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Let's Explore Magical Worlds - A Master of Magic Let's Play (With Mods)!

Second Duke Revier

Second Duke Revier

It's about time I Let's Played my favorite game of all time - Master of Magic. For most fantasy 4x enthusiasts, this game needs no introduction, but this is considered by many to be the grandfather of the genre, and a timeless classic that largely still holds up today, despite some quirks.

The long and short of it is that these games are about ruling over a wizard empire as a heavily customizable wizard emperor, with many traits and spells. And that's not all. Every playthrough is different, because the map, enemy wizards, and lairs all get randomized on every game. This game combines city management, deeply strategic combat, exciting treasure hunts and rpg style hero building all in one!



For the purposes of this Let's Play, I'll be using two mods. The first, Caster of Magic for Windows, is actually sold on Steam itself, and can be bought from here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1557960/Master_of_Magic_Caster_of_Magic_for_Windows/ It's a standalone recreation of the original mod on a new engine. The second, Caster of Magic for Windows: Warlord (henceforth referred to as Warlords), is a comprehensive mod of this mod, hosted at ModDB: https://www.moddb.com/mods/caster-o...magic-for-windows-warlord-1595-for-com2-10509 Both of these mods aim at fixing what I feel were severe deficiencies in the original game, mainly in terms of how much "oomph" spells had, and how usable summons were. The first mod is a little controversial in terms of its design, but the second mod fixes most of its flaws and adds some very cool things that make the experience considerably more interesting.

Now, LPing any longwinded strategy game is no easy task, and that goes doubly so for this game, which can often see grueling stalemates develop thanks to some realms countering others hard. My plan is to weave compelling stories around the wizards and empires I try out, instead of giving a turn by turn report of the game, though of course there'll be some insights into how the game plays. To that end, I'll also let the game randomize my wizards, to showcase just how much variety and flexibility the game has.

Alright, hopefully that's enough to get a solid start. Next time, the LP begins in earnest! See you all then!

Table of Contents

1. Big Spookums, Part 1
2. Big Spookums, Part 2
3. Big Spookums, Part 3
4. Big Spookums, Part 4
5. Big Spookums, Part 2-1
 
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Hell yeah, MoM is a GOAT. And one that still holds up surprisingly well! Anyone who hasn't given it a try is really missing out.
 
I've played so much MoM over the years. I remember installing the original from a stack of 3.5" floppies. I didn't love Caster of Magic, but I didn't realize there were further mods of it, so I'm interested to hear about that.

(Also: All Death books -> Wraiths is probably the most broken start in the game, with the easy takeover of every neutral town and leaving a stack of free zombie defenders in your wake.)
 


For the very first game, I roll this guy. He starts with 2 Sorcery books, 6 Death books and 1 Life book. Books determine how many spells the wizard starts with, as well as the spells they can access through research. As you can see, picking so many Death books also allows choosing which spells to start with, as well as which spells get guaranteed in the next tier. The default selection here is good enough, so I don't mess with it; I'll bring up what the spells do as I (or an enemy wizard/unit) use them.

Picking 2 Sorcery books allows choosing exactly one (1) Common spell from the Sorcery realm. While seemingly measly, it can still be fairly powerful. I pick Resist Magic to offset the bad resistance of Death's summons.

1 Life book doesn't offer any choice, but does add some Common Life spells for research. Considering that Life's Common spells are among the strongest Common spells around, this isn't really a bad thing.

Finally, let's look at the words on the bottom. These represent the wizard's traits, which offer unique benefits outside of their spells. They can be obtained at the cost of some books, and indeed, some powerful wizard builds sacrifice a bunch of books to rely on stacking the right traits.

Anyway, Channeler makes this wizard hurl spells for the same mana cost, regardless of how far the battle is from his capital. Normally, wizards pay a markup based on distance, which goes up to three times the original cost for distant fights! Naturally, this makes participating in distant battles more viable, and skirmishing more effective. This is actually considered one of the most powerful traits, and the game even acknowledges its power by having it cost 2 books!

Benefactor, on the other hand, is an interesting trait. It makes heroes and mercenaries show up for hire more often, and buffs any heroes under the wizard's hire. It also makes artifact merchants show up more often. Artifacts, to put it simply, are heroes' equipment, worn to boost their stats and grant them magical powers. Basically this is a very hero centric retort. I will try to use some of them in this playthrough, but they are a bit fickle by nature, and circumstances may work against them.



That being done, I pick a color, and let the game roll the wizard's capital's race. It picks Orcs, which, contrary to what most fantasy would have you believe, are just a jack of all trades, excelling at nothing, but not being poor at anything either. They're meant to be a "beginner" race, letting new players learn the nuances of city building and regular units with hands on experience. As such, they're a great fit for this game.

The empire starts pretty small, with just a capital, two spearmen, and two settlers. The capital itself is modest, supplying 7 gold and 16 food. Of the latter, each 1000 units of population, represented by the figures of orcish figures near the top, eats 2 food, and the four units currently available eat 1 food each, leaving only 2 food as surplus. Gold can be stockpiled, but food can't be. Presumably it rots when left for too long, and storage facilities can only do so much.

The capital also supplies labor and power. Labor simply depicts the amount of labor that gets utilized for any productive activities, like making buildings or units, and power is what fuels your wizard's spells, research and casting skill. The labor here comes mainly from the populace, obviously, and the power comes from the wizard's tower, which is part of every capital.



Now, let's look at how the power is distributed. As you can see, there's 20 whole power, which is roughly equally split between researching new spells, generating mana for spellcasting, and improving spellcasting potency to be able to cast more spells quicker. Right now, our power is too pathetic to support all of them at once, and being a Death heavy wizard means focusing on summons, which, well, need to be summoned via their respective spells, so I'll be channeling all of the power to mana production for now.

The Alchemy button lets you turn mana to gold, or vice versa. It's a pretty nifty and important feature, considering how much spellcasting is involved in this game, and makes it so that a strong "mundane" economy can support a wizard pretty well. Conversions have a 2:1 rate, so a fair amount of resources do get "lost" in the process, but mana is usually more important than gold, and with proper planning it's not too hard to raise a good amount of it. I convert my measly 80 pieces of gold into 40 mana to get my spellcasting going.



Here's our first glorious army - two Ghouls! 😆Ghouls are pretty strong creatures actually, with decent ranged and melee attacks, a whole slew of immunities, and, most importantly, the ability to turn their victims undead. Their major weakpoints are their speed, their low resistance (which does become a problem against the things they're not immune to), and their relatively high casting cost. It's hard to amass them, but if you can manage it, they're pretty powerful early on.



Their first fight is against a singular ghost in a ruined temple. I know, not very exciting. But it does give them an opportunity to destroy the lair before it can become a threat to the empire by spawning monsters, and also lets them pilfer its loot for the great glory of their wizard! Lol. Lairs often have substantial rewards and can be undermined with the right tricks for little expense, making them quite profitable. Besides, you want to take them anyway, why risk having monsters knock down the cities you worked so hard to build?



Speaking of! The capital is coming nicely, having built a marketplace for more money, a library for more research, a dock for the production of ships and also food, and now stables for cavalry and some additional productivity. Cavalry are rather brittle units, but they have amazing movement clearance, allowing them to work excellently as scouts and skirmishers. Not only that, they also strike first, meaning that, as long as they can do enough damage to kill their target, they will escape getting hit by a counterattack.

This is a pretty powerful ability, actually, as attacks and counterattacks normally are delivered at the same time, meaning most melee fighters are going to take some damage, no matter what. That being said, their frailty and poor stats mean that they aren't going to see much fighting, at least not in this playthrough.



It doesn't take long for them to find a inhabitation outside the empire. This is a small, sleepy village of Gnolls. With two ordinary swordsmen guarding it, it's not exactly a hard conquest, and the ghouls conveniently turn them to our side! Gnolls are a pretty good find though, excelling at creating strong military units which can deal oodles of damage. The defenses on them are a bit lackluster, and they are poor economically, but the capital, and later, the empire can easily make up for that.



Speaking of which, the two starting settlers have been settled, and have grown into small villages. Of course, they're not very productive, having very few people and next to no infrastructure, but with time, this will change.



Let's end this with a look at our first hero. He's an archer with healing spells who costs no money, grants 10 gold per turn, negates the penalties of movement tiles in the stack he's on, and raises the resistance of all units in his stack! This is pretty good, and a good sign of what you can expect from later heroes - he's actually one of the weakest heroes you can hire! That being said, he showed up this early only because of my wizard's Benefactor trait - normally heroes are extremely finicky about even showing up! I hire him because of course. Why wouldn't you?!

