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A modern take on Master of Magic

Discussion in 'Game Design' started by Not_Sure, Apr 21, 2017.

  1. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

    Joined:
    Dec 13, 2011
    Posts:
    3,546
    Lately I've been working 60 hours a week and nearly completely unable to touch Bravely Bear, but in the time that I do get time off I've been squeezing in some Master of Magic (one of my all time favorite games).

    The game certainly has its flaws, but there's something about MoM that all the clones (such as Age of Wonders III) has never been able to reproduce.

    Anyway, it's got me working on a GDD during my lunch breaks and I was wanting to share it here and get some feedback. Please tell me what you think.



    Elevator Pitch:

    More or less a modern version of the classic game Master of Magic. If you haven't played it you should. It's made by the same people that did Master of Orion and Xcom.


    For those who have not played it, Master of Magic is a 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate) game in which you conquer a fantasy world with a similar interface as Civilization. Unlike civilization, rather than researching technology, you research spells and all city buildings are available from the start.

    And also unlike Civ, combat is handled separately from the map screen in turn based combat.



    During combat you are able to cast spells, move units about, and leverage troop advantages against one another. Meanwhile it has unique mechanics based around how many units there are in a tile, hero units that have god-like stats and equip magic items, and units that may cast their own spells.

    The game is won when all other wizards are eliminated or if you cast the "Master of Magic" spell. Think of it as the tech victory in Civ.

    Oh, and there's two different realms to conquer. The over world and a magic world.


    Okay, a Modern MoM. But what would be different?

    For one, the original is one of the most broken and buggy games ever made. It's so buggy Peter Molyneux himself would say "Daaaaaamn!" So, that would be the first major improvements.

    But I would also consider the following (This is where I could really use some feedback).

    Diversity is Key:
    To start, I really want the game to hinge on the idea of building diversity. You need to have all the races enter your fold if you want all the unit options. And you need to get horses, griffins, worgs, or whatever before you can make mounts of them. Or, you may need to conquer a dragon before you can snag an egg to raise and breed.

    Actually, it's best to be feared AND loved:
    I would want to implement a Loved and Feared mechanic to all diplomacy that would play a huge part in ruling and in diplomacy. Basically every city, every rival mage, and every race of people would have a stat for how much they love you and how much they fear you. And, yes, you can be loved and feared.

    The values will go up and down depending on actions you take, decisions made during random events, and buildings made in town.

    So let's say you make a big army, fear goes up across the board. You move that army towards a rival city, fear goes up in that city, and in the owner, and in the race of the inhabitants. You attack the city and before combat even starts you enter diplomacy with the city. If they're more afraid (and/or love) of you more than they are of their leader they may just surrender. After you conquer them you can choose what to do with the inhabitants. If you free them, the race loves you. If you enslave them, they hate you and you loose love. If you kill them off they fear you and hate you. If you occupy the city they remain fairly unchanged.

    Meanwhile you're making taverns that increase love, but decrease fear. Or an arena that increases love and fear. Or a dungeon that increases fear.

    And of course on occasion you may have a prompt that says something like "A group of defecting dwarfs from (rival)'s kingdom have come looking for asylum in (your city). What will you have us do?" a) Send them away. b) March them back. c) Kill them. d) Enslave them. e) Allow them to join your side.

    Definitely a "Hands on" sort of leadership:

    One major change I would also do is have you, the actual mage in charge of stuff, out in the fields doing stuff. The capital city would still be the capital city, and corruption would go up as you get away from the capital. But, where you are would also effect corruption. So you can position yourself strategically to increase the effectiveness of the cities.

    Or, you could sit in a city and help it get built up fast to become a super power.

    Or, you know, you could also gallivant around and slaughter foes as powerhouse.

    Or, maybe go dungeon diving for improved gear for you and your heroes.

    Or, maybe you could position yourself near a battlefield so that you can cast spells cheaper without putting yourself at risk.

    Duke it out:
    And while we're at it, let's throw dukes into the mix to run your cities. Dukes will increase various stats in the city they oversee. Ah, but dukes also have a trade off that, well, they can be real ass hats and defect to other rivals or independent. But that's cool, because you can leverage what to do with them to manipulate who loves and/or fears you.

    Let me see your war face!:
    Skip to Edit.

    While I REALLY like the MoM format as is, I'm definitely open to different ways of doing it. For one, I could see doing combat in real time Myth or Total War style. Or maybe switch from squares to hexes like the Fantasy General series.

    One thing is for sure, I want the game to focus more on troop positioning.

    So a unit gets a buff for every adjacent ally. While loosing a buff for every adjacent enemy. Meanwhile the enemy's stats are going up and down by who is around them. And, I want there to be a "To Hit" stat that is depleted as they are attacked, so multiple attacks will deplete that defense making them more and more vulnerable. Then it is reset at the end of the turn.

    Lastly, if I WAS to keep combat TBS, I'm kicking around the ideas of either a) switching to two actions in which you can move and/or attack (so move twice, move and attack, attack and move, or attack twice) OR b) move at the same time as the opponent and have the armies react to each other's actions.

    EDIT: Upon further consideration I have decided that the best solution is to keep the square tiles to keep in the spirit of MoM, but lean heavily on the "to hit" mechanic. That way positioning will have a natural use.

    "To Hit" is a resource that all troops have. When attacking or being attacked they roll a D2 for every "To Hit" point. Each one that is a success eliminates one of the enemy's strikes and uses up that "To Hit". So if a unit is attacked multiple times they will become more and more vulnrable as the "To Hit"s are used up. They are then refilled at the end of the turn.

    Finally fix 4X multiplayer!!:
    So if you've ever played a 4x multiplayer you know the single biggest issue. Waiting. How people play a game where they need to wait up to 10 minutes for the other player to do their thing is beyond me.

    So here's my solution. One action per turn.

    Think about it. Not only is that great to keep turns reasonable, but it also gives a nerf to players who are over expanding.

    Of course I would include options to set up a series of commands, such as a build queue or instructions for a stack of troops like "explore" or go to this spot on the map.

    Winter is coming:
    In addition, I'd like to make the map actually go through seasons with ice growing on the bottom of the map, then shifting to the top. During this time cities will rise and dip in food production accordingly making granaries vital to store food in to support larger population.

    Additionally, various races will suffer penalties and buffs if they are in a climate they are accustom to. So beastmen would want to avoid tropical climates and prefer winter, while snakemen would prefer deserts. Speaking of which...

    Biome-dome:
    I would definitely have races prefer different biomes to live in and naturally migrate to cities that support the type of climate prefer. Snakemen like the tropical, Beastmen prefer tundra, halflings prefer grasslands, elfs prefer forests, dwarfs like mountains, goblins like swamps, orcs like deserts, Ribilicous need to be next to water, and humans like mild climates.

    Here comes the heat. No saving. Hardcore only:
    Yep. I can hear the groans now. Sure, I may make a "practice mode" that limits the difficulty to easy. But as far as the real game, when it comes to posting scores, you can not creep and save. You just need to take your mistakes and live with them.

    That said, if I did so I would absolutely have a "save and quit" feature. And I would have a turn by turn quick save in case of crashes. And I would save at the start of combat, but it would assume a total loss if you restart to prevent cheating.

    Also, I would have a time spell that lets you jump back in a point of time for a casting cost and maintenance cost per turn to keep up on that point in time. But, maybe not for multiplayer.

    Testy-Testy:
    Given the nature of the fear/love mechanic, another big part of the game would be strategically positioning troops to create fear. So you take an army and park them outside of a city and that would cause the citizens to lose their minds, making conquering them that much easier.

    And of course the AI would do so to test to see what you will do about it. Maybe if you do nothing they get to thinking that there isn't anything you can do about it.

    Under Siege:
    Capturing a city is WAY more involved to stop war from becoming a snowball. For starters, city walls are WAY more effective than in MoM, which for the most part were completely useless.

    But on the offense side, invaders may siege a city by moving onto the tile but declining to engage. This would cause the city to be forced to use their granary reserves of food as well as increase corruption in the city.

    In turn the sieged city can chose to attack, leaving the walls behind. Or, they can use this opportunity to move in the core army.

    Note: from here on in all content that is explicitly different or new to MoM will be proceeded by a "*"

    Resources

    The game will obviously have a variety of resources. Just a run down on them, they will be:
    Mana Reserve - Amount of mana you have in reserve for use in spells.
    Mana Production - Amount of mana generated each turn.
    Magic Research - Amount of research done each turn to learn new spells.
    Magic Skill - Amount of mana you may use in a single turn. All skill points not used in combat will go towards spells that you are casting on the map screen over multiple turns.

    Gold Reserve
    - Amount of gold you have that can go towards speeding up production.
    Gold Production - Amount of god you make each turn.

    Food Production
    - Amount of food made per turn. Any excess food would be sold off.
    *Food Storage - Food stored in granaries on a city by city basis. If a city is under siege (has a enemy unit adjacent to it) then they would need to rely on stored food.

    Labor Production - How much production a city makes towards creating units and buildings.

    Fame -
    How likely you are to be approached by merchants, mercenaries, and champions.
    *Infamy - How likely you are to be approached by evil merchants, mercenaries, and champions.

    Map Screen

    Maps will consist of basic tiles on three different climates. In addition, there will be special resources, rival cities, unaffiliated cities, ruins, lairs, dungeons, magic nodes, and portals.

    Basic Tiles (tropical, temperate, arctic):
    Forests (Jungle, Woods, Forests)
    - Gives slight production bonus to sawmills.
    Thick Forests (Thick Jungle, Woods, Forests) - Gives small production bonus to sawmills.
    Mountain (tropical, temperate, arctic) - Gives large production bonus to smiths.
    Hill (tropical, temperate, arctic) - Gives medium production bonus to smiths.
    Plain (savanna, grassland, tundra) - Produces food.
    Wastes (desert, swamp, glacier) - Produces nothing.
    Water and Rivers (tropical, temperate, arctic) - Gives bonuses to food and fishing markets.
    Reef (tropical only) gives large fishing bonus, but can not be crossed with ship.
    Beaches - can be landed.
    Coastal cliff - can not be landed.

    Resources:
    Gems
    - Large gold bonus for a limited amount.
    Gold vein - Medium gold bonus.
    Silver - Small gold bonus.
    Mithril - Troops made in city (or connected cities) have +1 melee damage.
    *Elder Wood - Troops made in city (or connected cities) have +1 ranged damage.
    Game - Static bonus to food production.
    *Mounts - Allows for troops with that mount in the city (or connected cities).
    *Relics - Creates more research.

