4X Best MoM mod: Caster of Magic

[JohnTheRevelator]

What? How did I not hear about this until now? It looks amazing!

 

[Cael]

Does this mod work with the original game (which I am playing via DOSBox)?

 

[Gregz]

Brilliant mod, installs easily and plays nice with Windows 7.

 

[Cael]

Tried Implode's mod. A having problems with starting it. I think it is because I have been messing around with the custom settings, but there is no manual to tell me what the limits are. I am going to stick with the original until something more stable turns up...

 

[Gregz]

Tried Implode's mod. A having problems with starting it. I think it is because I have been messing around with the custom settings, but there is no manual to tell me what the limits are. I am going to stick with the original until something more stable turns up...

Eh, don't mess with Implode's mod, it's janky af.

Caster of Magic has everything you could possibly want from a MoM mod.

 

[Cael]

Tried Implode's mod. A having problems with starting it. I think it is because I have been messing around with the custom settings, but there is no manual to tell me what the limits are. I am going to stick with the original until something more stable turns up...

Eh, don't mess with Implode's mod, it's janky af.

Caster of Magic has everything you could possibly want from a MoM mod.

Caster of Magic requires you to disclose your credit card details, yes?

 

[Blake00]

Does this mod work with the original game (which I am playing via DOSBox)?

Caster of magic is a full rebuild in a new windows engine however bloody slitherine released it as a DLC to Master of Magic forcing people to buy the original game even they've still got their old cd (eg like me). I bought it in the end as people throwing money at CoM shows Slitherine there's genuine interest in MoM related stuff still which means they'll hopefully keep working on their mysterious MoM2 or MoM remake project we know is happening but know very little about.

Tried Implode's mod. A having problems with starting it. I think it is because I have been messing around with the custom settings, but there is no manual to tell me what the limits are. I am going to stick with the original until something more stable turns up...

haha best to always get thinghs working before tampering.

download a fresh copy, run server.bat first, wait for it to run some stuff, then run client bat to start the game. You can see me doing it with an older version in this video here.

Caster of Magic requires you to disclose your credit card details, yes?

I used Paypal on steam. Not sure if GoG or the Slitherine store accepts paypal but they probably do.

.

 

[Cael]

Does this mod work with the original game (which I am playing via DOSBox)?

Caster of magic is a full rebuild in a new windows engine however bloody slitherine released it as a DLC to Master of Magic forcing people to buy the original game even they've still got their old cd (eg like me). I bought it in the end as people throwing money at CoM shows Slitherine there's genuine interest in MoM related stuff still which means they'll hopefully keep working on their mysterious MoM2 or MoM remake project we know is happening but know very little about.

Tried Implode's mod. A having problems with starting it. I think it is because I have been messing around with the custom settings, but there is no manual to tell me what the limits are. I am going to stick with the original until something more stable turns up...

haha best to always get thinghs working before tampering.

download a fresh copy, run server.bat first, wait for it to run some stuff, then run client bat to start the game. You can see me doing it with an older version in this video here.

Caster of Magic requires you to disclose your credit card details, yes?

I used Paypal on steam. Not sure if GoG or the Slitherine store accepts paypal but they probably do.

.

I haven't even tried to play it as is yet. I just downloaded it, got the server running, started a new game in the client, messed around with some of the parameters and the whole thing refused to allow me to do anything other than cancel out, which locked up the server until I rebooted the server.

Pay Pal will require your credit card details or something similar.

 

[Incantatar]

CoM II is amazeballs! Highly recommended! If anyone has any questions ask away.

 

[Cael]

CoM II is amazeballs! Highly recommended! If anyone has any questions ask away.

Is there any way to get it without giving my credit card details to a bunch of China cunt munching soibois?

 

[Fluent]

Quick question. Is it true that it greatly speeds up the game speed? And only aggressive expansions early and often will win? Tying into that question, can I just go about doing my own thing, developing my faction and turtling a bit and still be successful in the long run? Thanks! <3

 

[Blake00]

Quick question. Is it true that it greatly speeds up the game speed? And only aggressive expansions early and often will win? Tying into that question, can I just go about doing my own thing, developing my faction and turtling a bit and still be successful in the long run? Thanks! <3

CoM2 is waaaaay faster. Saving, loading, end of turn (even when there's 14 players) are all way faster. And I'm playing on a 9 year old computer lol.

