Master of Magic
 

Feel free to comment and discuss this game here. Also, if you have any useful tips or tricks don't hesitate to share them with the others! Thanks!

Review and Download (if available)

Yeah, now you have that jewel of the game here! Have fun with it, anyone! :D
Btw, my advise is: choose Myrran-ability and take as race the Night Elves, they produce one magic point per population and their ranged units (magicians, clerics etc.) are more powerful than any of the other races.

Oh Master of Magic is simply the best game in the world, i've been playing it for years!!

You guys might have some trouble running the game smoothly with sound, but it is possible using only VDMSound and some tweaking to the properties, if anyone needs help making it work i'd be glad to be of assistance, i just got it to work on my computer with sound without DosBox a little while ago.

In DosBox it still runs better than under Windows...

Not true, you can make it work with just VDMS and it runs just like the original, sound and everything.

I play every game on this site in DOSbox. I know know... I'm starting to sound like a commercial for the program :P

yeeeeeeessssss!!!! :P
Anather great stratagey game added to the site! I just love this game! :D

The other thing its got going for it is it isn\'t an adventure game :roll:

Just sad, that even in it's final patched, last version it's still quite buggy... :roll:

DosBox is amazing, but sometimes the speed in the game doesn't adjust to the sound of it so it runs kind of clunky (as is the case in Master of Magic), it doesn't run as smooth as it can on just VDMS. Problem is, it's kind of tricky to get the settings for it to actually run without DosBox, but the effort is well worth it for this game :)

I had little trouble getting it to run smoothly even in its unpatched state. Must be something about my computer. One of the greatest games ever made.

Even in it's unpatched state? Heh, the unpatched state is there to make troubles only - better you patch it. :wink:

Yep excellent game
Great review Picard!

Also every Dark elf unit has ranged atack. But other Myrran races also are extremly tough. Trols with their regeneration are almost imortal when yuo cast few spels on them. Dragon untis can fly so they don`t need ships.

Is there any way to run MoM more smoothly in DOSbox? I run it and my mouse goes over the letter then about 1- 1 1/2 seconds later it follows creating "lag" *shudder*. My computer is alot better than that :P so I dont know why Im getting some crappy performance. Any assistance?

You can increase the CPU-cycles in DosBox with CTRL+F12 and decrease with CTRL+F11, but don't set them higher than your CPU can handle, else it will be even slower again.
The only other way to play Master of Magic is to run it in the Dos-prompt in Windows 98, but then it's little too fast there, so you'll need Slowdown for Windows: http://newton.pbk-solutions.de/ncu_nbu/slowdown.htm
It won't even run under Windows XP by the sound turned off, I think... ;)

Master of Magic has an absurdly high conventional memory requirement. There is no way you could get it to run under any version of windows because of that. You will need a fairly good computer to get it to run smoothly under DOSBox. I'dd say a 1.2 Ghrz will do the trick.

No other game could drag me to computer like this one, and I played a lot of good games. Still, I guess there some good things when you live in poor country, like the fact that I still got Intell Pentium 133Mhz. Yap, I can play EVERY SINGLE GAME ON THIS SITE. Don't worry, I'll enjoy for everyone. pozzz

Well surely one of the best and most inovative strategy games around as I have rarely heard so many different opinions about the "only" way to win the game!

It is realy sad there was never a real sequal, altough when thinking more closly about it, it might be better that way!
( remmember Orion III)

:wall:

I personally love this game...


All i wanted to say LOL

Picard, i can run it with xp smooth as ever...

I used to play as the Trolls. May not have been the best choice from a strategic point of view, but in unit battles you could often just hit the other guy, run around until you healed, hit them again, rinse and repeat. :)

I played this game... ooh, ages ago, but I could have sworn there was an option to create a new wizard, or at least customise them (selecting their schools of magic, special abilities etc) am I wrong, or is it here somewhere?

I see the itemmake command is still there for creating absurdly powerful artefacts tho...

You can't make a custom Wizard on Intro difficulty, you have to be playing Easy or higher.

One of the best games ever made--if only the AI had been up to everything else. ;) Hopefully, Stardock's MoM 2 will be better in that respect.

O_M_G they're working on a sequel :blink: ?? Let there be singing in the streets!

Sequel????? WOW

I hope they won't get too much busy with make-up.....

now this is news

This is what I found out about it. Seems possible but nothing final.

"There is nothing official going on yet with Master of Magic.
We're still in negotiation with Atari on it. There probably won't be
"news" real soon as these kinds of licenses tend to be lengthy and
complicated to nail down and agree to (how many "Expansion packs"
are allowed, can it be distributed electronically? How will it be handled
on TotalGaming.net?, etc.). But we will try to set up MasterOfMagic.com soon
so that there's a forum there for people to discuss things. Until then, it's oaky
to talk here about what you'd like in there. But for those people looking for
a radical change, that's not going to happen. We *like* Master of Magic. We
just think it needs updated graphics and effects and a better computer AI and
maybe a few new building and units or something. We don't want a MOO3
type scenario where the basic game is being changed. Stardock diabolical
plan is to bring turn based strategy games back to the norm.
And one way we think that can be helped is with a new Master of Magic done RIGHT.
And that means not messing around with what made it a good game in the first place.
And unlike most developers, Stardock can pay for its own development on its own so no would-be publisher can force us to
"modernize" the game play.
We're going to focus on making a fantasy strategy game that adheres to the spirit.
That doesn't mean a MOM from Stardock is going to just be a MOM clone down to the nth degree.
I'm sure there will be lots of nitpicking because we'll make some tweak to the game (for instance we might mess around with some of the spells a bit)."

Negotiations for the MoM license and other Microprose titles have broken down in the past. Keep your fingers crossed, true believers."

From The unofficial Master of Magic 2 page

Edit:
THIS seems to be a Master of Magic fan project.

Hi, somebody know how to play this game in multiplayer?
the Review says that the game includes a multiplayer feature, but i can`t find it.

Sorry for my english, I`m argentinian (that country in south america) so i only know English from games, internet, and television.

that is great news - really it is the MOM sequel - still it could take a while and quite a few open source clones now also exist so if you want to try em out or contribute graphics, coding programming bug tesing wise head over to sourceforge.net.

From very reliable sources at Stardock, I can tell you that the game is being worked on. The project director told me about a year ago, when they were first in negotiations on the title, that since the AI was the difficult part, it wouldn't be that hard for them. I think he was boasting: there are far more variables in MoM than in Galactic Civilizations, and making any AI able to play well on a level field with humans is going to be tough. Still--if anybody can do it, Stardock can. I just hope they don't shortchange it in other regards.

Actually, there's no multiplayer mode originally. But you can download a Multiplayer Shell for the game at The Underdogs

this game is so addicting! its definitley the greatest one i played in the last year (who the f*ck needs doom3?)

the only question is: does anybody know where to get the handbook? scanned, as pdf? i'd be very grateful for that!

thx, stef

I have the manual for this game

thanks a lot, but after reading a guide on the web i figured out how the game works. manual isn't needed anymore.

lmasters of magic - the complete guide

It's extremely good, but it's also very opinionated. I found a few inaccurate statements, and a lot that the author admits is simply his take on various tactics in battle. The manual will actually provide the basics that let you formulate your own strategies--and that's all to the good.

There's hardly a better oldgame than this one. (Or any game at all for that matter)

Master of Orion II and Wizardry 7 maybe, but that's about it.

I actually bought it TWICE, first the disc version ( one of the discs died a couple of years ago). A while later I found the CD version for 5 bucks and bought it again.

Even 10 years later I still play it.

Awesome.

playing a game now on level 3 and it seems that the turtle dragon + stone skin is quite powerfull and barbarians as a race kind of sucks , tried to take over a lizard city and took me like 3x 9 units barbarians(even with the berserkers it was tough) + warbears , but as soon as i got the city i started making the dragon turtle and it seems almost unbeatable if you stack 4 or 5 of them togeter (and use stone skin) you can easely take over most cities

are there other normal units that have about the same strength as the turtle dragon ? and it seems that the patches have improved (made them stronger ) the heroes that's cool they used to go down way too easy

and i have another question , haven't been able to test this with the version i dled , but on my other comp i couldn't find a single benefit for a city wall , i know it's supposed to protect you but it only seemed to help the opponent and not me , does it give extra defense or so cause whenever one of my cities got attacked and i had a wall that wall only made my troops sitting ducks and didn't do anything to add defense ?

and in combat does it matter on what terrain you are ? is there more chance to not get hit if you are on a space with trees than something else ? or is that just a graphical add on that doesn't make a difference ?

Of the normal units with the very good strength I know of two. First, the Stag Beetle of the klakons. Very strong in combat + fire breath. Second, and this ones are the gods in calculated combat, are the paladins of the humans. Pierce, magic immune, strong enough, protected enough. You'll see. ;)

And about the city wall, I think it's there for the buildings of the city not being destroyed after a combat, should an enemy enter your town during it, but I'm not 100% sure.

uhm humans ??? i can't pick that race .... where do you find that race ?

Should be High Humans above / below High Elves. :huh:

And dont forget dark elf warlocks....Best normal unit in the game.....

ah yes i found the race , it's called "high men" thanks , will have to try that race some time

Two of them behind some melee protectors + 1-2 dark elf priests, and you can clear off many dungeons where you won't meet exactly 5 great wyrms (met them once, needed 2 good heroes to clean it off :blink:) or 3 great drakes.

Yup.With 8 warlocks and one hero,I was able to shoot down 3 Behemots and Colosus.But again enemy with magic imunity are warlocks (And whole dark elven race) useless

wow you were right about the paladins ... they are very strong , i don't have a unit that can match their strength , one paladin destroyed 4 turtle dragons yikes

kind of weird , paladins don't seem that strong but in combat it seems they are very very strong

haven't had a chance to fight a warlock though , guess i will have to try them myself and pick the other world to start a game ....

are there people here who would want to play a multi-player game ? and how many can join a multi-player game ? can you also play with 2 real players and 3 AI's ?

The biggest effect from walls is when you're up against ranged attackers (archers and such, or any unit with a ranged magical attack): walls will protect the units inside, though there's quite a random factor included.
Also, if you're defending and one of your units is significantly stronger than the others, place that behind the gap in the wall, forcing all non-flying units to fight your strongest unit first.
Besides, enemy units running around in your town during combat, will increase the chances of buildings being destroyed. Walls help to keep them out.
But honestly, I never bother building any walls :D

Multiplayer in Mom??!!!! :blink: How??? Where??? When?? :w00t:
Of course I would want to play!!!!! :drool:

Look here:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=687
Under the "extras" you can download the Multiplayer Shell. Though I didn't use it at all, and can't help with it in any way, sorry. ;)

k this multiplayer thing doesn't seem that easy to use ... any help from someone who already tried it ? and are there people who would want to try a multi player game ?

if so you can either answer here or pm me

am i asking this in the right forum section or should i start a new topic somewhere else btw ?


btw i do have the complete manual for this game if anyone needs it , i don't know if it's the manual for the final version though

As I already said I would LOVE to play mom in multiplayer.But I cant help you with mom shell:I read the readme file and i think it is very unclear and foggy(at least for me).Try to start new topic in multiplayer:challenges or general talk

I still remember it but haven't played it for some years, the best race is definitely dwarven, and the unit you'll get most out of are hammerhands they can beat anything easily and can be produced quickly.
Just choose myran, warlord, famous and charismatic (i think, the one where mercanaries cost half price), 4 or 5 books sorcery, and dwarwen.
Dwarven mine double of whatever resources you have, and you will have the first city almoust always by some resource if you are dwarven so you will have loads of money to buy mercenaries and game over, you win. Always keep one hero slot open so better can come, but you must not refuse heroes or they will be offered again, hire them and send them to die while they are still weak.
Have one army, couple of hammerhands and heroes who gain experiance, with warlord heroes get strong really quick.
I have played loads of games to try to have all six heroes extra rare, but i still think i have seen all but one, which never came.
I have actualy once found a file where all heroes where listed so thats how i know.
But palladins I have never found to be anything special, probably cause rarely played with human, warlocks are very good because of doombolt :w00t:

The palladins' strength is in their 'first strike' ability. They basicly get to deal all their damage before the enemy gets to strike back. So, the four figures would make 8(is this their attack, can't recall?), yeah, 8*0.4*4 ~= 13 damage. That damage is applied, and only then whoever remains gets to retaliate. IF someone remains! ;) They also get magic immunity, so you can pretty much waltz to any ranged magical unit and beat the living hell out of them. Shamans or priests could very well beat even hammerhands if there are enough of them. But one palladin unit wipes the floor with them.

You have to be careful with units that have 'negate first strike' like pikemen, though. And also those with thrown, breath, etc. ability. That's what makes barbarians so kickass. They suck for building or money or research, but they get thrown attack, and if you train and enchant them up enough they can kill things really well.

I always focus on heroes with ranged attacks, then beef them up with some artifacts. Then just hit and run. Sometimes it's a bit tricky to stay out of reach of several drakes, and it's risky if your opponent starts casting cracks call, but otherwise this method works fine for me.

For abilities I almost always pick artificer, plus the one that lowers the casting cost and upkeep of summoned creatures.
Once I was lucky to find the right retorts when exploring ruins and such, providing me with a very profitable loop: create artifact, sell it for more than it costs you to cast it, etc. Of course it still costs time, but it was nice nonetheless.

How many times did you die using that?

Just wondering....

Infact magic immunity provides immunity also againts all breath,gaze etc attacks...
That is why are paladins so strong.Units like drakes,chaos spawns etc..That kill almost every unit just with their gazes/breaths MUST enter melee attack with them.And in some causes(chaos spawn) is it their doom.Btw magic immunity enchantment is also resistent to dispel magic spells... :woot:
Sorcery Rulez!!! :brain:
Btw one advice to all ranged heroes players.Recuit some missle ranged heroes(tj with bow slot,fo example shuri...)And create bow with haste ability...They will be able to shot twice per turn :max: .Unfortunetly you cant put haste enchantment on staff or wands...

Rarely. For me the earliest stages were always the most critical.

i used to play with barbarians all the time , but their thrown weapon is nothing when they fight paladins , i killed 9 berserkers with 2 or 3 paladins and no damage LOL , barbs are pretty weak later in the game even when behind a citywall , my tactic with barbs was usually to conquer some other races early on as soon as i got some decent army , so i could get a strong unit from another race

doombolts seem good for defense behind a wall , paladins can't attack them so if you place the doombolt where the opening in the wall is you are safe against certain attackers as long as no ranged attacks of course , but stagbeetles will destroy them and doombolts kind of suck if they attack , just my experience

for a wizard i love ariel or freya , maybe cause i don't like the other ones ... , but also cause of their spells in battle , paladin + iron skin and you have a unit that is almost unbeatable ... except indeed when you fight units with pierced armor like pikemen ... or ranged attacks with rocks

about heroes i am still thinking they are not that strong , but after a citywall they can kick behind with their ranged attacks esp if you have some other strong units to defend against melee attacks


i think overall you need a good strategy and there is no "unbeatable" unit , some are strong but they all have a weakness somewhere , even paladins or stagbeetles and i am sure warlocks have one too , you just need to find the right unit , same goes for the races , some are good early on and you need to use that advantage and others you want to make peace early on and wait for their "super unit"


but it's nice to hear strategies from others , i want to repeat my request though , is there anyone who can help me out with the multiplayer ... you can dl it from another site , the link is somewhere in this thread , but i am not sure how to do this and still looking for some players who want to try it too

Disadvantage of warlocks-they sucks in melee combat.If they met a unit with teleport/merging they are killed pretty quickly.That also counts on creatures with big movement.Also they are defenseless against magic immunity.So they dont stand a chance against paladins,giant wyrms,Storm Drakes(Most powerful unit in game,almost unbeatable)heroes or units with haste etc...
From my experiences best unit against paladin(except of heroes) are longbowmen and slingers or steam cannons if you are Myrran.They all have powerful non-magic range attack.Btw High Elven Longbowmen are probably one of the best unit in game-they are relativ cheap,you need just to build a sawmill to produce them and they are probably most powerful non-magical ranged unit.

Yessss :D
Slingers and Longbowmen are best ranged non magical units.

i love halflings if not myrran.

But what do you mean heroes are week ???
:blink:
I don't even bother much with non heroes.

Only one good equipes super hero kills all sky drakes you can throw.
Jaer the Wind Mage at the begining is excellent, and if you don't get him need to hire air ships to transport troops.

...Am I the only one who loves dwarven ?...
:ph34r:

Do you mean Warlocks? 'Doombolt' is not a unit; it is an attack. The Dark Elves' Warlocks have an attack called Doom Bolt. This is the same as the Chaos spell called, Doom Bolt.

In any case, I am not so sure that Warlocks make the best City defenders (or even good city defenders). Warlocks melee attack got nerfed in v1.2, ATT=1! You should definitely use something meatier to defend your cities. Just about every unit in the game is meatier than Warlocks, so you have alot to choose from. But if you absolutely must have a magic ranged attacker as a city defender, go with the High Men Magicians. They are the best ranged magic attack normal unit in the game. They also have 6 figures, so its not only a better magic ranged attack, but they are also a bit heartier.

Warlocks are still a great unit. They have the second best magic ranged attack RA=8.4 (second only to the Hgh Men Magicians RA=9.0). And on the first turn they can cast their Doom Bolt spell, for a guaranteed automatic 10 damage. I think the best use for Warlocks is as City siege units. They have Missile Immunity, so they have very little to fear from Bows and they have 4 DEF and 9 RES so they have above average defense against magical attacks. If you can give them Magic Immunity, Invisibility, Elemental Armor, Invulnerability or Lionheart, that would make them the ultimate city siege unit.

This game is immense! The variety of spells and monsters is awesome! It's really different game if you change the difficulty level you know.

Doombolt is probably best attack in the game.If you have 6 warlocks you can cast 6 doombolts on the first turn(10 damage,regadless of armor) or even 7 if you are chaos wizard.That will decimate a LOT of enemy troops.And then,they are STILL one of the best magical ranged units,so they wouldnt have many problems with survivors... :twisted:
They are definetly better than highmen magicans!

When I played this game and I was about 12 it seemed like the most amazing game I ever played. But I think it lacks certain aspects late game.

Been playing this game on impossible. At the beginning, it is very hard. Start an early war with another Wizard and you are toast, and if you play with magic on powerful, the opposing Wizard can kill your heros at the beginning of the battles.

But I think as with games like Civilisation, it gets too easy once you have decent units. You can just send stacks of 9 Paladin/Turtle/Stag Beetles and they beat the crap out of any army. Any injured units you rotate with fresh units to allow them to heal.

Plus you don't have to kill every single city. Simply find what is usually the biggest city, destroy that and you've banished the enemy wizard. Along the way, many of the enemy units don't even try to stop you.

The most fun part is taking over nodes in Myrran, the monsters in some of these nodes are really difficult.

Having said that. I think this game will be the best game around for multiplayer. With the number of spells and units available, if you had human opponents to play against, it will generate days and days of fun.

Yeah.But it look like noone want to play it at all.Dunno why :blink:

hey i still want to try multiplayer as soon as someone helps me with the issue of how to start a game and how the turns go and such ....



and about this doombolt , ok i been fighting against some unit called "doombolt" it looks like a bird i think , so not sure what you are talking about that it is a spell ...


and about the AI , i think the problem is not late game but midgame , once you start taking over cities from wizards they seem not able to reconquer them if you have enough defense in those cities and i have yet to see an attack against my capital in midgame ... but that's probably cause they don't use ships very well as far as i see they make 9 triremes and they are just sitting there doing nothing ... if the AI would use those triremes it would be a whole other story , would be suddenly alot tougher to win i think ...

No No No.That unit was DoomBat.A crappy chaos monster.Doombolt is offensive spell that made 10 damge to each figure in the unit regadless of armor=dead unit(mostly :D )

Whether midgame or late game. Paladins are the most unbalanced units I've ever seen in a game. Stack of 4-5 can beat any army the computer has. Stack of 9 can be rotated so you basically do not lose a single unit in a battle.

I would love to play multiplayer with anyone here. How do we start? Also, bare in mind a multiplayer game will take days or weeks to complete.

you need to download the multiplayer from the underdogs site , the link is somewhere in this thread ... on page 3 or 4 i think .. , i have dled it but i am not sure how to start a game .... it seems quite complicated , but if you want to play then we have already 3 players , just need someone who can tell how it works LOL , maybe on the underdogs site there is more info or so will check ...


if you think you know how to start a multiplayer feel free to either pm me or put it in this thread :D

Try 8 halflings with +2 enchanted bullets, carried anywhere on the map by the Wind Mage. They can even take on and defeat a wyrm.