    Combat Zones:
    Rival City
    - A city owned by a rival player.
    Unaffiliated City - A city that is not owned by a rival, but may spread to additional cities.
    *Lairs - Home of a giant creature. Once defeated you may find items and/or a baby version of the creature which allows you to breed them in beastaries.
    Ruins - Ruins which house life or death magic creatures. Inside are random rewards.
    *Nature/Sorcery/Chaos Node - A grove inhabited by magic creatures of the affiliated type. Spells of the node type may only be cast. Once cleared you gain power in that type of magic and receive magic production from the tile.
    Planar Tower - A tower with all sorts of monster types. Once cleared, it may be used to travel to the other plain through that tile.
    *Portals - A portal with all monster types. Once cleared, it may be used to travel to a small, self contained, world. No cities may be built there, but there are various combat zones with rewards.
    *Heart of a Portal - A combat zone in a portal with a demi-god creature with the largest rewards in the game.
    *Dungeons - A tight area that only allows for single hero units to go into. Inside there are several traps and monsters that may harm your hero. But on there are also chests with items in them and potentially a boss who may drop a large reward.

    City Screen

    The city screen allows you to view citizens, current structures, resources being generated, and building queues.

    *Citizens
    As mentioned earlier diversity will play a major key in leveraging your victory. All citizens are not the same. Halflings produce more food. Elfs produce more food with woods. Dwarfs create more labor when mining. Humans are good at keeping the peace. Goblins take up extremely little living space. Orcs make superior troops. And all the while, races are migrating on their own to different cities that best soot them.

    Because of this, I'm far more keen to use a citizen allocation similar to Master of Orion 2 than like MoM.



    This way you would be able to pick up and move citizens around as you saw fit.

    Then you would have people protesting who produce nothing. But they can be controlled with temples, stationing troops in the city, changing their love/fear of them, or if all else fails start killing them off and hang the corpses in the streets to trade off love for fear until they comply. Oh, or you can throw them in shackles. That works too.

    Speaking of which, much like MoO2 there will also be slaves. Slaves may not migrate but can be moved where ever you please.

    One major downside of slaves is that they do not produce any research, and will only produce the base amount of labor and food, completely ignoring all building benefits, and races tend to REALLY hate being enslaved. Like a lot.

    You have a medium love penalty for enslaving protesters. A large one for if you enslave content citizens. And every turn incurs a love penalty. So if you do this you are really shooting yourself in the foot with that entire race.

    So you may decide to alternatively release them which will give you some love, but not nearly as much as you lost enslaving them. Freed slaves will roll for who will stay with you and who will leave the kingdom based on the race's love for you. Fear does not play in effect at all.

    On the other hand, you can move slaves to new cities to build the infrastructure since there's no buildings there to give benefits anyway. And, slave don't protest. But they will however riot.

    Rioters. Oh-boy, you done messed up. Rioters are what happens when protesting goes unnoticed. They are no longer content to not work, now they are actively doing damage to the city. You have three options. Let them burn themselves out and go back to protesting. Increase happiness to help them calm down faster. Or kill them trading off love for fear until they stop.

    *Building Buildings

    Due to all buildings being immediately available and not requiring research, I'd really like to be able to have a queue that can be filled all the way out so that you don't need to keep going back to the city again and again.

    And, of course, building buildings can be accelerated with gold. I'm not entirely certain how this will be handled yet, though.

    *Building Troops
    Well for starters, building troops and building buildings are two entirely seperate things. No more will you need to stop production of your town so that you can make more troops to keep it safe.

    This has never made sense to me why all 4x games expect you to stop making buildings so that you can make troops.

    In terms of logic, why would laborers in the city have any impact what so ever on making troops?!

    In terms of gameplay, why would you force the player to shift between these two constantly? What a major pain in the ass! This is a quality of life issue, plain and simple.

    *Labor Resource
    Labor will be a be made in 3 ways. Every citizen and every military unit will produce at least one point of labor, period. Then citizens placed as laborers will create additional labor. And finally buildings will also increase labor.

    There will be 5 main buildings that will increase production.

    Sawmills will increase production by a static value for forests in range (plus allow archers). Foresty Guilds will incease production by a percentage for every forest in range (plus food).

    Smiths will increase production by a static vlaue for hills and mountains in range. Miners Guilds will increase production by a percentage for every hill or moutain in range (plus gold).

    Finally, the Machinists' Guild will increase all production by a flat percentage.

    All excess labor can be converted to building housing for population increase, or trading goods for gold.

    *Food (Glorious Food!)
    To start, all excess food is halved before it goes to other cities. This will assure that specializing a city takes proper planning.

    Also, since there are winters granaries would actually work more like granaries. Rather than increase food production, they would store excess food so that you don't loose any shipping food there in the winter. And when your city is under siege, you can dip into the granary so your people don't starve.

    Food will come from citizens farming and from grasslands that increase food production by one per farmer. Or water that will do the same. Or food may come from forests given the right buildings or race working.

    Starvation is handled by placing the population in a negative growth, as well as making the city and the races in the city hate you.

    Lastly, making more food than what is needed does not magically make the population growth go up. No one is having babies because there is more it eat. That's just stupid. Instead extra food will be sold for gold at a ratio of 4:1. That's a lousy trade off, but it is better than nothing.

    *Research
    Just like in MoO2, research will be carried out by assigning citizens to do the research, rather than have a building produce a flat value. And relics and ruins in the area will also increase research done by citizens.

    I'm also thinking that I want each city to research its own spells individually, rather than having all research lumped into one thing. The reason why is because doing it city by city means that it will limit the effects of having a larger kingdom and stop expansion from having a cascading effect.

    So a mage with twice as many cities will have twice as many spell options, but not necessarily twice as powerful spells.

    Mana Generation
    I think MoM nailed mana generation. I would do it exactly the same. You can build a shrine and up grade it to a temple, then a Parthenon, and finally a cathedral. Each time it goes up a level it gains 1 mana generation and calms 1 citizen.


    Races

    As I mentioned earlier, diversity is key and the races all have their own niches that they fill. I'm currently looking at 12 races in all with the potential of breaking them into two groups of 6 (one reserved for an expansion along with other content that pushes the scope too far).

    The features that all races have that distinguish them is that they all have different climates they prefer, they all have different land types they prefer, they all have at least one special unit, they all have a special building, have different growth rates, and they all occupy different amounts of living space.

    Primary Races
    Halfling -
    Halflings are the second smallest race that excel at spying, farming, and love/fear. They are lousy at combat, but units often have more figures packed in them than most. This means they can take on most multifigure units, but get slaughtered by large single enemies with high armor.

    Climate: Temprate
    Preferred Tile: Grassland
    Temperament: Happy and Fearful
    Size: 2 out of 5
    Growth: 4 out of 5
    Special Unit: Assassin - Invisible on screen and does massive one time damage.
    Special Building: Brew House - Better tavern.

    Elf - Elfs are extremely nimble and have a significant boost to their "to hit" stat on all units. They get bonus food from all forest tiles.

    Climate: Temperate
    Preferred Tile: Forest
    Temperament: Stoic. Slow shifts in any direction in love or fear
    Size: 3 out of 5
    Growth: 2 out of 5
    Special Unit: Elven Lord - Best archer in the game.
    Special Building: Sacred Tree - Better sawmill.

    Dwarf - Dwarves are extremely hardy and have a large amount of hit points, but lacks some "to hit". They get bonus gold from mountain tiles.

    Climate: Temperate and Cold
    Preferred Tile: Mountain
    Temperament: Grudge holders. Extra love given for taverns and brew houses.
    Size: 3 out of 5
    Growth: 3 out of 5
    Special Unit: Steam Cannon - Best artillery in the game.
    Special Building: Master Forge - Better forge.

    Human -
    Humans are the mild middle race. They are fairly average across the board. They have a bonus towards love and fear in cities they inhabit due to their diplomatic nature.

    Climate: Temperate.
    Preferred Tile: None.
    Temperament: Average up and down for love and fear.
    Size: 3 out of 5
    Growth: 3 out of 5
    Special Unit: High Priests - Better cleric
    Special Building: Cathedral - Better chapel.

    Orc - Orcs are very hardy with bonuses to their health and armor, but are also extremely strong giving them even more bonuses to their melee attacks. Other than their military prowess, the race is a struggle to manage and all research done by orcs are halved. But they do farm on wastelands, which is nice.

    Climate: Tropical to Temperate.
    Preferred Tile: Wasteland
    Temperament: Quick to anger, slow to calm. Absolutely fearless. Military increases love.
    Size: 4 out of 5
    Growth: 4 out of 5
    Special Unit: Berserker - Best melee unit in the game that has a throwing bonus.
    Special Building: Proving grounds - better training grounds.

    Goblin - Goblins are the tiniest race in the game which means that they take up the least amount of space and can pack in cities quickly. Due to their sheer numbers they hold their own in combat, but get destroyed by area effect spells. Larger units, however, are cut down to size with the goblin's Boom Brigade. Goblins may also farm on swamps.

    Climate: Temperate
    Preferred Tile: Swamp
    Temperament: Slow to love, quick to hate, and always fearful.
    Size: 1 out of 5
    Growth: 5 out of 5
    Special Unit: Boom brigade (explosives on the backs of a handful of goblins)
    Special Building: Tinkerer's shop - better Machinists' Guild.

    Beast Men Expansion
    Ribilicous (Name needed) -
    Ribilicous are an aquatic frog like race that may only move and settle on tiles adjacent to water. This obviously severely limits where they can go, but the pay off is that they are able to move about the map right from the start as all units can cross all water tiles. In addition, Ribilicous receive big bonuses from all water tiles for food making them a good alternative to Halflings to feed your populations. Also, water counts towards living space for Ribilicous.

    Climate: Temperate.
    Preferred Tile: Water
    Temperament: Average love and hate?
    Size: 3 out of 5
    Growth: 3 out of 5
    Special Unit: Trident Men- Best Spear Men.
    Special Building: Fishing Emporium - Better fish market.

    Snakemen (Name needed) - Snakemen live in hot desert areas. They have a penalty to "to hit" during combat in cold climates, are generally hateful of other races, and the grow slower than most. However, they are able to travel across shallow water, get food from the desert, eats less than other races, and have a built in poison damage on all troops.

