The Master of Magic Thread

[tkfsung]

Catnip 1.0

Due to some unknown reason, my registration on the Dragonsword forums have failed, so I'll ask here:

Does anyone know what happened to Catnip 1.0 release? It was supposed to be released 2 days ago but no news from Catwalk.

Edit: never mind Catnip 1.01 is out! And is good ....

 

[Catwalk]

Dragonsword is down indefinitely, we've moved to Realms Beyond instead (at http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/foru ... y.php?f=56). Catnip is still under active development, and kyrub has resumed work on Insecticide. Hope you'll drop by to visit.

 

[Catwalk]

Our first tournament has been launched! The objective will be to build a power base of 200 fastest, we'll all be using the same wizard and map but will be allowed to pick any arcane race we like. For more details, come visit Realms Beyond Magic at http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=4220

Happy gaming, and stay tuned for the first Catnip release sometime around Christmas!

 

[coldcrow]

That is a great update. Thanks a lot.

 

[Wastelander]

Hello! As Zeus said, I also think MoM is one of the best game ever. In fact, we're working on a remake, and really would like to show it to you. If interested, you can find more information here. Everything you have to suggest will be well received . Thanks!

 

[hoverdog]

Hello! As Zeus said, I also think MoM is one of the best game ever. In fact, we're working on a remake, and really would like to show it to you. If interested, you can find more information here. Everything you have to suggest will be well received . Thanks!

another one? I really hope it won't share the fate of oh-how-many previous attempts.

though it seems you do have some previous experience in making games, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

 

[doomtrader]

Hi hoverdog,

This game will be released, and we are hoping to make it happen at the end of this year.
We are already working on it for almost a year and it starts to shape to a version which we would be able to present.

If you have any questions, please ask here or at our forum.

 

[hoverdog]

Thanks, I've already registered.

I've just noticed you're from my town

 

[doomtrader]

You mean me?

 

[hoverdog]

You mean me?

I mean your studio, Wastelands interactive.

at least that's what I deduced from your site.

 

[doomtrader]

We are located in Łódź

 

[hoverdog]

yup, that's what I'm talking about.

 

[doomtrader]

The worlds are so small.
It's a kind of Magic

 

[Wastelander]

Updates and questions below!

Planes

As you probably already know Worlds of Magic is going to boast a number of different planes. These are going to be:

Prime Material (A normal fantasy planet)
Paradise (Life)
Shadow (Death)
Air
Earth
Fire
Water

During game creation you'll more than likely be able to pick the number of planes (from 1 to max) and control what planes may be created and whether or not a plane can “repeat”. That is to say, might you get two or three prime material planes or two shadow planes. The planes themselves can almost be considered “planets”.

Read more here

Independent Empires

Here's the idea. Each independent city has a limited AI (as they all must anyway). It builds units to defend itself, builds buildings to better itself, sends out raiding parties to enrich itself, etc. Now, we give this AI a random “ambition” element. The bigger the city gets the more likely it is to get “ambitious”. Once that happens it receives (however we work it in the code) an AI upgrade. This AI can have some real random elements in how it plays, but it uses no magic. The idea is that some civic leader has risen through the ranks to found their own small empire. Once this happens an announcement is made that the empire of such-and-such has just been founded. The new empire AI starts playing like any other AI. It looks for cities to conquer, settles new cities, tries to eliminate it's opponents, etc.

This new AI empire could even start hiring heroes and causing real trouble. Now, this runs into another debate about whether we should use custom or predefined heroes, but we'll discuss that in another thread.

The basic question is this: How would you feel about getting stomped by a random AI that couldn't even use magic?

Read more here

Unlockable content

School 1: I bought it! Why should I have to work to play it my way?
Good point! I generally agree that if you paid for a game you should be able to enjoy it your way. If you want to set the difficulty on “I fell asleep playing it while watching TV, but I still won.” that's up to you. It's not my play style, but I'm not the game police.

School 2: If I can just have everything from the start why bother working for it?
Good point! I like to earn things with e-sweat, e-blood and e-tears (I hardly ever really cry over a game anymore). As soon as I start a game I set it on impossible and take it on at it's best. If you can earn something I go after it.

You see the problem here? Both are right. There's nothing wrong with either. So, how do we do both?

Read more here

Ideas?