Three players? Who? O.o
Btw if someone PM you and explains how it works dont forget to PM me and invite me to your game :D

@Borodin Halfing slingers are very strong but I just hate them :ranting:
Ugly,stupid hairy small critters!!! :rant:

I haven't sussed dosbox for this game (as in nosound) so if you'd post the vdm solution I'd be grateful, I run on a twiddled to bits xp.

I love this game, one of my absolute favourites.
I always play the orcs, because they can build all the buildings on the cities. (Yeah, who cares about strategy, when you can build magic stables and all!) And when choosing all the powers at the beginning, with the books, I only choose one power, usually Nature, Chaos or Death. I never choose Life. I guess that reveals something about my personality, I just have no idea what it would be. LOL

I remember that for the first few years of playing I didn't understand that the Magic Spirits can meld to the nodes and make more magic. I has that button on the lower-right corner, but I alwasy thought it said 'held'. Then just one day I clicked it and whoopsie, the spirit melted and turned into a cloud of magical stars LOL

Also, funny thing happens sometimes, I guess it's only on the easy-mode or something... when I explore the terrain all around, a small outpost by other wizard appears with only one house in the middle. I attact the city and raze it, and the wizard is destroyed. Easy. But this only works if there is only one house in the town. If there is more, the wizad will stay alive and get very mad.

I have also tried to look for the tales behind the wizards from all kinds of books about mythology. I found some of them, but some are still unknown. The search continues. I have never tried to find them from the internet though. Now I know what I will be doing for the rest of the night. :ok:

I read that MoM walktrough/FAQ someone posted a link to earlier on this thread, and there was some talk about life stealer. What the heck is that? Kills settlers? I have never came across any of those.

Could that be the life stealing ability of some death creatures? Though I don't remember their names.

When setting the sound options during the mom setup I choose "old" for the sound blaster type and left the other settings at default. I also used XP's compatability option (via properties) on the exe file, setting it to 98, enabeling hma and putting all the memory settings to auto. It then ran perfectly in DosBox.

I always thought the beetles were best. They have a ton of hit points and damage
I always won easily with a beetle army

I just run around with beefed up heroes, but I actually found a difficult battle ... I was fighting two sky drakes ... they have four movement so they reached me after a first round of my shots. i usually could take one out but the second one always got an attack off and killed my hero. these heros (4 of them) were all demi-gods and had all the most powerful items i created. and i had every spell i knew casted on each one ....

i think there might be a glitch or error with the invulnerability spell though it says the first two attacks to a unit with it are completely disregarded. but the drakes attacks still killled my hero.... any1 know whats up with that?

I found a neat thing out ...If you Customize a wizard and choose all Perks and dont actually choose any magic books you can research the two quickest things and after that Spell of Mastery will be available and you will be able to start researching it way before you should... It might be tough to stick it out without having any magic spells but just get some strong units protecting your city and then have another beefed up unit go out exploring it worked for me on Hard. Its easier cause you got many Perks too.

There is an error. After all, as you might have noticed, even the final patched version is still somewhat buggy. And there's no patch anymore, so yes, invulnerability is a pretty useless spell / magic item feature as it does nothing. But Wraithform (or whatever it's called) if pretty useful. ;)

Hello to everyone. Just wanted to post that I have found an easy way to get sound in MOM. Just open the mom Install file with Dosbox. (Replace the mom.exe on last line of Dosbox config with the line Install.exe.) this will open up the sound menu. Select your soundcard, do so twice, once for music, then for effects. Exit Install. Then go back to Dosbox config and replace Install.exe with MOM.exe. Create a shortcut to Dosbox on your desktop and run. Bingo----SOUND!! Actually VDM sound will run the game faster than Dosbox! So after running the Install in Dosbox, just run the game with VDM sound. Hope this helps anyone who needs it.

My understanding of the invulnerabilty spell (a "rare" life spell) is that it subtracts 2 damage from ANY attack. So if a hero with 10 health and invulnerabilty spell on him got hit by a doom bolt spell (a "rare" chaos spell) it would (in theory) only do 8 damage instead of 10. This would also apply to melee attacks (as I said it supposedly affects all attacks).

As for why your hero got smashed by a great drake... that isn't that surprising. Great Drakes normally have a fire breath attack of 30 and a melee attack of 30. (when at a chaos node, as they often are, the node's aura will boost their attacks by 2). You may also notice (if you happen to right-mouse-click on a great drake in combat) that they are +3 (plus three) to hit. The default "to hit" for all creatures in the game is 30%. A +3 to hit creature is 60% "to hit" (yeah each +1 is actually 10 percent. and yes, I know it is a bit of a silly combat system). So......

The short version is that a great drake (not at a chaos node) would do (on average) :

Fire breath: 30 * 0.6 = 18 damage.
Melee damage: 30 * 0.6 = 18 damage.

For a total of 36 health in damage. (this is why you normally don't want to thumb-wrestle great drakes. Shoot them from far away. And unless your name is Torin, don't fight them in melee).

So invulnerabilty would subtract 2 points from each attack. Making the total (on average) damage done by a great drake 32. This is enough to crush almost every hero easily.

As an aside, (yeah I can ramble forever) defense works in the same way that attack does. If your hero has a defense of 10, he/she will on average block about 3 health from every attack. (10 * 0.3 = 3.33...). The default "to hit" for DEFENSE is the same as the default "to hit" for ATTACK. Very few things modify this defensive "to hit" (essentially how effective each of those little shield icons are). The "lucky" ability (that halflings and some heroes have) is one. The prayer spell (an "uncommon" life spell) is another.

While an invulnerabilty spell will not allow your typical hero to go headbutt a great drake (no spell can, although invisibility spell will at least let him/her throw things at it from a safe distance) neither will wraith form (a "rare" death spell). In fact, wraith form's (one of death magics few "blessing" type spells) defensive aspects are generally only useful on very weak units.

Wraithform gives the target "weapon immunity". This raises a unit's defense to 10 against creatures not using: magic, mithril, or adamantite weapons. Three points here: 1. The defensive bonus is not that great. A defense of ten will only block about three damage on average. 2. Any opponent with the "alchemy wizard skill" (such as Jafar) will have ALL of their units with at least magic weapons. Moreover any town with an alchemists guild will create units with at least magic weapons (and mithril or adamantite if near those mineral deposits). 3. Heroes that live long enough will typically have defenses well over 10.

Wraithform IS USEFUL however in that it makes units (heroes in particular) non-corporeal. The major benefits of this are that the unit is immune to the web spell ("common" nature spell, also used by giant spiders), the cracks call spell ("uncommon" nature spell), and gains both the water walking and pathfinding ability.

Normally water-walking and pathfinding is an ideal way to get around however, non-corporeal units cannot benefit from magic roads. If however, the non-corporeal unit simply travels with a corporeal unit, then they CAN use magic roads.

The wizard customization is one of the many truly great features about this game IMHO.

The no spell book route can certainly be tough going. You start on the myrran plane with a myrran race (trolls or dwarves make good selections for this particular setup). You won't be able to cast any spells to help your units in combat (except for dispel magic and disenchant area...). It is true you can find spell books in nodes and some lairs, but those tend to be tougher fights. Moreover while you can START researching the spell of mastery relatively soon, you won't necessarily finish any sooner than you otherwise would.

The research cost of EVERY spell that you RESEARCH (not trade for or find) is subtracted from the research cost of the spell of mastery. So the more spells you research PRIOR to researching the spell of mastery, the less expensive it is when you finally do research it.

That being said, if you want to try the game casting very very very few spells, this is a good way to do it.


Some things to keep in mind:

The difficulty settings. Successful tactics at one setting may not be successful on another. The nodes and lair fights will become progressively more difficult as you go from "intro" to "impossible" settings. Also while the AI does not necessarily get better they certainly get more bonuses as the difficulty setting goes up:

At the impossible setting enemy wizards get several advantages. They start with more initial "picks". Meaning they can start with more spellbooks and special abilities (like alchemy, or archmage, or conjurer, etc). Moreover their "picks" are not bound by normal selection rules. For example, normally you'd need 1 or more spellbook in chaos, nature, and sorcery magic in order to select the "nodemaster" pick. Also, if you've played much on the impossible setting you may wonder how they can afford/feed their vast armies (usually of spearmen or something equally silly... but they DO have a lot of them). The enemy wizards get large "bonus" multipliers to their gold, food, and mana incomes. Spellbooks give you 1 "powerbase" each (the powerbase is just the total of all of your magical "income" from shrines, temples, nodes, certain races (dark elves, draconians, beastmen, high elves), and mineral deposits (mithril, adamantite, and the crystals found in deserts), volcanoes you've raised also add 1 each. The enemy wizards get something like 4 times that for each. This is why it is usually a good idea to keep nodes out of the hands of enemy wizards (the benefit to you is great, but what it takes away from them is greater still). Warp node (a "rare" death spell) is particularly useful in this regard. Particularly when you can "explore" the planes with the earth lore spell (a "common" nature spell).

I am captain typo (Vebose = Verbose) such is life.

Life steal is an ability possessed by some summoned death creatures (and one hero) and is also a "common" (level 1) death spell.

Chaos, Death, Nature, and Sorcery. All have at least one "direct" damage type of attack spell where increased mana into the spell (generally) yields more damage.

Death's is "life drain" although adding more mana supposedly affects how well a target can "resist" each point of life drain.

Chaos has "fire bolt", "lightning bolt", and "fireball" (doom bolt, and warp lightning cannot be "increased" in effect by adding more mana)

Nature has "ice bolt"

Sorcery has "psionic blast" (darn you Jafar, that's the 5th hero you've killed today)


Life drain unlike the others has the interesting property of bringing "Normal units" (not summoned units, like hell hounds, or sky drakes. And not heroes) killed "mostly" through life drain back from the dead to serve in your army. This spell is very useful, especially at the lower difficulty settings. And especially when used against weak normal units in enemy/neutral towns. Undead troops don't heal, but don't have any maintenence costs. They DO however reduce unrest in towns (just like all normal units) by 1 unrest for every 2 normal units.

If you end combat with 9 units (the maximum you can have at any one "tile") then any undead units won't show up. Just like you won't get any "prisoner" heroes from lairs to join you if you have 9 overland units at the end of combat.


The hero I mentioned earlier is actually a "champion" that you can either summon with the summon champion spell or might come around and ask to be hired if you have high enough fame. Although he won't do either if you don't have at least 1 death spell book. His normal name is Ravashack and is a "necromancer". He is similar to the hero Malleus in that he ALWAYS has the arcane power skill (a nice feature for caster types). As already stated, he also has the life drain ability at a range and in melee (although his melee attack is normally pretty pathetic). If you somehow manage to get Ravashack early in the game he can create large armies instantly out of the dying enemies in the neutral and enemy towns. While by no means the most powerful hero in the game, he is certainly entertaining and fun.

The "monsters" or summoned units with the life drain ability are Demon Lords, Death Knights, and Wraiths. Demon Lords and Death Knights are both "very rare" (level 4) death spells. So they normally aren't summoned until later in the game. But wraiths are a "rare" death spell (level 3). So if you begin the game with 11 death spell books you could select them as a starting spell.

Wraiths are basically ideal for conquering neutral towns. (and converting some of the enemy troops there into loyal death units).


BTW spells are grouped into 4 levels for each type. Level 1 or "common" spells are the most common, least expensive to research and cast, and in general the least powerful. Next is "uncommon", "rare", and "very rare". Their are 10 spells of each type at each level. So... their are 10 common death spells, 10 uncommon death spells, etc. etc. Just as their are 10 very rare nature spells... or chaos

Depending on what you select for your wizard during game setup, you can start with vastly different numbers and strengths of spells.

Ten spell books of any one type of spell book will guarantee that you will have research access to ALL SPELLS of that type. So why take 11 books in any one type? Two reason mainly... With more than 7 books in any type, spells of that type cost less to research and cast. But also you can begin the game with ALL of the common spells for that type, two uncommon spells, and one rare spell. This is an excellent way to get an idea of what spells are like for each of the spell books.

If you take less than 10 spell books for a particular type, you are not guranteed to be able to research all of the spells of that type. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can also trade for and find spells (of any level) if you have even 1 book of a particular type.

Some fun starting selections:

Take 11 life spell books. Choose "true sight" and "prayer" as your uncommon spells, and choose "Torin" as your rare spell. (this is particularly nasty if Torin has both "agility" and "lucky" skills).

Take 11 sorcery spell books. Choose "flight" and "phantom beast" for your uncommon spells, and choose "invisibility" as your rare spell. Flying invisible heroes are very difficult for most enemies to attack. This works well for ranged magic type heroes. "Spell lock" is also nice for those pesky "dispel" and "disenchant" spells cast by opponents.

Take 3 chaos, 2 nature, 3 sorcery, artificer, runemaster, node master. You start the game with create artifact spell. And more importantly can create artifacts for a profit. (actually any combination that uses the "runemaster" and "artificer" picks will allow you to do this). If you make a sword that costs 100 mana to create, you can break it on the anvil for 200 mana. Once you get a hero (any will do really) you can boost them up with some crazy artifacts.

Dark elves are great fun. Of particular interest are their night blades. These units cost 2 gold and 1 food to maintain (modest). But have the invisibility ability. Meaning only undead, creatures with true sight spell, (and sky drakes, and (arch?)angels) can see them. They are great for protecting nodes from enemy troops and spirits. They can also make effective "walls" at choke points to prevent enemy troops from freely passing through. And because they are invisible, most enemy troops cannot attack them.

Dark elf priests are powerful to be sure. But one could argue that beastmen priests are better because they have twice as many hit points and only one less magic attack strength. As such they tend to be a little more durable. (enemy wizards tend to target priest/shaman/magician/warlock units with direct damage spells. At only 4 hit points for the typical priest unit, this can mean a short combat career).

When playing dark elves keep in mind that they grow "very slowly" meaning they have a -20 per turn growth rate. If you want to take full advantage of their 1 "magical power" per population point (the highest in the game, followed by draconians, beastmen, and high elves, which all yield 1/2 point per population) be sure to plant your settler units in favorable growth rate areas. Choose areas with rivers if you can. And plains if you can't. Stay away from mountainous areas and deserts if you can. (those towns will grow very slowly). Also spells like "change terrain" (nature; uncommon), "gaia's blessing" (nature; rare) and "stream of life" (life; rare) are all great ways to improve growth rates in towns.

For areas that contain "powerbase" generating minerals (mithril, adamantite, quork and cryx crystals). I like to place dwarven settlers if I can (whether they are my "home" race or not. Dwarven towns grow slowly as well, but a well placed dwarven town can easily generate 10 mana per round as soon as it grows to 1 population. Where it would take a dark elf town many many many turns to reach that mana output. And a miner's guild built in a dwarven town will increase their bonus even more.

(no I can't spell Verbose consistently)

My understanding of the invulnerabilty spell (a "rare" life spell) is that it subtracts 2 damage from ANY attack. So if a hero with 10 health and invulnerabilty spell on him got hit by a doom bolt spell (a "rare" chaos spell) it would (in theory) only do 8 damage instead of 10. This would also apply to melee attacks (as I said it supposedly affects all attacks).

As for why your hero got smashed by a great drake... that isn't that surprising. Great Drakes normally have a fire breath attack of 30 and a melee attack of 30. (when at a chaos node, as they often are, the node's aura will boost their attacks by 2). You may also notice (if you happen to right-mouse-click on a great drake in combat) that they are +3 (plus three) to hit. The default "to hit" for all creatures in the game is 30%. A +3 to hit creature is 60% "to hit" (yeah each +1 is actually 10 percent. and yes, I know it is a bit of a silly combat system). So......

The short version is that a great drake (not at a chaos node) would do (on average) :

Fire breath: 30 * 0.6 = 18 damage.
Melee damage: 30 * 0.6 = 18 damage.

For a total of 36 health in damage. (this is why you normally don't want to thumb-wrestle great drakes. Shoot them from far away. And unless your name is Torin, don't fight them in melee).

So invulnerabilty would subtract 2 points from each attack. Making the total (on average) damage done by a great drake 32. This is enough to crush almost every hero easily.

As an aside, (yeah I can ramble forever) defense works in the same way that attack does. If your hero has a defense of 10, he/she will on average block about 3 health from every attack. (10 * 0.3 = 3.33...). The default "to hit" for DEFENSE is the same as the default "to hit" for ATTACK. Very few things modify this defensive "to hit" (essentially how effective each of those little shield icons are). The "lucky" ability (that halflings and some heroes have) is one. The prayer spell (an "uncommon" life spell) is another. [/b][/quote]
Doh. I read the sky drakes as great drakes. Still the math is similar. Only they have a 20 melee attack (also at +3) and a 20 lightning breath (only the lightning breath is armor piercing unlike the great drakes).

not at a sorcery node:

breath 20 * 0.6 = 12
melee 20 * 0.6 = 12

subtract 2 from each attack (from your heroes invulnerability)

leaves 20 damage (on average). Still a lot, and half that is armor piercing (meaning your hero can only "defend" with half of the number of shields that he/she has)

If the drake didn't have to move more than one move (of its 4 total) to attack you, it would be able to attack twice in one round. (for about 40 damage minus your heroes defense).

Depending on which hero it was at demigod level and which artifacts they were carrying... and the random rolls... it could have gone either way. But I think the crux of it is that invulnerabilty does not work quite how you thought it did (by completely removing attacks).

Okey, some things to correct here, as I noticed that during playing the game (and I used to play it maaany times ;)).

Life-Leeching
1. First of all, if a unit or a hero has a life-leeching ability (artifact, skill), the increased chance to hit REDUCES the chance to leech the life (thus also reducing the chance of killing an enemy completely with life-leech). Therefore are the Deathknights and heroes not so good to have this ability - little use of it then, as they have good chance to hit. And the better the chance to hit is, the less the possibility to leech life.
2. Second, the ranged attacks DON'T leech life. No, they don't. I tested that many times, especially on Ravashak when he still was weak and had little chances to hit. Didn't work. Also doesn't work with the Demonlord. (This is a bug)
3. Third, ANY unit can be raised from dead through life-leeching. I was able to have a colossus killed with the wraiths once, and I had him after as an undead unit. But, a summoned unit turned to undead state costs additionally 0.5% of mana to their normal mana cost. Thus useless on summoned units, they're better as non-undead then. Also it works on heroes. Oh yes. Got to love this unique Lifepriestess hero when she passed away with help of the wraiths early in the game.
But the during the combat summoned units can't be raised from death after the combat ends. No way. Tried that with Air Elementals and Earth Elementals. Enemy can have them, but players not (this is a bug).

Invisible Units / unexplored terrain
1. Any invisible unit CAN be seen by computer enemy. You have to think, the computer enemy is the computer that runs the game, and as such he knows and sees everything in the game. Yes, the computer enemy players should behave as if they wouldn't see the invisible units, but they don't in this game. They can see and attack invisible units on the map, just that they "can't see" them in combat (at least that works).
2. Also, the enemy computer players don't need the map / player revealing spells (Nature's Awareness, Awareness, Earth's Lore) as such, they can see every player and every place on the map at once. Just think on Jafar, when he casts his Floating Island near your starting city, should be known to everybody, is a common event. He doesn't have any units near your city, neither does he have any terrain-revealing spells cast. So this is also the awareness-cheating of the computer.

Heroes with chance to hit
Some heroes have that skill that increases their chance to hit (forgot the name) additionally. Now, if you create an artifact for them that has the maximum possible bonus value to hit on it and the hero has this chance-to-hit increasing skill AND the hero has a high level like Demigod AND the hero is a melee attacker only - they very often won't hit the enemy anymore. This seems to be also a bug of the game, in that with this combination the chance to hit of a hero goes over into a negative value because of the too high number. How to negate it? Don't add the chance to hit bonus to an artifact for this hero. Should be fine then (was then for me).

With that said, there are many more bugs in the game, like the game crash on casting the Chaos Channels Lycantropy spells sometimes. Or also that the volcanoes converted to mountains and further by the Change Terrain or that very rare Nature global spell spell stop to produce mana. A pity there was no additional patch for that, but this is how the game will remain now seemingly forever...

Thanks to both of you for your in-depth posts :OK:

I used to play MoM quite a lot, but I've learned a few things from your posts... If I ever get to play it again, that knowledge will come in really handy.

To take out drakes with heroes, I usually sent in two ranged heroes. They should of course be beefed up as much as possible (high attack, chance of hits,...) and preferably have a walking range of 6. It's still not easy to avoid 4 drakes at once, but it's possible, even if half of the turns consist of running without a chance of shooting. It should also be noted that ranged units with arrows and such have a quite limited amount of ammunition, whereas units with magical attack and a decent "mana pool" (or whatever those were called, the MP figure) can easily attack 20 times or more in the same combat. So I preferred sending in heroes with a ranged magical attack.

I agree that Ravashacks life draining ability is not as effective as his to-hit ability gets higher. However I know for a FACT that Ravashack the necromancer can AND does life drain using a magic ranged attack. (master of magic patched to version 1.31). A simple example is to take mr. low level ravashack into a wimpy neutral town after ravashack has been damaged. In combat you can actually watch his health go up during combat (no, no healing artifacts. no regeneration. no smoke and mirrors). And have a neutral normal unit animated (raised) and join your army after combat. (just ravashack in your force, no ghouls, no wraiths, no boogie men). I don't doubt that you have played master of magic MANY times (it is a FUN game!), but I can assure you that this is the case. Is life drain bugged? Yes. Can it work at a range? Yes. (if you like I could somehow pass along a saved game file that might better demonstrate this).

Also I agree that many summoned units can be raised through life drain (although as you pointed out it is usually not worth it because of the fact that they can't heal, AND cost 50% more than a normal summoned unit). If I seemed to indicate that this was not the case in my earlier posts it was not my intent. Undead and heroes can be killed by life drain spell, but neither can be raised (become undead in your service) because of dying from life drain. I am not clear if you indicated that your wraiths raised an enemy hero that joined your side. If this is somehow the case this is certainly news to me. As for animating earth elementals or air elementals or fire elementals, phantom warriors, or phantom beasts (or even a demon) save your mana. There is a FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR easier way to have these troops join your armies (and not have them become undead either). Most would call it a bug. Some call it an intended feature:

What you'll need:
1. A unit that can safely avoid combat (an invisible unit that the enemies can't see, a flying unit that the enemies can't reach, or even a really fast unit that the enemies can't reach)
2. The "word of recall" sorcery spell. (common; meaning you could start with this spell if you had 2 sorcery spell books)
3. Any combat summoning spell that you want the creature of.
(Chaos: fire elemental)
(Death: demon lord (which will summon a demon in combat))
(Sorcery: phantom warriors, phantom beast, air elemental)
(Nature: earth elemental)
4. Enough mana and casting skill to both summon the unit and cast word of recall on the summoned unit.

Enter combat with the unit mentioned in #1. Summon the unit. Cast word of recall on it. Don't win combat. (just hit 'D' for done until combat is over. Or move the unit around until combat is over).
After combat you will have your new summoned troops wherever your summoning circle is. The units won't be free (in fact some are expensive) but the casting cost is quite low (just what they cost in combat). Air elementals are the fastest (natural) creatures in the game flying invisibly at a 5 movement points per turn. (great scouts if you can afford to maintain them)

BTW word of recall is one of my favorite spells as it is VERY useful as a troop transport. (as fast as having a magic road connecting any two points). I am a big fan of having a high casting skill. Whenever I conquer a neutral town I deem worthy of keeping, rather than leaving behind any of my combat force, I'll simply cast summoning circle in the new town, and "word of recall" newly created troops from my troop production town(s). This keeps my experienced fighting force intact, and I don't have to create low level unenchanted normal units in the new town, I bring in highly trained and well equipped (mithril or adamantite) troops.

Also word of recall (and recall hero, but recall hero can only be cast on heroes in combat) can transport troops from one plane to another. This is great if you or someone else has the planar seal spell in effect.

On raise volcano spell, I will say that I REALLY REALLY wish that it had a 2% (or whatever the help says it is supposed to have) of leaving behind a new mineral vein. Alas, it doesn't. And as far as them ceasing to produce their mana... they are supposed to naturally convert into mountainous terrain (like 1% chance each turn or some such). In fact raise volcano combined with change terrain is an effective (but expensive) way to make those useless tundra areas into more productive and fertile towns.

I was going to reply with all of the bugs that I know of... but instead throw this link out. (it is probably shorter than my post would have been anyway) :D

http://db.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/fil...er_of_magic.txt

One of the more entertaining bugs mentioned in this faq is plane shifting (uncommon life spell) a magic spirit (or guardian spirit) onto a node on the other plane. (earth lore spell is a good way to find them early in the game). The node creatures will still be there, but your spirit can meld with the node.

There are absolutely some mistakes in that FAQ too. (Just as there are probably mistakes in all of my ramblings) If in doubt, ask. I'll be sure to respond with my 8 cents.

Oh, I think they also warn about cloak of fear spell in there. (It reminds me very much of the "to hit" wrapping you were talking about earlier. Put cloak of fear on a normally powerful unit and watch how pathetic they become. (no it isn't supposed to work like that).

If you ever play again... some people might find this editor useful for quickly trying out different tactics/spells/combos. I used an earlier version of it a decade ago without problems. You can do some neat things like have both life and death magic (not that this is more powerful than some of the other combos, but it is different, plus you can get all of the champion heroes (the ones requiring life spell books and death spell books)). You can also do cool things like make your opponents very powerful. And change heroes to your particular favorite (instead of reloading for the 10th time to summon "just the one you want")

http://www.inigo.com/momedit/

Please read the readme for it (its short). The interface is simple and clean.

The only thing that may look goofy at first is the casting skills under the wizard info section. Basically if you want a high skill you need to make the number really big. (my first guess would be that this value is the effective amount of power base that has been applied to casting skill in the game. And my understanding of that is that if you have a casting skill of 20 you need to put 20 points into casting skill in order to raise it to 21 (and then 21 to raise to 22, etc). This smacks of a long forgotten math lesson on sequences and simple formulas for converting the casting skill into the total amount trained and vice versa... But the short answer is to play with it.

The entry above that (casting remaining) is a useful number to drop to zero if you notice an opposing wizard casting some spell a little out of their league (like summon champion early in the game). I should say that this is how much mana/casting skill need to be applied to the spell for it to finish (cast). By setting it to zero, it basically casts instantly (the next turn).

Have fun. :xmas:

Been playin this game many years now :) and its fun to see all the insight on this great game.

My "cheap" unit that I have found nothing to beat is dwarven hammerhands. Just keep starting over till you get placed by some "purple crystals" (dunno the name, been callin em purple crystals forever, adatimate or somethin like that :) ) Well the attack bonus on these puppies and hammerhands make these units crush anything in their way, untouchable when they gain more levels, and if you are a warlord and they can gain that extra level... watch out.

Master of Magic is my most favourite game.

Btw... death magic is also very powerfull... try to choose all death books... and choose wraith spell. The fastest you can, get 300 mana and cast wraiths. You can have them after 30-40 turns. In this state of game... almost nothing can stop them. ;-)
They can fly, are fast, immune to normal weapon, life draining... with a little logic, you can win game very easily.

... and they also raise army of undead in their wake. :)

I usually prefer casting shadow demons first (at least I think that's how they're called: the purple red-eyed ranged units costing about 250 mana) because of their ranged attack that's quite powerful early in the game.

I have beaten this game on Impossible mode with everything but nature. The most imbalanced thing I would say is, Torin the Chosen. That guy is a robust unkillable nightmare, give him some cheesy items and watch him own. As far as units go, my friend played a pretty mean hafling/death combo that he could almost beat impossible with. Haflings slingers are the muck. Sorcery rocks, if you ever get Time Stop off, you can wreak some havoc, sky drakes are decent, the phantoms at the front own, flight is good. Confuse is the best spell for them though, it rocks the house. I beat Impossible very easy with Sorcery, considering I had to pump up Torin to win with Life, though I did that on my first or second try, took me more tries with Sorcery. I was never great with Nature, as far as races go, I'd have to say the dragon race, high men, dark elf, or haflings are the best. All the other races seemed lacking. Chaos magic is fun, you had some many spells that just wasted all of the opponents bases etc, if you got ahead of someone it was easy to win with Chaos, but you have to get spells like Chaos rift etc etc going before its very good, then have a million volcanoes set up to upkeep you spells.
Anyone else have a problem with some of the death spells? Like eternal darkness or something just crashed my game after a few turns of casting it, so was that ever fixed? as fast as heroes I liked to have, any one with noble/sage. I always booted Valana the bard, that bitch crashed my game. Mystic X was a pretty awesome random bit, the necro was good, the drake was decent, the chaos guy was decent, auron was decent, when it came down to hit giving them a platemail of X amount of power was all they needed. ;p I generally always did full books and alchemy for my caster, if I chose Myrran i went with Dark Elf then conquered some Drake cities and used the combination to own some things. Shadow Demons rock at the front, great for pestering opponents weaker cities.

This game rocks the house, hopefully the second one does to.

As far as I know those errors crashing the game were never fixed, unfortunately...

Valana the bard never gave me trouble, so those errors seem to differ from user to user, to make things even worse :blink:

I usually preferred playing with Nature, though I don't think I've ever tried Impossible, as the level below it was already tediously time-consuming as it was. Nature's got some awesome summoning spells.

O.o :OK:
This game take a lot of learning, but the complexity seems worth
it, hard to remember everything.....but it sounds like it gets
easier with practice from readling the posts here. I hope so.
:hello: :hello:

Some powerful but hard way at the begin:
Summon Champion, get Warrax the Chaos Warrior. He has usually arcane power that gives him very good ranged attack, plus his shots pierce (lightning). Create the best staff you're able to with your magic books, that has 6 to attack, 3 to defense and 3 hit. Instead of defense eventually rather additional spell points.

At this point you can use a nice bug in the game. Before selecting the fourth, last ability of the staff, click on the spell charges. Select the spell you like, and the number of it you like. After it is marked as the fourth attribute, DESELECT it again, and choose something different as the fourth ability, like Death or Flaming, whatever. Now, when the staff casting is finished, you get the staff that has not 4 abilities, but all 5, as the charges of the spell remain even after de-selectiing them. :D

Ok, also create the best armor and misc item for him. Particulary flying and regeneration is the best choice for the misc item. Or Wraithform is good for being able to walk on water to the neighbour isles. And always don't forget to choose additional movement as an ability for the armor / misc items. With the best items, though you would probably have now very little gold and mana left, your hero will rock the field. He should now have 9 movement points, which is absolutely necessary. Send him against Sky Drakes or Great Drakes, and run away to far away place on the battlefiled when they're within one round of reachable range to you. And shoot them all to death. But be careful with the Great Wyrms. As they can merge, they'll reach him instantly and kill very fast, no run away there, unless he can fly through the artifact or is invisible. With such a good hero (ranged only, not melee) you can kill anything with little patience. Not only Warrax is necessarily the best, but even any ranged caster with Arcane Power will do. But Warrax usually has the best range of abilities, and he ALWAYS has piercing, which makes him so good.

:bye:

Yea... Warrax is my favourite too.

I think wraiths are better than shadow demons. They can drain very good... so you kill weakest units first, and get very much life. Then, you can kill even great drake with them. Shadow demons can only dream about this. :)
So.. you can go with wraith even to most of nodes. You also get any neutral city very easily... and you will raise army of undead, which can be defense for that city... for no cost! That's why i prefer wraiths.

It does. Plus, the AI is pretty poor, which means it's very easy to take advantage of cheese: things that the AI doesn't understand, and you do.

With MOM2 underway, I can only hope nothing of the flavor and complexity of the original is sacrificed, as the AI improves.

O.o
Is there really going to be a new MOM2?? I saw hints of that over
the past time, but was not sure it was really happeing.....wow,
that would be quite something. Now i have to learn a whole new
system, while still mastering this one. ah well. it is worth it, for
such a chellenging game.
:OK:

Ok i need to get this off my chest, everyone writes how they can get the game running and with sound but for some reason i get the game running with sound in dosbox but it runs slow as hell im running a p4 with 2.88 gig cpu and well its a gaming computer so its all tricked out. now can someone give me a clue on how to get sound running with out performance drop. i tried the lame brain idea on installing to get sopund working and it did. so i run it in vdms and it ran for like 3 seconds and then told me it needed 583 k memory and to shut down all tsr. what ever that is. so instead i ran it in dosbox but it runs like crap so my option is to run with no sound with performance or to run it with sound and crappy performance please help me oh smart mom lords.

First of all, have you tried increasing the number of cycles in Dosbox to the point where increasing it any further will slow the game down again?

With P4 2.8 Ghz the cpu cycles should be able to increase to around 16.000-18.000 without slowing the emulation down yet. ;)

This is one of my all-time favorite strategy games. I loved it, and I can't believe a sequel has not yet appeared. It is a classic that has many elements that were unique to it and made it stand apart from the other turn-based Civilization-clones.

I loved summoning monsters to walk around and kick behind. And loading up a hero with all of the best items so he rocked. Very cool concept.

~Ether~

www.AutonomyRocks.com

MoM is the _best_ game ever. I am playing it for nearly a decade. It RoX:)

Try Halflings with full Nature book once... the result is amazing. Halflings have more food, less unrest, and have Slingers... with full Nature you can transorm any lands with your spells in Nature... all your cities grow very fast.

(On the other hand, the first two Sorcery books are essential to be quick enough in the beginning. They give you the Phantom Warriors which is a _very_ useful spell.)

cya,
HaaS

But there should have been anothe patch for the game. Even the final version still has quite some bugs...

I remember this game... Old favourite... super cool game!

I am running WinME (yes I know I should be shot for that) and can get music to play for the game, but I can't configure the digital sound effects correctly for my SB 64 card and the game crashes whenever I try to load it. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks

Just play the game in DosBox, which you can download from this site. :)

I suppose the better question should be how can I find out the correct settings for my sound card when I run the install configuration program?

My settings for the game in DosBox are:
Music - General Midi, adress 330, IRQ 7
Sound - Soundblaster Pro (later), adress 220, IRQ 7, DMA (DRQ) 1

That should work, does for me. ;)

Well I am pretty sure that my sound card is on IRQ 5, but how did you figure out which address and DRQ to use? Is there a section in my system manager that will tell me that information? I am pretty sure that I don't need to use DosBox because ME still has its own similar program.

These settings were the default ones for the Dos games from the time of MS-Dos, before Windows 95 and later ones. And these settings are also the default ones in DosBox.
But nevertheless you'll have much less troubles if you'll play the game in DosBox, as Dos games tend usually not to work under newer Windows versions. ;)

I would use dosbox anyway, unless you know you have a soundblaster or something.


I loved this game, I like to be the draconians!

Too bad the developer thought of updating Master of Orion 2 first. They even predicated MoM2's release upon MOO3's success. The result IMO is a disaster! MOO will never be the same. MOO is transformed into an ugly micro intensive, spreadsheet hugging game.
I hope the same thing won't happen to MoM.

For MoM2, MoM only needs to be improved in two areas:
1. Graphics
2. Multi-player

Well yeah. Look what happened to the Civ series... Well, except for winciv and civnet. :OK:

Well it's not officially a sequel, but you should check Age of WOnders 1 & 2. They have lots in common with MOM. ;)

Stability, don't forget stability :D

And better KI, too. Most of all better KI. :)

What is KI? Or do you mean, AI, artificial intelligence?

It might be the abbreviation of 'Küstliche Intelligenz', so it would be the same thing. At least there seems to be some sort of conference on AI which calls itself KI for some reason. :crazy: http://ki2005.uni-koblenz.de

Yeah, I too noticed the similiarity in the Age of Wonders series.

Man, I've been looking for this game for years now. You see, my parents were playtesters for Master of Magic (how awesome is that?), and I have some very fond memories associated with it. One of the game's designers is a friend of the family (hence our playtester status), and I know that he has always wanted to make a sequel to it. I guess we'll all just have to keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.

That would be awesome... hehe If it ever happened, it needs to have multiplayer. The ancient graphics can stay, if a new engine doesn't have to be created. I'm sure they could make something like winciv for it though, using that engine to convert the status to multiplayer.

If your family friend says he's starting work on it and needs help, I'm sure some of the guys here (including me) would love to help out!

Cool avatar Blastradius. Good old Ignus from Planescape Torment. Ah! The memories. :drool:

Yes. It's wierd when pyros become spellcasters... then people try to turn your body into a conduit to the plane of fire...

In master of magic you can get the spell immolation. Your heros can literally be on fire!!!

One of the greatest games ever made indeed. If u are a powergamer and want to beat the game on impossible here is two possible ways to go: :ok:

1.Go full on Light magic and get thorin the chosen one as fast as possible. he's overpowered.

2. or Use starting properties that alowes you to start on the other plane. keep restarting untill your starting city is next to an admantinum mine.

Good luck! you will need it :evil:

p.s. I have not played this game for about 10 years, but i still remeber it like i played it yesterday. will download it now. Hope it works smoother on dosbox than other games i played via dosbox.

Why, oh why, didnt they make a MoM2? :cry:

Look here for fanmade games that are inspired by Master of Magic.
And this one could interest you especially. Looks like the project is dead now, though... :(

They thought it wouldn't bring in enough dough if they made one. What a load of bull-honkey! LOL

Anyway, I know people from all over that have played this game. If they were selling this game in 8 different countries, why wouldn't it bring enough cash flow with it?

I like to be the draconians, and I have had a nightshade and one of the special moutain resources at the same time at least 7 times now :ok:

Maybe I missed something, but who said a successor to MoM wasn't made because it wouldn't bring in enough money? The problem for Microprose in those years was that it was generally ailling, and everybody knew it. The team who made MoM, SimTex, were very good, but veeeeery slow, and had been placed on a project called Guardians: Agents of Justice. (They literally took four years to do the latter, after which it was shelved because it still wasn't done, and the game was technologically out of date.) Sid Meier had left for greener pastures, and other talented folks were leaving, as well. In the end all they could manage were some lackluster tank sims and a secondrate add-on for Civ II. Very sad.

Well, nobody has claimed it and is profiting off of it... Afterall, interactive took the civ series, and MOM is only slightly older than civ1. Shouldn't someone have made it by now?

It is being made. Stardock, the folks that did Galactic Civilizations, have been commissioned to develop MoM2.

But they are having problems. Game makers shouldn't be stalled like that.

I'm unaware of any delays, and I've been following their work pretty closely. They've had the contract for less than a year. So what problems are you referring to?

Haven't had time to go through all the posts listed here, so I beg pardon if I'm repeating anyone.

Here is the recipe for the strongest AND Immortal unit:

1.Start as a death mage with high human race
2. Reach the paladins ASAP
3. Cast "Wraithform" on paladins. Bingo. U have the unit with both magic and weapon immunity. That makes them immortal everybody-killer :Titan:

After that game becomes VERY dull as all you have to do is train a couple of those units and conquer both worlds. "yawn"

Unless the Guys in myrror cast the block planar travel. I've seen the computers cast spells like that, and armegeddon. Though not at the same time, as I often try to do. If the computer is ever smart enough to do this, your wraithformed paladins won't be of any use to you when your world turns to ruin.

"Stardock continues to pursue the Master of Magic license, but development of Stardock's fantasy TBS game, which may be the next MoM, is on hold. Stardock is now focused on completing Galactic Civilizations 2 and the newly announced massively multiplayer RTS, Society."

This, borodin.

Question is, is he building from the ground up on this one? Or is he using graphics and scripting from the last one? Some times you will never know.


I suppose it isnt a problem as far as the game maker is concerned, but the other game to me is a problem LOL

It is rude to behind in LOL

Its a really nice game :w00t: , Im playing it atm on my old rig with full sound/speed, same with warlord2, Colonization :ok:

pentium 133Mhz
Sound Blaster AWE64 Value

"Stardock continues to pursue the Master of Magic license, but development of Stardock's fantasy TBS game, which may be the next MoM, is on hold. Stardock is now focused on completing Galactic Civilizations 2 and the newly announced massively multiplayer RTS, Society."

Bah! That's just plain...evil. :angry:

Question is, is he building from the ground up on this one? Or is he using graphics and scripting from the last one? Some times you will never know.

As far as I know (per a conversation I had with the lead dev about 18 months ago), they were going to include everything in the original title, but focus on AI. Of course, who knows what happened after that?

I was really looking forward to Stardock's MoM2. Pardon me while I sulk and brood.

Been playin MoM fairly steady since it came out. My favorite game of all time despite its flaws. If Stardock even remakes the original - with very little enhancements, you can count me in! This game really cries for a sequel though, I do hope for great AI, 6 (or so) "planes", and it would be super cool to have some of the old heros show up as playable (MOVABLE this time) wizards/warlords ('Ravashack the Lich' and 'Brax the Dwarven WarLord' anyone?) Some old races gave up and went "home" (goodbye knolls and Klackons) and a few new starting races take thier place. of course- a bijillion new spells/units/monsters/artifacts/&multiplay. Sigh...Maybey someday...

Moveable? your heros can't move?