    Climate: Tropical
    Preferred Tile: Jungle
    Temperament: Hateful of other races.
    Size: 3 out of 5
    Growth: 2 out of 5
    Special Unit: Strikers - Melee unit with a high "to hit" and a high first strike.
    Special Building: Pit of Horrors - Better dungeon.

    Gnolls -
    Gnolls are fairly mild across the board. But due to their slightly faster growth rate and the fact they have little competition for land in colder areas, the race succeeds well.

    Climate: Cold
    Preferred Tile: Tundra
    Temperament: Normal love, quick to fear.
    Size: 3 out of 5
    Growth: 4 out of 5
    Special Unit: Master Ranger - Best ranger.
    Special Building: Fur trader - Forests and hunting grounds make gold.

    Bugrum - Bugrum are the one race that completely ignores all effects of love and fear. They do not protest or riot. This is because the race is essentially hive minded, and all civilians count as slaves. This drastically limits the usefulness of temples and production buildings for them. However, they they reproduce extremely fast. Have double the living space in all tiles due to being subterranean. And have a natural armor bonus to all units.

    Climate: Tropical and Temperate
    Preferred Tile: Desert
    Temperament: N/A
    Size: 3 out of 5
    Growth: 5 out of 5
    Special Unit: Queen - A settler who is also a military unit and is present in all settlements.
    Special Building: Hive - Increases living space for everyone.

    Draken - Draken winged lizard men that live in total isolation. They are always tucked away in far remote locations and do not expand. They are by far the best military units in the game with their large size, ability to fly, and fire breath that does a combat roll on all figures in the enemy stack before the melee phase. However, the are also the slowest growing race in the game and live in locations that are not always suited for great cities. Draken units fly but still move one space per turn.

    Climate: All
    Preferred Tile: Remote mountain peaks.
    Temperament: Extremely stoic
    Size: 5 out of 5
    Growth: 1 out of 5
    Special Unit: Great Drake - A large ferocious single figure unit.
    Special Building: Great Walls - Better city walls.

    Birdmen - Birdmen are light and so their units have low health and armor in exchange for gaining flight and a bump to "to hit". Birdmen are also their own mount and may not use one, however all mount resources on the map serve as hunting grounds for them. In addition Birdment move 2 spots per turn making them the fastest units.

    Climate: Cold
    Preferred Tile: Forest
    Temperament: Quick to Love, slow to fear.
    Size: 3 out of 5
    Growth: 3 out of 5
    Special Unit: Wind Dervish - Melee unit with potential to do devastating damage to enemies without any "to hit"s left.
    Special Building: Sun stone - A defensive tower that generates mana.


    Combat Screen

    Coming soon



    Units

    Units are the collective troops that occupy a single tile. A unit may have one or more figures. Generally speaking units with more figures will have more hits, but they will generally be weaker. This means that units with more figures are better at taking down the opponent's "to hit" points, while larger units with less figures will be better at taking out units with large amounts of armor and health.

    Generally speaking though, it is better to be larger with fewer figures because "to hit" can eventually be overcome with perseverance, but armor can not. Also, lots of figures in one unit are very vulnerable to area damage, such as a fireball or fire breath.

    Basic Units
    Spearmen -
    Spearmen are immediately available in every city without any buildings at all. And while they are first available, they can hold their own and prove worth while as new buildings will scale their stats. Spearmen do not have as much armor as other melee units due to lacking a shield. This is made up for by the use of "first strike", meaning that spearmen will resolve their attack before the enemy. Often this may result in less figures during the retaliation or eliminating the unit all together without taking damage.

    Warriors - Warriors are available upon completing the smith. They may have all type of weapons, in all sizes, and with all sizes of shields. Each weapon type has its own specific benefits:

    Blades - Allows for up to 2 additional strikes.
    Swords - Allows for up to 1 additional strike and is twice as effective against armor.
    Spear (made through spearmen) - Is three times as effective against armor.
    Mace - Hits remove one "to hit" from the enemy and is twice as effective against armor.
    Hammer - Hits remove two "to hit"s from the enemy.
    Ax - Hits remove one "to hit" from the enemy and allows for up to one additional strike.

    Meanwhile, Weapon sizes may go up in size to increase damage or down to increase the number of attacks. And shields may go up in size to increase armor, or down to increase the "to hit"s.

    Bowmen - Bowmen are made available when the sawmill is made. They have a limited amount of shots, but can lower enemy numbers dramatically before the fight even starts.

    Halberd - Halberd units are available upon creating the Machinists' Guild. They are similar to the spearmen in that they use first strike rather than heavy armor. However, unlike spearmen they get a more diverse spectrum of benefits. They receive up to on additional strike when successful, double effective against armor, and the remove one "to hit" upon a successful strike.

    Catapult - Available when Machinists' Guild is built.

    Scout - A tiny ship that is fast, but may not enter the open sea without other ships present.

    Trireme - A small ship capible of open sea travel. Can carry a small number of Units.

    Galley - A large ship made for troop transport.

    Warship - A massive ship made explicitly for warfare.

    Clerics - Available when a temple is made, clerics have weak ranged attacks but can heal ally units.

    Mages - Are available when a library is made, and do a devastating area ranged attack that can wipe out whole units with multiple figures.

    Duel Class Units
    Duel classes are a unit that have the best benefits of both classes at the cost of the 50% more time than the most expensive unit. They are available after building the War College.

    Druid -
    Druids are a combination of mages and clerics. They require Temple and Magic School.

    Battle Mage -
    Battle Mages are Mages that have the melee capabilities of Warriors. They require Smith and the Library.

    Paladin -
    Paladins are Warriors with healing capabilities and ranged magic attacks. They require Smith and the Shrine.

    Ranger -
    Rangers are Warriors with Archery capabilities. They require Smith and Sawmill.

    Mounts

    Once a mount resource is available a stable can be made and the mount may be made. All mounts have the same base stat as a warrior, but have the added benefit of the mount they are given.

    Horse
    Worg
    Totally not a Chocobo
    Mamoth
    Unicorn
    Pegasis

    Griffin
    Wyvern

    Specialty Units

    Assassin (Halfling) -
    Assassins are invisible on the world map and are initially invisible on combat screen. Upon their first attack they do double damage with that ignores "to hit". After the initial attack they are no longer invisible.

    Elven Lord (Elf) - Elven Lords are the best archers in the game. They fire three shots per attack.

    Steam Cannon (Dwarf) -
    Steam Cannons are superior versions of catapults. They explode on contact and do area damage.

    High Priest (Human) - High Priests are clerics that heal for twice as much as a cleric.

    Berserker (Orc) -
    Beserkers are the best melee unit in the game. Hits remove two "to hit" from the enemy and allows for up to two additional strike. In addition they have Throw ability which is a single roll of damage before Fire Breath and First Strike, while still able to hit flying targets.

    Boom Brigade (Goblin) -
    Boom Brigade are ballistic units that explode when they attack an enemy doing massive area effect damage.

    Master Ranger (Gnoll) -
    Master Rangers are available with only a Smith or a Sawmill and have a bonus to movement.

    Striker (Snakemen) -
    Strikers replace Halberds and have a high "to hit" bonus and Poison.

    Trident (Ribilicous) -
    Tridents are available right from the start of every city. They have bonus "to hit".

    Queen (Bugrum) -
    Queens replace the Settler Unit. They are extremely large with high health and armor. When they settle a new city they are available for combat when defending. If they are lost in combat the city is unable to do anything until a new one is built.

    Great Drake (Draken) -
    Great Drakes are a large single figure unit with high health, armor, and damage.

    Wind Dervish (Birdmen) -
    Wind Dervishes are duel bladed warriors that are capable of doing four consecutive attacks. They have potential to do extremely high damage to units without an "to hit" points.

    Beasts

    (Wild)
    Centaurs
    Titan
    Colossus
    Cyclops
    Minotaur
    Behemoth
    Basilisk
    War Bears
    Giant Spiders
    Great Spider
    Wyrm
    Gorgon
    Manticore

    Doom Drake
    Storm Drake
    Ice Drake
    Fire Drake


    (Wind)
    Storm Elemental
    Rok
    Djinn

    (Chaos / Fire)
    Fire Elemental
    Hell Hounds
    Minions
    Hellfire Bat
    Efreet
    Demon
    Demon Lord

    (Sorcery / Water)
    Water Elemental
    Hydra
    Dragon Turtle
    Kraken
    Phantom Warriors
    Phantom Beast

    (Nature / Earth)
    Earth Elemental
    Werewolf
    Deadly Swarm
    Pixies
    Ent
    Sprigan
    Man Eater

    (Holy / Light)
    Spirit
    Cherub
    Angel
    Arch Angel
    Holy Knight

    (Death / Dark)
    Skeleton
    Zombie
    Ghouls
    Wraith
    Lich
    Vampire
    Death Knight

    (Arcane)
    Wisp
    Mana Beast

    (Tech)
    Mech
    Airship

    Champions

    Buildings

    Sawmill
    - All forests give +1 production. Allows Archers and Rangers (with forge).

    Sacred Tree (Elf only) - Replaces sawmill. +1 production and +1 food per forest. All ranged attacks gain +1 damage. Allows Archers, Rangers (with forge), and Elven Lords.

    Forestry Guild - All forests add +5% production and +1 food. All ranged attacks gain +1 damage.

    Smith -
    All mountains give +1 production. All units gain +1 melee and +1 Armor.Allows for Warriors, Rangers (with Sawmill or Sacred Tree), Paladins (with Chapel), and Battle Mage (with Wizards' Guild).

    Master Smith (Dwarf only) - Replaces forge. All mountains give +2 production. Allows for Warriors, Rangers (with Sawmill or Sacred Tree), and Steam Cannon (with Machinists' Guild).

    Miners' Guild - All mountains add +5% production and +1 gold.

    Machinists' Guild -
    Increases all production by 50%. Allows construction of catapults, engineers, and halberds.

    Tinkerer's Shop (Goblin only) - Adds a flat 10 production. Allows for Boom Brigade (Goblin only) and all catapults are now throw bombs.

    Market -
    Each citizen add +1 gold (per living space occupied).

    Bank - All gold production is increased by 50%.

    Farmer's Market -
    All farm tiles now produce +1 gold.

    Fish Market - All water tiles now produce +1 gold.

    Fishing Emporium (Ribilicous only) - All water tiles produce +2 gold.

    Fur Trader (Gnoll only) - All forests, mount resources, and game resources produce gold.

    Granary -
    Food production does not drop during winter and sieges.

    Mill - All grasslands produce +1 food.

    Port -
    Generates +5 gold a turn, increases migration, and increases appearances of merchants and mercenaries.

    Light House - Generates +5 gold a turn, increases migration, and increases appearances of merchants and mercenaries.

    City Walls -
    Defensive barrier for the city. Can be improved 3 times.

    Great Walls (Draken only) - A forth level wall that can not be passed by flying units.

    Moat - A water barrier around the city that prevents ground units from crossing on foot.

    Sun Stone (Birdmen only) - A defensive tower that generates +3 mana a turn and shoot a beam at enemy units in combat. Allows for Wind Dervishes (Birdmen only).

    Barracks -
    Increases unit production speed by 50%. Increases the effects of units in the city.

    Training Grounds - Increases unit production by 50%. Units in the city receive XP every turn, capping off at 2 levels below max.

    Proving Grounds (Orc Only) - Replaces Training Grounds. Increases unit production by 50%. Units in the city receive more XP every turn, capping off at 1 levels below max. Allows Berserkers (Orc only).

    War College - All units start as veterans. Allows commanders.

    Stables - Allows production of mounted units.

    Beastiary - Allows production of Beasts. Allows for great drakes (Draken only).

    Shrine -
    Produces +1 mana and calms 10% of the citizens. Allows production of clerics.

    Temple - Requires and replaces Shrine. Produces +2 mana and calms 20% of the citizens. Clerics start as veterans. Allows for druids (with magic school).

    Chapel - Requires and replaces Temple. Produces +3 mana and calms 30% of the citizens. Clerics start as Elite. Allows Paladins (with smith).

    Cathedral (Humans only) - Requires and replaces Chapel. Produces +4 mana and calms 40% of the citizens. Allows production of High Priests.

    Library -
    Research is doubled. Allows Mages.

    Magic School - Research is tripled. Mages start as Veterans. Allows Druids (with Temple).

    Wizard's Guild - Research is quadrupled. Allows battle mages (with Smith).

    Inn -
    Increases the migration to the city and increases merchant and mercenaries appearance.

    Tavern - Increases love, but decreases fear. Increases the migration to the city and increases merchant and mercenaries appearance.

    Theater - Increases love. Increases the migration to the city and increases merchant and mercenaries appearance.

    Brew House (Halflings only) - Replaces tavern. Significantly increases love and does not decrease fear. Increases the migration to the city and increases merchant and mercenaries appearance.

    Arena - Increases love and fear. Increases the migration to the city and increases merchant and mercenaries appearance.

    Gallows - Increases fear, but decreases love. Increases the migration to the city and increases merchant and mercenaries appearance.

    Dungeon - Increases fear. Increases the migration to the city and increases merchant and mercenaries appearance.

    Pit of Horrors (Snakemen only) - Replaces dungeon. Significantly increases fear. Increases the migration to the city and increases merchant and mercenaries appearance.

    Hive (Bugrum only) -
    Increases the living space of a city by a flat amount.

    *Magic
    Magic spells are largely unchanged from MoM. HOWEVER, the methods in which they are researched are DRASTICALLY different.

    To start, the books on the character creation screen no longer decide what spells can be researched and rather all spells can be researched. They will now have other effects that will be further discussed in the Mages section.

    Also, there is not one single spell being researched with all research being accumulated. Instead, it is done per city. This will allow players to keep in the game with fewer cities, while player who do have more cities will be allowed more variety.

    And spells will no longer be randomly pulled from a list thrown in as an option. Instead once again I will be pulling a page from Master of Orion and have a research MOSTLY similar to MoO2.



    So there will be different categories, in this case schools of magic, and each category has 10 tiers, and each tier has ~3 spells each. So 6 magics * 10 tiers * 3 spells giving a total of 180 spells.

    Now here's how it differs from MoO2. You can research any spell at any time on any tier. The difference is that you get a discount on the cost for everything researched before that tier.

    So let's say that tier 10 spells cost 10,000 research points. But you do a level 1 Tier spell for 100 research, 25% of the cost goes towards the spells above it and Tier 10 now costs 9,975 research.

    EDIT: Okay, I think I have the math now. For the first pick of a tier 5% of the cost go towards tiers above it and in the current tier, and 1% goes towards all other schools.

    The cost of spells on each tier are:

    100 RP
    250 RP
    450 RP
    700 RP
    1,000 RP
    1,350 RP
    1,750 RP
    2,200 RP
    2,700 RP
    3,250 RP

    And the Master Spell costs 10,000 RP.

    Arcane Spells
    Tier 1
    Tier 2
    Tier 3
    Tier 4
    Tier 5
    Tier 6
    Tier 7
    Tier 8
    Tier 9
    Tier 10

    Node Mastery (Global) - Gain control of every node, giving you all the mana you could ever want AND take away mana from all enemy nodes. This is locked in to the first player to cast it.

    Life Spells

    Tier 1
    Guardian Spirit (Summon) - Summons a flying spirit that can capture nodes.

    Prayer (Effect) - Grants one armor, one resistance, and one "To Hit" to every unit on the field.

    Bless (Buff) - Increases accuracy and allows Unit to hit physically immune creatures.

    Tier 2

    Heal (Effect) - Restore health to a unit.

    Smite (Attack) - Sends down a single bolt of holy lightning doing high damage. Effective against single figure units, not very effective against multi-figure units.

    True Sight (Buff) - Can see invisible creatures.

    Tier 3

    Cherubs (Summon) - Summons tiny angels with ranged attacks that may also charm.

    Divine Light (City) - Inhabitants of the city have increased love of you. This can apply to any city, yours, a neutral, or a rival.

    Just Cause (Global) - Twice as likely to have merchants, mercenaries, refugees, and heroes come to you.

    Tier 4


    Holy Armor (Buff) - Adds 3 resistance and armor.

    Holy Weapon (Buff) - Adds 3 magic damage to each strike. This damage is separate from the physical damage and rolls against resistance.

    Convert (Effect) - Attempt to capture a rival unit based on their love of you.

    Tier 5

    The Prophet (Summon) - Summons The Prophet, a hero unit that scales exponentially in power with experience. If the Prophet dies they my be summoned again, retaining all of their experience, but the cost goes up each revive. The Prophet may not be summoned if The Anti-Prophet is in your command.

    Regeneration (Buff) - Unit heals a portion of health every combat turn and completely heals at the end of combat.

    Crusade (Global) - All Units are trained faster.

    Tier 6
    Tier 7

    Angel (Summon) - Summons a strong flying melee unit that may also heal.

    Harmony (Global) - All races love one another in your cities.

    Tier 8
    Mass Healing (Effect) - Heals all units on the field.

    Resurrect (Effect) - Return unit to combat with 25% hit points.

    Omnipresence (Global) - See all cities locations and examine them.

    Tier 9

    Arch Angel (Summon) - Summons a fierce flying melee unit that also buffs all other units on the field. Arch Angels are stronger than the prophet at first, but the prophet will pass them about 1/2 up their levels.

    Omnipotent (Global) - All castings act as though you are present. Casting skill is refilled for each battle.

    Invulnerable (Buff) - All strikes subtract 5 damage before doing defense rolls.

    Tier 10

    Rapture (Global) - All citizens are taken out of all cities and placed in the capital city. Additional citizens are taken from rival cities based on the city and their race's love for you. The capital is now only reachable by flying creatures, has no limit to population, and has large bonuses to production, research, unit production, and farming is completely eliminated. Oh, and all units now fly.

    Death Spells
    Tier 1
    Ritual (Effect) - Takes away one armor, one resistance, and one "To Hit" to every enemy unit on the field.

    Curse (DeBuff) - Decreases the Unit's accuracy and makes them twice as susceptible to other Debuffs.

    Tier 2
    Tier 3
    Tier 4
    Tier 5

    The Anti-Prophet (summon)- Summons The Anti-Prophet, a hero unit that scales exponentially in power with experience. If the Anti-Prophet dies they my be summoned again, retaining all of their experience, but the cost goes up each revive. The Anti-Prophet may not be summoned if The Prophet is in your command.

    Tier 6
    Tier 7
    Tier 8
    Tier 9
    Tier 10

    Apocalypse (global) - Every single unit that dies becomes a wild undead unit. All undead units who you encounter become yours. All undead units also cost nothing to maintain. If another player has this on they can also take undead units.

    Sorcery Spells

    Tier 1
    Tier 2
    Tier 3
    Tier 4
    Tier 5
    Tier 6
    Tier 7
    Tier 8
    Tier 9
    Tier 10

    Attrition (Global) - All spells cost half as much to cast and to maintain, and all enemies pay double. If another player has this on they will also only pay half costs.

    Chaos Spells
    Tier 1
    Tier 2
    Tier 3
    Tier 4
    Tier 5
    Tier 6
    Tier 7
    Tier 8
    Tier 9

    Mark of the Phoenix (Buff) - At the end of combat unit is brought back to life if battle is won.

    Tier 10

    Arch Mage (Global) - All attack spells are double damage, cost half as much, and can be cast twice per turn.

    Nature Spells

    Tier 1
    Tier 2
    Tier 3
    Tier 4
    Tier 5
    Tier 6
    Tier 7
    Tier 8
    Tier 9
    Tier 10

    Gaia's Wrath (Global) - Wild creatures are generated across the entire map and attack every other player. Also natural disasters ravage all rivals. If another player has this on they will not be attacked or receive natural disasters as well.

    Mages

    Coming Soon



    Random Events

    Coming soon
     
    Last edited: Apr 29, 2017
  2. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2011
    Posts:
    9,859
    OK, first, I can't contain Conan the Grammarian (one of my multiple personalities) on "concur" vs. "conquer". You keep using the former when you mean the latter. Concur means to agree, so it's really not what you wanted in this context.

    (Conan, shut up about "loosing" vs. "losing," we all know what he meant!)

    Whew. That out of the way, yeah, MoM was a great game, at least at first. I reached a point where it just didn't seem very challenging anymore, and got a bit tedious. Keeping interest up throughout the long game arc is always the tricky bit in a 4X game.

