Might and Magic The Might and Magic Discussion Thread

[Humppaleka]

just get a DOSBOX with savestates and roll with it :casual:

 

[Strange Fellow]

.

I don't know what to tell you. Are you using the Fly spell? Extremely useful for getting around. Are you using Leather Skin, and buffing with Bless every fight? I restscum a lot, and spam fireballs/ lightning bolts and heals every turn. I'd feel guilty about it, but I get TPKs often enough as it is.

 

[newtmonkey]

Strange Fellow

I have started using Fly (didn't even realize I had it until this afternoon actually), so that helps get me back to town when things are rough. I do use the buff spells, dunno how much they help, but I assume any advantage you can get is worth it. I may just need to spam spells and heals like you said, I am still in the Wiz 1 mindset where you want to conserve your precious spells, though I know that's retarded when you are playing M&M haha.

I do like this game a lot, I just needed to vent a bit I think. I mean, worst case scenario I just find a safeish fixed encounter and pop it a few times, teleport to Dusk and start replacing my equipment with the best stuff you can buy there piece by piece.

Question: Would you recommend one-handed with shield or two-handed weapons for melee characters? I sort of assumed that doing more damage would be better than a few more armor class points, but maybe that is only true for the Wiz games.

 

[Strange Fellow]

I may just need to spam spells and heals like you said, I am still in the Wiz 1 mindset where you want to conserve your precious spells, though I know that's retarded when you are playing M&M haha.

Or maybe I'm just Playing It Wrong™.
I'd still rather do that than grind or use savestates.
As for the weapons, I just use whichever has the highest +#, because I don't have enough +2 twohanders for everyone. I would say they are superior, because a few AC don't seem to matter all that much, and the best defence is a good offence. Maybe go with onehander + shield on your cleric if he's casting a lot. Something to keep in mind is that the Archer can use a bow even in melee. If his hitpoints and AC are good, don't hesitate to put him up front.

 

[octavius]

Question: Would you recommend one-handed with shield or two-handed weapons for melee characters? I sort of assumed that doing more damage would be better than a few more armor class points, but maybe that is only true for the Wiz games.

Unless it's a very good two hander I prefer s&s myself. Higher damage helps against one enemy per round, while better AC usually defends against a larger number of enemy attacks per turn.

I suggest using the MM1 clue or hint book for the items list, since unlike MM2 there's no in-game way of ID'ing items.

 

[newtmonkey]

Strange Fellow octavius
Thanks for the advice guys! I'm still not sure whether to do S&S or two-handed for my KPC, I'll see how squishy they get as I make progress and decide from there I guess.

I took Strange Fellow's advice and just started casting spells basically every round with my Sorcerer. I was concerned over running out of gems for some reason, but realized that you more than make up for what you use whenever you get a chest or bag after a combat. I really wish I had had the foresight to roll high speed for my Sorcerer, as he basically goes last every turn. Oh well, I'm going to just deal with it for now.

With that in mind, I went and explored much of C-1 without any problem whatsoever, and even stumbled upon the Merchant's Pass! Now I can get access to Castle Blackridge and see what's up in there. I've fallen in love with this game again, though I'm sure I'll be back here whining and butthurt in due time.

 

[octavius]

Dragon Town by Christmas!

 

[No Great Name]

When first trying to branch out and explore the wilderness, what I did at first was follow the main "path" so to speak that connected most of the towns and some castles. This path and the areas around it are fairly safe, especially for a party at your level outside of a handful of areas which you'll learn to avoid for now (like the wyvern area). Once you have the paths to each town mapped out, as well as the towns and castles themselves as much as you can, then you should start pushing the map outwards however you see fit.

Also the cave outside of Sorpigal was tough for me when I first came across it too. I didn't come back to complete that one myself until I was a higher level.

 

[Sceptic]

I have resumed playing Might & Magic 1 lately.

I'm really not sure what I think about this one to be honest. The scope for its time is unbelievable, and even the UI is great once you spend a few minutes getting used to it.

The balance though just seems ridiculous.

I wish I could shred you for daring to criticize this gem, but much as I love it, I have to agree that it's completely unbalanced early on (and you're still sort of early on).

The roads are indeed safer, but by no means really safe, and random encounters in the game are completely out of whack. Unfortunately I have no great advice to add to what's already been said. Grinding fixed encounters is an option. So is using save states. Much as I frown on both practices, one or the other is the only real way to get overt he imbalance. Save states are not so bad if you have a bit of self control and you can keep some challenge without feeling like you're wasting hours making no progress whatsoever.

 

[Average Manatee]

I don't know whether to call the unbalanced or schizophrenically balanced. There's always places to explore that are level-appropriate but it's hard to tell where they are and whether you are bashing your head against a wall about to give way or a wall with 10 more walls immediately behind it. It's even less clear when the level-dependent encounters can start throwing harder stuff at you in previously easier areas.

 

[newtmonkey]

Any Sound Canvas experts here?

I have an actual Sound Canvas device hooked up to my PC via USB-MIDI cable for playing DOSBOX games. I've not had a single problem with it, until now.

If I play Worlds of Xeen some of the sound effects are messed up. Example: hitting enemies makes a weird pinging sound, and opening doors plays a telephone ringing.

I have the game set to use Sound Canvas for music/SFX (not MT-32), so I have no idea why it's doing this. Any help?

[Edit]
I have a CM-500 also. Using that and setting the game to "Roland MT-32" fixes it all, so in the worst case scenario I can just use this. However, I'd prefer to play the game using the synth it was meant to be played on (SC).

I have the GOG release, but just to test I tried some others I downloaded, and all have the same problem.

 

[newtmonkey]

Dredging up an old thread for a dumb reason, but does anyone use Dosbox SVN-Daum? If so, is "XEEN: Not enough memory" error something that can be fixed? It makes no sense in the context of the settings (changing memsizes makes no difference, etc), and it isn't an issue I have with normal Dosbox, which loads the game fine at the cost of having terrible sound/no mt-32 emulation.

I noticed this post while I was searching for the same issue. You have to use an older version of Dosbox SVN-Daum to get by this, or load the game into high memory ("LH Xeen.exe").

 

[Darth Canoli]

I noticed this post while I was searching for the same issue. You have to use an older version of Dosbox SVN-Daum to get by this, or load the game into high memory ("LH Xeen.exe").

+ Zeriel

The simple fix is to increase the memory allowed in the dosbox config.ini, i believe a simple search on dosbox config for Xeen in any search engine would do the trick.

hitting enemies makes a weird pinging sound

Hum, I have a very annoying pinging sound for arrows impact, i assumed it was the original sound, is it not ?

 

[newtmonkey]

Darth Canoli
I'm not 100% sure about the pinging sound for arrows. What sound effect do you get when you open doors?

 

[newtmonkey]

Still playing Might & Magic I.

After my string of posts here where I whined like a baby about how unfair the random encounters are (they are still pretty unfair at times), I decided to change how I was playing the game thank to advice from M&M bros on this here topic. Instead of playing like a pre-Bradley Wiz game (play conservatively and only use spells when necessary), I decided to just cast spells constantly and rest every few battles, since enemies hardly ever seem to interrupt your camp. I thought I would burn through gems doing this, but I found that it doesn't matter—plowing through encounters one after another ends up maintaining your gem supply very easily.

I explored some more of the wilderness, got the Merchant's Pass, and did a few quests for whatever that castle is called near Sorpigal. I actually had all the stuff he asked for (except for the medusa head) on hand, so this was like 5k easy experience in a matter of seconds. That brought some of my characters up to level 8, and I was then able to pretty easily explore the rest of the castle.

I know the game is gonna get hard and frustrating again, but right now it's addictive as hell. It's just so seductive there on my computer, all I have to do is double click that icon.

I also resumed my Might & Magic X game.
It's good for what it is I guess. The wilderness feels more like a dungeon with tree textures than even the wilderness in M&M1, and the combat is pretty dull. At this point I am just attacking with my two melee guys, casting that light spell that absorbs damage with my healer, and casting fire magic with my wizard, and that is enough to beat every combat it seems. I got bored after exploring for 15 mins or so, so I guess this will go on the backburner again for another 2-3 months.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Darth Canoli
I'm not 100% sure about the pinging sound for arrows. What sound effect do you get when you open doors?

A kind of grippy door opening sound that would have been recorded on a cassette tape.
The arrows release are just fine but the "metallic" impact sound are very annoying.

I'd have a metallic impact on CC as well sometimes but it's quite rare, most of the time, the sound is ok and not aggressive, not sure if it comes from a character class or a kind of weapon, maybe i should run some tests when i resume playing it.

 

[newtmonkey]

Darth Canoli
Well then, I'm not sure. Usually if the sound effects are wrong, you can tell straight away by the door opening sound (it will sound like a telephone ringing). So maybe the metallic impact sound for arrows is okay.

 

[Strange Fellow]

The telephone ringing has been mentioned earlier in this thread. Possibly by Sceptic or Jaesun

 

[Sceptic]

If I play Worlds of Xeen some of the sound effects are messed up. Example: hitting enemies makes a weird pinging sound, and opening doors plays a telephone ringing.