This must be a glitch in your software. I have used nearly all of the list of heros.

Off hand I can think of
Brax
Warrax
Serena
X
Fang
The wind wizard guy
Some bard chick
Some sage guy
And a few others

I haven't played within 5 months or so, so perhaps if you were to list the immobile units, someone could help you.

What do you mean by, movable? I remember having the lich around some time ago, and he moved correctly. Of course, this was back when the game was relatively new on the market.

Wizards must stay in thier fortress, they cannot move in overland or engage in combat the same way as other units do. They can move thier fortress if they cast the move fortress spell or If banished followed by casting the spell of return, choosing the city to place thier fortress.

MOM2 should let them move around.

Ravashack is a Necromancer champion/hero unit. My sugestion for a sequel (MOM2) would follow that all but one wizard, maybe Merlin, was permanantly banished from the two known planes of Arcanus and Myrror. The sequel game's Wizard/Warlord pool could be filled with some of the hero types from the original game,
i.e Rjak is no longer a starting wizard choice, he was banished to an unknown plane
(he may or may not make an appearance in some other plane in MOM2).
Ravashack became a Lich and is now the most powerful of the death magic wizards you can choose as a starting wizard. i.e. 2 - Let's say Roland became a warlord.
Note that Warlords are not necessarily magic users (Warax being one exception),
they would have to team up with a magic using companion, generic or otherwise. Wizards already have familiars that could be given combat/leadership abilities. (or they could team up too). bottom line is there are many places you could go with a sequel - wizards have leggs - use some characters from the original game.

Ohhh. Thats what you mean. Your guy isn't a unit, really. Or perhaps the sequel will have wheeled or floating fortresses that count as units themselves. But think of it this way: you are god, and you are only tethered to the planet by one string: that fortress. Now, if someone hacks that string you float away and lose. Because of this, you aren't a unit at all. :D

Which portrait do you prefer to use for a custom wizard? Myself I like Tauron and Rjak's portaits, but Tauron has a lame snake familiar and Rjak looks like a frail wuss in the spell discovery scenes. Jafar's image is the one I use 3rd most - but it's too mid-east for me but at least he has a nifty little imp familiar. Speaking of portraits, I really hate the tribal look of three of the wizards - you know Thaloc(?), Sharee(?) and Goatskin-Helmet Guy. Those guys are good for nothing but stomping into dust simply for being annoying-looking. Horus looks like a cheeseball. Freya and Merlin are *yawn* and I can't help but offer tribute to Kali. What? I'll Word-of-Recall her over to my summoning circle, *wink wink*. *begins casting Endurance*

Sharee is good for one thing: watching her cast spells. Too bad you cant tell much, and she aint so hot anyway LOL

Sharee begins casting Show Skin.
blastradius14 begins casting Digital Video Capture.
Squaddie casts For Shame! on blastradius14.

Who was the Wind Mage, again? As I recall, he was the best for my strategy. I always started in the other world, with small amounts of land, and his ability to fly with a party anywhere in a straight line made him invaluable in the early or midgame.

I like the wind mage, the sage and fang if I can get them:evil:

I actually still have the t-shirt that came with my original copy. Anyone else remember that?
This game was all about getting the heroes up, casting spells on them to make them special and maing them artifacts. And boy, did it work well.

Personally I liked the Dwarves, they were great builders. But the Night Elves were more fun...

And I believe that it was Jaer the Wind Mage..

Personally I was a Warrax fan, combined with Draco for soem close killin' action and that other mage, the one that begins with "M"

You mean Malleus. They're ok, but I prefer this priestess that you can get when you use Life Magic. She has really many abilities and always heals after combat. Otherwise Warrax is very good and eventually sometimes Mystic X and The Golden One, with lucky attributes.

Yes, that's whom I meant. Thanks.

What a shame Stardock has back-burnered it! I wonder if the publisher decided to back off on support. I really can't see the developers doing so without good reason, and they seemed pretty confident at one time that the AI would be easy to implement.

PIRATE TALE OF ALL OLD FAVORITE GAMES WHO SIT IN RIGHTS-LIMBO FOREVER, NEVER UPDATED OR SEQUELS NEVER MADE

Yar.

Sit back me maties and hear a tale.

Tis a sad tale, sad and oft' told aboard ol' cap'n squaddie's vessel.

Thar was a game of old. On ye bonnie computer.

It was a whale of a game, and pleased all who played her, from swabbie to cook to captain.

Alas, the game was passed by. It was left to the sea with no crew to man her.

She's out there e'en now tho years and years have passed- driftin' and driftin' - never to return to port or have her sails repaired or poop deck swabbed.

The owners and makers of the game have left her for the sea, and never shall we see her like again.

Stinks, doesn't it? I think more people would be happy if Stardock would work on MoM2 instead :D

I just finished a game in which I tried a super-fast strategy I read about somewhere. Started w/ 4 opponents, Impossible difficulty, medium landmass (i think it was medium), 11 life books, high elves. Immediatley summoned a few guardian spirits to scout around for enemy capital cities, Endurance speeds this up quite a lot. As soon as I had 3 spirits running around, I began casting Stream of Life (double population, no unrest) on my city. Once it was complete I raised the taxes to the maximum amount. Research Invulnerability as soon as it is available. Once you've got a enemy capital found, cast Invulnerable on your guardian spirit, and attack! The computer controlled player will probably not know how to handle your incorporal, invulnerable unit. The closest I came to loosing any of my units was when one of Jafar's heros cast psionic blast on it, taking it to red hits - a healing spell fixed me up ok and he never cast it again. Lionheart, Bless, Prayer all make it easier if you have the mana/casting skill for them. I defeated the 4th enemy in 1410 - took a while to find Ariel :bleh:

That's a cheap tactic. If MOM2 ever comes out and it is muliplayer, I wouldn't want someone to do that to me...

But weakened a bit after last patch (-1 magic attack), as well as Halfling units in general (-1 defense).

Plus, city walls extend scouting range of your city overland.

The palladins' strength is in their 'first strike' ability. They basicly get to deal all their damage before the enemy gets to strike back. So, the four figures would make 8(is this their attack, can't recall?), yeah, 8*0.4*4 ~= 13 damage. That damage is applied, and only then whoever remains gets to retaliate. IF someone remains! ;) They also get magic immunity, so you can pretty much waltz to any ranged magical unit and beat the living hell out of them. Shamans or priests could very well beat even hammerhands if there are enough of them. But one palladin unit wipes the floor with them.

You have to be careful with units that have 'negate first strike' like pikemen, though. And also those with thrown, breath, etc. ability. That's what makes barbarians so kickass. They suck for building or money or research, but they get thrown attack, and if you train and enchant them up enough they can kill things really well. [/b][/quote]
Barbarian melee units with thrown attack don't care about flying opponents, because they don't have to wait to be attacked like most other ones. This is the main advantage of a female hero "Shalla the Amazon". Properly trained, equipped and enchanted, she can easily beat 8 Sky Drakes in AUTO mode. :Titan:

Infact magic immunity provides immunity also againts all breath,gaze etc attacks...
That is why are paladins so strong.Units like drakes,chaos spawns etc..That kill almost every unit just with their gazes/breaths MUST enter melee attack with them.And in some causes(chaos spawn) is it their doom.Btw magic immunity enchantment is also resistent to dispel magic spells... :w00t:
Sorcery Rulez!!! :Brain:
Btw one advice to all ranged heroes players.Recuit some missle ranged heroes(tj with bow slot,fo example shuri...)And create bow with haste ability...They will be able to shot twice per turn :max: .Unfortunetly you cant put haste enchantment on staff or wands... [/b][/quote]
It isn't EXACTLY true. Doom Gaze of Chaos Spawns has an effect on paladins or other units with Magic Immunity. :not_ok:

But try to Chaos Channel Doom Drakes - they always get demon skin effect and then they don't suck so much. Their main strength lies elsewhere - they have 3 flying movement, so produced early (easily done), they can sweep all neutral cities on Myrror very fast in the game, and this is enough to win.

Not doombolt but doom bat - it looks like a giant, black, one-eyed bat. IMO it is misplaced unit which doesn't fit with rest of legions of chaos. Imagine a vampire bat from death realm of magic, having a vampiric ability instead of immolation. Wouldn't it be neat?

Eh, why not give it BOTH immolation and Vampiricism?

If you want to change the world, go help make MOM2. :D

The ONLY way to have your summoned units marching on overland map is to cast Word of Recall on them. You would think it IS a bug, but (surprise!) it isn't, because they have 7 mana upkeep cost :(, not worth the effort for Phantom Warriors. But this way you can quite fast produce quite an army of Demons! :)

I agree, Sorcery rocks, but is a bit expensive. On the opposite side, you can steal enemy units using Confusion/Word of Recall combo! :evil:

Hey bub, you can look at previous posts, copy them and use the quote button in the reply screen. DO NOT triple post. It gets annoying.

I remember there was a useful event (meteor hit town, magicless time, star conjunction) in the game before the last patch - the discovery of a new mine, like mithrill or jewel, near some town. Too bad that doesn't happen in the final patch anymore, that was handy... :(

I played the game repeatedly with the final patch for about a year after it came out, and there were still occasional random meteor strikes and mine discoveries. Of course, this was largely on the shadow side of the universe, so if you don't play there, I can't confirm you'll get those effects.

I play the final patch and get some of the events fairly regularly. Conjuctions for Chaos, Sorcery or Nature. Good or Bad Moons for Life or Death - and the rarer Mana Short. I think I've seen 2 meteor strikes in about 200 hrs of gameplay on the 1.31 version and one was on an enemy city. Other city events I've seen: Earthquake and Plague - and I think something like Population Boom (double pop growth). Other random events in general: Pirates stealing part or most of the treasury, neutral cities joining my kingdom through Diplomatic Marriage, Gift from the Gods: free magic item, Donation of gold from a wealthy merchant... any other confirmed random events anyone has seen?

Note: one Population Boom event hit a halfling city that already had Stream of Life on it :bleh: I had over 900 growth per turn when I changed to housing- but not quite 1000, damn the luck.

Funny Note: the first time I got the Diplomatic Marriage a city in Myrror joined my kingdom. This was on my first game ever - I hadn't read the manual and didn't know what Myrror was. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't find one city from the other when moving my troops around.

I get pirates stealing my treasury all the time. Once you get to max cash its either you must alchemize it into mana or you buy stuff. Cause if you don't they will abscond with some of it. It isn't as bad as Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance where the treasurer can abscond with more than 10000 gold from your treasury...

In myrror, I have had nightshade and gold and some times even another resource near my capital city. This is another game where I prefer to be a single city, and where it doesn't hurt you as bad to be one.

Arrrrg. I have a mental problem blastradius - I can't build more than one city. It never seems to be a good idea to build those settlers, let alone the units needed to protect the new city, I much prefer to upgrade an existing city. Taking over cities is fine - but I don't like it - I usually end up sitting around improving my city while the rest of the world is populated by the other wizards, then creating my unbeatable army of heros, units or summoned monsters and just go knock some heads. ARRRRg.

You're almost like me - I build 2-4 cities and that's it. The rest comes from getting a champion and best artifacts for him, taking over all the nodes on Myrror and after there's just the matter of either study up to the Spell of Mastery and finishing the game, or have some fun and watch the barbarians overrung enemy cities or mess around with the enemy, get boring after a while, anyway.

Get planar seal and cast Armageddon. A one city civ can manage this :twisted:

I usually conquer a few cities first in order to build up enough forces to take a few power nodes. After that initial phase, things go rather smoothly in comparison to those first struggles to get hold of some power nodes.

Halflings: halflings with +2 weapons. On the shadow side. With a quick, surgical strike at your only enemy in that world. Then I work towards casting the spell that seals off access, and set about exploring and conquering the place. Typically, by the time I'm ready to cut my spell and enter the other side, I have three stacks with veteran halfing units, three heroes with wind mastery, and lots of other perks going.

Is armageddon the chaos spell that randomly causes volcanos to rise each turn? I don't play with chaos that much - is it possible volcanos will rise within the city limits of your own cities? What about cities protected vs chaos magic?

As I recall, those world-affecting spells won't target your cities, and any protection against that specific type of magic remains in force. However, if the protection spell is cancelled for any reason--you can guess the rest.

Well, Armageddon will not affect your territory. If you are protected from such odd magics, stuff like the meteor spells and stuff will be deflected off the city.

Armageddon can bring enough mana to summon Chaos Drakes and stuff. Wheee.

MoM is a great game, and I hope Stardock makes a good sequel after all.

If you Google around enough you will find a lot of valuable information on how combat works, bugs in the game, etc.

The cheapest winning strategy is 11-Death books, pick Wraiths as your Rare spell, select High Elves, then cast Wraiths IMMEDIATELY. Pump everything you have into Mana production (liquify your starting gold into mana, keep converting gold to mana as you get more of it), because that early on, the bottleneck is NOT Casting Skill but Mana production. Summon ANOTHER group of wraiths as soon as you finish summoning the first; life-stealing wraiths are almost indestructible early in the game (and if they get injured, just eat some low-resistance units to get healthy), and you can usually win the game by 1405. As someone else posted, wraiths also leave behind hordes of undead garrisons for newly-conquered cities, making 11-Death even faster and stronger than the popular 11-Life/Torin the Chosen strategy. This strategy also works well with Life (Torin); it doesn't work that well with Chaos (Chaos Spawn), Sorcery (Storm Giant), or Nature (Gorgons) because those units are weaker in many ways (slower, can't life-steal so you may need to rest them, don't leave undead armies in their wake, and unlike Torin they can't gain experience and items, so you can't get a superboosted Torin-with-Heroism-cast-on-him effect).

The typical starting game at Impossible: liquify gold into mana and summon Magic Spirit as fast as you can; use it to scout around the map. At the same time, keep your starting troops at home and increase taxes as much as you can without having rebels. Like with every other city you will ever build up, build in this order: Builder's Hall, Granary, Smithy, Marketplace, Farmer's Market (after that, it depends.. probably a shrine if you need it, else a sawmill + forester's guild as a precursor to miner's guild + mechanician's guild).

Everybody has their favorite normal unit, apparently. I am firmly in the Paladins camp because Paladins are so efficient (just place them so they always attack, to gain the First Strike benefit, using Flight if necessary). Champion Paladins with adamantium and Holy Arms in the background deal 48 swords at 70% accuracy + armor piercing, and get 8 hearts per figure or 32 hearts for the unit--more than almost anything not named Behemoth. Paladins really only have three weaknesses: they can't fly, they can get picked off by slingers, and Pikemen severely injure them. Flight and Guardian wind guard against Cracks Call and some nasty halflings. Champion-level experience, Charm of Life, Adamantium weapons, and Prayer or High Prayer means that even Pikemen can't severely damage Paladins, though one must be careful around them. (One satisfactory solution is to cast Call Lightning or some other combat spell to kill pikemen while your paladins run around dodging attacks.)

Mortu has my vote for toughest hero, even though I rarely play Death Magic and don't get to use him (Roland is an okay substitute, but has lesser hit points). With proper spells (Iron Skin, Regeneration, Flight, True Sight, Spell Lock, etc.) and items, even an inexperienced Mortu can kill anything in one hit and not have to suffer a counterattack. And with experience or at least a lot of spells/items, he can even take Sky Drake and Great Drake attacks and suffer only a few hit points' damage. This means that you can have Mortu single-handedly taking out tough nodes, enemy fortresses, etc. while your other heroes band together and wipe out the other half of the world, retiring to your fortress to boost your overland casting ability after they get Demi-God status.

As for spell combination, I think an Impossible game I just finished had the best combo: I started off with 4 Life 3 Sorcery Myrran and Warlord, the Myrran part to get Trolls (paladins take too long to get; the idea was to use War Trolls to kill enemy mages quickly so I would have Myrror all to myself). I eventually won 3 Nature books, 1 Chaos book, Node Mastery, and Archmage (making it easier for me to get spells through Counter Magic, and my own spells are twice as hard to dispel, and best of all, +50% bonus to casting skill improvement--very crucial, since casting skill is the main bottleneck in mid-game when you have no mana problems due to Alchemy and gold-producing cities). I also conquered and bartered spells a lot so that most of my spell discoveries in lairs/nodes were spells that nobody else had.

I also had a lot of luck in that I killed my Myrror competitor, Raven, very quickly with a swarm of War Trolls that systematically took over his Dark Elf empire one city at a time. Then I was even luckier when Merlin broke through to Myrror (boo) with High Men and build several big cities next to adamantium mines (yay). The computer develops cities quickly on Impossible, but by the time Merlin cranked out adamantium paladins, I had 43 fame and thus could (and did) summon all 6 high-level heroes (including Torin) and took over his paladin factories. I continued to settle Myrror with as many Dark Elves as possible, because they generate so much mana just by breathing, PLUS they can make most of the advanced structures including Merchant's Guild.

This is why this combo is just about perfect: you get Stream of Life AND Gaea's Blessing (cast them on all your cities, jack up tax rate to maximum, and thanks to Alchemy you will never worry about gold or mana again). Dark Elf cities generate a ton of mana and gold. Warlord + Crusade + Altar of Battle made my two adamantium paladin cities priceless, and I eventually got almost all of the best spells (too bad you can't have both Life and Death, because I love some of the Death spells like Black Prayer):

Flight (gets rid of paladin's main weakness: Cracks Call), True Sight, Invisibility, Magic Immunity, Guardian Wind (no slingers worries!), Spell Lock, Incarnation, Charm of Life, Holy Arms, Crusade, Altar of Battle, Prayer, High Prayer (for paladins and heroes). Also useful are Planar Travel and Plane Shift.

Web, Call Lightning, Regeneration, Iron Skin, Counter Magic (combined with Spell Lock = your heroes have nothing to be afraid of when assaulting enemy wizards' troops), Dispel Magic True, Haste, Dispel Evil, Healing, Mass Healing, Cracks Call, Confusion, Mind Storm, Banish, Creature Binding, Phantom Beast, Phantom Warriors, Air Elemental, Ice Bolt, Psionic Blast (for general combat)

Gaea's Blessing, Stream of Life, Raise Volcano, Change Terrain, Transmute (terraforming/city development--you can even settle what was once the North Pole or South Pole by casting enough Volcano + Change Terrain spells)

Suppress Magic, Time Stop, and the nifty Spell Blast (along with Spell Lock and maybe Magic Immunity, this spell is in a class by itself). Nature's Awareness helped me keep tabs on everybody better than Awareness by itself. There are also some other nifty spells like Earth gate, Wind Mastery, and Just Cause (which not only increases fame by 10, reducing army upkeep costs, but also reduces unrest!) that are not killer spells but are very handy.

By the end, I had every hero except Roland parked in my fortress to help me cast Raise Volcano + Change Terrain faster. Roland was a one-man wrecking crew with Regeneration, Invulnerability, Planar Travel, Iron Skin, and a lot of other spells cast on him; Sky Drakes/Great Drakes did zero or one point of damage against him, and since he can't cast spells anyway, I didn't feel bad having him roaming around.

I can't remember any MoM game I've ever played where I had such a complete package of the best spells; I came close a few times, but I think this was the first time I had all of the great Sorcery/Life spells combined with the Raise Volcano/Change Terrain combo--too bad the game is bugged so volcanoes don't leave behind mineral deposits, ever, but hey, that's what MoM2 is for. ;)

Reading these strategies makes me want to play MoM again :ok:

You're right about wraiths being a lot more potent than similar creatures from the other magic types, but in a lot of situations a Chaos Spawn or Storm Giant can take out a lot of opponents.
Gorgons are weak indeed, though Nature was usually my favourite type of magic because of the hugely impressive creatures a bit later in the game.

As for heroes, when I was up against sky drakes I always tried to fight them with beefed up ranged heroes who could stay out of reach the entire time.

First, a bit of errata.. Paladins don't have 8 hp at Champion level normally, you need Charm of Life for that.

Also, I forgot to mention some other spells like Spell Binding (allows you to steal anyone else's Global Enchantments) that make the Life/Sorcery/Nature/Chaos combo so lethal.

I agree about the Gorgons (I only once tried an 11-nature Impossible game and won, but it was pretty gruesome and I never tried it again). Storm Giants can't fly, don't leave behind undead garrisons, and take up a ghastly 10 mana upkeep (compared to 5 for wraiths) and often need to be rested to heal. Chaos Spawn are terrific early game, but damn that 1 Flight is so slooooooow... and they don't leave behind undead garrisons, either. They also have high upkeep.

There are many ways to take out drakes, and a ranged assault is probably safest. Roland takes a long time to get strong enough to go it alone, even with Heroism and artifacts and strong spells cast on him. But I tend to cast a lot of spells from my fortress so I like having my lone non-mage out and about while every other hero helps me cast spells back home (even Alorra, who often gets a spellcasting pick as part of her randomly-selected abilities).