    I'd encourage you to study the Civ series, and in particular, the bifurcation between "Civ lite" (i.e. Civ Revolution) and the main series (Civ IV, Civ V, etc.). Civ Rev is a much faster, shallower game, and you'd think it would be not as much fun — and yet personally, it's the one video game (on any device) that I keep coming back to and playing again and again for years. Whereas, I have Civ IV installed (I think) but haven't touched it since the first couple of games I played (even though I was a huge Civ fan in earlier days).

    So basically I think this shows that you can make a 4X game that can be played in less than two hours, and it's still awesome. Or you can make one that takes 20 hours per game... and it may be awesome too, but it'll probably have a smaller audience, they'll play less often, and you'll have a greater challenge in preventing tedium.

    Multiplayer I think may be really hard for this, particularly with the combat screen. Any way you do it, it seems to me that a battle takes a lot longer than a turn/action without a battle. So player A runs into player B, and now they spend 5 minutes resolving the battle... what are players C and D doing during this time? But maybe it would work OK for 2 players.

    I like your love/fear mechanic. Seems like a neat idea.
     
  3. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

    Joined:
    Dec 13, 2011
    Posts:
    3,546
    Thanks for correcting my spelling. Like I said, I did this on my lunch break. Not a lot of time to spell check.

    And I do love Civ, especially Civ 3.

    You are correct that the pacing can become a slog, which is no fun. One of the reasons is that you quickly get to a point where you can walk over the enemy and there's no reason to relent.

    In Civ they fix this by giving your country war fatigue, which is a good mechanic. This, coupled with the distance from the capital effects corruption makes it impossible to over reach. Oh, and the AI is programmed to take advantage of the fact you are distracted by another war front and will often jump in to exploit it.

    I also think that you can make a game of intimidation that will create fear among rival cities. Rather than going in and invading, you could station yourself outside and make the city start falling into a panic. By the time you invade they may just surrender.

    Oh, and you are correct. I do need to address the issue with multiplayer combat.

    What if you could participate in combat via magic?

    So the mage you have an alliance with gets into it with another player. You can now cast a spell against the enemy, to buff the ally troops, or maybe summon a monster and move them yourself.

    Oh, and if there are more than one fight in a turn, have all combats take place at the same time on different tabs.

    That, or have an option to auto complete fights.
     
  4. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest

    If you're seriously is going to do a remake or spiritual successor of good old game, I advice you to look at remake of Master of Orion, called Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars, which was made with modern game design techniques, or in other words, they made EVERY possible mistake. They either hired children from kindergarden to make this game, or devs are just trolls, or idiots, or all of this. So just study that 4X wanna-be-game and make everything not like there and you will pretty much succeed, or at least it won't be the worst 4X game ever made by humanity. I played million of games for my entire life, but it was the only game, which forced me to look into credits, just to see the names of those morons. They should be banned from game industry for polluting it. If I were the dev of that game, I would be too ashamed to even show it to public, delete it and pretend that I've never ever made it.

    As for multiplayer - yes, this is the problem of 4X games, but in 95% cases those games are played as single player, so you shouldn't sacrifice certain game mechanics in miltiplayer favor, if it can't be done separately for single/multiplayer modes. You may try simultaneous turns, but with some smart mechanics which will disable it for certain armies/units/cities which are near enemies, so it won't be the problem like in AoW3, where players have to use gentleman rules to not turn game into real time strategy with "who will surround enemy faster" tactics, players there usually give time to each other to move all their troops together, and they don't attack, until the other side is ready. But obviously such mechanic should be integrated in game somehow. Also it shouldn't be done like in heroes5, where it is simply disabled, when you see an enemy, since it'll hasten game only at the start and this is not a solution. Again, as for AoW3, other players can't make their turns there, when someone has a battle going on, again, this should be fixed by making some zone around battle which will disable movements or spellcasting there, but you still may have simultaneous turns elsewhere, but again, this mechanic will be flawed, because this will give players additional information where the battle is happening. For example you see that you can't move your scout - you understand, that some player(s) have a battle nearby. In other words simultaneous turns mechanic requires a lot of thinking to make it perfect.

    As for combat, don't make it real time or something like that, just an ordinary turn based combat with positioning/terrain factors, also make it round based with all your troops moving in any order you want, so it opens more tactical options, the downside of such combat will be AI - it'll be really hard to make it good, since there're over9000 possible moves per round and he'll need to find the best one, if you want to make AI challenging. Such combats will never be boring, if mechanics are implemented right and gives you a lot of tools to manipulate to factors which affect the outcome of battle. And since positioning is affected and the combat itself is tactical, randomness should be minimal or eliminated, or else you'll turn game into roulette, which is usually hated by people, who love tactics and planning, may be some min-max thing can be done, but serious randomness like hit/miss/crit or stuns/instakills shouldn't present in such games, since they're about planning, not about guessing. Lucky idiots shouldn't always win people, who exploited their weakness and planned everything right, but just got unlucky.

    As for no-save hardcoreness, I really don't know why would you do this for a single player game, if someone wants to load a game, he'll do this anyway - just alt-tab, copy save file somewhere and store it. Just like in every other single player game, where you can copy your 1-life characters or 1-save-games. If player wants to play without saves - he'll play without saves. If player want to play with saves - he'll do this. You'll only decrease user-friendliness with this mechanic and nothing else. May be you can add this as option at start, but don't make it as a core mechanic. Especially if you decide to use randomness in combats and the gap between worst and best outcome will be huge, then the "game" may end anytime, and inability to load game just because of stupid random mechanic, which ruined whole game, will be disappointing.
     
  5. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

    Joined:
    Dec 13, 2011
    Posts:
    3,546
    I have put some thought into luck. I decided that I don't want the game to lean on luck nearly as much a MoM did, but I for sure don't want to completely eliminate it.

    One of my least favorite games of all time is Chess because a huge chunk of it becomes memorizing different strategies and moves. And in the end I can't stand that people seem to think that it's this great big intellectual exercise, but in reality almost all games come down to who has memorized the most useless pieces of knowledge. And in turn people who are new will consistently get massacred. I mean I guess that shows that being skilled pays off, but what kind of "skill" or "intelligence" is there really in doing "Knight's Defense" this and "Battery Attack" that?

    But I do like games like Catan where you need to weigh your odds, leverage your advantages, and work with others against the lead.

    Also, I guess I could always have all skills levels open for saves but only allow online scores being posted with hardcore games.
     
  6. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest

    Well, it depends on many factors, complete elimination of luck is still possible in certain mechanics and it can be left in others. For example you can make controlled random, where something is based on luck before player can take a decision. For example like in card games, you draw random cards and then you have to use whatever you have in your hands to win, but there's no random effects at cards itself, so you 100% sure, than if you do this card, you'll have certain result, thus allowing you to plan actions, but you don't know which cards you draw. It's still better, than misses or crits, which can easily win/lose you a battle and it has nothing to do with your skills, intellect or ability to plan actions, even if you take %'s into consideration of your actions, like target has 20 HP and you deal 10 damage with 50% chance to hit, which means you'll need ~4 strikes to kill it (20/(10*0.5)). But if you have 50% chance to "draw" 10-damage-attack and can use it anytime, it's far better.

    Yes, chess has nothing to do with intellect or skills, it's rather primitive game, just like poker, where everything can be calculated even before you play the game itself, which means if you don't have an access to computer/AI/notes, you simply test your memory, as you said, since you don't need to use your own intellect in those games. But what would you think of chess, if each game you and your opponent would have different chess pieces? :D Moreover, you would also "draw" them like in card game and can put them board? That would turn this game into really interesting skill and intellect based game, where no randomness is involved in "combat" mechanic itself, but the game is still unpredictable and different from battle to battle. That's what I meant by elimination of randomness. But since you can't just "draw" units during combat or do some other stuff like that, you may still randomize stats of units a little bit and make them train/improve randomly after combat. So the same human footman may differ from other human footman, thus making battles different, because sometimes he may have a little more HP, or better armor or more damage, thus changing the way you act in combat for max efficiency. As you can see, it's still randomness and luck in "leveling up", but it's controlled luck, because you know what stats he increased and you'll later use it in combat. Something like that.
     
    Not_Sure likes this.
  7. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

    Joined:
    Dec 13, 2011
    Posts:
    3,546
    @u53d I think you and I are on the EXACT same track after all.

    I completely agree with this.

    The only MINOR tweak is that I would lie a little about the percentages.

    I would make the odds seem less likely than they actually are.

    The reason why I would do this is because people, generally speaking, are going to prefer to feel like they're lucking out when in reality it's just pandering.

    Then as far as the "hard core" munchkin players out there, I'm certain that would actually like the game MORE because of this piece of information. Because if there's one thing munchkins love, it's figuring out a secret mechanic and leveraging it.

    Right now, my general idea for combat is similar to MoM's stats but with a few tweaks.



    SO in MoM they have the primary stats:
    Melee
    Range
    Armor
    Resist
    Hits

    I would basically keep all of those but add a "to hit" value. Add x # of units (to make it more clear). Add x # of Attacks. And I would be more specific about the damage types by showing different pictures.

    Melee and Range would always have a static value.

    Then "to hit" would roll however many "to hits" are available as a D2. Every one that is successful would eliminate one whole attack. But the "to hit" would disappear until the next round, meaning getting attacked by multiple units in one turn is bad.

    After the hits that get through are added up they are checked against the armor or resistance the same as with the "to hit" stat as Value x D2. This is done for each strike. One for every troop and one for every strike in an attack. But unlike "to hit" they are not removed after each hit.

    Each hit can not do more damage than the value of each figure in a unit. So if yo have a unit with, say, 6 swords men with 5 hits each. That's a total of (6*5) 30 HP. HOWEVER, if a giant comes up and hits twice for 20 points each hit, the max damage would be 5 damage per hit, taking a total damage of 10 HP and leave them with 20 HP rather than dying.

    For multiple figure units, the figures go away as a percent of the health.

    This means that as a multiple figure unit takes damage they are less and less effective.

    Finally, I want there to be a "wheel" of melee attack types that alter the formula slightly. The symbols will be:
    A Blade
    A Sword
    A Spear
    A Mace
    A Hammer
    An Axe

    The idea being that blades, spears, and hammers are all their own advantage, but Swords, Maces, and Axes get half of the bonus of their neighboring melee type.