 

[Wastelander]

Happy monday there! Today we have a lot of updates about Worlds of Magic (as well as lots of questions for you lol) so let's get on it.

1.- Undead race and Necromancy.

Here is the starting lineup for the Undead race.

Settlers (They need another name, I know)
Engineers (The undead race can think, remember. They can use roads.)
Skeletons
Skeletal Archers
Zombies
Deathweb - The deathweb attacks with a poisonous bite, and can disable opponents with its web attack.
Huecuva - They fill the role of clerics in the Undead empire and unleash negative energy to consume a map tile. Corrupted tiles provide a boost to Undead cities but decimate resources in living cities.
Bonestorm - The Undead army's siege engine.
Phantom Lancers - A full suit of armor and horse barding, animated by the vengeful spirit of a slain warrior.
Arcane Wraith - Arcane Wraith are powerful sorcerers.
Spectres - Spectres are agonized spirits of murdered humanoids, unable to find rest in the afterlife. Their cold touch draws life essence from the living, and humanoids killed by this life drain may become spectres themselves. Fortunately for the living world, spectres are nearly helpless in sunlight and flee from it if possible.
Death Guards - One of the ultimate evils, these undead knights are heavily armored, and powerful in both martial and arcane attacks.

Additional info here

Bigger version here: http://screen.bitterglory.com/in/13-02/jwtpjwlqk.jpg

Tightly related with the Undead, we have the Necromancy. There's no need to explain too far what Necromancy is, but there's an important concept: energy. Necromancy uses positive and negative energy to effect the body. It has no dealings with the “soul”. In other words:

"Necromancers can heal the living, just like life mages do. However, once someone is dead necromancers don't bother to bring them “back” they just reanimate them and make them get back to work as an undead slave. While someone is living they use positive energy to keep them going and negative energy to hurt them. If they're dealing with someone who's already dead they use negative energy to heal them and positive energy to damage them."

A ton more info about Necromancy

2.- The insectoid race.

We want the insectoid race to be a really UNIQUE faction. A unique faction needs a unique name, so I want to hear your ideas :D. Also we are discussing how to turn characterize the faction, and there are some of our considerations (in Aaron's voice).

"In my mind all this makes their strengths fairly obvious. There is no unrest. They pay 100% taxes minus food. (The hive mind understands that other races love useless gold.) They have high production bonuses. They attack using wave after wave of their men. They have exoskeletons so their base armor class is good."

And that sounds good. But...

"On the other hand they give the other races the creeps. It's almost impossible to effectively bring other races into their hive. So, captured cities have extreme unrest issues. However, if they complete destroy enemy cities they generate even more negative feelings."

Mooore insectoids info

3.- GOLEMS

Not surprisingly this is one of our potential new races.

"To dive into the problems first (you guys will probably see more problems than I do, but I'll do my best) golem are just too powerful and in D20 they have no intelligence. They're so immune to everything in the universe it's ridiculous. You could throw the entire Mentalism school out of the window when facing them. Some of their lowest tier units would be top tier, so you wouldn't be able to build any units until your city was almost complete. So far it doesn't look like much of a faction option.
So what can be done? Well, I would suggest following (loosely) the example D&D set with it's “living construct” sub-type. Now, we couldn't use it exactly for two reasons: First, it belongs to Wizards of the Coast (I think). Second, their implementation isn't a perfect fit for WoM."
Asmodai, one of the friens in our forum adds (as always) extremely interesting points:
"In my mind, as in D20, Golems are powerful creatures. I like the idea they are created by dwarves, it's true to MoM and it's been cemented in my head by Dragon Age and other lore. I wouldn't mind other faction wizards being able to create them as well via finding Golem manuals (items) or possibly even a high level earth spell or similar but I don't really picture a spearman type (as far as strength) golem. I had a similar weakness with Draconians though and they are quite popular so I'll just defer to the masses. I do think of them though as fantasy robots (which is supported by many of your comparisons) and while I don't mind them as rare high level units having an entire faction of the "robots" running around for me is something I'm not a huge fan of in the fantasy setting. While I'm not a fan of Eberron it's quite popular and players can play as warforged (basically golems) from level 1 so perhaps there is your solution for inspiration.
I definitely want to see golems in the game, I'm just not big on an entire faction of them."

Opinions?