There's a boss mode lone start option that allows you to have the entire world to yourself while all the other players get stuck on the other world. I like it as I can expand without much harassment. The AI is very aggressive and loves getting in your face even when you're at peace with them so I don't like starting near them.

 

[TigerKnee]

What does the "II" in the game name entail?

 

[Incantatar]

CoM II is amazeballs! Highly recommended! If anyone has any questions ask away.

Is there any way to get it without giving my credit card details to a bunch of China cunt munching soibois?

Yes. I didn't pay with any credit card. You can buy it on either Steam or GOG with any payment option that is possible there.

Quick question. Is it true that it greatly speeds up the game speed? And only aggressive expansions early and often will win? Tying into that question, can I just go about doing my own thing, developing my faction and turtling a bit and still be successful in the long run? Thanks! <3

Adding to what Blake said, I like turtling a bit myself and I can do it without any issues on Fair difficulty. Diplomacy is improved a lot. I disable chaotic AI at game start and try to be neutral to most wizards. Green/White makes you more good aligned, Red/Black more bad aligned, while Blue is neutral. Opposite alignments won't like you but your own colors will. You can go into wizard contracts with the AI and over time relations improve. Not being very weak or very powerful helps too. On medium difficulty there is no need to rush, but look out for mono Blue and Red wizards. They will grow very powerful in the end game.

 

[Cael]

CoM II is amazeballs! Highly recommended! If anyone has any questions ask away.

Is there any way to get it without giving my credit card details to a bunch of China cunt munching soibois?

Yes. I didn't pay with any credit card. You can buy it on either Steam or GOG with any payment option that is possible there.

Quick question. Is it true that it greatly speeds up the game speed? And only aggressive expansions early and often will win? Tying into that question, can I just go about doing my own thing, developing my faction and turtling a bit and still be successful in the long run? Thanks! <3

Adding to what Blake said, I like turtling a bit myself and I can do it without any issues on Fair difficulty. Diplomacy is improved a lot. I disable chaotic AI at game start and try to be neutral to most wizards. Green/White makes you more good aligned, Red/Black more bad aligned, while Blue is neutral. Opposite alignments won't like you but your own colors will. You can go into wizard contracts with the AI and over time relations improve. Not being very weak or very powerful helps too. On medium difficulty there is no need to rush, but look out for mono Blue and Red wizards. They will grow very powerful in the end game.

Suppress Magic and Time Stop really sucks balls. I remember the first time I ran into Time Stop. I had to watch the computer play with itself for ages before it ran out of mana...

 

[Incantatar]

Suppress Magic and Time Stop really sucks balls. I remember the first time I ran into Time Stop. I had to watch the computer play with itself for ages before it ran out of mana...

Since blue is my favorite magic school, this is usually what I do. Usually only a full blue spell book will be that dangerous (Jafar). Kill or hurt him early.

 

[Cael]

Suppress Magic and Time Stop really sucks balls. I remember the first time I ran into Time Stop. I had to watch the computer play with itself for ages before it ran out of mana...

Since blue is my favorite magic school, this is usually what I do. Usually only a full blue spell book will be that dangerous (Jafar). Kill or hurt him early.

Oh, I didn't realise what it was at first. The game just stopped responding. I thought the game hit a bug or something. It only hit me what it was several games later.

Also, the original had a bug where if you raised too many volcanoes (or maybe just a volcano in a certain square in the polar region), the game goes into a display glitch where you have multicoloured lines running across the screen and the game eventually crashed. This bug is still present in v1.31.

 

[Blake00]

Oh, I didn't realise what it was at first. The game just stopped responding. I thought the game hit a bug or something. It only hit me what it was several games later.

Yeah I remember when time stop was cast on me the first time I thought it was a bug. I played for ages waiting for it to stop but it didn't as the AI must have had so much mana. I lived in fear of that spell from that day onwards lol.

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[Lady Error]

No ur MoM jokes? Codex, I am dissapoint.

 

[Incantatar]

Fuck you Ariel, you maniacal CUNT!
Surprise attacked 2 cities, 2 towers and 4 nodes from neutral relations. I was almost done banishing Horus after a long war. With one blow she pushed even to me score wise. I'm so mad!

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Ok, I put up the 5€ to play the Windows version even though I already had the DosBox version. The game has been rewritten from scratch with new features, so fair enough in my view. Just terrible marketing on their part.

So far I have some mixed feelings about the game. Some things are great, others are questionable, some I don't like at all.

Playing against 13 wizards is amazing and precisely what I always wanted. The original MoM was never that good at city building / management and with only 3 other wizards, that's what you'd spend all your time doing. By the time you got ready to take them on with your genius munchkin strategy, I felt the game was already over. Arbitrary diplomacy and huge AI bonuses were the ways the game used to counter the player, but this wasn't satisfying. Now that you can crowd the map with other wizards and change the map size (not just relative landmass size), the strategy element is much more alive.

Diplomacy seems much improved in general, with wizard personalities being important factors in who you should try to ally and coexist with. It doesn't seem wizards have a preference for their own school like before, and I was able to play a Death wizard without being ostracized (diplomacy was impossible for Death wizards before), which on the whole I think is good.

Queuing production and accumulating for the next round is another big plus, reducing some micromanagement and making redundant that trick where you paid for the production of something and then switched all the workers to farmers to free up laborers in other cities for that round.

Balance changes are a mixed bag. The Death school, which was the weakest before (until the late game, where it was probably overpowered, but I generally got bored before) is now fully viable for the early game, which is great. You have a Tactician trait which gives a defense bonus to all creatures (including summons, unlike Warlord), finally allowing you to make use of your cheap skeletons (they have no maintenance cost and can be used to maintain order, so if anything they're a bit OP now). Some other cool debuffs and overland spells too, which I haven't got to use yet.

Some of your favorite spells seem to have been removed, like Wall of Stone and Eldritch weapon. Oh well... On the whole the changes seem to make sense, but... they're part of a new system that's very constrained compared to the original. Before you had common and uncommon spells, the latter only accessible at the beginning if you went all in on single school. Now you have starting spells, early spells (which you can research from the beginning, but can't start with), plus iirc 'rare' and 'very rare' spells which are "guaranteed" or not depending on how many books you choose. I'm not really sure what "guaranteed" means and the manual isn't very clear on that. I guess they can be researched at a later date while others may never appear? In any case, you can't go all in on a single school anymore, which was one BEST THINGS ABOUT (YOUR) MOM and what set it apart! Why limit the player like that? So what if it's unbalanced? High risk, high reward, let the player decide.

On the same page, you can only choose 4 traits now and you must choose at least one trait. Makes sense in RPG logic, but (your) MOM was always different from the others, because it always let me do what I wanted.

Let's go to the unequivocally negative: the game is quite a bit uglier in parts. Some of the perfectly fine tiles in the original, like those for mountains, were replaced with much lower quality ones. What gives? The building menus look uglier, more generic and, perhaps, a bit more confusing (difficult to tell, as I'm used to the original). The same thing with the Magic and Wizard menus. I hope this is a work in progress.

I also regret to say the combat sees a bit more chaotic. For starters, many more units have 2 movement speeds and they'll keep running away like a cockroach from a broom if they find themselves outnumbered. The highlight color is now red, making it even more difficult to see your selected unit. The original game wasn't tactically deep, but it was charming and elegant in its simplicity. I'm not sure some of these improvements add to it.

There's probably a lot more, as I've only played for a few hours. I don't want to finish on a negative note, so I'd like to say the music sounds a lot better now. This was to be expected, but still a nice surprise to hear it. I try to keep in mind this is a one-man project with a personal vision of what the game should be like. All in all, 10/10 for the effort, even though I'll probably keep returning to the original more often. I'd really like to see a re-release of the original for Windows with all the QoL improvements, better AI and 14 wizard death matches and, maybe, some toggleable balance changes. That'd be a day one purchase, certainly.

 

[Cael]

Before you had common and uncommon spells, the latter only accessible at the beginning if you went all in on single school. Now you have starting spells, early spells (which you can research from the beginning, but can't start with), plus iirc 'rare' and 'very rare' spells which are "guaranteed" or not depending on how many books you choose. I'm not really sure what "guaranteed" means and the manual isn't very clear on that. I guess they can be researched at a later date while others may never appear? In any case, you can't go all in on a single school anymore, which was one BEST THINGS ABOUT (YOUR) MOM and what set it apart! Why limit the player like that? So what if it's unbalanced? High risk, high reward, let the player decide.

