[Cainehill]

[quote]Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
In MoM one of my favorite spells was charm. I loved going into caves with one guy and trying to win it by charming the basilisk. Of course I always saved before hand and reloaded if I failed. And that was many many times. That favorite spell of mine would quickly be targeted by MPers as needing fixed. They want a combat to be a formula so that it can be used strategically, not as a luck roll.


Yet Dom2 has Charm, Succubus, and Hellbind Heart. The key to the spell being viable for MP is that you can't save and reload - it's a crap shoot, as are several other spells in Dom2 (like the ones that have a 50% chance of killing an enemy commander, 50% to come back, or Stream of Life - 40% it kills the enemy, 60% it heals, hastes, etc).

One of the best efforts at a MoM2 was "Age of Wonders : Shadow Magic". Is seemed obvious that they did it on purpose. That Lasted a month on my machine and MoM is still on my machine. Why? Im not totally sure. But it just felt too watered down. It was multiplayer. It was basically, exactly, what a multiplayer MoM would be. Others can try to pin it down further. All I know is that it didnt hold my attention even though it seemed like an awfully good MoM update.

I wouldn't call it a MoM update, as a number of things were very different. As Kel said - it didn't have the 4X (or Civ2) feel that MoM did, scouting, sending out settlers (pioneers?) and hoping for great sites.

I found that the game bogged down - individual units in squads, 9 units per squad, up to 4 squads per side, made for long grinding battles. Likewise some of the maps and scenarios were too large and started to stagnate for me.

And, worst of all, the ... linear scenarios. First you got one kind of magic. Then you got a different kind. And when you got to a scenario you hated, too bad - either finish that one and hope for better, or stop playing.

I never played AoW multiplayer - maybe it's actually better that way, but ....

One I personally miss (and should post on the other OT thread) is the original Warlords. Minimal micromanagement, fairly quickpaced, each race played differently and each had several possible immediate courses of action. It was great for hot-seat MP games, especially with multiple computers - we'd set up 2 or 3 computers in an apartment and have multiple games going, so people didn't have to wait too long to have a turn to take.

Anacreon was another me and my friends did that with - take home some laptop computers from work for the weekend and game away.