Alright, that's enough for the first session. A lot of time had to go into explaining the mechanics, and this early on you usually don't get to meet other wizards or fight memorable battles. But not to worry, things will become more interesting, and very soon. See you then!
 


The interim period was mostly spent summoning ghouls, building up the cities economically, and exploring more of the land. The scouting cavalry eventually came in contact with three wizards, but nothing much came of it...yet. Eventually, I had amassed enough ghouls to attempt assaulting this lair. It consisted of three hell hounds and fire elementals each.

Hell Hounds are Chaos realm's Common summon, and are essentially light cavalry, dealing decent damage with their attack and fire breath, and having high speed, but lacking in defenses. Fire Breath works sort of like First Strike, dealing damage before regular melee combat begins. It only works on the attack, much like First Strike. Fire Elementals boast a variety of resistances, but are most notable for their unique attacks, relying heavily on their fire breath and immolating touch. The latter deals damage to all figures in a unit, meaning they're very effective against high figure units, like most regular units trained at cities.

Anyhow, the key to handling both of them is fighting them at range, which my army is thankfully well equipped to do. In addition, I cast Darkness to boost all of the ghouls' stats save HP by 1. This may seem like a small buff, but is actually quite strong, considering ghouls have four figures and the game has each figure execute an attack while fighting an enemy unit. Further, each point of resistance actually helps a ton, considering they effectively raises resistance against curses and such by 10%, each. Basically, Darkness, despite looking rather paltry and simplistic, is actually a considerable buff, and will continue to remain relevant in any fights involving my Death creatures or the undead they raise.



Anyway, the long and short of it is that the battle was easily won, and the ghouls raised two undead hell hounds in its aftermath. The fire elementals sadly can't be raised, as they are non corporeal, and undead magic requires having a physical body to manipulate.

Turning on to political matters, one of the three wizards, Kali, took a liking to my wizard, as she shared a deep taste in Death magic. To display her admiration, she offered a pact between his empire and hers. Wizard pacts are an agreement between two wizards to not aggress against each other. Additionally, the player is forced to evacuate any armies within a three tile radius of any of the signatory wizard's cities to maintain it. The upside is, the pact improves the player's standing with the signed wizard, and can eventually grow into a full fledged military alliance. Which itself has some perks and downsides of its own, but we'll get to that later. Having a guarantee of no aggression is itself great however, considering how opportunistic MoM wizards can be and how devastating an unexpected attack often is.



To sweeten the deal, my wizard also acquired this spell by trading with her. Yes, spells can be traded for, and many smart players use and abuse this to get strong spells far earlier than they normally would. Spells can also be learnt from lairs, and indeed, my wizard did learn one other spell from vanquishing that lair, Blur.

Anyhow, as you can tell from the spell description, this improves the player wizard's standing with all other wizards. And by a fairly solid measure, at that. My friend often says that it can cool wizards off "even the worst of behavior", and that is, as far as I can tell, essentially true. Naturally, I make my wizard cast it as soon as he gets it.



Which is ironic, because I soon made him invade Merlin's territory. I did this because he was pretty close, lying directly west of the current empire, and his disposition made it clear that he was getting aggravated by my wizard's books and would eventually attack him, sooner or later. His empire is mainly Klackons, a race of extremely productive, though asocial ants. They're often not very well liked by players because their military is thoroughly mediocre and limited, and their economic potential is hard to exploit with other starting races, thanks to their asocial tendencies making them prone to rebellion when controlled by other races.

That aside, this was a bit of a tough battle, as his soldiers, while looking unassuming, had two buffs pushing up their defense considerably, making most of the ghouls' shots do pitiful damage! Luckily, I had hired a unit of gladiators, and their resistance was still rather pathetic, despite all the buffing. I took advantage of this by buffing the gladiators with Cloak of Fear, which frightened their attackers into not dealing damage in melee! This let the army pull through, turning what would have been a close shave a victory.