The original had guaranteed spells. That is the number of spells you get at each tier as researchable depending on your number of books in the sphere. Of course, with trading, you can easily break that limit, so the number of books didn't really mattered for that. It mattered for the mana and research discount, and what enchantments you can put on items you create.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Yes, I stand corrected. There were also 3 tiers of spells (now 4), while the major difference is that you can't pick the strongest, game-changing spells as researchable right off the bat. The earliest superior spells you can research immediately are of the second tier, which can make a big difference but won't break the game. For example, you can go straight for Giant Spiders (Nature), Werewolves or Werewolves + Blood Lust (Death), Gargoyles + Immolation (Fire), etc. which give you much stronger results than what you'd have available by early or early-mid game if you didn't sacrifice enough books to make those spells available so soon, but it still won't let you conquer the whole map or even free some of the nodes in your continent.

I've been playing the game obsessively for the last weeks and it's grown a lot on me. The new spell distribution contributes to a more logical progression, there are many more spells and the system is overall remarkably balanced, while maintaining the character of each realm and the characteristic "asymmetry" of the original. One thing I really like is how every spell and unit has its own commentary in the manual, providing reasoning for every change.

All in all, I think the game is superior to the original, although you might not like it at first (I had a lot of reservations, as seen in the previous post). I still prefer the slower pace of the original's combat and its tech trees. Food is easier to come by now and it seems easier to produce things in general, which contributes to a faster pace in general. By default, you also start with a couple of settlers which is supposed to fast track the early game, but thankfully you can disable it. I much prefer a slower start and having the opportunity to explore my surroundings, but I guess this is a matter of preference.

What's still holding back the game from true greatness is the strategic layer. There's an issue with the maps, as independently of your settings, you're likely to start isolated in an island or at best sharing it with another wizard. The AI is predictably poor at launching amphibian assaults, sometimes declaring war and then sitting on its ass without making a single offensive move. Invariably, after enough time passes, it requests a peace treaty citing the "heavy burdens" of war and lamenting all the "senseless destruction" wreaked by our armies. Sure, buddy. The AI fares much better when it shares a continent with you, though. It'll bypass your strongholds to launch a surprise attack on your poorly garrisoned towns right at the worst time.

When it comes to settling new land, the AI is ridiculously bold. They'll send a single unit of settlers across the ocean to nest in that single available space that shares two resource squares with you. This doesn't make a lot of sense because you can just wait for the town to populate and then steal it (there's a swordsman generated automatically, but it hardly makes a difference), saving you the trouble of making settlers yourself. It's also a diplomatic blunder to intrude upon your fellow wizard's territory like that (or it should be).

The AI should expand more logically, sending troops to protect its new settlements. There should be a way for wizards to communicate with each other regarding foreign troops in their territory. You can't force a scout to leave you alone apart from outright aggression, and you can't prevent a settler from claiming territory right next to you. It should be considered a provocation and a violation of the wizard pact to intrude upon another wizard's resource squares. The maps should also contain more chokepoints, landbridges and other features that make them more interesting to play. If the maps contain a lot of water, the AI should at least be more concerned with building large navies and learn how to launch amphibian assaults ( I know the latter is very difficult to code).

 

[Blake00]

FYI Suppanut has released a new version 1.4.2 of his Warlords mod for CoM2Win. Warlords changes many things in Caster of Magic 2 for Windows, some to feel more like classic MoM again and some others are new things entirely eg rebalanced wizard, races, units and spells along with 50 brand new units/creatures. You can get the latest release from here:

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=10548

 

[Average Manatee]

So, anyone playing Caster of Magic and been able to win on higher difficulties? They go Beginner/Easy/Normal/Fair/Advanced/Expert/Master/Lunatic/Phantasm, and anything above Expert seems entirely impossible for me. Even Expert feels close to impossible to do reliably, I need to savescum some battles along with having a great build and good RNG on my start to get ahead. Just defending cities from neutral stacks quickly becomes difficult so any quick expansion is incredibly risky to do without massive savescumming and the AI will just overwhelm your island with settlers and armies.

There's still strong strategies but nothing runaway dominant like starting with specific rare spells in vanilla Master of Magic. The AI doesn't exactly intentionally field counters to your best strats but it builds enough of everything and is brutally efficient at using those counter spells/units/combinations whenever they get in battle with you. It's also very hard to create super units, AI knows to prioritize dispels hard the more enchantments you have running and even with the retorts/global enchants that make your stuff harder to dispel you'll commonly need to spend several turns re-enchanting after hard battles.