Possible Golem Faction

Bigger version here: http://screen.bitterglory.com/in/13-02/iqkciwwev.png

Well, see you around ;D

 

[Zeus]

Game sounds neat, but maybe you should start a separate "Worlds of Magic" thread for these updates.

 

[Wastelander]

Game sounds neat, but maybe you should start a separate "Worlds of Magic" thread for these updates.

I will, thank you Zeus .

 

[Zeus]

No prob, dude! Good luck with the game. Always happy when a new fantasy strategy game is in the works.

 

[Wastelander]

No prob, dude! Good luck with the game. Always happy when a new fantasy strategy game is in the works.

In fact if you like the game and want to open the thread, paste the URL and we will participate too. If not, I will open it in few days ; )

 

[octavius]

I never played MoM before, mainly because it was released for DOS only when I still only had an Amiga and my gaming time was mostly spent on play-by-mail games anyway.
But now the time has come to try it, and I now see firsthand how much it inspired the Age of Wonders games. The map is also very similar to Civilization, but I actually think Civ 1's graphics looked crisper and less pixelated. Even the shareware game Athra Chronicles released at the same time as MoM has crisper graphics, so that was kind of a bummer.

I was thinking of playing all the 14 Wizards, from the easist to the hardest one, and then try some custom Wizards.
I'm also going to use the unoffical "Insecticide" patch.
So how would you (roughly) rate the 14 wizards? Which one should I start with?

 

[TigerKnee]

Haha, I've been playing MoM for years and it just struck me I have never once used the default wizards.

In fact, looking over their builds, they kind of anger me in the optimization sense, especially all the wizards with like "10 books in one colour and +1 perk"... mostly because a simple 11 books build would ironically be much more effective (to the point of brokenness) due to balancing hiccups.

I'm definitely not a strategical and tactical genius, but I believe the single-focused colour wizards are the better ones, going in order of what is considered to be the best colours in the game, with "Life" as the best one and "Chaos/Nature" being some of the lower ones due to the strategic weakness of Direct Damage spells and summoning. The 2 colour splits do it half-half which I really don't like. I guess maybe the perks make up for it... let me see...Warlord and Myrran are really good perks, but the Warlord wizard doesn't have "Life" books (the best combo with said Perk) and the Myrran... is ok. Probably the strongest out of the dual color wizards since you get an entire plane to develop by yourself.

 

[baturinsky]

My favorite thing about Myrror is insta-roads. And dwarves work very well with alchemy.

 

[Absalom]

I never played MoM before, mainly because it was released for DOS only when I still only had an Amiga and my gaming time was mostly spent on play-by-mail games anyway.
But now the time has come to try it, and I now see firsthand how much it inspired the Age of Wonders games. The map is also very similar to Civilization, but I actually think Civ 1's graphics looked crisper and less pixelated. Even the shareware game Athra Chronicles released at the same time as MoM has crisper graphics, so that was kind of a bummer.

I was thinking of playing all the 14 Wizards, from the easist to the hardest one, and then try some custom Wizards.
I'm also going to use the unoffical "Insecticide" patch.
So how would you (roughly) rate the 14 wizards? Which one should I start with?

Amiga version of Civ or Dos version?

And as for recommendations for wizards to try I'd say the Myran (draconian dude) one would be the easiest though technically the easiest would be a custom wizard.

 

[Borelli]

I'm also going to use the unoffical "Insecticide" patch.

I thought this patch would remove klackons but it turns out it's just a bug fix!

 

[octavius]

I never played MoM before, mainly because it was released for DOS only when I still only had an Amiga and my gaming time was mostly spent on play-by-mail games anyway.
But now the time has come to try it, and I now see firsthand how much it inspired the Age of Wonders games. The map is also very similar to Civilization, but I actually think Civ 1's graphics looked crisper and less pixelated. Even the shareware game Athra Chronicles released at the same time as MoM has crisper graphics, so that was kind of a bummer.

I was thinking of playing all the 14 Wizards, from the easist to the hardest one, and then try some custom Wizards.
I'm also going to use the unoffical "Insecticide" patch.
So how would you (roughly) rate the 14 wizards? Which one should I start with?

Amiga version of Civ or Dos version?

DOS version. The Amiga version was not good; I don't think it has any better graphics, but the worst part was that the world building was not random. Using the same parameters always produced the same world.

This is how the games look like on my system: