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Master of Magic remake from Thea developers and Slitherine

Blake00

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Yuuki said:
On the beta question, I will answer now, the beta will start soon, but, we are doing it in waves, so the first one will likely be small. You will get an invite from Slitherine if you were selected to be a tester.

Sounds like things will be kicking off soon with the official Master of Magic remake beta testing. Good luck to everyone who applied!

I've also got some inside gossip for everyone (shared with permission lol). MuHa currently have Seravy (creator of Caster of Magic ) testing their latest MoM remake builds. He's been putting the game through it's paces and giving them feedback (no he's not 'CoMifying' it just incase someone thinks that and gets either hopeful or rage triggered lol, it's just testing). Also while nothing is guaranteed, if all goes well hopefully Implode (creator of MoM-Multiplayer Edition ) will also be included in one of the up and coming early beta testing waves. These 2 guys have spent the last 15 or so years pulling apart every little bit of MoM and remaking it in their own fashion for their respective projects. It's crazy to think of all the endless spells, buffs, attributes and assets these guys spent endless hours tinkering with and recreating over the years. All the little things the rest of us mere mortals have to go and look up on the MoM wiki site is probably burned into these guys brains so bad it'll haunt them in their dreams for all eternity haha. So who better to beta test and find bugs for MuHa! Due to being too busy and my computer being too old I can't take part myself but I take huge comfort knowing that these 'big guns' of the MoM modding community will be there to test and help spot issues. :)
 

Ibbz

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Messages
499
So who better to beta test and find bugs for MuHa! Due to being too busy and my computer being too old I can't take part myself but I take huge comfort knowing that these 'big guns' of the MoM modding community will be there to test and help spot issues
Just so long as they actually listen to the feedback, and it's not a situation where it's ignored like in numerous other instances.
 

Blake00

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EDIT: WRONG LINK FIXED
Tenth MuHa dev diary for the official Master of Magic remake is here. This one contains a nice dev team Q&A based on questions the community sent in. We also get to see the updated city screen which those with a keen eye will notice little citizens going about their business (with animation according to the interview). The games extreme modability allowing fans to redesign MoM in their own way is mentioned a few times too.

http://muhagames.com/dev-diary-10-april-2022/

devdiaary-april-2.png
 
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Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
The artstyle is still bland, but this time the map looks barren and bland as well, both the campaign and battle maps. Perhaps they are going to add more details in the future. I still don't see why I should play this instead of the original, though.
 

Blake00

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Yeah unfortunately the words "bland terrain" have been used quite a bit in the communities but who knows if it'll lead to any improvements there as I think they're pretty far along now and are mostly fixing bugs and improving AI.

Bit sad to see that they've retained the max 5 player limit but they did say they were going to stay true to the original as much as possible I guess.
 
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Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
Speaking of being far along, when are they going to roll out the beta?
 

Blake00

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Speaking of being far along, when are they going to roll out the beta?
First wave kicked off a week or 2 ago, I think it was only a pretty small group of testers that got in. I saw Yuuki posting that invites for the second wave of beta testing will be going out soon.

Not sure how many waves they're planning but safe to say if people here missed out then you'll probably get something eventually.

.
 

Gaznak

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The Fortress Unvanquishable
Damn, I found out the brilliant Drake178's Differential Patcher and 1.60 patch only a couple of days ago. Time to play good old MoM again!

Slitherine, Serawy and Muha can go to everyhwere they want, including even Inferno itself.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://muhagames.com/mom-dev-diary-11-may-2022/

MoM Dev Diary #11, May 2022

Busy beta times.
Last month we officially entered into closed beta and now, together with the first wave of testers, we are working hard at bug hunting and monitoring player feedback. As such, this month I am only going to quickly say that we are alive, we are working hard to make that announced early Autumn deadline!

Here is a link to the Home of Wargames video, where you can finally see some gameplay and myself… https://youtu.be/gmM8NTndAF0

And here are a few screenshots of things we improved via feedback (we did a lot more, but those are a few visual bits I can share.

hsrrr.png

Locations no longer have the additional red markers under them, to allow for better immersion. And units also have a less obtrusive bottom marker.
gdd.png

And as part of a larger design progress of monster lairs, we now also show the more difficult lairs with the red light.
building-managerarrows.jpg

And the building queue now has the arrows so you can rearrange your building orders. You can do this from either the building manager screen or the main city view.
arrows2.jpg

And, the main city view, where you can also switch the production order, no longer shows you the current unit/building being constructed as next, as it did before. It now correctly shows you the current building under construction and has the que underneath.
jsjsjsjs.png

We now have a help button in combat that explains battle mechanics in a more comprehensive way.

These are obviously only little snippets of the work happening behind the scenes now. We are hunting down many bugs as well as balancing issues with the help of our committed testers. We hope to show you more gameplay in the future as we push on towards release, but for now, that’s it folks.

And I shall leave you with a peek at an amusing (well, not so amusing for us when we try to find it..) bug.

bug2.jpg

As you see, we sometimes have our players pay a hefty price for destroying their enemies’ cities or, in fact, for keeping them! * Note, I can confirm that this bug has been hunted down and squashed at the time of this publication.

Thanks for your interest, and stay tuned for more news in the coming months.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
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Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://muhagames.com/master-of-magic-dev-diary-12-july-2022/

Master of Magic Dev Diary #12, July 2022​

Busy beta times continued.

devdiaryjuly3.png

Our improved battle maps are now less flat and have the location models in for more flavour.

So, we’re at the end of July now, and I am sure you’re all wondering how things are progressing, right? Well, things are going well. We are producing regular patches/updates (8 big ones so far) to catch bugs as well as modify features due to feedback and/or add new ones.

Our biggest hurdle remains firmly in the AI behaviours. While the AI at the moment is learning more and more complex tasks and combinations, and in the weeks to come, we will hopefully have it become more and more aggressive and proactive towards the player.

But for now, we come across such odd diplomatic conversations:

devdiaryjuly7.png

I mean, I did not declare war on him, and I certainly did not refuse any offers, maybe I accidentally said no to a date, or something, and he’s upset now? Don’t know, but he is angry…


What’s new in our Master of Magic?​

I’ve had a few questions on social media in regards to what we’ve changed from the original, so I’ll try to give some examples here. We do not have a list that we can share, as many of the changes happened organically, so while trying to implement a thing, it needed to be changed because it did not work with our systems; or, feedback and ideas leading to new features, etc.

So spells are one of the things that we tried to copy almost 1:1, but inevitably, there are things we could not duplicate. All of the original spells from Master of Magic are in the game, but some have changed mechanics. I’ll discuss the few examples I can think of:

Web​

Original web – Web a common, instant combat, Nature spell. For a base cost of 10 Mana, it may be cast on an enemy unit during combat to prevent that unit from moving or attacking for a while. If the target is a flying unit, it will also lose this property until the end of the battle .

New Web – A strong spider’s web tries to entangle the enemy. Target unit gets -3 resistance and may be immobilised (D10 roll – current resistance the result = number of turns active, but the minimum is 1). Web also prevents flight for the rest of the battle, even if it did not immobilise its target.

The reason for the change was that we did not have the mechanic to handle the original design, in terms of it being immune to resist rolls. We had many talks about how to best imitate the original with what we could do, and after a discussion with our beta testers, this was the compromise that was reached.

Flying Fortress/Fortress of Flying​

Another such spell is Flying Fortress. In the original, the spell made the town and all its defenders float, and thus, the spell’s effect is to prevent Walking and Swimming units from entering or leaving the town limits during combat.

Our version has been renamed (fun fact, it is actually the only spell we renamed, I think…) to Fortress of Flying, and it now gives all of its defenders the ability to fly. Again, the change was made because it would be very resource consuming to try and emulate the original mechanic 1:1, it would also potentially require additional graphics changes on top of the correct mechanic. So, in the end, our solution was to keep with the spirit of the original – making it harder for non-flying units to conquer a city.

Units and unit skills/abilities​

devdiaryjuly.png

One of the most talked about feature changes was actually movement points. When we started Beta, back in May, the movement points for all units were doubled. This did speed up the overland exploration quite a bit, but we soon discovered we had not fully considered the knock on effect this would have, especially on battle tactics. Ranged units were particularly affected here, as they could now move quite a bit and then still shoot in combat. Some of the more powerful creatures that were originally slow but dangerous, also got, well, more dangerous with that extra speed.

So, after a lot of talks with the testers as well as the team, we reverted the changes to adding +1 movement to all units, with exceptions of +2 movement to such units as settlers, engineers, ships, heroes, floating island and non-flying mounted units(mammoths, beetles, turtles). In addition, non-magic ranged units were given +1 to ranged attack, to compensate for the range penalties as enemy units can now run further away.

And while we are talking about ranged units, we also made a change to magic ranged attacks, in that our system does not use Mana for magic ranged attack, it uses the same system as normal ranged attacks, so ammo. A unit with magical ranged attack will have the ranged attack strength listed as usual, but they will have the magic ranged skill listed in their abilities and thus their ranged attack will have the ‘magic’ qualities. This was once more a decision led by the need to streamline certain areas of the game, in terms of not adding more custom mechanics that are complicated for us to script and potentially for a new player to grasp.

And, one of the sticky points that we’ve tried our best to resolve via dialogue with our testers as well as our own design ideas, is the hydra. After many talks and ideas, we decided we are unable to emulate its original 9 figure mechanic, but instead, we worked hard to give our Hydra more robust statistics so that it remains a strong and interesting fantastic unit. So our hydra now has an impressive melee attack of 15 and 45 hit points (in comparison to 6 attack and 10 hit points in the original) which we hope compensates for the multiple vs one figure change.

devdiaryjuly4-1.png

Secret beta testers share their thoughts​

Below I shall also mention a few things our wonderful testers added to the list of changes and stuff they wanted to talk about in the dev diary.

So, in the spirit of every little helps, we have the: Dethstryke the Swordsman had an axe but he has been fixed and given a sword – I mean, it ain’t much, but it shows we care, right?

devdiaryjuly5.png

Amongst some of the memorable bloopers we had so far, we had the inexplicable, yet somehow lore appropriate gaps in reality where Myrran cities could be seen on Arcanus and vice versa… Or, our draconians were so into the fact that they can actually all fly, they decided that building shipyards is for wingless fools only. We also had like really polite raiders, where if you were defending a town and got attacked, you chose to flee, because you knew you would get murdered, and yet, the nice fellas would let you stay in your city after you flee, effectively, giving up their sure victory…

Beta Roadmap​

devdiaryjuly6.png

I can’t give you a detailed one, but let me try to map out a few things we have planned for the coming weeks:

  • Animation speed adjustment option is awaiting implementation
  • Choosing the number of enemy Wizards you will face in a game
  • Choosing the map size
  • Implementing Time Stop and Fortress of Flying
  • Fixing the end game (this may in fact be in before I publish this…)
  • AI improvements continued
  • Adding High Score table
Out of development, we’re also working on some things for the marketing team, as well as putting together a game manual (yeah, that was fun to do, considering the complexity of the game…)

Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for future updates.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
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Messages
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Pathfinder: Wrath
All of the changes are for the worse, lol. Giving units extra movement will definitely make it feel not like MoM and has the most unwanted consequences. Ranged magical attacks not costing mana is decline of the highest order.
 

Blake00

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Ah man.. all these 'we had to change this because we've got no money and can't do in 2022 what a bunch of dudes did in 1994 from scratch' changes... ladies and gentlemen... meet the future of the Master of Magic franchise... :(

Also that whole movement thing blew up in the community months ago so this isn't much of a backtrack. Making all these units faster completely changes all the balancing in the game and the way it's played. And now they're racing around having to change other things to counter balance against these new changes they shouldn't have made in the first place!
 
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mastroego

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Why is it so hard to COPY something that works?
Especially if you're actually doing a remake and using the fucking same title of the game?

I guess some mysteries are not meant to ever be solved...
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
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Messages
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Pathfinder: Wrath
Why is it so hard to COPY something that works?
Especially if you're actually doing a remake and using the fucking same title of the game?

I guess some mysteries are not meant to ever be solved...
I can understand some of the changes, which are ironically trying to bypass technological limitations that didn't exist when MoM was developed. I'll make an educated guess and say the movement speed change wasn't done to "speed up the game" in the straightforward sense, but to compensate for turn times. I played some MoM today and turns are literally instantaneous. I highly, highly doubt it's going to be like that in the remake, so you'll literally be spending more time waiting for the AI's turns than playing the game, so it really won't be fun moving a single hex and waiting again. Overall, all of these changes lead me to conclude that surprise, surprise MoM doesn't really need a remake. Or if it does, they don't have the budget and/or technology to improve the game in any significant sense at this point in time. I predict the remake is going to be worse in every possible way that matters. Sure, there are going to be some modern UI schemes that will make it a bit easier to control, but the original is surprisingly playable to this day and I'm not finding myself needing too many modern conveniences when I play it. On top of that, the remake continues to look worse.

Well, there is one thing they could improve - the random map generation. The one in the original can very easily make it so you only have a single square out of the region you start in (like a natural corrior), but that square is occupied by a lair with a monster too tough for your basic troops to handle. Today, it boxed me in like that with an air elemental that is strong, flying, and invisible. I had to abandon that playthrough, lol. Technically, I could've continued it, but I'd have had to wait a bunch of turns to either get strong troops or a spell that will get me out of there, but I would've ran out of gold at one point too and yeah. Better to just start again.
 
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Magnum

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East Commonlands
Ah man.. all these 'we had to change this because we've got no money and can't do in 2022 what a bunch of dudes did in 1994 from scratch' changes... ladies and gentlemen... meet the future of the Master of Magic franchise... :(

Not only that but when that recent MMO (sans RPG) New World released I laughed that they couldn't swim or go underwater yet Everquest had this day 1 ( including a dungeon underwater ) a full twenty years before New World, with a massive budget and team, couldn't do it because "reasons". EQ even had to do it over a phone line.

These advancements that are regressions have put me off of modern game engines (like all two of them!) designed for all platforms.

 
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Tanaka

Educated
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Feb 23, 2016
Messages
55
Bit sad to see that they've retained the max 5 player limit but they did say they were going to stay true to the original as much as possible I guess.

Yeah not interested for this reason it's 2022 not 1994 some things can be updated.
 

ArchAngel

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Messages
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Bit sad to see that they've retained the max 5 player limit but they did say they were going to stay true to the original as much as possible I guess.

Yeah not interested for this reason it's 2022 not 1994 some things can be updated.
So this needs to be changed but when they speed up movement then it needs to be like old game!! They cannot win whatever they do. Best is to do whatever they want and ignore all the complainers.
 
Joined
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Bit sad to see that they've retained the max 5 player limit but they did say they were going to stay true to the original as much as possible I guess.

Yeah not interested for this reason it's 2022 not 1994 some things can be updated.
I hope it's moddable.

At the same time I kind of respect the limit for making all games unique and for ensuring that there is no drawn out endgame. Having played Caster of Magic with much more AIs the end game gets incredibly tedious and depending on how many AIs hate you (which is largely outside your control, depending on who has what books) you can get endlessly pelted by bullshit globals, city attacks, and your enchantments being dispelled by half the game even if they aren't at war with you (and starting a war over it would lead to an almost immediate gangrape). And on higher difficulties that AI has much more mana than you, so any contest involving multiple AIs fighting your mana generation with theirs ends up being like a 10:1 disadvantage at best. Not doing that again unless it's with a very specifically optimized build stacking disenchantment bonuses, otherwise 4-7ish AIs makes for a good game.
 

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