Re: Favorite games
 

I mentioned that it's like that for most roguelikes. I've played Crawl, I like it and I know it's different. I even mentioned that there's less need for spoilers when it comes to Crawl. What else should I have said?

Still, there's lots of skills involved in roguelikes. Skills like knowing when to run, how to get your things identified (depends from the game), knowing when to turn back before you have to run, surviving when low on food, avoiding tough monsters you can't fight yet. To know when to run, you have to know if a given monster is dangerous - that's also a skill of sorts, or a spoiler-thing, but some games are better in this regard. Descriptions can help, or just making the really dangerous monsters look dangerous somehow. Capital letter, ominous color, changing colors, weird effects/messages on the same level, threatening you, etc etc.

Re: Favorite games
 

You should've appologised ;-).

About green in Master of Magic: I disagree it's a strong magic. Abusing sprites is just that - abuse of game mechanics intended to prevent deadlocks. I have really no idea why it favours attacker over defender. I suppose you could... attack a city with a fast and regenerating unit, wait, and... conquer it without touching city gate ?
Green magic has lots of ineffective summons (except for Great Wyrm, I guess), some small buffs, and ... what else ? Cracks call is frustrating in the hands of AI, but not cost effective.

Re: Favorite games
 

Web is good. And if a city is defended by a bunch of worms on the ground, there's no reason it shouldn't be conquered by bunch of magical flying units. Unless the worms are armed with shotguns.

Hey, I tried Crawl (on the telnet server), it's pretty cool! Except I keep hitting 'l' to look around, and it moves me. I suppose I could remap the keys, but I haven't even looked for help other than ?? yet. What's a good 1st character to try? I did a Demigod Crusader and forgot to watch my HP. Now I'm trying a Draconian Chaos Knight.

Re: Favorite games
 

Not counting the ancient text only games (Infocom's come to mind) or war games, the following are/were my top ten strategy games in rough chronological order(can't remember the exact order). They might not be the best games now, but each broke new grounds at the time and were head and shoulders above the rest - eating up countless number of hours of my time...

Sword of Aragon
Wizard's Crown
Wasteland
MOO
HOMM
Civ
MOM
Xcom
VGA Planets
and of course, Dom3, or I should say 2 even though I barely played it (waited for Dom3 before buying a copy) since most of the ground breaking were done in Dom2.

Re: Favorite games
 

Yes, web is nice. But conquering a city without harming its defenders ?

1. You look around with 'x' (examine). While doing so, you can press '?' to view monster description.

Some of easiest characters are:
Troll berserker (and berserkers in general). Trolls have stupidly high regeneration rate, great hp, and fight very well unarmed. You shouldn't run into trouble too fast. Just watch for orc wizards, priests, warriors (purple, green, yellow). They hit hard.
If you DO run into trouble, press 'a' and berserk.
Crawl rewards specialist classes at the moment. For fighter types, try dwarves, minotaurs, orcs, trolls. Demigods have all skills slightly below average, which means they are much worse at many skills than those specialists. Caution - ogres are hard to play.
Fighter is armour-based, Gladiator is more about dodging.
Assassin can be also nice starting class, just don't train Darts too hard. It doesn't pay off. Poisoned needles should be saved for tougher enemies.
Gods good for fighters: Okawaru, Yredelemnul, Xom, Makhleb...

Re: Favorite games
 

True True that its an exploit about the sprites but you actually kill the defenders to get the city.

*Life has much goodies, Just cause, altar of battle, buffs, healing!!!!!, Torin http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif, but its weak in summons, you have to wait till arch angel.
*blue i think its the best, counter magic, phantasmal warriors, damage spells, spell blast, improved dispelling, and the best critter around, the sky drake, also the fun steal global that i dont remember the name now.
*black is cool, you get the cheapest summons, drain life+black sleep combo to get units as undead, wrack battle enchantment, werewolfs, and the cool zombie mastery plus cool special heros.
*green has early summons, web, call lightning, earth lore, change terrain & transmute and later town portal to teleport troops around.
*fire has the best battle damage with many types of. and also some overland violence with volcanos and earthquakes. I can think of chaos channels + the overland enchantment that boost chaos units.

