Categories
PC Gaming

Master of Magic Classic

Funny enough, I did manage to enjoy the original Master of Magic. But only after playing Master of Magic 2022, as it explains a lot of mechanics.
There is “continue move” in the original, just somewhat hidden. And there’s also auto-build, called “Grand Visier”. But you cannot turn it for a specific city. Everything or nothing.
Slightly annoying that heroes sometimes lose artifacts when they die. Although I guess this has to do with the artifact being owned by “neutral” faction. Save often.
Completed my first game with elves, and they are awesome, just as I expected. Decimated everything with my longbowmen. Also randomly found a Ring of Invulnerability, which is quite literally makes a hero invulnerable to most types of attacks 😬 That sure helped a lot.

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There are some issues with the generated maps being mostly islands. AI is quite good at managing naval raids. But for me, it was very cumbersome to put my heroes on ships.
I also slightly understand some players razing most of the cities. CPU is very good at finding underdefended towns, and recapturing them. No town – no problem.

Categories
PC Gaming

Master of Magic

One design choice that I find questionable is that the dungeon drops are not prerolled. That means every time you load a save file, you can get completely different set of outcomes from the same dungeon.

 

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All units in the game have to-hit. But the weird thing is that the default to-hit is 30%. Which means that units miss a lot.
The is surprising amount of attention to counter magic. In addition to both combat and global map dispells, there is also an entire mechanic to fail enemy spells before they are being cast.

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It is somewhat of a problem how slow the game is. It takes a lot of turns to get started and hire at least one hero. Then it took me about 200 turns to best 3 of my opponents. And I didn’t even get to research yhr Spell of Mastery, which is the alternative way to end the game. Not even mentioning casting it, which probably would have taken even longer.

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Part of the fun, I guess, is also to create things that are intentionally broken. You can summon heroes like Torin, essentially an avatar, already extremely powerful, then craft artifacts that grant him invincibility against most types of harm. All you need is enough time.

Categories
PC Gaming

Master of Magic

Master of Magic was one of the favorite games of my childhood. Since apparently there’s now a remake, the original one was rename to Master of Magic Classic.

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I don’t understand how did I manage to play it as a kid, without any manual and not understanding much English. Because as an adult 25 years later, I got wiped out on my first turns, and couldn’t figure out how to build more soldiers.

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The remake feels like an improvement in all areas. There are now battle outcome predictions. And build queues for cities. And you can also let AI manage city development. And you have “continue move”, so you don’t need to remember where your army was heading.

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The game mechanics are a bit weird. It’s mostly based around special scout units, spirits. Only they can capture mana nodes for some reasons. Mana nodes are the main sources of mana. And since the game is called Master of Magic, mana is very important. With enough mana, you can summon phantom units during battle. Meaning that it’s enough to have just a single flying spirit and enough mana to wreak havoc and capture some villages.