Favorite games

[sector24]

My favorite MoM spells are Change Terrain and Chaos Channels. I usually played Nomads, or Dark Elves when I wanted to be left alone. The sprites for green magic were totally overpowered because they could fly. For instance, you could send two sprites against a Great Wyrm and since it couldn't hit flyers you could wear it down and steal its goodies or unlock a node before you'd normally be able to. Even if you couldn't clean out the whole battlefied before you ran out of ammo, sprites could almost always retreat successfully so you could wear a site down over time.

Building on the "flyers rule" strategy, I LOVED flying Dark Elf Warlocks. The doom spell could eliminate tough flyers or archers and then the conventional melee units just had to sit there and take damage until you ran out of ammo.

Part of MoM's charm is that it has a lot of valid and enjoyable playstyles.

[lch]

Torin said:
Why white magic? green magic is broken

White magic has the best buffs for units and thus enables them to easily gain lots of experience in combat, from the early game on.

[B0rsuk]

Foodstamp said:
Hooray for single player games like Master of Magic where balance can take a backseat to variety.

While this is generally true, MOM has exceptionally bad balance. Mana cost of some summon spells is just crazy.

- War bears from nature magic cost 80/2 turn if I remember correctly, and they're likely to lose against swordsmen. War bears have no redeeming qualities.
- Ghouls cost 80 mana. While they're nice and can create undead, they don't heal at all and if you want to use them as an undead factory, be prepared to soften enemies with spells like Weakness etc.
- Hellhounds cost 40/1 turn and they absolutely kick ***. Unlike ghouls, they heal. Fire breath is a form of first strike. It also allows them to fight flying creatures. Hell hounds easily destroy ghouls 1 on 1, as well as war bears, which are twice as expensive.
- MOM is a very buggy game, and some spells just flat don't work. For example Flying Fortress. Neither does Aura of Fear. Subversion does opposite what it's supposed to. Why would you cast a spell that only harms you ?! This is just wrong. MOM, even patched (the version from The Underdogs) is buggier than Fallout.

Balance of many things is so wrong it can easily be considered a bug. There are many ways to play MOM, but there are also many easy ways to win. Any 11 book wizard (all books in the same magic) has access to POWERFUL spells right from the start. Wraiths, Chimeras, or Torin will conquer at least half of the map without breaking a sweat.

I think Sprites are not very cost effective. They have high cost, upkeep, and only 4 shots.
Besides, Sprites are not better at running away than any other creature. I remember, from manual (available on The Underdogs) that there's a flat chance of running away. The chance is something like 50% or 75% per unit, and 0% on Easy difficulty. You'll need a lot more than 4 shots to kill something like a Great Wyrm ! How many groups of Sprites does it take to kill a Wyrm ?

----------

You know what ? I think Dominions3 is more of a SP game than MP game. Kristoffer clearly cares much more about flavour than balance. I don't blame him, he's a bit like a mad scientist :-). And, best of all, he/they gave us tools to fix balance ourselves. But most games (especially from EA) have less bugfixes than Dom3 has extras added in patches. Alternatively, Dom3 can be considered a 'roleplaying MP strategy game'. But this carries a risk of running into a minmaxer.

[Potatoman]

Foodstamp said:
Hooray for single player games like Master of Magic where balance can take a backseat to variety. Balance has become an obsession of modern gamers, and it makes perfect sense in a multiplayer game, but in a game like Master of Magic what is the point?

This is an interesting viewpoint. I agree with you, to an extent. In a game that is designed only for single-player use, players can adjust for rough balancing by handicapping themselves or helping themselves, depending on whether they take advantage of poorly-balanced mechanics or units. As long as the balance is not too lobsided (eg. you MUST use unit x to win, or if unit y is useless), then the game can still work. I would only have an issue if the units/spells/races that I liked were so terrible that I could not use them and win.

It's interesting to note that, as AIs get more difficult, balance becomes more important. If you must play optimally against a difficult AI opponent (or another player online) then, in order to win in a roughly-balanced game, the effective variety of stuff that you can use is greatly reduced. It is the unfortunate reason why fine game balance is essential for most modern games.

As for MoM, I actually do wish that it had been balanced better. I would find replaying MoM more fun if it was able to challenge me without forcing me to handicap myself (which also effectively limits the variety of things available in MoM), and I would have a great deal of admiration for a game able to wrap all of MoM's "stuff" into a coherent and balanced game system. Plus, then it could have hotseat multiplayer, so I could play it with my friends. Then it'd be perfect.

[Stryke11]

Ok, it's pretty clear that many people here dig the Rogue-likes. While I have become addicted to Dwarf Fortress (albeit with a graphics pack) I can't seem to get into Roguelikes, and since they are so popular I know I'm missing something.

I have played a few, but of the main ones I have Slash 'em, a Nethack variant. I use a graphical 2d tileset. I have heard about the depth of the programming and how basically anything can be done, but I'm not seeing any of that. I usually die between floor 2-3, I don't know how to use stores, and its pretty basic repetitive move around, search, kick open doors, pick up random stuff, and fight stuff.

Since these games get so much praise I know I am missing something or doing something wrong. Please help me get the full experience! Is there a tutorial? Tips? Did I pick the wrong game to start with? I've played a relatively new roguelike called Drash and that one is pretty fun, but it doesn't claim to have the depth of Nethack and Slash 'Em.

Anything y'all who like these types of games can share to increase my enjoyment and understanding of the genre would be well appreciated. I have seen how imposing DF was until I learned it and so I'm expecting a similar epiphany once I understand the true Rogue-likes.

Thanks!

[Baalz]

Hmmm, am I missing something WRT Dwarf Fortress? I've spent hundreds of hours on rougelikes, so the interface isn't too much of a barrier, but I feel like I'm playing Sims: dwarf. I guess I was looking for something more like Dungeon Keeper and less picking out the color or of chairs and cabinetry. Should I give it another whirl or is this one just not up my alley?

[lch]

Baalz said:
Hmmm, am I missing something WRT Dwarf Fortress? [...] I guess I was looking for something more like Dungeon Keeper and less picking out the color or of chairs and cabinetry.

Again, I can heartily recommend gardening. It's very therapeutic.

[sector24]

Stryke11 said:
Ok, it's pretty clear that many people here dig the Rogue-likes. While I have become addicted to Dwarf Fortress (albeit with a graphics pack) I can't seem to get into Roguelikes, and since they are so popular I know I'm missing something.

I have played a few, but of the main ones I have Slash 'em, a Nethack variant. I use a graphical 2d tileset. I have heard about the depth of the programming and how basically anything can be done, but I'm not seeing any of that. I usually die between floor 2-3, I don't know how to use stores, and its pretty basic repetitive move around, search, kick open doors, pick up random stuff, and fight stuff.

Since these games get so much praise I know I am missing something or doing something wrong. Please help me get the full experience! Is there a tutorial? Tips? Did I pick the wrong game to start with? I've played a relatively new roguelike called Drash and that one is pretty fun, but it doesn't claim to have the depth of Nethack and Slash 'Em.

Anything y'all who like these types of games can share to increase my enjoyment and understanding of the genre would be well appreciated. I have seen how imposing DF was until I learned it and so I'm expecting a similar epiphany once I understand the true Rogue-likes.

Thanks!

For me, the fun of roguelikes (Nethack in particular) is unraveling the mysteries of the items:

"Nearly every item in the game interacts on some level with another item or object in the game. For instance, if you find a wand and you don't know what it does, you can use one of the charges of the wand to draw on the ground. The game will give you a message such as, "The floor is riddled with bullet holes" indicating that you have a wand of magic missiles. If flames shot from the tip then you'd have a wand of fire. Sometimes nothing obvious happens. Maybe you have a wand of invisibility and you can't see what you drew on the ground. You'll have to find another way to discover what it is. If you find a potion, you can take a sip of it to try to figure out what it is, but you don't want to drink the whole thing. It might be a potion of polymorph and turn you into a lizard! Or maybe it'll turn you into a red dragon... Every item can eventually be determined through experimentation or by discovering what other items are and using process of elimination."

The problem with roguelikes is the extremely high opportunity cost of getting into the game. For instance, in order to really get into Nethack you have to memorize ridiculous amounts of game data. You need to know all the in-game messages that give away what a wand is when you engrave, plus you need to know which wand it might be if you receive no message at all.

You also need to memorize the relative costs of items so that you can ID them by buying/selling them at shops. You also need to account for your charisma modifier and the random chance of a 25% or 33% markup. It goes on and on. The only real way to learn these things is by dying. Over and over and over again. So it's tough to get into these games.

If you'd like to try something a little easier, you can try Lost Labyrinth (www.lostlabyrinth.com) or maybe Incursion (http://www.incursion-roguelike.org/index.html). They're still complicated, but the opportunity cost in learning these games is somewhere in the neigborhood of hours rather than days.

----

Back to MoM for a second, the manual is wrong. Retreating flyers rarely if ever get killed. Sprites themselves may not be that good, but the idea is to stack flying ranged attackers into the same army. You get a highly mobile force that 80% of the monsters in the game can't even attack. Sprites are just the lowest level of that concept. Eventually I put Chaos Channels on all my ranged units and group the flyers together. But our play styles are very different. I'm just in it for the fun, I like to get as many goodie huts as possible before the AI.

[lch]

sector24 said:
Back to MoM for a second, the manual is wrong. Retreating flyers rarely if ever get killed. Sprites themselves may not be that good, but the idea is to stack flying ranged attackers into the same army.

I always was under the impression that the closer you were to the edge of the battleground and the further away from your enemy, the higher your chance of survival when fleeing. So the best before fleeing would be to go for the shortest way to the battleground border with your units and flee then. True?

[B0rsuk]

Real men don't need to flee.