My goal was almost always a balanced wizard with all the colors so i can to spell trade and get every goodie, with charismatic to aid diplomacy.
Also famous + warlord to boost troops & heroes and get the more heroes and mercs.

pitty you cannot get life & death at the same time, i tried that getting death and drained life from an arch angel (a life spellcaster) but what i got is an undead arch angel with 40 points of death spells.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Sick.gif

Re: Favorite games
 

You're nuts.

Web is green. It grounds all flying units. Combine that with the white spell for improving movement one for trolls
and trolls can outregen almost any combat.

MOM was awesome for the depth of options, and how many nations were viable.

Re: Favorite games
 

1. Dominions II and III. I have played this game for years now, 1st on a local forum in New Orleans, and here after Katrina. It has withstood the test of time. The endless variety allows almost infinite replay.

2. Civilization-The Grandfather of all of these great games. Though it does not have the infinite replay of Dominions, it was transcendental for its time. You could play the game 24 hours a day for weeks and be in bliss. No game, not even Dominions, rivaled the original Civ for addiction over the short haul.

3. Moo II- Another great game. Better than Moo, and certainly better than the flop that was Moo III.

4. Master of Magic-many have already given it accolades.

5. Original EQ-breaking the Plane of Fear before any of the expansions was not for the faint of heart. This was a game that will never come again. Before Companies catered to the casual player, there was a brutal game with severe penalties for death. Companies discovered if they made things easier and with no penalties they would get more paying customers.

True, but for hardcore gamers, the original EQ was King.

Re: Favorite games
 

Better yet, enchant a warship with flight and it alone can clean ground units.
Better yet if you built it with mithril or admiantum.

Re: Favorite games
 

Wow I can't believe no one is mentioning my favorite MoM spell of all time, Confusion. Give me that spell on a blue/black wizard and I can give you the world.

Re: Favorite games
 

haha, confusion + nightblades (invisible) almost a cheat

Re: Favorite games
 

Thanks for the RL info, everyone. Perhaps my problem was starting with the Nethack variant Slash 'Em, which is likely the most complicated of the lot. I will check out the 7day ones and Crawl. I appreciate the info.

As to DF being Sims with Dwarves...well...I would actually have purchased a Sims game if it included goblin invasions you had to fight off. IMO, if you get rid of the nonsensical dwarven justice, and if noble requests were LOGICAL (like no request for glass in an area with no sand) it would be pretty much perfect. The website says the dev wants to make seiges, and army stuff in general, more cool, and that's just gravy. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Favorite games
 

Dwarf Fortress is very, very far from finish if you look at all the planned development. It is still only in early alpha, and Toady is working on it on it day and night. I find this extremely cool.

Re: Favorite games
 

Not counting dom3, here's a short list:

X-Com
Master of Orion I
Master of Magic
Ultima VI and VII
Civilization
Battletech: The Cresent Hawk's Revenge (wonderful tactical squad based mech game)

I also played that Magic The Gathering card game for a whlle and dom3's system of counters and counters to those counters is familiar (I think I read this in an interview with the devs somewhere...)

Re: Favorite games
 

Master of Magic - I never played this. I tried once to download some abandonware and DOS emulator but I am no tech guru and never managed to get this to run.

I see now you can buy a version on eBay for ~$80 that supposedly has been patched to easily run on XP or Vista and has the manuals on CD.

Wondering how fun it would be at this point? On the plus side, I have never played it. On the negative side, that is pretty expensive and some of those old school games are more fun in one's memory than they are when you try to play them these days.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

Re: Favorite games
 

don't click the link

NO!!! I said DON'T click the link.

ahh. you done did it. you clicked the link. you can kiss your evening goodbye.

http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/game.asp

Re: Favorite games
 

Borsuk, thanks for the Crawl suggestion. I'm playing it and it's great, way more fun then Slash 'Em, and I think I'm picking up the key commands, since it appears for the most part they stay the same across games.

ToME seems cool, too, but I'm just not ready for that level of complexity. I dl'd a few of the 7Day games that looked promising, as well.

Re: Favorite games
 

DC, MoM is a classic (and fun) game, but I wouldn't spend $US80 on it.

Re: Favorite games
 

Wokeye, thanks for the feedback. I wish I hadn't missed it the first time around, but suspect that it wouldn't be worth so much cold hard cash today, despite the fat and enticing manual... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: Favorite games
 

You're welcome. If you have any questions, it would be best to join ##crawl at irc.freenode.org . Traffic is quite high over there, much higher than #dominions. And you can often chat with developers.
There are a lot of subtle commands ready to be discovered. For example, try pressing CTRL-O for auto-explore. You can disable/enable autopickup with CTRL-A . CTRL-G lets you travel between explored levels. CTRL-F is for searching. You can search for items, shops, staircases etc... and just press a letter to travel there.
Check your species' innate abilities by pressing A .

Re: Favorite games
 

They're selling it for $80 on ebay? That sounds really expensive, I remember I got it for around $50 when it first came out. Anyway, I'm sure you can find it for less, or probably get it from an abandonware site otherwise. I've gotten my version working on Dosbox (on a Mac no less) with no serious problems. Check out Dosbox if you are having problems with XP, it's free and open source! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Master of Magic is still pretty fun. It is basically like Civilization with magic. What is most interesting about it is looking at the wizard creation process and seeing how it obviously inspired CoE and Dominions pretender creation. The library of spells is fun too, though not as extensive as Dom 3's. Still I have to wonder why Master of Magic never had a sequel...

Re: Favorite games
 

Quick tips on running MOM with Dosbox:

1. Download MOM from http://www.the-underdogs.info
2. Unpack to a directory of your choice
3. Run dosbox
4. Type:
mount c: /directory/with/MOM
c:
4.
type
install
(select sound blaster pro 'later' for sound and music)
5.
Type:
magic
6. Optimize CPU cycles by pressing CTRL-F12 (faster) or CTRL-F11 (slower) until it feels fast for you. There should be no delay in menu.

Note that you only have to do points 1,2 and 4 the first time. Later, just do the remaining points.

Re: Favorite games
 

the version of MOM from the Underdogs is the 1.31 ?

Re: Favorite games
 

Total rip-off. It probably just has an installer for DosBox or VDMSound or something like that. The manuals for MoM are all available on the net, too, on HOTU for example. Do yourself a favor, save those dollars and get the game from HOTU yourself. Then install VDMSound and use it on the games setup.exe (?) and magic.exe yourself.

yes

Re: Favorite games
 

No, it's 1.3.1

Re: Favorite games
 

About running MoM. I don't have specific rememberance, but I know that sometime in the past three years I loaded it up and played it on my WinXP rig (same as it is now, only diff is a beter vid card) and I DON'T recall using any helper programs. I know WinXP has a menu you can pull up when you right click a .bat or .exe file that impacts how it tries to run the file...perhaps there's another way? I own the game, but I think this recent install was from a dl'd copy (who can keep full track of game CD's from that far back). I don't have it installed anymore, so sorry I can't give more specific help.

Re: Favorite games
 

The question is: Do you remember if you had sound or not? If you had sound, then either you are using a very old sound card, or one that is mysteriously driver compatible with a Sound Blaster 16 or older one.

Re: Favorite games
 

TWISTER!

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/redface.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/redface.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/redface.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/redface.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/redface.gif

Obviously the game is more fun played in a ummm more private setting, and with attractive people rather than dorks. A few beers could looosen things up as well!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zDiqPbYsz8

Re: Favorite games
 

While I am clearly technologically challenged, that link seems to lead to a blank page? Am I missing something? Thanks for bearing with me.

Re: Favorite games
 

It lacks 'www' from the actual address.

Re: Favorite games
 

I played MoM just last week on my XP box in a Dosbox. I think I had sound off. I had the original but used a copy from an abandonware site.
-SSJ

Re: Favorite games
 

Re: Favorite games
 

There is a change you can make in your registry that will allow you to run the game without the help of DosBox or VDMsound. The registry change enables a menu item when you right click and choose properties and toggle the memory settings. This is the way I ran the game on Windows 98, ME and XP for years.

Then I wanted to hear the sounds, so I started using VDMsound. If I can figure out the registry change again, I will post it, because out of all the ways I have run the game, it ran the best straight in windows without sound. It never crashed, the turns loaded the quickest and there were no problems with the cpu speed.

Re: Favorite games
 

I was able to get music from Dosbox by selecting the MIDI option in the install program. I don't remember if sound worked though.

Re: Favorite games
 

Ok I was able to figure out how to run Master of Magic without any special programs on Windows XP. Last time I did this, I could have swore I had to make changes to the registry, but this time I did not need to.

1. You right click on the "MAGIC.exe" file. Click properties.

2. Choose the "Compatibility" tab and choose to run the program in "Windows 95 mode". NOTE: This step may not be necessary.

3. Choose the "Memory" tab. Set conventional memory to auto/auto. Expanded (EMS) memory needs to be 3072. The other fields can be set to auto.

Save your changes. Run MAGIC.exe

One additional note... If sound is enabled, you may need to go into the Install.exe and disable the sound settings. To do this, you will need to actually pull up a C:\ prompt, navigate to the directory magic is stored in, and run the Install in the DOS environment. Then save your settings.

Hope this helps anyone who is having issues running Master of Magic with DosBox or VDMsound. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Favorite games
 

Foodstamp and Sector24,
Thanks - between the download and the instructions, that was amazingly easy. Much appreciated!

Re: Favorite games
 

Excellent, I hope you enjoy playing Master of Magic. For me, it was love at first sight. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Favorite games
 

Ok, I just spent an hour looking though my old files and I was wrong. I DID play MoM in Dosbox, using a front-end program called D-Fend. I also had Fantasy General in there, another great game.

Funny thing is it's a good thing I have the game settings saved in D-Fend, because it I had to reinstall it today I wouldn't have the foggiest idea how to do it.

Oh, and I have sound and it seems fine. The interface sucks, but I just think that's how the game was (right click to move the map around).

This may be unusual, but one of my favorite aspects of the game was the ability to name your outposts. That one level of immersion really meant a lot to me. I enjoy the same thing about GalCiv2. Not that I was entirely creative...the west outpost was Westgarde, the east Eastgarde, and well, you get the picture. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Favorite games
 

I did, this game is too good.

Re: Favorite games
 

MoM sure sounds like a fun game. I'm thinking about downloading and installing the game but it seems that you have to run the program DosBox for MoM to work properly on the XP.
Since I'm only 16 years old, without any PC of my own, my dad would freak if something happened to our computer (yes I'm a whiny kid). My question is: Will DosBox f(censored)k up the computer, with f(censored)k up I mean make any serious changes to the system?

I almost forgot: Legacy of Kain series rule! Great story and action. (thanks for the reminder Kamamura http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Favorite games
 

What? Dosbox f-up your computer? I don't think so.. I've never heard of such a thing.

It's just a dos emulator, I'm sure it's no more risky than any other program.

I have it on my computer and nothing has happened.

Re: Favorite games
 

Check Foodstamp's post on this page, it looks like you can run MoM without DOSBox. But even if you do need DOSBox, it's pretty harmless as far as I know.

Re: Favorite games
 

DOSbox will not do anything other than emulate DOS.

Re: Favorite games
 

The FoodStamp / Sector24 combo worked perfect for me.

Re: Favorite games
 

thanks for the help guys. I'll try it out.

Re: Favorite games
 

Installing Dosbox should be no more dangerous than installing Microsoft Word. (Perhaps even less, because Word would mess with windows to associate its files with itself http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif)

And I recently discovered another game that definitely goes in my favorite pile: "UFO:Alien Invasion". It's heavily inspired by the original XCOM games (which were awesome, as everyone should already know http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif).
It's Open Source (which is good), and not entirely complete (which is bad), but it is complete enough to play and enjoy without noticing anything "missing".

Re: Favorite games
 

To put some of the original purpose back into this thread http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Roughly in order:

UFO: Aftershock
Master of Orion 3
Broken Sword 3
Dominions 3 (duh)
Rome: Total War
Freespace 2
Independence War 2
Wizardry 8 (Played it so many times, haven't finished it even once)
Baldur's Gate 2
Knights of the old Republic 2

Re: Favorite games
 

Haha, yes, Wizardry 8. I began it 3 times and like you never finished it. I don't know why, I really like it.

Re: Favorite games
 

Not many people like Heroes of Might and Magic series I see...for me HoMM3 is the best game I've ever played, I'm a die hard Heroes fan, still addicted to it and making new maps/campaign for it.

Re: Favorite games
 

the same, never finish it and I began it a lot of times.
Maybe because I wanted to try another team each time