Get airships and run away while firing rocks. You can kill alot of wimpy things early in the game with these :ok:

I've never even tried airships, though I've heard quite a few people praising them... Good idea!

hey another_guest I surf with images off but decided to load yours.. I am axident, the person who wrote that long entry that you replied to just now (since when do I NOT write long entries).. fancy running into you here, after the X-Com: UFO thread. I can't for the life of me remember my abandonia pw though so I'm not logged in as axident for the time being. I think it's hilarious that it's over 1900 posts long at UFO now haha

Yeah some people like airships or casting Flight on a warship or whatever; I think it's amusing (especially flying invisible warships and clicking "Auto" and wearing down opponents after a long barrage of rocks), but prefer heroes because they gain more from experience. :)

The dwarven cannons are still better than the airship or the warship, they deal more damage. Just build them with adamantium weapons, cast Chaos Channels on them to make them fly so not everybody can attack them and invinsibility + some other nice spells, and they'll easily enough take down even the Great Drakes (but not Sky Drakes - immunity to illusions, hehe). :D

What part of early didn't you read? :bleh:

Airships by themselves are cheaper overall than cannons. They may not be as strong, but for low mana purposes you can go farther. It's a good way to cut down on the marauder's forces.

Heh, amazing. Here I've been playing verson 1.1 (the like 8+ disk version) for the past decade. MoM IS the ultimate turn based strategy game. I swear with everything that's come out in the past 10 years, nothing gets me going like a game of MoM. The thought of MoM II coming out someday has me amused. I'd seriously buy 10 copies just to support the project :)

I use Dosbox on a Dell XPS Gen2 laptop running winXP with all the service packs. Plays perfect. Fast, and good sound. I use SB original for both midi and SFX. The midi is slightly choppy every so often, but enabling Roland sound seems to slow the game down a bit (especially during screen transitions). Roland sound is 50x better than SB midi though.. so I might just suck it up and endure slightly longer loading times heh. I used to use VDMSound, but it got a bit clunky. Not to mention VDMSound would cause the laptops CPU to go ape (100% utilization), wheras Dosbox uses only 20% or so. Thanks for an awesome site and good memories!!

HI !
I also think that MOM is the best game ever exists. I'm a professional software developer, and I'm deveoping a very similar game on the web (It will be free to play). If anyone interested on testing, write me a mail. gery@c2.hu You can see my previous work here: http://www.visualchat.hu

There is any relation between Civ 2 and MoM? They look to similar.

Actually, there's a relation between Civilzation 1 and Master of Magic, as MoM was made on example of Civilization 1. Civilization 2 came later, after MoM ;)

True: MoM appeared in 1995, and Civ 2 in 1996. One of the worst faults of "Wild Bill" Steadley, who founded and ran Microprose for a number of years, was his inability to understand the value and followup titles--series. The original Civ appeared in 1991, became a huge hit, and didn't capitalize on this with a followup until after Wild Bill had left the company.

M&M was an incredible title. Too bad the AI is so poor!

I started playing this last night, and got so hooked I didn't sleep until 6 am. It took me ages to figre even the basics out mind you, but it was mad good fun.

Thing is, I can't get sound working for the life of me. But i'm just wondering are the sounds worth getting? Anyway, if anyone has any idea how I can get sound then err, please let me know >_> I'm using a Realtrek AC97 audio if it matters.

Sound is not increadably important but it does add a little. What are you using to run MoM? DOSBox? If you let us know we can help you further.

I'm using Dosbox.

There's a conflict in MoM when you set both the music and sound to Soundblaster Pro. Set music to General Midi, adress 330, IRQ 7, and sound to Sound Blaster Pro (Later) with adress 220, IRQ 7 and DRQ 1. Then I guess it should work

I use Soundblaster (orig.) for both music and sound and it works fine.

Ok, here is a little trick if using DOSBox properly seems hard. Once you have downloaded DOSBox you should get a dosbox.exe file, simply drag the Orion.exe onto the dosbox.exe then the game will load up fine and you can dominate star systems with glee, saved games and everything work fine as well so you can still save and load.

This technique works for a number of games, however when using it, I believe that DOSBox commands do not work such as changing cycle speed, screenshots etc...

How to use dosbox?Do as follows

It opens in z and must mount a directory "c:"(u can take anyother) with the games folder

Example of mounting MOO and run it in Dosbox:
Z:> mount c: c:/games
Z:> c:
C:>cd MOO
c:/MOO>master

when wrote " / " i wanna wrote the other diagonal bar.

Doesn't matter which one is written, either \ or /, both can be used, and not only in DosBox.

As soon as I got the doom mastery enchantment, the enemy wizards fell before my almighty mutant army! HAH!
Love this game.

One of my favorite games of all times!

My favorite setup is to choose at least 2 books from life, chaos, sorcery, then artificer and runemaster. With this combination, you can make artifacts, then burn them into mana for twice what they cost you. A +1 damage sword costs 38 mana to create, and gives you 75 mana when you convert it.

This gives you two advantages:
1. You get as much mana as you have skill every turn. This gets even better when you have heros with spell casting ability, who increase your effective skill for overland spells.
2. You can deck out your heros with superior artifacts.

After my initial selection, you still have three slots to use. You can:
1. add 3 chaos books. This allows you to make weapons with lightning ability, which halves your target armor. Shuri with a lightning bow easily takes out sky drakes.
2. Add 3 life books. You can create armor with invulnerability. This makes your heros very tough, especially in the early going. An Invulnerable Brax will take out all neutral towns, and most light to medium defended nodes.
3. Start on myrror. Always a good thing, gives you more time to create those artifacts, better nodes and ruins to attack, and more mana.

Agreed :)

Though the monsters on Myrror always seem tougher in the beginning than on the other plane.

I only wish somebody would remake the damn thing. :D MoM was a superb game, but too complex for any AI to handle. As Stardock has just released its GalCiv 2, maybe they'll return to MoM 2, but I'm doubtful. It sounded as though they'd parted company with MoM's potential publisher at some previous point.

Hi!
I have got a problem. Every time I try to run master of magic it says "insufficient memory. You need at least 538k free. Try removing all TSR´s"

Yes, I know theres Dosbox, but I have got Win 98, with 650 Mhz. Can anybody help me? Very interesting is, that five years ago I spent hours and hours in playing it- on the same PC. I learned lots of englisch by the trial-and-error
-system, what this spell would do and so on...(my native language is german)
Very interesting riddles often. You cant imagine my surprise when I got my first magic creature! (it was a basilik)


PS: I preferred nature, because of the change Terrain an earth lore spell in the early game. Later the global enchantments were totaly ruling, e.g. wrath of nature or herb mastery.

I can try to help you, but first of all I need few things of you. First is how much memory do you have on Windows 98? Second copy and paste the exact content of autoexec.bat and config.sys of your machine you're using here and I'll modify it for you so that you have enough memory after for Master of Magic. The modified content you can save then in your autoexec.bat and config.sys. Also you'll need to play the game in a Dos shell (that attachment on your desktop or in the start-menu) and not directly out from Windows, then the game should work.
And last but not least - you need to download the program Slowdown here and use it to slow your pc down everytime you play Master of Magic as otherwise you'll get pretty unpleasant sound errors while in the game, and the game will often produce otherwise not available bugs.

Wow, that would be great!
The Dos-Shell starts automatically, so thats not a problem. I downloaded the slowdownprogramme, and the memory is 128 MB RAM.

The Autoexec.bat:

SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H7 P330 T6
SET SBPCI=C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\AUDIO\DOSDRV

mode con codepage prepare=((850) C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ega.cpi)
mode con codepage select=850
keyb gr,,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\keyboard.sys


and the config.sys:

[menu]
menuitem=CD, Computer mit CD-ROM-Unterst�tzung starten.
menuitem=NOCD, Computer ohne CD-ROM-Unterst�tzung starten.
menuitem=HELP, Die Hilfedatei anzeigen.
menudefault=CD,30
menucolor=7,0

[CD]
device=himem.sys /testmem:off
device=oakcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
device=btdosm.sys
device=flashpt.sys
device=btcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
device=aspi2dos.sys
device=aspi8dos.sys
device=aspi4dos.sys
device=aspi8u2.sys
device=aspicd.sys /D:mscd001

[NOCD]
device=himem.sys /testmem:off

[HELP]
device=himem.sys /testmem:off

[COMMON]
files=10
buffers=10
dos=high,umb
stacks=9,256
devicehigh=ramdrive.sys /E 2048
lastdrive=z
device=display.sys con=(ega,,1)
country=049,850,country.sys
install=mode.com con cp prepare=((850) ega.cpi)
install=mode.com con cp select=850
install=keyb.com gr,,keyboard.sys


Won't there be any problems if I change them? I always thought that they are essential and should not be changed? Even though thanks a lot for your help!

They can and need to be changed to fit the configuration on your PC to your needs. That's actually the first thing one needs to do after installing Windows 98 or 95 on their PC, if he's playing Dos games on his machine.
Anyway, here are the modified versions (changes are underlined):

Config.sys
[menu]
menuitem=CD, Computer mit CD-ROM-Unterst�tzung starten.
menuitem=NOCD, Computer ohne CD-ROM-Unterst�tzung starten.
menuitem=HELP, Die Hilfedatei anzeigen.
menudefault=CD,30
menucolor=7,0

[CD]
device=himem.sys /testmem:off
device=emm386.exe RAM
devicehigh=oakcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
devicehigh=btdosm.sys
devicehigh=flashpt.sys
devicehigh=btcdrom.sys /D:mscd001
devicehigh=aspi2dos.sys
devicehigh=aspi8dos.sys
devicehigh=aspi4dos.sys
devicehigh=aspi8u2.sys
devicehigh=aspicd.sys /D:mscd001

[NOCD]
device=himem.sys /testmem:off
device=emm386.exe RAM

[HELP]
device=himem.sys /testmem:off

[COMMON]
files=20
buffers=10
dos=high,umb
stacks=9,256
devicehigh=ramdrive.sys /E 2048
lastdrive=z
devicehigh=display.sys con=(ega,,1)
country=049,850,country.sys
install=mode.com con cp prepare=((850) ega.cpi)
install=mode.com con cp select=850
install=keyb.com gr,,keyboard.sys

Autoexec.bat
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H7 P330 T6
SET SBPCI=C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\AUDIO\DOSDRV

mode con codepage prepare=((850) C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ega.cpi)
mode con codepage select=850
lh keyb gr,,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\keyboard.sys
mode con: rate=32 delay=1
LH path:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:mscd001 /L:X /E

Remark - in the line with mscdex.exe the path is where your mscdex.exe is located (for example c:\windows\mscdex.exe), you need to find where it is if it's not in your Windows folder, and /L:X - X is the letter of your CD drive, replace X with that letter. Also loading mscdex.exe is essential to have CD-Rom access after quitting Windows and restarting in Dos-mode. If you never restart in Dos-mode, you don't need to load mscdex.exe and can remove the line.
mode con: rate=32 delay=1 is just for faster keyboard repeat-rate and shorter delay while typing something in Dos-shell or in Dos-games.
Ansonsten viel Glück! :ok:

For the noobs here, point 1, refers to the 'cheat' where the combo of runemaster +arifier allows you to make an artifact for X, and get back effectively 2x on breaking it.

A good thing to do at the start of the game, when you don't need to cast many spells You can start bootstrapping your mana upwards, by first building cheap sword+1, break it to get the mana, then repeat with a more expensive item, and so on. Of course, you could just keep building cheap stuff, but I find it takes a lot to micromanage. On the negative side, making expensive stuff that you don't intend to use and tie up your spell casting ability.


Or, get 3 more socery books. So you can get access to magic immunity+ guardian wind.

Arm your heroes with archery or ranged magical attacks with misc items that provides flight.magic immunity,guardian winds and you can spend 99% of each battle happily shooting at enemy wizards troops inside cities (not nodes or ruins) without any risk.

They seldom have flying units, except for summons, and most of them like shadow demons, demon lords don't attempt to close for combat.

I actually won at impossible using this combo.

Or Hammerhands! Champion Hammerhands with adamanitum and Holy arms beat Paladins with the same despite armor piercing plus first strike.

Overall magic immunity makes Paladins more flexible in most situations, but Hammerhands are much easier to get, from your capital city , all you need is fighter's guild and you are off!

Ditto for slingers.

Interesting combo.

Huh? You started with 4 life, 3 sorcery, how did you get Gaea's blessing? You can't be sure you will find a nature spellbook in nodes.

You did ALL this in one game? Seems like overkill :)

Honestly, why not simply put the AI out of its misery? with 6 champion heroes not to mention adamanite champion paladins, you don't need to cast raise volcano +change terrian

Here are some tricks that perhaps are not so well known or less well known to less experienced players in MOM.

1. Adjusting tax levels. A lot of hints talk about casting just cause and or stream of life and then raising tax rates. In fact, in most cases, it makes a lot of sense to raise tax rates even before you cast those spells. Additional unrest of 1 rebel in most cities is often worth it for the extra gold, particularly if you don't need the production points which is typically true for most cities in your empires except for the capital and various paladin/slinger etc factories. In 99% of the cases, the extra gold from higher tax rates can speed up building anyway when needed and you still come up ahead.

2. Skill/research/mana/gold management. A lot of players know that there is little point in keeping lots of gold reserves (500 is the max for heroes to come calling if you want that), and given how fast gold accumulates (even at normal default tax rates), a lot of players use their mana sources solely to channel into skill and research while using alchemy to fuel mana reserves.

This is usually the right move, even without alchemy skill. However, in many cases, at the start, it is actually better to focus on Mana and Skill instead of research. Particularly when you need to cast quick spells.

3. Trading spells with wizards. If you are a none-specialist wizards with picks in several realms (2 or more, but 3/4 is better), you should trade spells aggressively. You can often trade the same spell several times with different wizards, or use a spell you just trade for from another wizard, to trade for yet another spell for a third wizard.

You can often tell if on first contact, the wizard will quickly declare war (no or little common spellbooks, predominatly death when you are life etc,capitals are on same contientent), so in such cases you should quickly trade spells before he declares war.

Don't worry if you are trading an expensive rare spell for a common spell, in many cases the later can be useful too either on it's own, or for trading with another wizard.

At hard/impossible level most wizards have 1 or 2 picks in some realm of magic, this creates a HUGE possibility of exchange because you can be advanced in one realm, which he isn't.

Done correctly, you can even keep pace with some wizards on impossible level without doing a lot of research.

Some spells i try not to trade because i find them irriating (counter magic!) but normally i trade almost everything. I even trade cracks call/web at times.

4. Banishing Wizards. Sometimes you might actually want to keep banishing wizards over and over again , just to get spells from capturing his wizard's tower. Probably applicable at higher difficulty levels when they have a lot of spells.


5.Summoning circle +recall unit to move units quickly. One of the fastest way of transport is by moving the summoning circle and then attack with the unit you want transported, and cast recall unit in combat.

Used correctly this is a very powerful tactic, since getting troops where you need them quickly is a big part of strategy games.


Variations of the trick.

* Heroes when hired (not by casting summon heroes/champions), appear at your capital city, even if the summoning circle has moved. In many cases, you want the hero to quickly join the other killer stacks (heros+super unit) so he can gain experience. But the killer unit is probably half the world away , if not in another plane. So what do you do?

It might be a good idea to keep a monster lair nearby so you can quickly move the new recruited hero to attack it, then recall unit. Suitable lairs do not include shooters,casters or teleporters units that can damage your hero of course on their first turn. Also obviously before that you need to move the summoning circle to a suitable spot

*Summon circle +recall unit defeats planar seal. Requires that you have a city on the necessary plane of course.

6. Sharing artifacts. There is a 20 mana cost to teleport artifacts from one hero to another. If you have an artifact that grants High movement bonuses, flight, etc it actually makes sense to incur the mana cost but to allow heroes to share the item just for the extra speed. Of course it works too for combat related stuff, but i find being able to quickly move heroes even more critical.

Hey guys, I just played the game for my first time using Dark Elves in Myrran (won the game in 21 hrs!) on easy. I have a couple questions:

1. I realize that you start with 11 picks, and if you choose myrran, you can go there. How many life books do you need so that you can get stream of life (I found it in a node eventually)? Also, is there a max. number of books you can have? I know I had 4 chaos books and 3 life books (plus sage and some other special power), but I found 2 sorcery books and 1 life book (something like that). Is it possible to have more than 11 books? Also, I take it you can only find only nature/sorcery/chaos books, because I don't know if you can find life/death nodes. So should I go for more life books and less chaos books because I can pick them up later?

2. If you put your hero in any town, does their casting ability help you research/cast spells?

3. I saw some posts about adamatium or something, I know sometimes my troops couldn't kill some creatures (weapon immunity I think), and I had to rely on magic. What is this about adamatium mines? or weapon/armor?

4. About random events, I had a city that a random event always happened, it was plague (happened twice in a row!!) and then suddenly it got health boom (double pop increase). Also, I conquered a lot of crappy towns, and they had very high rebellion rates, so I put 8 troops to try to minimize their uprising, but some of my other towns suddenly rebelled (my own dark elf towns nearby) and just became independed, so I had to go back and whack them. I solved that problem using stream of life on the rebelling towns. (and then figured out the max tax thing with stream of life on everytown). I found that drakes are damn powerful... too powerful, but what are these "behemoths"?

5. What is this banish spell to banish a enemy wizard? Do you sometimes get free spells? How about free books?

This game is real awesome, but little bit laggy.

I think if you want to win on impossible playing a fair game, you'd need a huge huge number of towns (for dark elves) and maybe some sorcery magic to spell blast any 'bad' spells. I found allying with trusty computers was good because they don't suddenly attack you.

It's been quite a few years since I last played Mom, but already some response on your questions, no doubt some other people in here can explain in far more detail... Edit: note that there's also a link to the manual here on abandonia :D

1. There's indeed a limit to the # of spell books. 11 in normal cases, but I seem to remember there were exceptions (amongst other depending on your initial characteristics?)...

2. (Some) heroes can boost your spellcasting ability regardless of their location, I believe it's their spellcaster ability that matters. Damn, I suck at explaining this, but it's all become so vague with time :)

3. Adamantium and mythrill: can only be obtained by building cities near the appropriate mines (crystal-like icons on the map, hover your mouse over the tiles and they'll give you the explanation of what's on that tile). Units trained there will get quite a boost from this. Basically it's a free and continuous power-up, especially valuable early in the game when you don't have access to all-powerful creatures and your heroes aren't that impressive yet.

4. Aren't behemoths the bordeaux/purple magical creatures? Tough, quite a powerful attack but I'd still prefer drakes. Think you have to be into nature spells in order to cast behemoths (except through the usual alternative ways of acquiring some spell). Some races are far more likely to rebel, a.o. dark elves. Choose your buildings in conquered towns wisely, that helps a lot (e.g. some buildings lower the unrest).

5. Banishing spell: one way to get rid of an enemy wizard, though he can return. In any case it takes him out for quite some time. Takes a lot of time to research though. You'll be warned whenever an opposing wizard starts researching it.
You can get free spells and books from conquering nodes (though you have to be really lucky + it's usually the best guarded nodes that offer the greatest reward) or of course trade spells with other wizards.

3. You also need to have the Alchemist's Guild to be built as only after you've built it the units produced in that city have magical weapons, or mithril-/asamantium-ones in case of their deposit near the city.

5. What is the Banishing Spell? I never saw such a spell in the game, neither through playing the game (and I played it a lot) nor through searching through hex-editing. There is Spell of Mastery but that one, once cast, banishes all opponents permanently without any return and you win the game. If the enemy gets it first and casts is successfully then you're banished instead.
There's also an option for you or the enemy players to cast a Spell of Return, choosable just as an option if one's capital city has been conquered, but only if one has yet more cities left to return to. And if you destroy all cities of that enemy then you banish him again and this time permanently as there's nowhere for him to return anymore.

Life & Death books usually can't be found in nodes but after the battles with strong Life and Death creatures like Angels or Demon Lords. Mostly to find in temple-shaped spots or the towers.

thanx for quick response. I will try that now and get back t o you

After a few hours of reading i've managed to get it working. Even got sound :)
Can't wait to play my first game.
Love you guys keep up the good work. Especially you laiocfar. I have to type with alt + numbers or character map but i might post some strats later anyway.

Its fun to get planar seal, and lock your enemies out of your realm.

