MOM magic types learning curve

[pchang]

Quick and Early expansion

is the key to winning the game. There are plenty of different wizard, race combinations that will do the trick. Sorcery Master, Conjurer, all blue gives you the ability to expand with magic spirits. Warlord, Myrran, and some white gives you the ability to expand with ultra-elite draconian swordsmen. Chaos Master, Conjuerer, all red gives you the ability to expand with magic spirits. There are plenty of others.

[bakalov]

Sure, there is even a tactic using all white and Invulnerable guardian spirits, which may be enhanced with other life spells like endurance, bless, etc, and they can even defeat the enemy wizards at the very beginning ....

[Father Beast]

Re: Suppress Magic

Originally posted by pchang
is nice, but it has some bad side effects. If you take out an enemy tower, they start casting spell of return. Suppress Magic can dispel the Spell of Return, but it doesn't kill the enemy wizard. Instead, the enemy wizard enters some phantom state where they can cast spells during combat and stuff, but they have no tower. You can't see what spells they are casting or anything since they show up as a broken mirror. The only way to defeat them is to take their last city or cast the Spell of Mastery.

OH!!! So that's what happened! I experienced that in a game a while back, and couldn't figure out what to do about it. I eventually won, but it was a pain.

[pchang]

Another bug

I don't know if this is in the FAQ or not, but if you defeat a Wizard's tower and their last city is an outpost and not a full city, you will crash the game if you destroy that outpost. You must wait until it becomes a hamlet. This means you must protect that outpost from other wizards or raiders or they will crash the game too.

[aaglo]

I could have missed this in the posts, but:

Nature has one very-very-very good attack spell (a rare or very rare spell):
CALL LIGHTNING
- It strikes 3-5 times per turn on your foes during the entire fight. With a sufficiently fast unit, you are untouchable (by melee weapons)! Especially great for tough nature nodes.

[pchang]

I try to use call lightning sparingly. I have noticed a number of game crashes during combat when this spell was active. Although, this has not happened lately.

[KenderBane]

- It strikes 3-5 times per turn on your foes during the entire fight. With a sufficiently fast unit, you are untouchable (by melee weapons)! Especially great for tough nature nodes.

CALL LIGHTNING was one of the reasons I LOVED playing an all nature Mage.

Not only could you get Call lightning early; you also had access to Great Wyrms. While Wyrms weren't the 'best' unit in that they didn't fly, they were the fasted unit on the tactical screen; literally able to be anywhere on screen in a single move, and then attack. And they are TOUGH !

Going All nature also gives immediate access to a single Very Rare Spell ... I invariably choose Gaia's Blessing. The Nature cure-all city enchantment. Red and Black city damagers are slowly dispelled. Land automatically improved. Population grows wonderfully. Awesome for rapid expansion and protective measures.


Finally, I usually use All Nature combined with the Lizard men. All units are amphibious (almost as good as flying when moving strategically), rapid growth, and DRAGON TURTLES ... fantasy version of amphibious tanks !

[aaglo]

I liked to combine both nature&chaos with barbarians (flame-blade + giant strength + thrown weapons). That's a lot of pre-attack value - even for puny spearmen (thrown attack 4 for 8 figures).

that's gotta make a great difference

[pchang]

gnolls and barbarians are very good for early expansion, but you need to capture other races to generate the kill stacks needed to take out the tough nodes (or summon lots of top level creatures).

[Shadow Dweller]

well, elok's post was, it seemed ot me, mostly about nature magic and how to make it usefull. Honestly don't even bothering summoning natures creatures untill Colossus/Wrym/Gorgon, the lower-mid level creatures are a waste of time. Natures big bonus is in it's ability to help buff, and protect you city-built creatures and exploration.

start the game with halflings and when you get stuck in battle, g-growth your swordsman and spearmen and viola, you have the hardest hitting units on arcanus early game. Yes, technicaly gnoll hit harder, but at least halflings are usefull late game unlike gnoll. Also stone skin, a common unit enchantment, is VERY usefull in early game defence. That extra defence point can make a world of difference.

Wall of stone, while not doing anything more than magicly building your city wall is nice because it allows you to save prouction time for units, or more important buildings.

Web, as has been noted is nice when in conjunction with CC, but on it's own can be a lifesaver earlygame before you have your missle units or flying units up and running, or just when you need some extra time to get your defences in order.

Earth Lore is a god send early game because it allows you to pick your colonization stratagy better and gives your forwarning of which enemy wizards your going to be facing and what nuteral cities are around your empire.

Pathfinding is a given.

Ice Bolt, while ineffective against death creatures is still a decent damage spell.

Change terain is great especaily to exploit the cities max pop glitch and transmute can give your cities either that extra gold/production boost(copper/coal to gold/diamond) or gold/unit buff(silver to mythril).

Earthquake, hail storm can be very damaging to enemy cities and units outside of combat, something not to take litely.

waterwalking can give you a quick boost to overseas expansion.

resist elements/elemental armor gives limited resistance to magic, good especaily on myrror against darkelf cities.

Nature is my favorite type to play if you can tell.



Also, not part of the origonal request but here are some unit stats for heroes that you may find interesting...

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

and this too, it's the spell book listing all the spells:

http://www.enigmastation.com/~cislyn/misc/MoM/momspellbook.pdf

this is also the best site left for a collection of data fo mom stuff...

http://www20.brinkster.com/kadirclan/

[Sikander]

Re: Quick and Early expansion

Originally posted by pchang
is the key to winning the game. There are plenty of different wizard, race combinations that will do the trick. Sorcery Master, Conjurer, all blue gives you the ability to expand with magic spirits. Warlord, Myrran, and some white gives you the ability to expand with ultra-elite draconian swordsmen. Chaos Master, Conjuerer, all red gives you the ability to expand with magic spirits. There are plenty of others.

I've had some great success in only building up one city and a killer stack of heroes to wipe out the other wizards. Sure I have to conquer their cities in order to win the game, but I don't have to do much in the way of spreading out / colonizing. This is on Impossible btw, using the weapon building strategy for mana and killer heroes.

[squigg007]

personally, i think chaos magic is the easiest.

take 7 books, channeler, conjurer, and chaos mastery)

maintenance for creatures is REALLY cheap ( channeler reduces by 1/2, conjurer by 1/4, and mastery by 15% i think). Anyway, hell hounds are good in the beginning, they can take neutral cities pretty easily (i don't play impossible btw no fun).

you get good spells, like lightning bolt, warp lightning, and disentigrate (which is awesome if you can get a mage heor with tons of - spell save)

efreet is not bad of a creature, great drake is good, hydra is good but SLOW.

another fun thing to do is play myrran trolls rest in death. Black channel every single troop, (remove it if you cant afford the mana cost) and use darkness which gives all your guys +1 att/def/res. regenerate gets rid of the nasty undead can't heal thing.

Wrack is a good spell too, it's bugged somehow making it more powerful than it should be. Wraiths and death knights are amazing also. Famine is bugged and doesn't do anything btw...

[Ellestar]

[SIZE=1]Going All nature also gives immediate access to a single Very Rare Spell ... I invariably choose Gaia's Blessing. The Nature cure-all city enchantment. Red and Black city damagers are slowly dispelled. Land automatically improved. Population grows wonderfully. Awesome for rapid expansion and protective measures.

I prefer 11 life books and Stream of Life. Maximum taxes (no unrest), 50+ cities

[Pherdnut]

I would definitely say black, although fun, is the weakest of all the colors. One thing designers forget when making good and evil magic in fantasy games is that when you have spell resistance, you need to balance for the fact that most of your evil variety of magic is on unwilling participants and consequently much less likely to work, whereas the good guys everything works. If good mage can give his fighter buddy a righteous +2 bonus to defense, evil mage needs something cooler than a nefarious -2 to defense spell for it to be balanced.

Of course MoM does offer enough variety in spells that Death magic isn't totally worthless. Skeletons are great buffer units and dirt cheap to maintain. And of course the high level stuff that's mentioned is fun although I thought wrack was a bit overstated. It's not powerful enough to kill some things before combat automatically comes to a close, but it is relatively cheap for what it does.

For early game raiders though, nothing beats Heroism and Warlord unless you're up against a sorceror that actually uses True Dispel. Just a single unit of ultra-elite halfling swordsman will take down just about any town you come across and it's a great spell to give early vulnerable heroes a leg up with too.

I'm surprised more people don't talk about Lizard Men. Javelineers are fantastic early raiders and easy to get. Strong in both range and melee. An all lizard man army with three dragon turtles, 5 javelineers, and a unit shamen (shamans? wubba?) is nothing to scoff at.

You know what's scary? I haven't played this game in like five years and all this crap comes back to me like it was yesterday.

[DaveV]

Originally posted by Pherdnut
I'm surprised more people don't talk about Lizard Men. Javelineers are fantastic early raiders and easy to get. Strong in both range and melee. An all lizard man army with three dragon turtles, 5 javelineers, and a unit shamen (shamans? wubba?) is nothing to scoff at.

When I was learning the game and working my way up through the levels, I liked lizardmen a lot. At Impossible, though, they just have too many drawbacks, IMO. The lizards have to build an Armory and a fighter's guild to build javelineers, so the halflings could already have two slingers on the board before the lizards can start building their first javelin chucker. The lack of adamantium really hurts against the tougher monsters at Impossible. Add in the lack of production enhancing buildings, and I don't think the lizards are in the top tier. They can be a real annoyance in a nearby neutral city in the early game, though...