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I would like to correct the official documentation and clarify how Heroism works in MM3-4-5.
It simply adds the spellcaster's level to the "To Hit", aka "Attack bonus".
The manual AND in-game description for all these game is wrong. It does NOT increase the level of the physical attacker.
Allow me to demonstrate with this test from MM3 with a level 1 barbarian.( I can't include my screenshot here sorry)
My mid-game level party dumped the knight and I created level 1 barbarian with 13 might, just for this test, and I equipped him with steel hand-axe (roughly 13 damage on average). I went to the Arena I checked the monsters' hit point before and after the barbarian's attack (using the Where are We mod). Only 1 hit. Every time.
So if the official description of the spell was correct, my cleric's Heroism spell should have given more attacks to my levl1 barbarian. But he attacks only once. EVERY time. For roughly 13 damage.
The Where are We mod folks know this, and corrected the spell description to:
"+Level to hit on one character(mm3)"
"+Level to hit on one party(mm4-5)"
I would like to correct the official documentation and clarify how Heroism works in MM3-4-5.
It simply adds the spellcaster's level to the "To Hit", aka "Attack bonus".
The manual AND in-game description for all these game is wrong. It does NOT increase the level of the physical attacker.
Allow me to demonstrate with this test from MM3 with a level 1 barbarian.( I can't include my screenshot here sorry)
My mid-game level party dumped the knight and I created level 1 barbarian with 13 might, just for this test, and I equipped him with steel hand-axe (roughly 13 damage on average). I went to the Arena I checked the monsters' hit point before and after the barbarian's attack (using the Where are We mod). Only 1 hit. Every time.
So if the official description of the spell was correct, my cleric's Heroism spell should have given more attacks to my levl1 barbarian. But he attacks only once. EVERY time. For roughly 13 damage.
The Where are We mod folks know this, and corrected the spell description to:
"+Level to hit on one character(mm3)"
"+Level to hit on one party(mm4-5)"
So I've been driving a whole lot and while daydreaming, thought of imaginary new classes for MM3-4-5 that I would implement if I had the reverse engineering talent to do so.
Trickster
Inspired by AD&D's Thief/Mage multiclass.
Has the same spellcasting ability and spell points as the Archer.
Has the same starting thieving abillity as the Ninja.
Primary stats: Intellect, Luck
Equipment: Short sword, dagger, short bow,sling, scale armor.
Gains an attack every 7 levels.
Same HP growth as the Sorcerer.
New ability: "Trick". Distract monsters with an illusion of the party placed somewhere else, or turn
party invisible for a few minutes.
Shyster (aka Con artist, aka Snake oil Salesman)
Inspired by AD&D's Cleric/Thief multiclass.
Has the same spellcasting ability and spell points as the Paladin.
Has the same starting thieving abillity as the Ninja.
Primary stats: Personality, Luck
Equipment: Cudgel, short sword, dagger, sling, chain mail, shield.
Gains an attack every 7 levels.
Same HP growth as the Cleric.
New ability: "Swindle". Able to swindle goods from well-meaning merchants, or swindle quest reward gold from NPCs without having to to actually solve the quest.
Bard
Inspired by AD&D's Bard class
Has the same spellcasting ability and spell points as the Ranger.
Has the same starting thieving abillity as the Ninja.
Primary stats: Intellect, Personality, Luck
Equipment: Cudgel, short sword, hand axe, dagger, one-handed spear, crossbow, short bow, sling, ring mail.
Gains an attack every 7 levels.
Same HP growth as the Druid.
New ability: "Sing". As long as the bard is in Sing mode, some stats are raised for the party or lowered for the monsters, depending on the song; but he cannot take any other actions while Singing.
"Hide" : Monsters will not target the Bard for physical attacks unless he's the only party member left standing.
I've just discovered that some guy made an open source, online/offline HD remake of old good Arcomage. It can be played with ai and multiplayer. It's available under this link: https://arcomage.github.io/
Has anyone ever encountered a ?bug? in MM2, where:
a) All characters have stats moved to 5.
b) If any character has an item that gives a bonus to a stat, and this item is removed, then the stat goes to 0.
c) Reequipping the item gives the standard bonus (0+bonus).
I saw it after defeating Dawn. My characters all have a standard age. Cleric spells (including the Divine Intervention) don't change anything. I think I could play with the circus and make alignment changes to move everything to normality, but I guess it wouldn't be very entertaining; or I can use my backup save from 10 levels before, which is not so pleasant either.