I have the game set to use Sound Canvas for music/SFX (not MT-32), so I have no idea why it's doing this. Any help?

The game doesn't do a GS reset when you start it. If another game had done a GM reset (a lot of them do), then you are in GM mode when you play WOX, which means that as far as the game is concerned the extra GS-only tones don't exist and, when one is called for, the SC reverts to the base GM tone (leading to the wrong sound playing - the telephone ring is the most obvious). The fix is easy: just do a GS reset on the device (hold "instrument >" down while you power on, then when asked "initi GS, sure?" press ALL).

 

[Eggs is eggs]

sbtype=sbpro2
sbbase=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
mixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplrate=22050

These are the settings I use for dosbox to get soundblaster/adlib. That's what I played these games on originally so I prefer that to Roland, which I guess is supposed to be newer and better than soundblaster.

 

[newtmonkey]

Sceptic
Thank you for the info. I wonder if this is an SC-88 specific issue? The key combination to initiate a GS Reset is different for the SC-88 (hold Select and press the Instrument <> buttons), but I tried sending a GS Reset and still got the same telephone sound. (I have also tried sending a GS reset through both windows and DOS tools). At this point, I am thinking the SC-88 is just not gonna work right for this game, even with SC-55 map configured.

Well, I just tested it with my CM-500 in GS mode, and the sound effects all play fine. So this looks like an SC-88 issue. Time to spend more money on Roland synths to track down a genuine SC-55. (Switching between the MT-32 and GS modes on the CM-500 is annoying, I got the CM-500 because I wanted the updated MT-32 sound effects...).

 

[newtmonkey]

Also, this has nothing to do with M&M and ALSO I am drunk, but can I just say here that the Sound Canvas is FUCKING AMAZING

The minute I played the System Shock intro MIDI file on Sound Canvas hardware and realized that the music playing in the intro FMV is literally just recorded from the Sound Canvas blew my mind. Also, all the CD music from Warcraft 2 is also just (basically) recorded straight from a Sound Canvas. I dunno how I would have reacted back in the day if I had such powerful audio hardware, probably would have had a stroke right then and there.

One of the best games to enjoy on the Sound Canvas is Anvil of Dawn. That soundtrack brings tears to my eyes when it hear it on the SC, my God.

Some of the instruments are not great (tho better than anything else at the time), but load up the WC2 midis, or the soundtrack to Anvil of Dawn, and it's almost like listening to an orchestrated version.

 

[Barbalos]

I'm using MUNT with a cm-32l rom for the sound in World of Xeen, such a huge upgrade from the stock sound! It took a bit of ini configuring and running the Xeen installer in dosbox to get it working but it was well worth it.


I also just started a merged playthrough of MM6-8 in the MM8 engine ( https://www.celestialheavens.com/forum/10/16657 ), I'm early in MM6 and it's going fine so far, though I don't seem to be able to hire NPCs like you could in vanilla MM6. Also I have 5 party members instead of 4 in the original, so it's less balanced. Still, I'm super happy this merge works, since I was having a reputation bug in the vanilla GOG release of MM6 that was causing me to lose reputation within 5 minutes of playing, for no apparent reason.

There's also no thief class available in the merge, so I went with an archer who I am teaching disarm trap and perception. Hope that works out for me in MM7.

 

[Darth Canoli]

So maybe the metallic impact sound for arrows is okay.

sbtype=sbpro2
sbbase=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
mixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplrate=22050

These are the settings I use for dosbox to get soundblaster/adlib. That's what I played these games on originally so I prefer that to Roland, which I guess is supposed to be newer and better than soundblaster.

Interesting, here's my sound settings, same ones for Terra and Xeen.

sbtype=sb16
sbbase=220
irq=5
dma=1
hdma=5
mixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplrate=22050

Maybe i should try yours but i watched some guy let's play in youtube for xeen and the sound is not as good as mine as far as i can tell; the guy can't shut his clap for 1 second ...

 

[Eggs is eggs]

I remember fiddling around with the settings trying to recreate what it sounded like on my old 386 computer and sbpro2 seemed to be the closest to it. The soundblaster 16 is a slightly newer card than the soundblaster pro though I'm not sure what the differences would be or even if there might be an issue with the emulation of one over the other.

For the metallic sound for arrows, do you mean that *pang* type sound when you hit monsters with arrows? Yeah that is fine. But I don't recall hearing a telephone ringing when you open doors. Sounds like a weird sampling error.