    I'm thinking:
    A Blade will go again if it gets a hit up to 2 times.
    A Sword will go again only once if it lands, and armor defense is.
    A Spear has armor defense cut in a quarter.
    A Mace has armor defense cut in half, and removes one "to hit" upon a successful hit.
    A Hammer removes two "to hits" up a successful hit.
    An Axe will go again only once if it lands, and removes one "to hit" with every successful hit.

    You'll notice that this give 3 great possible strategies with melee items that blend in between.

    Hammers are great for starting an engagement and knocking the enemy around, stripping them of their "to hits".

    Then a blade can come in and seize the opportunity to do triple damage on a unit that is beaten down.

    Or a spear could skip all that and cut right through the armor.

    Oh, and I may do something special for halberds, like give them half the effect of blades, spears, and hammers.

    But don't look at this and assume that it is plainly better to have units with multiple figures over one big figure.

    Multiple figure units are susceptible to group attacks such as fireball spells or flame breath that does a roll on each unit separately. So a fireball spell that does 20 damage on a giant will do 20 damage, while the same attack on 6 swordsmen is going to do (6*20) 120 damage!
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2017
  8. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

    Joined:
    Dec 13, 2011
    Posts:
    3,546
    Can anyone look at the races I currently have and make suggestions?

    I particularly would like to know what race would be interesting to see for the 6th beastman race.

    EDIT: Shoot, I think that at this point it would be best not to touch magic production or research at all since no one has. I need to think of what I could do that would make the race different.

    IDK, birdmen?
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2017
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  9. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

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    What about Pig men? Or you could call them, Hog men/or Boar men?:p
    Giant sized, stinky, scary, snorkelly Pig beastman looking creatures
    that act super hoggish/boarish and love to fight.:p

    Bird men are a great idea.
    There could be many varieties, or species of birdmen.
     
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  10. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    I really like pigmen as an idea. Especially as an homage to Zelda.



    I need to make sure though that each race has a niche to fill and is radically different in some way.

    Halflings - Easiest to manage and great farmers.
    Elfs - Stoic and highest "to hit" stats.
    Dwarfs - Can turn mountains into gold farms and gives all units better armor and melee damage.
    Humans - Most mild, but has best healing units and the best mana production building.
    Orcs - Impossible to manage, but has the best troops and can grow food in wastelands.
    Goblins - Are almost exclusively controlled with fear and has the most figures in a unit.

    Murlock - Has a very unique niche that allows them to spread across the map, but not inland.
    Gnoll - Has little competition in the cold areas.
    Draken - Isolationists with amazing endgame combat capabilities.
    Bugrum - A entire race of slaves that needs to win through sheer expansion and overwhelming numbers. Also, queens are a freaking cool idea.

    Snakemen - Definitely needs some tweaking, but I do like the idea of the best dungeon and penalties for cold weather.

    Birdmen-types -Very shaky on this and would be willing to trade them out. On one hand I like the idea that they fly and move fast for scouting, but on the other I don't know how I can make them work for combat. I know flying means that they can use a lot of hit and run tactics, but that also means that the moment the other races get flight their game is up and they immediately become useless.

    Also, I'm stuck on switching up between what aesthetics to use for snakemen and murlocks.

    I could either go Snakemen or Lizardmen

    And Frogmen or Naga or "Black Lagoon" monsters.

    I think Frogmen would be nice to have a comic character, but then why can't they go inland and why can they go out to sea?

    Nagas are cool, but they don't match the Fishing Emporium building, which is goofy. If I did choose Naga, I would need to choose something other than Snakemen so I don't have two snake type races.

    Lastly, I like Snakemen because you don't see them that often. But I also think that there are a lot of CRPG player that would want to see Lizardmen, like from Elder Scrolls. Of course, does "Pit of Horrors" really fit Lizardmen? Not really.

    IDK, what do you think?

    Also, how can I make Pigmen work? Like I said, Birdmen are shaky as they stand because the are mechanically broken in concept.
     
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  11. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

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    Ha! Ha! Who could ever forget Pig Ganon, from the old zelda cartoon.
    He was so horrifying to look at. Lol! :p

    Frog men? Well the frogmen from the old ninja turtles cartoon, ate pizza and walked the streets.

    Snakemen: Well, nothing is wrong, with having two species of Snakemen.
    Yeah, I agree. Strangely you don't really see Snakemen in games.
    But believe it or not, scary lizard men creatures, were popular in games, during the dreamcast, PS2 era.

    Birdmen: Well watch the old power rangers movie, with the stinky Tenga bird warriors summoned by scary old Ivan ooze. Maybe you might get some ideas, for annoying bird combat tactics.

    And if you want, give some of the birdmen species (especially if some are bad)
    some semi sharp teeth, like those ancient birds, from the dinosaur days.

    And as you said, if the other races get flight in your game, probably make it
    where only bird men, have the ability to do super speed flight, or some special power abilities, that no other character can do. :)


    I think that is why you're struggling.
    Forget about characters, being mechanically broken, for now.
    Otherwise you might end up being confused and might lose motivation
    to continue onward, with your game. :)

    Take a nice look at the legend of zelda games.
    They have tall dog knights who do kung-fu when their armour is broken
    and blue/bluish grey Pig dog looking baddies, with long spears.
    And nintendo made them all work well, in the zelda game universe.
    Ha! Ha! :D
     
    Last edited: May 19, 2017
  12. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

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    I forgot to mention.

    Frog men are an interesting idea.
    You could probably have 2 related species, frog men and toad men.

    Maybe throw in some cutesy bunny rabbit people too.
    Who are good at growing vegetables and food.
    And are agile and quick thinking, in combat.

    PS: Check out the nice advice, in my above post.
    I even analysed your characters too.:)
    Enjoy.
     
  13. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    Hmm - this doesn't really align with how people normally react and have reacted to foreign forces occupying there lands throughout history. How could this be acceptable to the player in a game when most of our historical experiences are the opposite resulting effect? Might want to research this. Most people throughout history are hostile to foreign occupation, even if the hostility is masked in submissive passivity.

    So the player is going to be playing as a game character, rather than playing as the overall sim controller of the game? So the player is an actual 'unit' in the game? This would be like the player controlling a 'hero' unit in Starcraft/Warcraft, and this hero unit is the character, instead of the player acting more like the overseer of the entire tribe/country more common to RTS games.

    I've not played any recent 4x games but I can relate here to older RTS games played. Nobunauga's Ambition has this one action per turn system.

    Have you considered a subterranean race?
     
  14. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    Sort of. It's more like the location of the Wizard avatar would effect the surrounding map areas for unrest and spell casting. They would be like a second capital in Civ that can move around, but also has great stats.

    Also, I think the game would end when the player has no Wizard AND no capital.

    That way they could lose one or the other, but still stay in the game.

    I have.
    I feel like that would be a good balance too, having them work as slaves that don't get bonuses from buildings.

    But at the same time they get a huge unit at the start of every city, the queen.
     
    Last edited: Jun 7, 2017
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  15. coverpage

    coverpage

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    I spent so much of my childhood playing MoM, such an epic game.

    In my opinion one of the most fun part of MoM is how it convince you that it is all real; you are a boss wizard trying to take over the world. And I think they do that, in a large part due to the uniqueness of the creatures and spells.

    Even by today's standard, each of the spell and creatures has properly unique abilities. Wrath raise dead, basilsk petrify, some creature range attack and fly etc.This makes us fall into the fantasy of it all. It becomes quite magical. To exaggerate to bring across my point, now we have more like, fire1, fire2, fira3, ice1, ice2, blizzard3, all of which are very similar.

    Secondly, the story telling. They are listed in a spell book and acquired through resource; the story telling of how we acquire them is quite believable. Then the opponent characters are so real. Now and then, during the game, a dialogue comes out with your opponent being pissed with you as though he's really there. And when you ally and give resources to them, the way they show pleasure add on to the illusion that the enemy is real.

    I think you can push this further. Push the story telling to be more real, with more lifelike interactions, summoning cutscenes etc.

    And push for the uniqueness of the spells and creatures further. Also, as suggested by some, make the colonization of territories have more unique consequences.

    MoM is very successful because of how well it convinces you the fantasy is real. This is unlike competitive games today where the game mechanics is addictive, but the fantasy comes second.

    Improving it must push this boundary further.
     
    Last edited: Jun 20, 2017
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  16. BoredBoredBored

    BoredBoredBored

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    I'm late to the discussion, but I was searching for any new MOM development, and found this discussion. I wrote (offline) a fairly long list of complaints about MOM and how to improve the game. After more thought, I added more. Then more. Then I rethought the basis of the problems, and got a different perspective.

    The basics of MOM--and other similar 4x tbs games--has a few serious flaws. These make the game boring after a while.

    1) Tedious micromanagement. Moving a few units around, and choosing what to build in a few cities is fun. Later in the game, moving scores of units around each turn is tedious micromanagement, as is clicking on dozens of cities to choose a new building. Furthermore, adding a shrine or sawmill in the early game makes a big difference in your empire's production; later in the game, it adds just a tiny increment, which is much less satisfying. Is drowning the player in micromanagment intended to divert their attention from the fact that AI is incompetent or that the game is actually boring?

    2) Strategic choices (or lack thereof). For a game supposed to be strategic, there are actually very few strategic decisions available during play. All the strategy is in creating the nation; the rest of the game is just tediously micromanaging that strategy. In-game, all the choices are either obvious of unimportant. The game needs more unexpected things to create strategic responses to.

    3) The snowball effect. The game's ending is decided very early. Take a city from a rival, and the rest is just clean-up.

    The real problem of 4x games is that they aren't actually strategy games. They're racing games: 'fill your bucket (with research, gold, military units, etc) faster than your rivals'. Worse, it's not even a fair race. A good analogy is a car race, with all rivals starting with similar cars, but if a car gets ahead of the others, its engine HP increases the further ahead it gets. Once the player gets a little bit ahead (due to superior human skill), the rest of the game is a boring drive alone.

    A remake of MOM, following the same 4x principles, could be a commercial success. Reviews might rave about it...after playing it for only a few hours. Players would buy it, play it a bit, then look for something else. I don't think that yet another standard 4x game is going to offer long replayability. Adding more units, spells, etc, most of which won't ever get selected, won't solve the basic problem. That doesn't change the basics of the racing game any more than adding cupholders and bluetooth audio to the cars does.


    I really would like to have a tbs game with good replayability. I want something that I can play when I want for as long as I want (multiplayer doesn't offer that). I want surprises in the game, so each game is different. The game should develop differently each time, even if you replay a saved game from turn one. It should offer real strategic decisions to be made during the game, in response to what is encountered. Encounter some gnolls on turn 12: attack them and end the game as a viscious conquerer; ignore them and end as a peaceful trading empire rolling in gold; they attack you and you end up winning through magic research. Each turn should have the potential for causing you to drastically change the outcome of the game. I'm not sure whether it's possible to modify MOM into that, since it's core is that 'racing car with a growing engine' game.

    I can offer some suggestions for reducing MOM's problems, such as tedium and snowballing, but it doesn't change the fact that it's a racing game. I don't think the gaming world needs another one of those.

    I would like a game I could call up when I was in the mood (not multiplayer), where I can explore and exploit, feel satisfaction from building my empire my way, make some friends, deal with some enemies, help my friends against their enemies (and feel good about it rather than having the friendly nation ignore it), and struggle towards a goal. I do want some of that feedback that creates the 'just one more turn' craving. I hope it would leave some memorable stories, such as managing to keep a peace treaty with the gnolls through the whole game, despite some near-failures. I want to feel good about some clever trick where I kept the elves and the halflings at war for most of the game. MOM doesn't provide that, since it's just one strategy (outgrow your rivals), and it really doesn't make any difference whether your rivals have wings and use red magic or whether they're beetles and and use black magic.

    If you really do want to remake MOM still as a 'racing with a growing engine' game, it needs more than new car options and new roadside scenery. I'm just not sure what would work.

    If you want suggestions for slight improvements for MOM, I can tidy up my notes and post them.
     
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  17. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    Those are some really great insights! So much so that by the third paragraph, I had completely forgiven your post-necromancy. :)

    I only played MoM a little bit, but I've played one Civ or another pretty much my whole life, and it suffers from the same fundamental flaws. (Though obviously it's still fun enough to keep me coming back.)

    There are ways to reduce the tedium — what you're probably thinking of as "slight improvements" — such as standing orders, city governors who automatically choose production according to priorities you set, etc. But you still have basically a race, and the game is over way before it's over.

    And some of those self-created story opportunities you crave could be created by improvements to the AI (which is my passion — if anybody wants to make such a game, and wants any help with the AI, call me!). But it'd still be a race.

    Stepping way, way back, any 4X game has positive feedback loops. More resources gives you more ways to get even more resources, and/or stop your opponents from getting as many resources. A tech tree is another (big) such loop. That's not necessarily bad; positive feedback loops towards the end of a game can keep it from dragging on forever (I'm looking at you, Risk). But such feedback in the early game creates the race and walking-dead problems.

    So to mitigate that, I guess you'd want to remove the positive feedback loops in the early game, so that it is flat (all players progress at the same rate regardless of how much they're progressed already), or even negative (the farther behind a player is, the faster they progress). These risk demotivating the player, but maybe not; whoever's in first could still be in first, just without an ever-widening lead.

    How to translate that to 4X terms, though? The positive-feedback loop is a big part of what gives you that continuous drip of accomplishment. Like the idle-clicker games, those feedback numbers (resources, income, whatever) need to get bigger and bigger to give you the same feeling of accomplishment for having done your turn.

    But... what if all the players were intertwined, like the modern world economy? Something gets invented in one country, it's quickly copied by other countries. The inventor is still ahead for having invented it first, but they don't stay ahead if they don't keep innovating. So doggedly trying to bring this back to game terms:
    • The cost of discovering a technology (or in MoM terms, a spell) is cut in half each time another player discovers it.
    • Whenever you mine/harvest/generate a resource, you keep half, and half is distributed evenly among the other remaining players. (Maybe we can come up with some story explanation for this?)
    These are both negative feedback loops that help the players who are behind more than the players ahead, resulting in a closer game where a losing player might be able to come from behind for the win. It might also present some "leech" strategies where you purposely try not to be the first to research or develop resources, instead mooching off the more aggressive players... but that'd be risky, and probably require considerable skill to pull off.

    Beyond that, I think (again) the key is a good AI, and a good game fiction with lots of interesting events and consequences. Burning fields here should not only result in food shortages for your enemy, but increased food prices (if food can be bought/sold) for everyone, as well as annoying the fish people who live downstream (because of all the ashy run-off). Or whatever.

    Final parting thought. I haven't tried them, but there is a modern game or two where it matters not just what you build, but in detail where and how you build it — I'm thinking of Manufactoria in particular. This brings a whole new dimension (engineering) to what would otherwise be just a 4X game. Manufactoria also has a negative feedback loop: there is only one enemy (the bug-people native to the planet you've invaded), but the more you build up and pollute the environment, the stronger they become. That works because it's a single-player asymmetric game... but I'll quit now before my final thought grows into three thoughts. :)
     
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  18. BoredBoredBored

    BoredBoredBored

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    Simple explanation: reduced resource cost for you means lower cost for everyone you trade with. There are world prices for commodities because we all do trade.

    Sharing the benefits shrinks the lead of the leader, but doesn't eliminate it. Still, it would at least solve the problem of the rivals being completely hopeless (spearmen defending against tanks). One nice thing is that it's simple enough change that someone can probably mod it into an existing 4x game to see if it actually works well at making the game more fun.

    The accomplishments from positive feedback loops probably are the addiction of 'just one more turn'. The trick will be finding some suitable replacements for that.
     
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  19. Clayrp

    Clayrp

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    Please add the city's name to the combat screen when it's attacked. So tired of guessing which one needs attention after battles.
     
  20. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    Holy necro-post, Batman!

    Well, since @Clayrp has already brought this thread back from the grave, I'll ask: did anything ever come of this, @Not_Sure? I thought you (and we, collectively in this thread) had some really good ideas, and I'd love to see something come of it. (And my offer to help out with the AI still stands!)
     
  21. proeliator7

    proeliator7

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    where is download link?
     
  22. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    You know me, I can’t finish anything ever...
     
  23. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    Alas. Finishing stuff is hard, for sure. Really hard, especially when there's always a better idea waiting to grab your attention.

    Well, if you ever come back to this, keep us posted! It still sounds like fun to me.

    - Joe

    P.S. I wonder if the secret in this case is to trick other players into finishing it for you? That is, design it to be highly moddable from the beginning, so that every race, every building, every spell, and all the AI is something players can add/tweak themselves. Get only a thin core up and running, and let players design 90% of the game via building and sharing mods. Use MiniScript for the modding language. Hmm....
     
  24. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    Okay, here goes.....

    (Deep breath)

    I absolutely hate the mod community.

    Ten thousand tons of garbage for every rare pearl, no respect for balance, no respect for cannon, gamers flip out if you suggest that modders should ever receive any form of compensation, and they never finish anything (heh, I know. Right?).

    My first experiences with modders was for Tribes. They made the “Renegade” mod which basically turned every weapon into a machine gun and completely turned the game to a crappy dice roll. It over ran the servers and nearly ruined the game.
     
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  25. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    Well, sure. Finding the pearls among the piles of garbage is the meta-game. :)
     
  26. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    Damn, just rereading all of this took over an hour. How the hell I would ever finish it is a laughable joke.

    Oh,and decreasing the costs of research for everyone who researched it is genius.
     
  27. D6ten

    D6ten

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    Your version has a lot of similarity with my board game take on the game.

    I think mostly of prestige and terror value you had through fear and love. I thought of using it as a currency in exchange for miracles or feats, but abuse of such feats deter the value of terror and love, making it obsolete after a while, hence using it as an expendable currency is the best way in my opinion.

    Also on my take of the game, there is no spell that wizards could trade, for no wizards share anything in common. Even buildings are wildly different. Making strategy vary a lot from race to race.

    Also, making multiple winning conditions allow for great diversion and coming back from what appears has the tail end of progress a possible outcome.

    I don't like the idea of hundreds of spells. I like the idea of uniqueness and variety. Make the diplomatic decisions worth it, even with non-affiliated cities. And make various victory conditions.
     
  28. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

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    I stand with what I said last year.
    Your game needs pig men.:D
     
  29. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    I think a large pool of spells is necessary for the mastery victory.

    It makes sure you have lots of things to do before you get to the winning spell.

    The only change I would make is having the last spell in each school be the mastery spell, but also have every spell researched count towards researching it.

    The original MoM had the flaw that the less spells you could learn, the sooner it popped up.
     
  30. D6ten

    D6ten

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    When I played, most of my spells were unused. But I would love if every race had a different spellbook.
    Wich is the case for my board game.
     
  31. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    Maybe learning each spell could add to your casting skill so everything has some value even if it's not used.
     
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  32. D6ten

    D6ten

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    It very much depends on how your casting skill works. I hate Master of magic concepts of casting skill.

    For my board game, I use two different attributes to encompass it better.

    One is magic power. How much Mana you produce as well as how much casting you can do.

    I also have casting finesse, Wich is the equivalent to an attack roll vs magic defense for those cases were a unit resists your magic.

    I also like the idea of having different ways to stop a magic attack. Some attacks target your pure defense, others target your magic defense. It mostly depends on if the spell has a physical effects (fireball, hurling stones) or not (cloak of fear).

    Gaze attacks, fire breath and such all have a finesse rating for defender to roll against.
     
  33. Blakeley00

    Blakeley00

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    Wow you guys have put a lot of thought into this!!

    Has anyone attempted any sort of development yet? I run the Master of Magic fans Facebook page so everyone will do their nut if you guys are working on something.

    Many fans have tried to recreate MoM (without messing with it too much) and sadly nearly all have failed.
    The only project that has even got close is Master of Magic – Implode’s Multiplayer Edition, a brilliant Open Source Java MoM engine rebuild that supports larger maps, up to 14 players (either Human or AI), and any modern resolution like HD 4K etc. The only stuff it's missing is global AI and some good bug fixing and polishing.

    Although sadly it's creator Implode has gone AWOL and the project has been inactive for a while now.. :(

    But hopefully one day he'll return to it, or someone else will finish what he started due to it being opensource...

    I've recently made a video (as part of a up and coming Civ/Col/MoM/CtP/AlphaC games in HD series) of it if anyone wants to see it:
     
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  34. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

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    Hey @Blakeley00, thanks for jumping in! I don't think any of the developers in this thread have gotten serious about it. It's a good idea, but there are so many good ideas, and so little time...

    I also doubt you'll get much interest around here for working on a Java codebase, however, if that game is open-source then I would guess the graphics are also available? That might be a real time-saver for someone, even if they didn't use the code.
     
  35. Blakeley00

    Blakeley00

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    Exactly.. no doubt his code accesses huge data tables with all the useful spells, abilities, cities, races, units and buildings etc which I believe was built but him and others working on the popular MoM wiki site. And seeing how he coded in certain situations and to solve certain problems could be immensely helpful to someone making a unity MoM game.

    But yeah probably just a pipe dream. Hopefully one day Implode comes back and finishes his project!
     
  36. Not_Sure

    Not_Sure

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    I'm kind of surprised how much traction this thread has had.

    Maybe that's a sign that things are ripe for a fantasy 4x game...
     
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  37. D6ten

    D6ten

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    I would remove the exterminate part of 4x in favor for a rewarding diplomatic system.

    @Blakeley00
    Does his graphics improve on what MOM used? I am actually building a board game and for playtests purpose I would love to save time on Artwork.

    My projects is 12% complete so far in terms of races and gameplay.
    I completed the Goblins spellbook, and units.

    No tests on it yet though and it will most probably change after some testing has been done. The thing is I am as far as I know the only person working on a board game of MoM. All other attempts are either on hold or entirely abandoned. So computer games threads like this one offers more to me in terms of interest and feedback than board game geek.

    I will look for the MoM Facebook page.
     
  38. tppubl

    tppubl

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    So is it done yet?
    :)
    ok I played if for many years and I have tons of other things to do but I still revisit MoM, and I had the magic item designer mod and seem to remember a multi-player mod.
    So end-game city management was a time sink - saved build orders by race would help
    Take a look at the Fall from Heaven mod for Civ IV (No it was never done for later Civ's) end game balance isn't too bad - imo that's about how off-the-wall game content was pitched to ensure power levels attained in the end game had decent challenges.
     
    Last edited: Jul 22, 2019
  39. Blakeley00

    Blakeley00

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    No Implode used original art assets so no fancy graphics sorry haha. Did you join the Master of Magic fans Facebook page? I'm sure some of the fans there would be interested. There's also the Realms Beyond MoM forum and the GoG moM forum. Pretty much the last MoM forums out there sadly!

    HOWEVER.. BIG FRIGGIN NEWS GUYS!!!!!!!!

    Looks like I don't have to worry about the unfinished fan remake I posted above anymore as it appears we've got an official Master of Magic sequel or Remake on way (courtesy of Slitherine who've bought the rights from Atari's IP dungeon and just made the announcement on their site)!!!

    Guess this explains the mysterious Atari activities I noticed recently. Clearly they reacquired MoM so they could sell it to Slitherine for $$$.

    I'm such a super fan of this 25 year old game that I'm SUPER EXCITED about this news lol.

    I can't can't believe that after all these years a real sequel just might be happening now. Sadly most of the old MoM forums are long dead so if there's any fans here who know of a good old MoM2 wishlist/feature request list out there please let me know and I'll go post it over on the Slitherine forums (which I've just signed up to). In fact this thread might be a good source as you guys posted a lot of 'wish list' stuff in here!

    They've probably barely started the project yet so now is the time to get fan feature requests and wish list items in front of their faces. If the remaining fan base doesn't speak up now then god knows what sort of game we'll end up with. So now is the time to act!

    My list:

    • BIG ONE - More than 4 enemy players. Implode's MoM HD Multiplayer Remake allowed EVERY wizard in one game for super 14 player games which would have bee EPIC and so much fun had he finished the project.
    • Larger maps (Insectiside fan patch added huge map size to the original)
    • Limited Spying (most fantasy rpgs have thieves/rogues so it fits and stealing spells would be fun)
    • Time limit and bigger cost on time stop spell (if you're planning on having that annoying spell again)
    • Demand or give cities in Diplomacy (most 4x games have this now and I like using it to play god/peacekeep and save bullied Civs and minor factions from deaths door)
    • Expand Grey Neutral Faction into lots of minor factions with identities and race affiliations (eg a minor Elven race with a minor elf wizard that likes Elven main civs and makes trouble for others.. this is another thing done in modern 4x fantasy and space games)
    • More worlds and/or an underground world (although this has already been done before in AoW, HoMM & Warlock series)
    • More ocean content eg HoMM series filled oceans with shipwreck lairs and treasures (even Morrowind had underwater caves filled with creatures and treasure so this is not new to fantasy games). You could even have a Merfolk faction with cities in the ocean. The fun Fantasy and Midgard scenarios for Civilization 2 Test of Time had a good underwater Merfolk faction with lots of sea based units/creatures.
    • Not essential but some cool weather effects would be a fun immersion factor (especially as you can tie spells into them for gameplay events such as huge storms and earthquakes etc). The Official Playstation remake of Master of Magic has clouds rolling over and some cool weather effects from spells. The new Civ6 addon Gathering Storm is another good example of world changing weather effects.
    • Talk to Seravy, he's da man on all things MoM and the creator of the super popular MoM overhaul mod Caster of Magic

    EDIT: BIG NEWS! Slitherine have indeed spoken to Seravy as they releasing his Caster of Magic as an official DLC to Master of Magic on Steam and GoG!!!
    https://blakessanctum.wordpress.com...agic-master-of-magic-mod-is-now-on-steam-gog/

    EDIT2: On top of that Slitherine have also now setup an official Master of Magic forum! And they've kindly moved my ever growing MoM2 wishlist thread into there too. :)
    http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=590

    EDIT3:
    And if all that isn't enough Seravy has hinted that he is working on a Caster of Magic 2! A full MoM rebuild in a new engine with all of CoM's changes built in and much more due to being free of the old games limitations. Eg full 14 wizard salughterfest games!!


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    Last edited: May 3, 2021
  40. Blakeley00

    Blakeley00

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2019
    Posts:
    7
    WOAH!!! The good news keeps coming for MoM fans. After years Implode has returned from his self imposed exile (think kungfu movie where the bad guy bests the good guy so the good guy climbs up a mountain and learns better kungfu with some old guy with a grey beard who never speaks and then the good guy comes back and kicks the bad guys ass lol) and released a new version of his HD Multiplayer remake of Master of Magic with for the first time FUNCTIONING AI!! This is the moment many like me have been waiting/hoping for.. hopefully people try it and give him some feedback!

    Announcement: https://mom.pjj.cc/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9815

    Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/momime/files/

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  41. Blakeley00

    Blakeley00

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2019
    Posts:
    7
    Big news! Looks like Seravy's Caster of Magic 2 (possibly renamed to 'Caster of Magic for Windows' now probably by Slitherine lol) is coming out of private beta and going public on steam soon.

    What is also very interesting is that it says on the announcement that it supports custom resizable windows and presumably resolutions! I'll try to confirm that since that would be awesome news as Seravy had zero interest in higher viewing resolutions when I last talked to him about it (eg he was gonna keep it at 320x200 still lol). Maybe Slitherine or all his beta testers kept pestering him about it and he found a way to do it lol. Either way it's great news. Modern resolutions plus full 13 Wizard slaughterthon games are gonna be epic! Have wishlisted! Before anyone asks no it is not multiplayer lol (try Master of Magic - Implodes Multiplayer edition remake for that).

    https://steamcommunity.com/games/1146370/announcements/detail/3055100754907446252

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  42. Blakeley00

    Blakeley00

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2019
    Posts:
    7
    A little late to the party with this even bigger news but OMG lol.. After 25 years of nothing it really is an amazing time for us diehard Master of Magic fans! There I was a few weeks ago getting excited about Seravy’s new Caster of Magic 2 for Windows release and then something even more amazing got officially announced, as we finally have confirmation of the Slitherine mystery MoM project I’ve posted about here before! Slitherine are working with Thea series creators MuHa games on a Official Master of Magic Remake!!! MuHa are a small indie studio so sure enough it's nothing AAA however the new remake already looks and sounds pretty good! I can already see people complaining about the hexes and lack of multiplayer but neither of those bother me. Super excited about this!!


    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623070/Master_of_Magic/


    Trailer/Intro:




    Dev Interview:

     
  43. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

    Joined:
    Aug 4, 2013
    Posts:
    2,074
    Wow! Someone revived this semi old topic. Cool!
     
  44. c-Row

    c-Row

    Joined:
    Nov 10, 2009
    Posts:
    847
    Currently developing my own (very small) 4X game this thread is an endless source of ideas and inspiration. :) Sometimes reviving an old topic is a beautiful thing.
     
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  45. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2011
    Posts:
    9,859
    One thing I hope you'll include is modding — adding new races, events, spells (if applicable), etc. to a game like this would be a ton of fun and could keep your game feeling fresh and alive for many years!
     
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  46. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

    Joined:
    Aug 4, 2013
    Posts:
    2,074
    Updates or some free fun dlc story missions, after every couple of months, might be a good thing to keep the game alive, interesting, and fun too.
     
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  47. Blakeley00

    Blakeley00

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2019
    Posts:
    7
    Haven't updated this thread in a while with all the latest official Master of Magic remake dev diaries and I thought I'd better post about their latest 9th dev diary as that has a application link for people to apply to be involved in beta testing! So if there's any lurking MoM fans here who want in on that, go apply now!

    Ninth Dev diary:
    http://muhagames.com/master-of-magic-dev-diary-9/




    For those who haven't seen all the previous dev diaries here they are...

    Eight dev diary
    http://muhagames.com/master-of-magic-dev-diary-8-february-2022/




    Seventh dev diary
    http://muhagames.com/master-of-magic-dev-diary-7-january-2022/




    Sixth dev diary
    http://muhagames.com/mom-dev-diary-6-december-2021/




    Fifth dev diary
    http://muhagames.com/dev-diary-5-november-2021/




    Fourth dev diary
    http://muhagames.com/mom-dev-diary-4-october-2021/




    Third dev diary
    https://muhagames.com/mom-dev-diary-3-september-2021/




    Second dev diary
    http://muhagames.com/mom-dev-diary-2-august-2021/




    First dev diary
    http://muhagames.com/dev-diary-1-june-2021/


     
    c-Row likes this.
  48. c-Row

    c-Row

    Joined:
    Nov 10, 2009
    Posts:
    847
    Seems like they made slightly more progress than I did. :D
     
  49. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

    Joined:
    Aug 4, 2013
    Posts:
    2,074
    Yeah, true.:)