After removing and reequipping the Photon Blade, Knight's might went from 5 to 0, then to 22.
That makes sense. The worst thing is, in the end, I didn't steal anything - I forgot to click 'Search', and when I came back, the treasure disappeared and I forgot about it completely.
And sure enough, now the circus works only on hirelings. Wonderful.
Edit: In order to make the circus usable for character X, I needed to remove X from the party and then reinstate it.
The circus is great, and is how I pumped my stats all the way to 100 for everybody. My Lloyds Beacon was placed right next to the well in the oasis.
I then used the various stats exchange buffs (-5 for +3) to exceed some of them past 100, then used the circus to buff up again those I just lowered by the exchange.
Be careful if you're as greedy as I am - the well LOWERS stat to 100 if it exceeds it!
Some might argue that for quicker results to pump them to 50, instead of the circus, to use the other dungeons' stat boosters,which work repeatedly, and all year long. Set up a Lloyds Beacon there, and it makes the 5 visits super fast and trivial.
Except the one for accuracy.... if I recall, that one is a pain in the ass due to very hard unskippable encounters, best to stick to circus for accuracy. Still, I think you can cheese Lloyds Beacon for that one too, though.
Note that it's helpful to have a fellow with a divine mace (having the Divine Intervention) along with a cleric.
It felt to me like this game was way more experimental than any other I've played in the series, for better or worse. I started with a party imported from the previous title, which was probably a mistake. My observations after playing it:
1) Exploration:
-> I liked how some spells could only be obtained from certain, somewhat related places or people (unless you ventured into the depths of a certain castle). It gave them a sort of identity, which is something I don't see very often.
-> The intensity of exploration from the previous game was gone. I spent the entire game with the Time Distortion spell; the areas where using it resulted in a failure were scarce, and even then, fights were so slow (with higher armor classes and hit points) that I could almost always easily retreat from the untimely death. As a result, I barely needed to reload the game despite it retaining the mechanic of saving at the inn from Book One. I think even if I started from level 1, most of the game would be played at levels above 7th, so the shallowness persists. The save mechanics didn't seem to me to be an integral part of the exploration anymore.
-> Cities were way more boring than in both Book One and Isles of Terra. Tundara had its quest and peculiar structure (I had to walk quite a bit to get to the temple), but other cities felt like mere hubs without anything interesting going on. Sansobar and Vulcania were completely bland; Middlegate had two mildly interesting fountains; and Atlantium had some statues and a top tier joke.
-> The game lacked spatial challenges like Castle Blackwind in Isles of Terra or Soul Maze/Astral Plane, or the second level of the Ancient Temple with circular teleports in Book One. It felt to me like JVC wanted to allow the players to rely solely on his in-game maps rather than their own tricks - which is a shame, since they were one of the more interesting things in both MM1 and MM3 (even double shame, as I wanted to test the limits of my own automapper).
-> Oddly, there were barely any explicit puzzles in this game; messages were somewhat simple if you used code to decipher them; the entry code to Druids' Cave was semiobvious; the non-blocking puzzles allowing to avoid fights in fortresses at the Isle of the Ancients were lovely; the most interesting one - the last puzzle - was bizarre; while I like the idea (limited time, randomized cryptogram), I don't have a clue why JVC went for information completely outside of the game to define the message. It wasn't that atrocious since the first image on the web after I searched for the word 'preamble' was that exact preamble; but imagine if JVC was Turkish ("King Kalohn, the immortal leader and the unrivalled hero").
-> I disliked the unnecessary symmetry of the world; all four elemental planes were painfully insipid. All they had were some Red Messages (that weren't really necessary), talons (the location of which you could already know), and irrelevant Elemental Lords. There were four castles, all with the same structure (three levels, things for the Element Orb and bishops on top, really interesting stuff on the bottom). Four cities were laid in four corners of the CRON, and one in the middle. It added predictability to exploration, which is quite a letdown for me.
-> Hinting at the places of mercenaries and spells in Castle Xabran was a nice touch at the end of the game.
-> Dungeons (especially castles) became way more rewarding, and unlike in Book One, the rewards were diverse, including spells, mercs, alignmets, tripling experience, or thousands of hitpoints.
2) Combat:
-> Hitting any key - inventory, changing direction, pressing an unrelated key (which was useful for me for mapping) could lead to combat; it was infuriating; it penalized dilligence and proper preparation.
-> I like the idea behind the party disposition; first, it wasn't equivalent to difficulty, as fights on a more intense disposition resulted in better loot and more experience points. What I didn't like is the implementation; on higher difficulties, the last enemies (usually 100-200) were the same. This leads to a situation where I usually know before combat whether the fight will be dead simple or whether I should just retreat. There were almost no intense, interesting fights on 'Thrill Seeker' disposition. I would rather have the disposition lower the number of random encounters.
-> Even without random encounters, I think there was too much uninspired combat. For example, I saw 32 copy-pasted encounters on the pretty barren Plane of Fire.
-> Most enemies had some resistances - which I consider an improvement, though it would be nice if I could get this information about an enemy in some way.
-> The mechanic that was particularly odd for me was the ability to act during a turn; if I understood it correctly, only the first ten enemies were able to move during a turn - so, if I managed to regularly kill the first ten characters during a single turn, I could breeze through an arbitrarily long fight. The problem is, it was insufferably tedious, and automating spell casting was impossible, so I couldn't just mow down enemies with Ctrl+a.
-> The combat became way less tedious once I switched to a lineup with two mercenary sorcerers along with a standard party composition and started spamming Disintegration, Dancing Swords, or Star Burst depending on the number of enemies and place. Dancing Swords were the ?only? spell, that acted on a crowd and was working pretty much universally, and Disintegration was very handy if there were many (200) somewhat weak enemies, and I had to ration spell points.
3) Quests seemed more polished than in the previous entry; King's quests seemed way less random (Slayer ordered me to kill either some random monster or three exact beasts depending on my choice; Hoardall wanted some items; remaining king and queen had exactly one, distinct quest); rewards were much more acceptable.
4) The graphics were pretty but wore down quickly. I kept seeing the same monsters and terrain types over and over.
5) The alignment blended with itemization was neat, with the ability to switch any equipment as a reward for delving deep into three castles; but the constant random encounters on a way there made this experience painful. It is one of the few games that, I believe, could benefit from having sort of a stronghold allowing, among other things, to switch alignments without repeating those tedious encounters or calculated teleports over and over.
6) Humour - it might be my favourite part of the game - very intense and uncanny. The best jokes for me were:
Though I think this joke would be better if the ride were free of charge.
At last, I can LARP as a Balkan party of adventurers!
Accordingly, this wearisome dungeon level was full of guards removing all my gold. Note that the same icon was also used for Gwyndon, the young apprentice of Corak the Mysterious.
Overall, I preferred the third and first ones. They didn't have endless encounters, the third one had way more interesting exploration, and the first one made great use of its save system and low level adventure. It's interesting how JVC addressed most of the problems of Gates to Another World in Isles of Terra and simultaneously how he was capable of continuously reinventing this series:
-> As the series moved towards mostly a high level adventure, the old save system was scrapped.
-> The cities felt boring, so the teleport system was added along with the order of exploration (in MM2 getting to any city was banal from the start - even roads were mostly safe). Also, they were more compact, with all important copy-pasted buildings (temple, smith, training, etc.) technically consisting of a single cell.
-> Graphics got uglier, but most locations spiced things up with new things - like altars in Blistering Heights or cauldrons in Cursed Cold Cavern - which made them more memorable from my perspective.
-> The longer the game, the more tiresome random encounters became - and so they were removed completely.
-> Myriads of very tough puzzles got added (including spatial ones), and the idea of having meta-information in the last dungeons was retained - this time aiding in solving those puzzles.
Random encounter frequency is pretty low in MM2 compared to the Bard's Tale and later Wizardry games. Also, there were always new types of monsters to face and new items to be found, which combined with the best tactical combat of any TB blobber, for me made the combat exciting until the end. Well, except for the Elemental Planes which were a slog.
And the game is balanced for an imported party. A lvl 1 party will always struggle in Middlegate unless grinding the Skeleton Closet.
Also, there were always new types of monsters to face and new items to be found, which combined with the best tactical combat of any TB blobber, for me made the combat exciting until the end.
Yeah, well, it would be more exciting if they could survive my initial onslaught of four quick wizards with Dancing Swords. The only enemies I can think of that were regularly able to avoid this spell were golems - and I think (I don't have numbers) that they were quite susceptible to Holy Mace. Also, I think the game would be more intricate (not necessarily better) if there was some penalty for retreating - but there was pretty much none, especially with Lloyd's Beacon. Interestingly, I never ran out of gems.
