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Originally posted by Guest@Feb 22 2006, 12:32 AM

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.

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.

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.

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.

Originally posted by Guest@Aug 24 2005, 07:32 AM

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.*

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.

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).

Interesting combo.

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).

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.

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)

You did ALL this in one game? Seems like overkill

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.

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.

[another_guest]

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

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.

[Scatty]

Originally posted by another_guest@Mar 21 2006, 06:08 PM
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.

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.

[blastradius14]

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

Originally posted by blastradius14@Mar 22 2006, 07:41 PM
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: