What is this MoM

[Heresson]

Surely it is a dumb question and I'm sure I will be ahsamed when I'll hear it's a game I know, but I was just curious...

[Main_Brain]

Master of Magic :=)

[Heresson]

ANd what is Master of Magic?
(a bit scared)

[St Leo]

It's a civ clone from Simtex and Microprose about elves and stuff.

More importantly, is it pronounced "M'Ohm", "M'Ahm", or "M'Ouhm"?

[Heresson]

I never heard of this. Is it good?

[Heresson]

It must be if it is "a classic"...

[St Leo]

Not really, but every game in the HoMM, AoW, Warlords, and Disciples series gets compared with MoM on usenet.

[Sikander]

Yes it is good. It's very rich with a lot of ways to play (like SMAC). You are a wizard who commands a city at the beginning of the game. Your city is populated with one of a number of races. Each race has a whole slew of units and city improvements that it can build, including ships, swimming creatures, and flying creatures as well as the more mundane slingers, archers, pikemen, swordsmen etc.

The other really great thing about the game is the magic system, which is quite complex and rich. There are various schools of magic, each of which has its own spells. You research spells much like you would tech in other civ type games. You also have heroes (like MOO 2) who fight for you, and they can be assigned magical weapons that you find around the map (after you take out whatever was guarding them). You can also design and build your own weapons if you wish.

You compete on a more or less even basis with other Wizard led clans, conquering and building an empire. Combat is done via a tactical submodule (you can optionally let the computer resolve the battle if you wish) where you fight on a map of the square which is being attacked.

It's a good game even by today's standards, and I wouldn't mind if it was merely upgraded for todays machines and graphics, especially as I have seen how a complete redesign can really suck (Civ 3, MOO 3?).

[aaglo]

Oh yes, Master of Magic is a very good game. I'm still hooked on it - pretty much for the reasons sikander mentioned.

The last time I checked the game was freeware (at http://www.the-underdogs.org/ )

It is a DOS-game, so you'll propably need a dos-boot in your pc (or an older pc )

Great game

[Rex Little]

It's been out for something like 8 or 9 years now, and I still play it quite often.

[Heresson]

Thank You all. The description - kill me if I'm wrong - reminds me a bit of Heroes. That means that i will like it probably.

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by St Leo
Not really, but every game in the HoMM, AoW, Warlords, and Disciples series gets compared with MoM on usenet.

It is better than any of these games mentioned. It is deeper than most TBS games, actually.

But, if you know how, it's fairly easy to beat, even on impossible.

ACK!

[aaglo]

Yep, it's pretty easy, but very fun game

And you can make it very difficult with a custom wizard - just give a lot of different retorts and only a few books... you won't get any great spells (unless you get lucky).

One of the hardest games I've had so far:
I was a myrran wizard with alchemy, famous, charismatic and archmage retorts, and one book of life, chaos and nature (IIRC). The race was orcs (no bonuses/negatives, no very good units).
It was quite a challenge due to the lame race...

[Frogman]

Well, its not a bad game, but its not as good as Age of Wonders. Unfortunately MoM was buggy and some stuff was never fixed. It just pissed me off that disenchant area would wipe out all your unit enchantments, even if they had spell lock. I hated the cracks call spell, a 25% chance to kill any unit no matter what defense you had. Plus the ai was dumb as dirt. Even on impossible, all you needed was one killer stack and the ai just couldn't deal with you. There should have been a limit as to how many heroes you could group together.

Some of the units were cool, my favorite units where gold medal or champion slingers with adamantium weapons. There was a chaos spell that could make them fly. Damn, they could kill anything. The other cool unit I had was an undead archangel. It was tough to get. I had to hit an arch angel with some powerful lifestealing units and it became undead with 40 points of death magic it could use.

Well, ok, it was a great game that soaked up many hours, but the ai just wasn't as good as civII and you could really abuse the tactical combat. Age of Wonders is still a better game and you can play mp and use it in windows. Also, the lack of a map editor really cut into the replay value of MoM.

Unfortunately, MoM2 will probably suck. It seems like every sequel coming out now is just too complicated or they get lost in their improved graphics and fail to find the gameplay.

[Malleus]

Well, well, well, the greatest game of all time: Master of Magic.

Interesting trivia: MoM is the game most requested to have a sequel every year since it's release throughout the entire life of Microprose!

K