2kBcEo Look at the animations.
 

Zeus

Cipher
Joined
Apr 25, 2008
Messages
1,523
It's a hell of a lot easier to get Master of Magic running in DOSBox than DOS. :D

I used to spend *days upon days* messing around with boot disks, editing autoexec files, etc., etc. That game required so much memory it was insane.

Here's some tips for getting Master of Magic to run in DOSBox. I've got a 2.4ghz Pentium IV, which is about five years old, so it should work for anyone with a computer bought this decade.

First of all, I use D-Fend Reloaded. It's the best DOSBox graphical frontend, IMO. Even if you don't use D-Fend Reloaded, you can still take advantage of these settings, just don't ask me for the commands.


CPU
- Emulation Core: Dynamic
- CPU Cycles: 10000

Memory
- Memory (in MB): 16
- Check "Use XMS-Memory"
- Check "Use EMS-Memory"
- Check "Use UMB-Memory"

Graphics
- Window resolution: 640x480
- Fullscreen resolution: 640x480
- Check "Use double buffering"
- Check "Keep correct aspect"
- Render: Overlay
- Video card: VGA
- Scale: Nearest Neighbor upscaling with a factor of 2 (normal 2x)
- Frameskip: 0

The most important settings are "Render: Overlay" and "Emulation core: Dynamic," both of which really speed things up for me.

The only thing to remember is you'll need the latest version of DOSBox, 0.72, because earlier versions had trouble with the dynamic core and Master of Magic.

Enjoy!
 

Zeus

Cipher
Joined
Apr 25, 2008
Messages
1,523
Seboss said:
I think my only gripe is the lack of auto battle resolution. The turn based combat is all nice and good, but after the thirtiest wandering ghouls attack against my capital, it becomes a little tedious.

Click "Game" in the top-left, then click Settings, and under combat, check "Strategic Combat Only." It'll skip by the tactical combat and display results.

Strategic Combat Only and Save/Load cheese is the secret to success. Don't like the item you found in that cave? Load your game, enter a 2 second Strategic Combat with superior forces and see if you get something better. :D
 

tkfsung

Novice
Joined
Aug 6, 2010
Messages
4
Location
Perth
Bug help?

Sorry about posting this here, but I have been unable to get help anywhere else.

My MoM games have a certain bug: I cannot pick my guaranteed spells that are not common UNLESS I put all 11 picks into one form of magic...

I am running MoM 1.31 with DosBox, and running Magic.exe.

Can anyone help at all? This occurs to me on both MoM 1.40f and MoM 2.0.

Thanks.
 

tkfsung

Novice
Joined
Aug 6, 2010
Messages
4
Location
Perth
I've tried 4 Life, 4 Nature, 2 Sorcery and Alchemist. By the manual I should get one uncommon and 2 common for life and nature, instead I get 3 commons each. I've tried other combinations (extensively), such as 10 Sorcery (gives 9 common spell picks only 0.o).

As I haven't seen other people complain about this issue, I wonder if it is just me. I have tried new installs, different patchs, different wizards.... surely it cannot be Windows XP or DosBox?
 

Zeus

Cipher
Joined
Apr 25, 2008
Messages
1,523
tkfsung said:
Sorry about posting this here, but I have been unable to get help anywhere else.

No problemo. Good to hear people are still playing this game!

tkfsung said:
My MoM games have a certain bug: I cannot pick my guaranteed spells that are not common UNLESS I put all 11 picks into one form of magic...

You have to fully specialize (11 books) in a sphere of magic in order to pick uncommons and rares. If the manual says different, it's because it's (unfortunately) outdated. The game was pretty heavily patched after its initial release.

Good news is, you can work up some seriously crushing strategies focusing on one school of magic, especially Death and Nature, two of my favorites. :D
 

tkfsung

Novice
Joined
Aug 6, 2010
Messages
4
Location
Perth
Thankyou VERY much for your reply, I've been wondering for years why it was the case. And yes I pull it up about once a year to play with again... there is so much replayability.

The down side with that of course is without artificier and and runemaster making the powerful artifacts takes impractical amounts of time :( I will of course live with it and add my prayers to Implode and anyone else making multiplayer clones of MoM... also looking forward to the release of Catnip 1.0 mod tomorrow (crosses fingers).

Off to start a Life 2, Nature 2, Sorcery 2, Chaos 1, Runemaster, Artificier, Node Mastery, Alchemist game with Halflings :P
 

chzr

Scholar
Joined
Jun 26, 2010
Messages
1,238
Zeus said:
It's a hell of a lot easier to get Master of Magic running in DOSBox than DOS. :D

I used to spend *days upon days* messing around with boot disks, editing autoexec files, etc., etc. That game required so much memory it was insane.

Here's some tips for getting Master of Magic to run in DOSBox. I've got a 2.4ghz Pentium IV, which is about five years old, so it should work for anyone with a computer bought this decade.

First of all, I use D-Fend Reloaded. It's the best DOSBox graphical frontend, IMO. Even if you don't use D-Fend Reloaded, you can still take advantage of these settings, just don't ask me for the commands.


CPU
- Emulation Core: Dynamic
- CPU Cycles: 10000

Memory
- Memory (in MB): 16
- Check "Use XMS-Memory"
- Check "Use EMS-Memory"
- Check "Use UMB-Memory"

Graphics
- Window resolution: 640x480
- Fullscreen resolution: 640x480
- Check "Use double buffering"
- Check "Keep correct aspect"
- Render: Overlay
- Video card: VGA
- Scale: Nearest Neighbor upscaling with a factor of 2 (normal 2x)
- Frameskip: 0

The most important settings are "Render: Overlay" and "Emulation core: Dynamic," both of which really speed things up for me.

The only thing to remember is you'll need the latest version of DOSBox, 0.72, because earlier versions had trouble with the dynamic core and Master of Magic.

Enjoy!


Here's my tip:

1) unzip moo to x:\moo
2) open dosbox:
mount c x:\moo
c:
magic

Enjoy!
 

mornick

Scholar
Joined
Jun 10, 2010
Messages
178
My preferred custom setup is:

Portrait - Rjak (since he won't have anything I can trade for if he appears in the game)
Books: 4 Life, 1 Nature, 1 Sorcery, 1 Chaos
Retorts: Warlord, Archmage, Node mastery
Race: High men

Paladin power FTW - add crusade for maximum carnage.
Research arcane spells first - they are guaranteed and then trade them for spells you haven't got in your own books (reading the glyphs on undiscovered spells in your spellbook (F3) is pretty easy - and it allows for true munchkinism!)

Alternative - forego node mastery and the sorcery and chaos books, choose alchemy and more life/nature books. That makes the early game easier - alchemy is very nice indeed. Alas, you'll have less magical power and you won't be able to trade as many spells with other wizards.
 

Fowyr

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Mar 29, 2009
Messages
7,671
Zeus said:
The game was pretty heavily patched after its initial release.
Yeah, many creatures was changed and bugs squashed. Most obnoxious for me was bug when your enemy gains suppres magic, wind mastery and several other global enchantments. And dispel enchantment causes game to crash 95% of the time.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,983
I liked getting the runemaster and artificer traits, so I could crank out crazy strong items, then I'd focus on getting a single absurdly overpowered hero to mop up the whole game.
 

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