So I finally finished MM4. Went everywhere and conquered everything, except the last south-eastern big room of the dragon cave. My party is currently at level 19. I used a patch that prevented the double XP bug when below lv 15 (thanks again for this, Cedric Busch!)
I like how JVC clearly meant this as one half of one big world, and to pull it off without ruining the Darkside's early game experience too much, he made MM4 a low level campaign with a hard level cap, but included a more dangerous mid-level area: the entire north eastern part of the world. The abundance of boosting fountains makes lots of sense in that context.
But taken on its own, MM4 was definitely a lot shorter and less interesting than MM3.
The only sci-fi elements I have found so far are the 4 corners of the world.
RadiantMay 3, 2021 at 4:58 AM
According to ScummVM (which contains a reverse-engineered Might&Magic engine, among others), accuracy does impact melee attacks (but not linearly). Also, characters get a level-based to-hit bonus similar to THAC0 (i.e. warriors get +1 per level, clerics get +1 per two levels, and so forth).
asimpkinsMay 3, 2021 at 6:39 PM
That undocumented to-hit class bonus is interesting, and it's strange the manual doesn't mention it along with the other class stuff because it's pretty simple and very relevant.
I think I hunted down the right code for it, and Knights and Barbarians get +1 per level, Druids and Clerics get +1 per 3 levels, Sorcerers get +1 per 4 levels, and the other classes all get +1 per 2 levels.
Pure spell casters give up a lot for extra spell points. If I ever played this again, I'd like to try multiple Paladins and Archers instead of Clerics and Sorcerers.
Which would mean that a level 40 paladin with 250 accuracy would have the same hit rate as a level 40 barbarian with 11 accuracy? That does seem to make accuracy fairly weak. Which is surprising to me, usually I really like to see it raise and can feel hitting enemies more often but that might just be the levels I'm getting in the meantime.
I'd guess we do something like (level bonus) + (accuracy bonuses) + d20 vs AC to find the final hit rate?
That said it doesn't matter much for M&M4/5 due to how group buffs give everyone an additional +1 attack per level (and temp level buffs boost both this and base accuracy). In M&M3 though its common to not run around with them since SP isn't infinite and buffs are very expensive and single effect/target, which makes the higher SP classes a bit more useful.
That said it doesn't matter much for M&M4/5 due to how group buffs give everyone an additional +1 attack per level (and temp level buffs boost both this and base accuracy). In M&M3 though its common to not run around with them since SP isn't infinite and buffs are very expensive and single effect/target, which makes the higher SP classes a bit more useful.
You mean an additional "to hit" (or "attack bonus") point per level. Heroism does not increase temporary level, contrary to the in-game spell description.
Otherwise, I agree with your post.
There is an advantage though to have (in MM4-5 Xeen) the sorcerer having plenty of mana to cast offensive spells for every important fight.
You mean an additional "to hit" (or "attack bonus") point per level. Heroism does not increase temporary level, contrary to the in-game spell description.
Otherwise, I agree with your post.
I was referring to the fountains which boost level. No reason not to have them up past the early game, one of them is even in a city you can just use a mirror/town portal to get to without needing to occupy a valuable beacon slot.
Interestingly, the game isn't really much smaller than Gates to Another World.
In Might & Magic 2, I visited 15163 map cells (the theoretical maximum is 60*16*16=15360) and annotated 1860 fields (but only 1479 if I exclude combat-related annotation).
In contrast, in Clouds of Xeen, I visited 14699 cells (without really venturing into the Darkside) and annotated 1055 cells.
Despite that and similar early game structure (in the second game, I started at level 7; in the fourth, the leveling is very quick in the beginning and traps are very sparse before getting neat spells), I felt like Gates took me, like, three or four times longer than Clouds. For me, it shows how bloated encounter design can influence playing time.
It's harder to compare Isles of Terra to Clouds, as Isles featured quite nasty puzzles, the early dungeon crawl was way more sluggish (as traps were plentiful), and leveling was much slower in the beginning.
You're most likely right about MM2, and it has not only random encounters but every fixed encounter respawning contributes a lot to its gameplay time.
MM3 however, I felt had WAY more dungeons, especially in the early game. Almost every 5x5 square you clear has a dungeon, not even including town caverns which were mysteriously absent from MM4.
And those early dungeons as you pointed out, have lots of traps, and almost all of them inflict nasty status ailments.