You can expect it to be dispelled few turns later though. The enemy wizards try all the time to dispel global enchantments that were either casted by player or other computer wizards so in the end it's a matter of whether you have chosen the bonuses that make your spells harder to dispel or not. Therefore global enchantments need to be recast once in a time if you want to keep them :tai:

Stream of life is a rare spell. So you need at least 2 life spell books to have a chance of getting it. Either it is already in your spell book (unlikely with only 2 spellbooks), or you trade it , or you find it.

If you have only one life book, you can never get rare life spells, unless you find another life book.

Of course with only 2 life books, you get only one rare spell researchable in your spellbook, so chances are you won't have it.


If you devote all the remaining 9 books to life, you will have access to research 9 rare spells. There are 10 rare spells, so there is a small chance stream of life won't be in your initial spellbooks.

Heroes add half their spell ability to your Skill (though they cannot add more than 100% of your base skill). They don't help research, unless they have sage ability.

Weapon immunity is pretty wimpy. It raises your shields to 10, against units without magical/holy/admanite/mithral etc weapons. If the unit has this almost of defense or more it doesn't do anything.

Still If you start with Alchemy, all your normal units start with magical weapons and +1 to hit. Units built in cities with alchemist guild's also gain that perk.

Better yet, start a town with access to Mithril or adamantium mines, then build an alchemist guild this gives even bigger bonuses.

Mithril weapons - +1 attack , +1 defense
Admanitum weapons +2 attack, +2 defense

This is per figure !!








Also, is there a max. number of books you can have? I know I had 4 chaos books and 3 life books (plus sage and some other special power), but I found 2 sorcery books and 1 life book (something like that). Is it possible to have more than 11 books? Also, I take it you can only find only nature/sorcery/chaos books, because I don't know if you can find life/death nodes. So should I go for more life books and less chaos books because I can pick them up later?[/quote]

Dark elves rebel like crazy, when they conquer other races, or when they are conquered. Halflings are best if you don't want to worry about rebels.

Any way is to cast Just Cause, that reduces rebels by one in all cities. Also build shrines,temples etc of course.


As far as i know which cities rebel and become independent is a random event. It can happen even if the city has no rebels. Only 3 types of city can't be hit by this event.
Cities with your wizard tower, cities with where you have more fanastic creatures than normal units, and cities with heroes.


As far as I know there is no spell to banish a wizard, unless you mean Spell of Mastery which banishes all wizards and end the game straight away. Alternatively If you capture the enemy wizard's tower, he can return by casting the spell of return if he has mana reseves.



Or kill the enemy fast. At impossible levels, I find the wizards turn on you pretty fast anyway.[/quote]



The absolute maximum number of books you can have is 13. Once you reach this limit you cannot find more spellbooks. You are also limited to 5 retorts I think.

No you can find life and death books too (but not both obviously). Life books can be found in fallen temples and lost temples. Death books can be found in dungeons,abandon keeps and anicent ruins. Wizard's towers, monster lair, mysteries cave can contain any type of spell book.

What treasures you get is based randomly and on the strength of the opposition, nodes tend to have stronger opposition, so you tend to get more good stuff there.

There's also an excellent official strategy guide , if you are lucky enough to own it. :)

That's strange. I seem to recall 13 as the maximum number of books you can have. :blink: True, you can only start off with a maximum of 11, but the AI can start with more on higher difficulty settings, and you can get more books in nodes and ruins up to the maximum of 13. That's why it may be a good strategy to start with fewer books and more retorts, hoping to find a lot of extra books and boost it to 13 anyway eventually. Of course, you can find retorts as well, but I don't think they are interchangable with books, so if you conquer a node that is supposed to have books in it, but you already have 13 books on hand, you get nothing, AFAIK.

Yes the retorts may be found instead of books, it's just a matter of always saving before a node battle and if you don't like what you get, load and try again. Usually if you don't have full number of books yet you'll get books mostly and the retorts only when you have all books full. Sometimes there's a chance though to still get a retort if you don't have all 13 books or 1 retort and 1 book after battles with especially many powerful enemies, but the chance is small.
In any case you'll get always something out of the nodes or life/death enemies unless you have all 13 books AND maximum possible number of retorts which is 5 or 6, I believe.

Maximum retorts is 6. Maximum number of spellbooks is 13.

You basically need only 3 spellbooks in 4 schools = 3*4=12 spellbooks to gain access to very rare spells of all 4 schools + arcane.

Ultimate setup would be something like this.

SSSSLLLNNNCCC + 6 retorts of your choosing

Say

1)Warlord
2) Divine Power
3) Channeler
4) Myrann
5) Articier
6) Sorcery Mastery

That's 13+2+2+2+3+1+1 = 24 picks!

Maximum retorts is 6. Maximum number of spellbooks is 13.

You basically need only 3 spellbooks in 4 schools = 3*4=12 spellbooks to gain access to very rare spells of all 4 schools + arcane.

Ultimate setup would be something like this.

SSSSLLLNNNCCC + 6 retorts of your choosing

Say

1)Warlord
2) Divine Power
3) Channeler
4) Myrann
5) Articier
6) Sorcery Mastery

That's 13+2+2+2+3+1+1 = 24 picks! [/b][/quote]
Ah. A mistake, you can actually get 25 picks because famous is worth 2 picks.

Thanks for your replies to my huge question. One more question, what is a retort used for?

It depends on what the specific retort is. Basicly a 'retort' is like a special skill of your wizard, such as Artificer, Alchemy, Warlord, etc.

Of those 3, Artificer halves the cost of creating artifacts through a spell and starts you off with the artifact creation spell from the begining; Alchemy lets you convert mana to gold at a ratio of 1:1 instead of 2:1, which means you no longer lose half of the resource when you convert from one form to the other; and Warlord makes all your normal (i.e. non-magical) units be 1 level higher than usual, which is very useful (that's why it costs 2 picks).

This is the best game ever!!!

You get a lot more from it , if you study the manuals...

Though 1.31 changed a few things, it's still mostly valid.

For a challange in game play, try taking only a single book of magic or try conquering the world with only a single city!
:Titan:

Why, I can conquer the world, though with two cities and not one :P And with all nodes on Myrror being my :whistle:

What difficulty setting? Hats off if it's more than easy :)
I must say I have to expand a bit early in the game to get some cash flow... Only 2 cities would make my advance a lot slower I reckon.

I tried that once, on the second-hard difficult setting, 4 opponents, strongest magic node effects and medium land-size (hate the opponents to have too many cities, slows game-turns down). It is safe enough as long as you start on Myrror. I chose a city with a good bonus, preferably 1 adamantium + 1 gold / jewel mine in it's radius, and being on water shore is great as well for those nations that can build merchant's guild (requires two ship buildings before can be built). All you have to do is to plunder few easiest lairs around you with the two starter units, then position them in the city for the case of attack of neutral city or plundering monsters. And from the first round on comstruct buildings, build them all.
When I have them all up to wizards tower (therefore already have alchemists's guild) I start to build the best units (while dismissing the starting ones), one or two each for city defense and to plunder harder lairs, for example with High Elves - 1-2 Elvenlords (the ones with piercing attack like Paladins), 2 Longbowshooters (with adamantium they're good killers) and 1-2 Magicians. After they're built I set the city to produce gold through converting build-strength (the hammers) for gold (with all of the gold-bonus increasing buildings that gives a nice boost) and set up a second town.
With the units I plunder the more advanced lairs and preferably at least one magic node if there's one nearby and reachable, and meanwhile study spells up to be able to create artifact and summon a champion, not hero. He either joins the "elite army" or waits in town until the best, most powerful artifacts for him are created. When he has them all he can try himself on all but the hardest lairs/nodes, gains levels through experience unless he was cast Chaos Channels / Black Channels upon (then he doesn't get exp from battles), gathers fame that decreases the gold-cost of units and most important - conquers the magic nodes and spell-books/mana-increasing retorts (save-reload until you have what you want). With each node more in my possession I grow in power rapidly so already soon the enemy wizards are not a threat anymore, unless one of them was lucky and managed to rise high in power while I was trying the same. But even then there're no real problems anymore, it's just a question of some time and lots of fun before he's eradicated, my meanwhile powerful champion will quickly decrease his army and number of his cities, and weak he's not a threat.

All you actually will have to do from then on is to study spells up to Spell of Mastery, cast that spell and win. The AI is quite weak so there's not much challenge anyway, but on the difficulty-level Impossible it's quite difficult while doesn't really increase fun.

I've beaten it on hard with one city when starting on Myrror. Just lock em out and go for armageddon!


Summoning volcanoes and owning all the nodes on your side of the world really helps your power to keep the enemies from dispelling your planar seal.

Lately I feel more like starting on the regular plane (i.e. not Myrror) because it's happened a bit too often that my first city was overrun by rampaging monsters from a nearby node that was too powerful to conquer thus far.

Volcanoes never seem to work for me, whenever I cast them I don't see any increase in mana per turn :blink:

I usually go for lots of magic and a relatively small army (compared to enemy wizards), with a few beefed up heroes/champions with ranged attack. Plus a few powerful beasts to take care of the toughest nodes.

Volcanoes add 0.5 to your spell power points (in that magic-menu above) which is then divided between your mana, research and casting skill accordingly to how you raised the three bars. If you you leave them at their default values you should notice increase in mana per turn for every two volcanoes. And don't forget that volcanoes have a % chance to convert back to hills and stop producing mana after that, so never rely on volcanoes as your firm mana source unless you have Armageddon in effect, then there appear more new volcanoes than them stop to exist, although there's a limited amount of volcanoes that can be existing.

Many thanks for the explanation! I expected it to be 1 mana per volcano.

Then volcanoes aren't such a great spell after all, if you look at mana output compared to casting cost.

Well, it's still good to harm enemy's cities (as it destroys buildings when cast) and ruin the landscape around them. And if you have already many nodes under your control and can cast Armageddon in a matter of two-three rounds it will still boost your mana quite noticeable.

True, though for that casting cost I can think of spells than can do a lot more harm to an enemy's cities :D

Anyway, currently I'm returning to my usual nature spell books, but this time combined with barbarians... Long live the berserkers!

You can always blight the enemies to death if you don't like volcanoes. AI isn't too strong at doing lots of things at once, so the more blight and destruction you put on the enemy, the more overall they won't be able to assault you properly until they fix it.


If you have enough mana and your city has a nightshade you can make your city invulnerable to magic and able to defend from even the strongest foes.

Quick question: any tips on how to speeden up your advance early in the game, regardless of the chosen race or wizard picks?
I do the usual stuff, exploring ruins whenever the monsters aren't too strong, building smithy, granary, marketplace, barracks, armory (or is the first building a fighters guild?). Then I boost my city's defenses by training a few halberdiers or similar.
Next, farmers market, shrine, etc.
Once that is in place, 2 settlers for new cities nearby.
And of course I spend most of my gold to finish buildings earlier.

However I notice that even on "normal" difficulty it takes me a few decades to catch up with the enemy wizards... Even when I build shrines and such as early as possible, and try hard to claim a few nodes, I'll see most enemy wizards having more power than me when I look at the graphs.

Any brilliant tactical advice?

Not really, but here's some stuff. :) I don't think it makes sense to postpone your expansion until your single city is all-mighty. I like to build as many settlers in each city as it's needed to occupy all surrounding terrain, just like in Civ, which was much like this game (no secret here).

And even talking exclusively about mana, all your cities will need a shrine very early in their development. Many cities with only a shrine each (and at least some of them will be more developed) create more mana than a single one with all the advanced buildings. Each city will pay for its building, and still grant a positive balance to pay for more soldiers, even if these are advanced units built in the capital (or capitals). And if you started with a Myrran race or conquered one, its very population creates mana for you, so the larger your empire the more mana you get.

I'll give that a try, though I'm always annoyed when I've just built a few settlements early in the game and they're being overrun by monsters I can't take on yet (because at that point I've only had time to train like 2 halberdiers/similar for each city).

Usually I start building a shrine once it takes less than 100 turns as first indication (of course it won't take 100 turns because the city's production increases over time) or whenever I get rebels at 2% tax rate. Mana is usually not much of a problem, since for most types of magic I don't use the very basic creatures, so I spend little to no mana early in the game.

Before I liked to play on Myrran, but lately I prefer the regular plane because the nodes and such are not as hard to conquer... Well, at least some of them.

If you expand energetically don't worry about losing one of your outposts, it may perfectly happen but it wouldn't be a tragedy. And remember that the mana you manage to create goes not only to spell casting, but also to research and skill increase.

Not really, but here's some stuff. :) I don't think it makes sense to postpone your expansion until your single city is all-mighty. I like to build as many settlers in each city as it's needed to occupy all surrounding terrain, just like in Civ, which was much like this game (no secret here).
Many cities with only a shrine each (and at least some of them will be more developed) create more mana than a single one with all the advanced buildings. Each city will pay for its building, and still grant a positive balance to pay for more soldiers, even if these are advanced units built in the capital (or capitals). And if you started with a Myrran race or conquered one, its very population creates mana for you, so the larger your empire the more mana you get. [/b][/quote]
I personally disagree with this. I think it's better to concentrate on taking down neutral cities. This makes scouting very very important so you can find them. These netural cities will be usually very well developed compared to what you can do.

I find that if you can quickly capture netural or other wizard cities, you have a quick boast towards winning. By comparison taking down nodes are less important.

Certainly for very slow growing races like dwarves , they grow too slow for it to be worth building new cities. Each settler unit hurts your capital city pop, and unlike in the original civ, each settler unit that builds a city doesn't become immediately productive, but must pass through several turns as an outpost. If you are unlucky it can take a long long time, before it becomes a full fledged 1 pop village.

Halflings grow the fastest.

It depends on what you mean by early. Certainly at the point it takes around say 90-100 turns to build (less with slow development), it's pointless.

It's hard to give general advise, since it depends on your setup but i find that neutral cities are the key to winning. If you capture them early, you can even keep pace if not exceed "hard" level opponents.

Heck a early blitz against impossible level opponents, can even allow you to keep pace with 'impossible' just by taking over the empire of one opposing wizard.

In my experience, neutral cities are quite hard to conquer early in the game on harder levels. I've seen some that have 4 units of swordmen (4 swordmen in each unit) at the very beginning, and quickly increase to 6 and more units. Maybe I'm still a slow starter, but damn these cities can be difficult, since their troops have much more experience than your own newly created ones...

When it say impossible its really imposible. At least to me.

True, but they are all of the same type, so you can beat them using the right kind of troops. For example with an army of spirites against mere swordman you can hurt them very badly. or better yet use slingers.

The computer cheats like crazy.

*Computer Wizard has 15 picks

*Population growth is 3X

*Production point/Gold/Food/Mana production is 2.5X

*Spell research is 1.25X

*Upkeep is 0.5X

It's winnable, but you have to be really good and know all the tricks. I found it unwinable a few months ago too short of using 11 book strategies, but now I managed to win three times , using 'normal' strategies.

And there are a lot of much better players who can win impossible fairly easily.

Personally i find that proper adjustment of tax rates is the key, most players probably don't touch it, or set it too low. Even if tax rates cause some unrest in some cities it might still be worth it overall.

One thing I find about master of magic that can keep it interesting, is the computer players are occasionally able to get a very rare spell quite early -- myrran computer wizards can sometimes clear a tower after 30 turns, for example. With save/reload and an editor like momedit you can make the computer player get whatever very rare spell you find the worst -- for me and my 11 death books it's great unsummoning, followed by another computer player getting life force, and suppress magic after that, time stop... That can even things up, sometimes, even if one is an expert player. In addition, in theory it is possible to start on a tiny island with room for only your land-locked capital city, and it's also possible to have no neutral cities on your plane, and it's possible to have chaos rift cast on your capital, and it's possible your plane has only 11-book opponents, it's possible the computer player's unsummoning and life force spells always dispel whatever you cast -- so one game in a billion all these things, and more, can happen at once! In theory, there is no formula to win every single game, even though you might reasonably expect to win every game you happen to play. Somewhere out there a billion monkeys who are perfect master of magic players are playing, and one of them is losing due to an incredible confluence of unfortunate events.

I find that the key to winning on impossible level is to grow quickly. You want a race with a good population bonus and cheap settlers. You also want a decent military unit that doesn't require a ton of infrastructure to build.

To me, the barbarians are ideal. +20 population growth, 60 point settlers, and the awesome berserker unit.

The berserkers are almost too good, they seem like cheating. 6 figures per unit, thrown attack 4, melee attack 7, these guys have more offense than paladins and are way easier to produce. With 3 hearts per figure they also soak up damage well.

Warlord ability is crucial. Expand rapidly to 4-6 cities then send your berserker armies out to crush everything in their path :Titan: . You only need 1 or 2 cities producing military units, the rest are only needed for taxes and food to support your armies.

After your first 2-3 berserkers are built pause production long enough to build an alchemists guild, this will give your units magic weopons, which affect creatures with weapon immunity (like shadow demons) and get +1 to hit. Be sure to stack a shaman with each army so damaged units heal quickly.

I have never been able to win on impossible with a Myrran race, they all grow too slowly. Even if I manage to survive the wandering raiders, by the time I really get anywhere some enemy wizard is casting the spell of mastery :tomato: .

I used to prefer berserkers too, but lately I really like stag beetles (don't remember the according race right away). Though I must add I haven't tried impossible yet...
However these stag beetles were produced quite early and were ideal to take over both nodes and neutral/enemy cities. Plus it was the fastest I ever wiped out an enemy wizard (on hard level).
What's really annoying is when an enemy wizard starts shattering every decent spell you're casting...
And I have to agree, while Myrran provides quite some opportunities, I find the environment is so tough compared to Arcanus that it slows you down early in the game. Which is deadly on the higher difficulty levels.
I've been much into casting Gorgons lately. Before I considered them way too expensive for what they did, but against the right enemy they can be very impressive.

Yep, just like civ but when doing that in impossible i found that my 5th city is more a trench than a city + i take a big army to capture a node and lost it to a magic spirit.

True, very annoying when you can't cast guardian spirits!
There's a reason why the computer usually stacks up quite an army on his own nodes if they are only guarded by magic spirits.

I first played MoM when it first came out in the 90's. I've been looking for it again since i lost the copy years ago. There has never been another stratgey game to compare to it, past or present.
However, i was never a fan of the Myrran races. THe strongest was High Men with Life magic. Once Paladins have invulvnerability, you can't loose.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(sarua @ Aug 26 2004, 07:56 AM) [snapback]10524[/snapback]</div>I am always choose Myrran, Race=Draconian, face=Sss'RA, magic books Life=2,Nature=2,Sorcery=2,Chaos=2. Starting spells: holy armor,stone skin,confusion,eldritch weapon.

The reason that I love Myrran is that you have only one opponent on your plane. This give you time to make your heroes a real behind-kicking monsters. :). Also you can concentrate on your cities development instead of producing spearmens for defence.

Then I fly around the capital with 2 units separately (spearmen starts at 12 o'clock, swordsmen at 6 o'clock, then move by spiral clockwise). When i enter a lair with Great Wyrm or another non flying MegaMonster I start cast confusion on those creatures,
after several tries you can take them under control. And get a cool stuff at start of the game.

Having a lot of different magic books helps to change spells with almost any wizard and you can find a lot of spells of different realms in ruins.

Also I take a neutral cities of non-flying races. Just Fly and Confuse.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Ahnassi @ Jun 1 2006, 04:22 AM) [snapback]233575[/snapback]</div>That's only true up to difficulty level normal, on difficult or impossible there're often additionally other wizards besides Sss'ra starting on Myrror, or they set up cities later in the game there and spawn across their area of land.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Dan Hanegan @ May 17 2006, 06:14 PM) [snapback]230926[/snapback]</div>I am using Item Make program (supplied with MoM) to edit first 255 items to make it really cool
Make every 2nd staff to have a FlameStrike X 4. Plus Good hero. And you will win even at Myrran.

There is a whole site dedicated to Heros and thier roles in the game. I have a copy of this site.
Write me and I can send you that manual

Well - Age of Wonders 2 is probably the game that matches MoM best - it lack a lot of the charm of MoM - but basically it's the same game (with a lot of small differences)....It isn't as complete a game as MoM - I mean, a game from the early 1990s that features brilliant strategic and tactical gameplay, some (rather good) role-playing elements, great music, okay sound effects - and Civilization at the same time....damn :kosta:

/Raasted

If you manage to just simply spell banish the other wizards of the face of the earth in impossible, then that must be the hardest victory.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Gamefreak @ Jun 1 2006, 04:44 PM) [snapback]233586[/snapback]</div>That's only true up to difficulty level normal, on difficult or impossible there're often additionally other wizards besides Sss'ra starting on Myrror, or they set up cities later in the game there and spawn across their area of land.
[/b][/quote]
I am always play on Impossible
4 opponents.
I played many times and only once or twice I had 2 opponents on Myrran

BTW who knows what is "-4 spellsave"? what does it make?

Its a replica of D&D type spell saves, or a resistance modifier to casted spells. Your character (depending on his/her level has a chance to resist whatever spells in some manner or another, and a -4 to this could be devastating when the enemy casts stuff that can kill you. Spell immunity however, is unaffected by such things.

Or at least thats what your situation may be about.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(blastradius14 @ Jun 9 2006, 04:13 AM) [snapback]235375[/snapback]</div>So -4 is bad and +4 would be good, or vice versa?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(blastradius14 @ Jun 9 2006, 01:13 PM) [snapback]235375[/snapback]</div>So when I Create an Artifact and choose a "-4 spell save" I am doing a bad thing for my heroes? or for enemy armies?

Let's make an example:
I gave Malleus stuff Flaming, "+6 attack","+4 to Hit","-4 spell save".
cast on them invisibility or flight or chaos chanel(wings)
And sent him to the lair with Great Wyrm.
This mean that Great Wyrm will have 8 resistance instead of 12?

Magic immunity gives resistance equal 32 or 25 - can't remember excatly.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Ahnassi @ Jun 9 2006, 05:26 AM) [snapback]235397[/snapback]</div>Spell save -4 in Create Artifact Menu is a positive thing that lowers the resistance of the enemy you're casting spells on. Doesn't have an effect on summoning or positive spells on yourself or friendly units. About attacking with the ranged magic attack, not sure there. But chance to hit is very helpful on ranged attack.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Dan Hanegan @ May 17 2006, 06:14 PM) [snapback]230926[/snapback]</div>LOL, trying to win the game by out colonising the AI using a myran race obviously won't work. You need to abuse the killer units of the myrans! I agree about the barbarian strategy and it probably works for the halflings too, but you can't play the slow growing dwarves like barbarians obviously.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Ahnassi @ Jun 1 2006, 06:34 AM) [snapback]233587[/snapback]</div>You need to surivive long enough for the merchant to show up and make plenty of $$$$.


http://mom.diaspora.ru/txt/heroes.doc/index.html

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Richrf @ Jun 14 2006, 09:46 AM) [snapback]236577[/snapback]</div>Well-armed Hero makes no difference which race do you play.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Richrf @ Jun 14 2006, 09:46 AM) [snapback]236577[/snapback]</div>Nope. Imaging a lair with 1-4 great wyrms. There's no doubt that this lair have something valuable (for example one of your hand-made staffs). If you have flying unit/spell ,confusion spell, mana, and patience then you surely win and get all cool stuff in the lair.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Richrf @ Jun 14 2006, 09:46 AM) [snapback]236577[/snapback]</div>YES! this is it! I am glad that it still alive.

Ahnassi's tactic for defeating otherwise nearly invincible -utterly so without terminator heroes- Great Wyrms is quite interesting indeed. Thanks.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Japofran @ Jun 14 2006, 11:50 AM) [snapback]236586[/snapback]</div>Here is an ideal lair
http://www.geocities.com/ajirra/goodlair.jpg
I have 1 Draconian swordsmen with resist magic and resist elements cast on it

here is a confused Great wyrm and a bunch of war "puppies" >:)

http://www.geocities.com/ajirra/confusedw.gif

here is what is left after confusion takes the great wyrm under my control
http://www.geocities.com/ajirra/conf_1st_time.gif

all war bears made a suicide. and both wyrms is half damaged. at next time when confusion works
they will annihilate each other. So i won 2 fame and a cool artifact(As I said before you need to work with ITEMMAKE on first 255 items to make guarded artifacts really cool).

here is the edited ITEMDATA.LBX
ITEMDATA.LBX edited with ITEMMAKE utility and packed with ARJ

It's nice for you to upload it, but keep in mind that others might want a different setup of the items in it. It would be maybe wiser to upload itemmake.exe instead for those who don't have it in their Master of Magic directory :whistling:

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jun 15 2006, 04:56 PM) [snapback]236917[/snapback]</div>Yap! Agree!
This File is for those who do not want to spend a lot time making their own items and for others as an example.
It is doubtful to me that somebody does not have this utility.

If somebody does not have this program with the game please send me PM.
I am posting a link ITEMMAKE . the Microprose utility for making items for Master of Magic

Actually, once my capital city of dark elves rebelled, thus resulting in "Raiders take over -Wizard's name- fortress" or "Raiders banishes -name-. It does not happen often because people tend to let the capital more defended.

Some time ago I have read on some forum a tricky tactics that allows you to gain an unlimited fame.

Unfortunately I can't rememeber it.

I know how to gain fame from banish.
You can banish wizards many times but it give you only 5 fame per banich.
Suppose that you banished a wizard then you storm all his cities except 1 or 2 small cities.
After he cast the spell of return you can banish him again. If wizard have only 2 cities then you should give him a 1000gp so he can return faster. But then you need to wait some turns while he produces a settlers and sends it to make outpost then to wait some turns while his outpost grows into hamlet. It takes a lot of time in the game. The reason to get a lot fame is to get score about 150%. The score consists of fame, year when you finished, population,spells researched and a score for casting a spell of mastery. The bonus for time is the biggest. So you need a fame boost to cover up your waiting. So usually you can banish each wizard 4 times before you clear the map and found new cities all over the world. Total 4*4*5=80 fame for banish and 3*10=30 fame for defeat. You need to keep 1 wizard at the end of the game to have a possibility of casting the spell of mastery.

But that was another tactics described on that forum.

My maximum score was 109%.

Who knows how to gain a lot of fame in a short time?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Ahnassi @ Jun 20 2006, 01:49 AM) [snapback]237991[/snapback]</div>Quite easy - you get a champion, create the best artifacts and set him out on rampage on lairs, ruins, temples and nodes. It should bring you already around 40 fame somewhere in the middle of all covered places. Shorter than that I don't think there's a way.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jun 20 2006, 04:41 PM) [snapback]238014[/snapback]</div>Quite easy - you get a champion, create the best artifacts and set him out on rampage on lairs, ruins, temples and nodes. It should bring you already around 40 fame somewhere in the middle of all covered places. Shorter than that I don't think there's a way.
[/b][/quote]
hmm. lairs cannot regenerate. once you explore it disappears. That was some other renewable source of fame.

who knows what is the difference between:
1)magic weapon
2)adamantium weapon
3)mithril weapon

magic weapon gives +1 to hit.
What give the rest two?

I noticed that once you build an alchemist guild you can produce units only with magic weapons even if there're adamantium mines near the city.

The difference between magic, and mithril and adamantium weapons is that mithril increases the attack strength by one and adamantium by two besides the +1 chance to hit, while magic weapons don't increase the attack strength.
Once you've built the alchemists guild you can produce units with mithtril and adamantium weapons if the appropriate mines are in the city's cover area which is 2 blocks in each straight direction and 1 block in diagonal directions, I think.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jun 21 2006, 07:31 PM) [snapback]238379[/snapback]</div>oops this means that something wrong with my copy of the game.
i checked yesterday : no alchemist guild in town but a adamantum mine is 2 blocks below. result - unnit with magic weapon :(

Can you help me to determine which file is corrupted. Can you post a file list with file size and dates?
like "c:\games\mom\DIR /on /n /l >mylist.txt" ?

Are you able to build the Guild, Ahnassi?

For Adamantium & Mithril mines I thought your city had to be located ON the same square, whereas for food, gold, silver, ores, etc it's enough to be within the 1-2 blocks range described by Scatty

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(another_guest @ Jun 22 2006, 09:47 AM) [snapback]238708[/snapback]</div>No, they can be all located within the city's reach area and bring bonuses, only that for getting weapon bonuses from adamantium and mithril mines you need that alchemist's guild to be built. Otherwise they only bring bonuses to the magic, which are increased through building the mountaineer's guild just like the other mineral bonuses like gold or diamonds.

may be your sorcerer person. Some of them are alchemists or something like that, so they can do the direct resource thing without a guild.

Ah yes, you mean choosing or finding the Alchemy ability which provides all built units automatically with magic weapons. I never took that ability so far so can't judge if it provides the mithril or adamantium weapons to the built units without the Alchemist's guild.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jun 23 2006, 12:59 PM) [snapback]239110[/snapback]</div>No it doesn't. Alchemy just gives all your troops magic weapons (acting like a normal Guild without resource mines). If you want to use the mithril or admantium mines you need to build Aclhemist Guild even if you have the alchemy retort.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jun 21 2006, 08:31 AM) [snapback]238379[/snapback]</div>A minor point is magic weapons like mithril and admantium count as magical, so it bypasses any unit that has weapon immunity. Not that weapon immunity is a big deal, it just raises the unit defense to 10, if it is below that. If the unit already has defense higher than 10, it does nothing else.

Well, magic weapons are nice when you encounter those pesky air elementals :) Air elementals will wipe out your troops but will be slaughtered by a couple of basic berserkers with magic weapons.

How i hate these elementals grrrr!!!!

I tell you, send some berserkers (or similar units from other races) with magical weapons, and those elementals are finished :)
But they are surprisingly strong sometimes, really dangerous to bump into.

And make sure the berserkers attack the elementals first, only then their high attack strength comes into play, if they're defending when attacked then not their weapon strength counts but the strength of the shields is calculated for the damage they do, and berserkers have 'really' little shields.

But even when defending units counterattack or something, right? Even if it's after some have already been killed. Anyway I fully mastered Civ and Col, but for some reason I'm not that good at this one, even though I completed it even at Impossible difficulty level --conquering the enemies' capitals to paralize all their units...

When units counterattack not the strength/number of their swords count but the strength of their shields, and also units who have special additional attacks like throwing weapons or first strike can't use them when counterattacking, therefore it's usually better to attack first than to be engaged in counterattack especially with those additional attacks. But not always, attacking Phantom Warriors first for example is worse than defending and letting them come, strangely, though if there's first strike or throwing weapons available then attacking first is still better as then they're killed without even harming the attacking unit. So I'm not entirely sure of the entire mechanism.

An additional reason why attacking first is often better, is that you can have several of your units gang up and take out an enemy unit completely.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jun 29 2006, 05:29 AM) [snapback]240381[/snapback]</div>Nonsense.

When 2 units with no first strike or gazes or thrown weapons etc, attack each other, both attacks are resolved simultaneously.

Attacker attacks with his swords, hits are blocked by the defender shields

at the same time

Defender attacks with his swords, hits are blocked by defender shields.

After that figures die.

Why then should you attack first?

Because abilities like thrown, first strike,breathes etc only come into play if you are the attacker. The only exception is gazes (doom,stoning,death) these work also if you are defending.

So if you have any of these abilities you should attack. Or if the opposing unit has any of these abilities, you should attack first to prevent them from using their abilities.



No. Assuming that your unit has no special abilities that apply only when you are the attacker, it makes no difference.

Phaton warriors do have illusionary attacks that ignore shields , so it is not wise to engage them in melee, but if you do choose to do that, attacking first or not makes no difference.


What's so strange. Only attackers get to use first strike and thrown abilities. These abilities occur prior to the normal melee, so if these attacks kill the Phantom warrior before the oridinary melee stage your units don't get hurt.


Here's a timing table.

Phase 1 : Breath*, Thrown*, Gaze (attacker)

Phase 2 : Gaze (defender)

Phase 3 : First strike

Phase 4 : Normal melee (attack/defense) , also life stealing attacks, poison, touch attacks, ,


*Applies to only attacker (i.e the unit initating the melee).

The fact is still that if you attack phantom warriors first, your default units that you can build at the cities will be damaged badly, but often if you don't attack and let the phantom warriors attack first the unit takes less damage while the warriors are often killed instead. This isn't usually the matter with the high-level heroes with good items as they can deal great damage and have a better chance to hit. Just try it out yourself, you'll see that defending and letting phantom warriors attack is better than attacking them first. I didn't take it out of my imagination, you know, but from playing lots of times and noticing.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jul 3 2006, 10:12 PM) [snapback]241312[/snapback]</div>Sure sounds very anecdotal to me! You need to carry out numerous specific experiments to even come close to proving what you are saying. Selective observation is a very tricky thing when it comes to probabilities.

In any case even if I grant your observations of phantom warriors, what you are proposing (that units counter attack on strength of shields) is unreasonable.

It's possible that illusionary attacks might be a bit loopy in counterattacks, but certainly what you propose makes no sense .

Oh really? Then why it is so that if you attack the berserkers for example with the hammerheads (or whatever they're called in English), the hammerheads almost don't take any damage while the berserkers are killed in the process? If the berserkers would counterattack with their attack strength which is pretty strong for them too, then the hammerheads would be hurt quite noticeably too, right? But the berserkers usually stand no chance against middle or good units attacking them first in melee, while when the berserkers attack they're 'the' killers (mostly because of the thrown weapons, but also because of the strength of their swords).
I'm all ears to your counter-arguments.

The game manual or something didn't provide information about in-game mechanics?

Yes you're right, it's lying before me here and it's all covered there. Sorry, the dispute is solved.

I just asked, I didn't know. Now I see there's a link here in Ab to download the manual, and that's what I'm going to do right now. :D

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jul 5 2006, 08:41 PM) [snapback]241746[/snapback]</div>LOL, you don't state what levels the units are, so let's assume base level green Hammerhands have 3 defense , beserkers 6 swords. That's only 0.9 hits on average! And given that you are not systematically doing experiments ..... And what do you mean by "almost don't take any damage". Is 2 hearts considered that? what about 3? 4? Or do you just look at whether the health status is green or not? LOL.

Funny how you are the only brilliant MOM player to notice such things that no other expert MOM player who has played hundreds of games have ever seen.

As I said, you want to convince people, give us exact stats of the attackers. defenders, what level they are at (eite whatever) what spells there are etc.. the exact circumstances, the number of times you played each scenario, and then we can see how likely what you claimed happened is.

Saying things like , "almost do no damage" ,"usually stand no chance", is impossible for people to verify.

You already answered your own question here. Thrown weapons are very powerful, because they occur prior to melee attacks.

Go and play the game, and see for yourself if you need some proof instead of argueing here. People play games to have fun with them and not to set up experiments, and if that's not the case for you then you're thinkably wrong here.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(To Mr. Nonsense @ Jul 10 2006, 10:39 PM) [snapback]242571[/snapback]</div>My dear friend, Scatty was the one that made claims, without having evidence to back him up. The rest of us who knows how the combat system works as stated in both the manual and the Strategic guide as well as the unofficial FAQ, should not be the one who needs to bring evidence.

For the record, I did a quick experiment. With a recruit spearman with iron skin, holy armor which leads to a shield of 1+2+5 = 8 and a swords of 1. I also modded the spearman to have movement of 5 to aid testing.

I brought it up against a warbear.

My friend claims that the defending unit counterattacks using his shields instead of swords.

It's simple enough, under his hypothesis, it is obvious that if you use your spearman to attack it will do less damage then letting the spearman counterattack (8 shields will be used to calculate damage according to him).

I won't bore you with the results, but basically whether I attacked first or the spearman attacked first, the bears suffered the same amount of damage (between 0 to 2 hits). This is very unlikely if the spearsman counterattacks with shields since shields are *8 times* that of swords.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jul 6 2006, 06:55 AM) [snapback]241796[/snapback]</div>??? I thought you were claiming both the manual, the official strategy guide was wrong?? So you are now saying your observations are wrong?

I didn't claim such a thing, I actually forgot that I had it :P

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Scatty @ Jul 18 2006, 07:02 AM) [snapback]243714[/snapback]</div>Well you put pretty strong claims on your theory about how defense is used for counter attacks... No reminder in the form of quotes needed I trust?

Please note that the manual isn't completely clear on the mechanics with regards to multi figure combat (e.g is it total swords * figures or does each figure take a seperate swing (sometimes it matters), do units defend with total defense* figures or do they defend indidivually each trying to block the damage inccured etc). , the MOM official strategic guide gives a much clearer version but whether that is 100% accurate, I don't think anyone has had the patience to test.

But your theory about how defense is used for counterattack is patently wrong despite all your protests. Here's a sample.

Does anyone know why I can't get Master of Magic to save a game? I am running it with dosbox(latest version) and I have copied everything from my cd to a folder on my harddrive. If it makes a difference, I am running windows XP.

One thing I do notice is that my computer defaults my "magic" folder to 'read' only in the attributes section, even after I try to uncheck it. Does anyone know how to prevent this or how to "make" in not read only? Thanks for your help.

Jim

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(FreeFreddy @ Aug 24 2004, 03:02 PM) [snapback]9891[/snapback]</div>Hello, this is another question which I'm certain most of you will find laughably simple. How do you ...apply.?? a patch to a game? I have downloaded both the game and the patch. I read the read me file, but I didn't see any clear and simple instruction for the computer illiterate folks like me.
Would someone please help me with this?
Thanks in advace.

But of course, especially since you asked so nicely. :)

Looking at the patch archive, it looks like an "overwrite" style patch, ie one where you have to replace the files in the game directory with those from the patch archive.

Just unpack the contents of the archive with the patch to where you have unpacked the game, and choose "yes to all" when prompted about overwriting files. Simple like that.

Have fun:)

Thanks again Horsman! You are quickly becoming my Knight in Shining Armor!

No problem. If you need any more help with any other games... just ask. :)

I was playing it today, I love this game since day I play it....

Keeping the things simple and experimenting, this game have a HIGH replaying level)....

The funny thing is: today I get something I call "The Flying Dutch" unit.....

And of course: is a YAB :whistling: :bleh:

I dont know, I have a archmage with 2 life books, 6 or 7 books of Chaos and 1 of nature (wich I find in a Keep), .I was advanced in the game (normal level, I dont have enough experience to deal with immpossible level), also I was Myrrean and Dark Elf Civ, also extermined the other mage in myrra (Ss´ra) and I have the other 4 mages alive, I have a good mixture of spells and found the Artificer and Runesmaster artifacs in some Lair too...

I was having a good time when a Dark Elfs Galleon wich I build to pick a captured-then-settled Halfings isolated in a isle to traslade to a few lone continent (I wanna more Farms) then suddendly and without explication the Galleon becomes WindWalker/DemonCaster/Invissble/immune to Poison, fire, death, and a lot of more stuff I cant rememeber/have Death precence or something (have a Skull item in his propeties)/"Corrupting Soil" stuff and having a lot of swords, shields and crosses.....and Plane Travel included...

When I see that thing i said "Wow, Davy Jones is in the house" LOL

Obviously I use to get into the most powerfull mage continent and have some fun....until I cast Crusader and
the thing was unstoppable, Shamans and lesser units (this saved game sucks cuz everyone have packs and packs of Klaklon bugs).....

The flaws this Black Pearl have: never send it against a city, he dont move at all and the game defeats u and lost the unit.

A pack of 9 Fire Breathing elite Battle Bugs ruin his paint, if u not cast anything to help him, of course...

If anyone wanna see it send me a mail to biesiuss2 (at) yahoo.com

Master of Magic Rules the planet....

Something cool characters development to add to a MoM2 or Fanmods can be:

Hero afinnity: a Chaos Hero can develop better with a Chaotic Archmage than a LifeArchmage one...

The Hability of at certain level the Heroes can be independent (LOL) exp:
Making the Heros have "Life Time", Example, Jars serve u for 30 "Arcanum or Myrran" years then retire or jubilate, This make more Heroes available (ok im tired of having Bagthru on my door every time I play) and rotate and renew the possibilities.

When u leave a certain Hero in a mid-developed city, then other mage induces him to his side, he betrays u and join the other Mage. Also u can do that with other Mage Heros, so some features to keep your Hero can be greated, like Nobelity issues or Magic/Gold rewards.

To Extend the playing Game u can "Jubilate" a certain Hero after a reasonable time of service, making him regent or something of certain number of cities.... This can help to avoid rebellions for a certain time. Dreaming a little u can creat "Bloodlines".

Made these regular "Ultra Elite" or "Champion" units generate a Hero, example:

I have a pack of Longbows garrisoned in the Main City from the beguinning, for one or another reason they survive all the game and When I finish they still there, at highest level. Why not a "special" Building available when you have a certain number of Capitals or certain monetary level and buildings where u send a Ultra Elite or Champion´s to train adn get a Hero?, maybe a skill of the Archmage can be "Wizard Trainer or Hero Trainer".

That and some campaing mode can be great in this game, even If still in low res graphics what I plead is a good storytelling Game....

Thanks for having it here!

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MoM_Junkie_Vebose @ Apr 8 2005, 09:31 AM) [snapback]92344[/snapback]</div>This brings up an interesting point. Does anyone know how to "break into" the game and give ourselves some unfair advantages?

I might if I had enough data to process.

But I don't feel like working on that.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Szaemon @ Aug 10 2006, 03:16 PM) [snapback]247752[/snapback]</div>This brings up an interesting point. Does anyone know how to "break into" the game and give ourselves some unfair advantages?
[/b][/quote]
Simply, look here - Dirty Little Helper
All you need yet is a hex-editor and some basic knowledge with it.

The "Flying Dutch Unit" is so cheap. Well, I guess a lot of things are cheap in this game. They're not as cheap since there's no real multiplayer mode yet. I like using Dark Elves for their Warlocks' special Doom Bolt. Ten hits instantly like that will kill nearly anything. A full army of Warlocks can take out anything (without Magic Immunity, right?).

Exactly, you wouldn't want to try that against one or more sky drakes...

Thanks Scatty. In fact I have no knowledge (basic or otherwise) regarding hex editing...but this is the kind of game that inspires a quest for knowledge....

It's easier then it seems, really. The hardest part will be to get familiar with the hexadecimal numbering system.

For a decent editor, I recommend Hex Workshop. Maybe not the best there is, but I've been using it for seven years now and didn't have any complaints so far. Plus, it includes a numeric converter from decimal to hexadecimal values and vice versa.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(the_fifth_horseman @ Aug 12 2006, 12:40 AM) [snapback]247980[/snapback]</div>Thanks again! you answered my next question before I could ask it. I hope you're right about it being easier than it seems. After my first glance...well, I guess I don't have to tell you how it seems...

If you have any problems with using it, just PM me and ask.

This is my favorite game! I thought that I am the only one still playing this old game, but as I see now...
MoM RULES!!!

My best strategy I tried is based on Shadow demons unit. I choose all death books and Shadow demons, Black prayer and Wrack spells. I summon Shadow demons as soon as I gather enough mana (They cost 195 with all death books). About four units can explore both planes (planar travel) and conquer many cities and lairs. They can use murran roads so you can use murran roads to travel on arcanus.

My capitol race is Halflings - that way other cities don’t have too many rebels + they have a food bonus.
Using this strategy I finished the game in year 1404 several times (impossible level).
There is no time for expanding with settlers, there will be enough cities conquered in both planes.

Other wizards can be defeated by taking their capitol city first, before they declare war (sometimes don’t, but if you play fast they don’t have too much cities).
Power drain spell is useful to cast on wizard you are about to attack (drain up to 150 mana and hopefully prevent opponent spells).
………

I tried using the confusion spell trick someone explained earlier, really cool to take some powerful units under control in early stage of the game.
I’d like to try some more ideas you have because I LOVE THIS GAME !!!

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ljubishan @ Sep 27 2006, 02:15 PM) [snapback]257767[/snapback]</div>The Power Drain spell is unfortunately the most unuseful spell in the game, because the opponent wizards cheat and always have enough mana for at least weaker spells. Even if you drain the 150 mana with the spell, next round they have enough mana again already. Doesn't even matter if they have no nodes under control, but with them of course they have more opportunities.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Guest @ Sep 27 2006, 04:26 PM) [snapback]257796[/snapback]</div>Even if you drain the 150 mana with the spell, next round they have enough mana again already.
[/b][/quote]

Of course. But it costs 30 (with all death books) and if you can cats it instantly when next to a oponent capitol you can enter a battle in same turn. 30 skill is not that hard to get.
I used power drain only in those moments and it helped to finish them off fast. :butcher:

Just something i noticed: it says that game was released in 1995, which is wrong.
Games was published in 1994 surely. On HOTU they even say 1993 but i think they are wrong too. I remember when this game was reviewed in PC Gamer and in one magazine from my country. I still have them in fact, surely 1994. March or April in 1994.

Im new to this forum but not new to this game. The reason to why I even found it was that I was wondering what Spell Save was.
My favourite way to win at impossible is to pick 11 books of Life and Highmen. I choose Stream of Life, the lower tier spells is not very important but I usually pick plane shift and true sight. I immediatly start casting Stream of Life in the beginning of the game and boost mana to the max. When I have it active on my city I boost the taxes to 100% since noone will strike with Stream of Life activated. I go for bank as fast as possible and then I just start spamming settlers and put Stream of Life on every city.
With the huge amount of taxes I can just use alchemy to cover the mana cost. If you have come this far you just about won since you get more income than you can spend and you will have alot of RP coming in with all the highmen cities. Buy lots of buildings, you won't get low on cash. Then just cast Incarnation as soon as possible and kill everything you can with Torin+paladins.

Another strategy that is really good is to pick 11 Death books and choose wraiths as the high tier spell. Summon them as fast as possible and take every town you can. If you can, kill the other wizards when you find them. You will get loads of guarded cities with nice defense since all the troops you kill will become undead. This means no upkeep so it is basically free defense for all your towns.

Now, this is arcanus of course and I would really like to know some good strategies for beating 4 opponents as myrran on impossible without modifying the game by for example changing the items that you will loot. Long post, but I am so excited to see that I'm not the only one loving this game.

Edit: 11 books=)

13 life books (???), there are 11 picks on start, the other two you probably got wining some lairs and nodes. Anyway the reason is to get the spell cast discount (40% with 11 books), but if you pick Myrran you use 3 picks so choosing 8 books (any same type) can get you only 10% discount. That’s why I pick Warlord, and different type of books to get wide range of spells to use.

My opinion is that the key for wining when starting in myrror plane is to eliminate competition in myrror as soon as possible because they grow quickly.

I usually use draconian race to explore with swordsman and spearman. Surveyor (F1 key – that gives info about terrain) can direct scouts to a nearby city (city can be in unexplored area, searching the borders of the explored area with surveyor will tell you if there is a city three squares away). Doom drakes aren’t so bad and they need only stables to build.
Find the enemy’s capitol city. Win it... and the rest is much easier.

Also, finding a dwarwen city would be useful. Dwarwen engineers are so efficient in building roads. Two engineers together can build road in one turn on every square except mountains (two turns). Connected cities need fewer units to defend and give mobility to your attacking groups. Also everywhere I see the area rich in minerals (crysx and gems) I send a dwarwen settler. Once I had a 1 pop. dwarwen city with 3 crysx mines... 30 mana production.

But roads on Myrror can also work to your disadvantage. I'm mostly thinking of rampaging monsters as particularly on Myrror they can be quite dangerous in the early stages of the game.

Also why I don't always like Myrran, on Arcanus it's quite easy to take control of a few nodes early on whereas on Myrror these are often guarded by worms and drakes, which means quite a drawback to your mana production.

:blink: Sound. The nemesis of all classic-gamers. I'm running a 266mhz Windows 98se laptop. The sound won't work, and the install files will not run. I generally use SB Pr0 (220, 5, 1).

I really like the look of this game (layout remarkably similar to the later Master of Orion 2), but would prefer some sound... Any ideas?

You need to load the sound drivers in Ms-Dos, before Windows 98 loads, or you won't have sound when ending Windows 98 and starting in Dos-Mode. As for Windows 98, there usually won't be sound for Dos games while you're playing them in Windows.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Guest @ Oct 11 2006, 10:40 AM) [snapback]260636[/snapback]</div>Ah. I've never yet quit windows and entered Dos to run sound in a Dos-based game (World of Xeen, Arena, Wolfenstein, etc). The only games I've met so far in which the sound doesn't work in Windows is Master of Magic and Discworld, though I've just downloaded them so I hope the problem will be resolved.

I'm just concerned that Master of magic has no install file or setup/config file that allows me to tell the game which sound card I have... I suppose I should learn to use Dos :)

I never managed to run MoM in Win98 normally, but its "DOS mode" did the trick. If you sound card is as old as your computer seems, but newer that a SBAWE32, those came with SB16 emulation drivers which Win98 took care of loading in normal and DOS mode. For the parameters (Adress, IRQ and DMA) look in AUTOEXEC.BAT.

I tried with both DosBox and VDMSound and had no luck. This was one of my favorites in college and I'd love to play it again. I think I have my original disks?/CD? around here somewhere. Any help getting it to work would be much appreciated. I could dust off the old P3 laptop I have in the closet if I need to bring out the artillery...Or commandeer the old P1MMX-233 I gave to my mom to not use many years ago. I'm running a high-end system now.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DiamondSoul @ Aug 23 2004, 07:23 PM) [snapback]9835[/snapback]</div>

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Chizm @ Oct 13 2006, 01:21 AM) [snapback]260971[/snapback]</div>What do you mean, you had no luck with DosBox? On an high-end system DosBox should work flawlessly, as long as you increase the CPU cycles with CTRL-F12 for the game to run fast enough.

Exactly, even a 5-year old 1.6 GHz laptop with 256 MB ram could run it. In that case I would suggest skipping 1 or 2 frames though, that also helps quite a bit.

However note that especially during combat MoM can crash (particularly when summoning lightning or demons) so remember to SAVE OFTEN :)
Though all in all it only happens once in every that many hours.

An important thing, for DOSBox or pure DOS or whatever, you must enable EMS to play this game.

You could also buy a cheapie second-hand 486 or 586 system (if you wonder: 586 is the "true" name for Pentium 1 processors and their AMD equivalents).
These things aint really expensive, I got one last year.

I was said once by a teacher, God knows if it's true, that the new chips were named Pentium instead of 586 because in order to patent something it needs a name not made up entirely of numbers. So 286, 386, 486 chips had been copied with impunity, and so Intel came up with the name Pentium because it didn't want that to happen again. /OFF TOPIC OVER

I once installed DOS 6.22 in a P3 450 MHz and no game run too fast or anything, everything went smooth as silk. A few games didn't even work while they worked under DOSBox or even Win98 (DOS7), or just didn't work under any system *on my machine*, but that random stuff was already common in the old days of DOS (There was a much greater number of games that didn't work under Win98 but did under DOS6 though.) Besides you can then install DOS in one partition and Windows in another, thus making operation easier. (For example my hat is off to you if you can download a game from Abandonia using DOS, but with both installed in two partitions of the same computer, you can download it under Windows, then reboot and play it under DOS.)

But this game works under DOSBox, if you enable EMS.

(From the manual)
"As part of the installation process, you are promted to select a few settings for your sound configuration..."

What installation process? Is there no way to let this game know what sound card I have? :wallbash:

Pirate copies of games (which includes abandonware) are usually already installed so you don't need to go through another installation process. In order to configure the sound card run INSTALL instead of MAGIC.

One of the most underestimated features is the WARLORD ability!!!

Some Ultra Elite Stagbugs- almost nothing can stop them.... :w00t:

I used to pick Warlord. Ultra Elite High Elven Longbowmen dude.

Underestimated? That has to be the most popular pick.

I'll bet alchemy is more underestimated. Most probably pick it for the magic weapons but that's just gravy. The massive production boost you can get from shunting magic over to gold early on is considerable. It's also handy for those emergency situations where you need mana before a big fight. I frequently combine it with warlord.

Underestimated race? I'd say lizardmen. Javalineers are fan-freaking-phenomenal and you can build them very quickly. Unlike other strong ranged attackers they're also quite potent at melee so you'll never have one of those "aw-crap-9-skeletons" moments like you do with with longbowmen and slingers. And no, you don't BUILD CITIES with lizardmen. You take other people's. They are a raider race designed for quick build-and-conquer. You can capture high men and build paladins 300 turns later. In the meantime you can take an 8-stack of javs and grab all the towns, nodes and dungeons at your leisure.

I nearly always pick alchemy, indeed to switch easily between mana and gold shortage/reserves in the different phases of the game. And of course later on when producing magical items.

Lizardmen really allow for really quick expansion over water, rather than having to wait for the island spell or being able to build boats.

I've been messing around with full magic strategies. Life seems to have the best ones. Invulnerable/enduranced guardian spirit (it's deliciously cheap) seems like the fastest possible way to win the game and stream of life on your first city is a hoot. Sure everybody else might be on their third or fourth colony but you'll have a full economic powerhouse in that time ready to spit out the best possible units. Works well with high elves and high men.

Best all-death strategy seems to be wraiths but they aren't indestructable and at a serious advantage fighting enemies that are immune to death effects since they rely on life-steal to get health back. Still, a pretty nasty method for gobbling up city defenders that are near you. I didn't realize that the undead they leave in their wake cost no maintenance. I wish black channels was the same way.

The best thing you can do with Nature seems to be basilisks, which are tough but not indestructable. It's kind of like getting early stag beetles, basically. Although I haven't tried to see if I can make gorgons affordable yet.

I haven't found a happy early rare spell chaos setup yet. Those beholder things are nasty but slow and not invulnerable and a lot of the best stuff you can do is available with less than full books. Chaos summons seem to work best when enhanced with magic from other colors, unfortunately. Corruption is a sweet way to slow other wizards down but that's hardly a tough spell to come by.

Sorcery has weaker versions of most strategies without full books so I'm not really blown away by it but early windwalking can really help you clean out neighboring irritants, nodes, and dungeons quickly once you have a decent army and any unit with move 2 or more ready to go. Still, you can pretty much get the same thing with pathfinding. I think sorcery is the coolest of the five but going full books doesn't seem worth giving up useful retorts. I suppose magic immunity might be nice against sprites, but it doesn't help you against most earlier opponents.

hey we owned the game once a long time ago... and it´s the reason i joined abandonia and all that... so could anyone let me know how i work the patch..... I unzipped it in my c:\dos\cdrive\mom folder that i chosed to call the game folder.... but am i to install it? i didn´t find a installfile of any specifications..... so i wonder what to do... cause the game isn´t locking any more beutiful then it did before.....

sry for all bad spellings...

Run it in DosBox. DosBox has a couple things that can slightly improve the graphics, like ADVMAME3x scaler.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(LingonKungen @ Nov 23 2006, 11:25 AM) [snapback]268383[/snapback]</div>Just copy the files of the patch over those in the MoM folder

iM ALREADY running it in DosBox... but there is nothing i need to do about hte patch?

thx anyways... it´s not that it´s bad looking... Im just a little to used to playing DoD source nowdays...

Hey...I realize this is probably hopeless but is there anywhere I can download this game? The first time I got it I played it for about 8 hours straight over and over..and I really miss it. I love it still more then any of the current eye candy games out there...download, or buy for something besides 50 bucks on Ebay?...
Please?

Help a game addict girl?
Nickybird

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Nickybird @ Dec 5 2006, 06:51 AM) [snapback]270326[/snapback]</div>Never mind. Sister thought it said Strategy GUIDE...

Runs fine in DosBox on WinXP, thanks for the cool old game... couldn't get the manuals though.

You can find the manual and the spell book at replacementdocs.com :) I just checked.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Nickybird @ Dec 5 2006, 07:51 AM) [snapback]270326[/snapback]</div>From Abandonia, of course. ^_^

I have a question... Probably will go unanswered, but here goes.
There used to be a really sweet master of magic editor (might have been a hex editor), where you could do awesome things like for example, change it so Sky Drakes were 2 units instead of just 1 unit, or you could have 6 Hell Hounds in one unit instead of 4. I think you could do a whole bunch of other neat things with it too.
Unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere. It used to be found at the Master of Magic Resource Center, but now that it's gone under I can't find it anywhere else. I don't even remember what it's called it's been so long.... it makes me want to bash my head against a brick wall, as shown here ---> :wallbash:

If anyone has any information at all, like where i could find it, if something similar exists (change number of units), or even the name of this editor, I would greatly appreciate if you were to tell me! Please post or e-mail me at ' the_afro_is_back@hotmail.com ' if you know anything at all about this editor. Thank you! ^_^

Sincerely, Jonny B.

This Game is one of THE GREATEST!! I played it back in 1995 till my eyes hurt and my hands were about to fall off! There is one thing though that bugs the hell out of me.....WHY IN GOD'S NAME DIDNT MICROPROSE MAKE A SEQUEL????? WHY?? :angry: :wallbash: Sigh...It is ALWAYS the older games that are much, MUCH better than the newer stuff that is out there now.

Well not always, there are some good new games too. It's just the memories that are connected to a certain time period, which we don't want to see going. Though in one thing I agree with you - the "great time of boom of the games" has passed, it became harder to find new ideas for games and eventhough there're still good (yet) games coming out, they're not as great as those of some years before, and many games are simply coming out for financial reasons, not game fun.
But instead of complaining about lack of a sequel - why not make something good yourself? :ok:

something like.... A FAN´S SEQUEL???

Could someone please help me out and tell me the procedure for applying the patch?

Is there anyway i can improve my dosbox..help appreciated

1)increase the hard disk size of my virtual c: in dos box.The default is 100++ mb.

2)Im trying to play masters of magic.but its real damn slow and glitchy.

3)Im tryin to use this dosbox to play LORDS 2 and other games released during the pentium 1(133 mhz) and pentium pro era (166 MHZ).Maybe ill be experimental with games like warcraft too.However,my game glitches and suddenly,it hangs..any help is apppreciated

Pls email to [BEEEP]@yahoo.com thanks ..if u wish to reply via this website for everyone to read.,pls email me to stating so,with the url,where u replied in.

You might want to check out the official DosBox FAQ for this kind of info. All the things you asked about are there.

Since that email has probably been cleaned up by the moderators, I'll post my reply here...
What are the specifications of the pc you are using?
Have you tried:
- increasing the number of CPU cycles (depending on your pc this will probably have to be between 15000 and 20000)?
- add a frameskip of 1 or 2?
- changing the virtual memory settings (32 MB should be enough, never tried 63 so far; allow the use of EMS and XMS if necessary)?

It's been way to long since I last used dos programs, I admit I knew quite alot about it as a kid but I can't remember the slightest thing about it except c: and dir commands. X_x

I have the program already unziped into a file but I have no idea how to access it, I did mount the drive and file but I don't know how to access or open files, I did get into the MOM file but from there I don't know what to do and the game has yet to be installed.

All I really need to know is how to open the file and the command that is needed to do so....to be honest I can't remember much at all. X_x

anyway you can e-mail me about it at [BEEEP]@hotmail.com and if not I'll just check back on this forum some time later.

MOM is one of the best games i ever played. I played it for years after i bought it. To bad that they never made a new version.

A hint if you play it the first time:
Choose High-Elves, Life-Magic and "Warlord". Master-of-combat-longbow-elves are very funny to play with. especially with some improving spells on them.... ^^

I remember using lizard people, they had some unit knows as lizard dragons I can't remember exactly but they used to pack a punch and had high defense....then I would train up some hero's remember getting a demi god but never actually got to train them to be gods.....requiered to much exp. X_x

The name was "Dragon Turtle". Nice at first, but little to do against mere Pikemen.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Singularity @ Jan 5 2007, 08:27 PM) [snapback]273487[/snapback]</div>Yeah that's the name, I remember having a little problem with pikemen....but if you make it strong enough it can even over come them....with great pain but still. D:

Omg. D:

I got it to work....who would of known all I had to do was type magic. -.-

I just downloaded the game, but i can not seem to get it to install... Windows Xp...
i select install but it says check invalid program name check pif file.

help?

Just use DosBox for Dos games instead of running them in Windows XP.

computer AI is really low... I started to learn this game by choosing Impossible level and there proves out to be little challenge.

If you want a quick victory against computers(or maybe even other human players), choose pure nature magic (11 picks) and then make sure to select Stone Giant spell as well as Pathfinding spell... Then put all your power into mana and start summoning a stone giant at the first turn. When it is summoned put pathfinding on him, and start your conquer by flagging as many neutral towns and ruins/wonders as possible. When you have enough mana supply get a second stone giant... and also if possible try to get a huntress and team her up with the two stonegiants...... You will soon be able to claim most lands while the enemies are still struggling to build low-level units.

You'll actually archieve the same, if not better result, with Death magic and Wraiths, and maybe 1-2 Shadow Demons added to them. Since Wraiths steal life, the regenerate and also create zombies after the battle who don't cost anything at all to upkeep, thus can be assigned to guard the city and remove the unrest.

This may test your patience, but I need a little help installing my MOM download (I'm not very good with computers yet). Oh I used to play this lots back in the day but have been away from computers for way too long. I just downloaded the game and the 1.31 patch and don't know what to do next. I have Windows XP. Can I use that? Any help would be great. Thanks :)

Use DosBox to run the game. You can download it here.

You might want to check out the official DosBox FAQ, and particularly this part of it. It is quite helpful for users unfamiliar with DosBox.

i didnt see anyone who liked lizardmen in the first few pages

they more or less have the same strategy as gnolls: dont bother with too many buildings, just get slave races. Your units are stronger and tougher than most units of the same tier and you can walk anywhere. Javelinmen are decent ranged units AND melee units and it doesnt take much construction to be able to produce them