After that, the war took a bit of a backseat as my wizard spent his time getting Aura of Majesty up. However, I ferried over some undead troops and combined them with the newly raised soldiers to capture a second city, and with some griffin riders, extremely powerful flying fighters, joining as mercenaries, Merlin knew his time was up, and quickly asked for a reprieve. The funny thing is, I had trained precisely no actual soldiers for fighting yet, relying solely on ghouls and their raised undead, with some choice mercenaries occasionally thrown in. Goes to show how powerful they are, I guess.



And with that, I end this session. Depicted here is the state of the land explored so far. Kali, to the southeast, is marked by purple, and is currently a staunch ally. Merlin, to the west and roughly within the centre of east, is marked by grey. The pink wizard in the west is Ariel, and is going to be my next target, actually. All of the colored bits of map were filled in by me, as the vanilla map is rather hard to read. Our empire is doing pretty well, having occupied three new cities and cut an enemy empire in half. But it's still the early days, and there's still much to be done - the game doesn't end until either all wizards are defeated, or a special spell sealing all their powers is cast. And we won't be seeing the latter for a LONG time, if at all...

Let's hope for the best! Thanks for reading!
 
I just played a round of the 2022 official remake of this; and I've also played the unofficial remakes Worlds of Magic and Planar Conquest. If at some point you feel it appropriate I can talk about them.
 


Most of this session was spent consolidating, with ghouls converting rampaging monsters into undead. The campaign against Ariel was rather uneventful, because the two cities grabbed from her were poorly defended, and with the empire growing, defending it became a bigger concern.



Naturally, then, attention turned to clearing out other, stronger lairs. This one was infested with boars, but thanks to a bit of trickery and a strong hero, they were easily dealt with.

That hero, by the way, is a Warrior Mage. As you'd expect, he's a blend of a warrior and a wizard, having several powerful spells, casting skill, and a strong ranged attack, but also good defense and melee attack. His defenses are further boosted by Agility, a skill that grants additional defense per level. His version is a boosted variant of it, which grants 2 defense every other level instead of 1! And to top everything off, he gains mana while engaging in melee. Scary stuff!

In the fight above, he helped by casting flight on himself, then buffing the griffins with cloak of fear, letting them attack the boars with near impunity. Then, as if to add insult to injury, he blasted them apart with his ranged shots, while being completely impervious to them - in this game, flying makes a unit immune to all regular melee attacks. The opposing unit needs either breath, thrown weapons, or its own flight to be able to fight them in melee.



The monotony was broken with a second campaign launched against Merlin, this time targeting his settlements on my starting continent. By now he had picked up Prayer, which was rather concerning as it raised the hit rate and evasion on all his units in battle by 10%. This may sound insignificant, but it really isn't - they apply to every single attack and defend, respectively. To put it simply, every single point of attack rolls the unit's hit rate to land, and every single point of defense rolls the unit's evasion to block damage. This makes for a slightly swingy, yet surprisingly deep system, with a fair bit of nuance to each unit's stats.

Mechanical talk aside, the buff did swing the fight in his favor, with the ghouls rendered nearly helpless, but the griffin riders, with some buffs cast on them, and the two heroes prevailed. My second hero in the combat here was the War Monk, a beefy guy with high defense from super Agility, complete immunity to all curses from Charmed, a considerable boost to my wizard's fame, making him pay less in troop upkeep, and two healing spells! Talk about a beast, heh.



The fight did cost a considerable chunk of the army, however, so they had to wait for reinforcements, which would come from the random mercenaries approaching my wizard. In the meantime, though, they spent their time beating up Merlin's scattered forces and trying to raise them as undead. They even got a few units out of it, but unfortunately, Merlin was capable of exorcising them in combat. Exorcism is an instant death spell designed specifically for killing the undead, gaining a whopping -3 resistance modifier against them. Thankfully the spell was single target, so with enough of a mass, it wouldn't be a problem, but it was still quite obnoxious.

Eventually I raised a core of sea hags and crusaders, and they were pretty well suited to the job, with the sea hags being capable of targeting the Klackon soldiers' mediocre resistance in multiple ways, and the Crusaders having high defense as well as a charge of Holy Armor, which buffed the evasion of its target by 10%. As I explained earlier, this stat, despite seeming mild, is actually quite impactful. 10% in particular is actually a fairly big swing, considering that almost all units start with only 30% hitrate and evasion! Anyway, with this army I cleared off Merlin's easternmost settlement on my continent, but this city remained out of reach, thanks to the presence of a Dervish buffing the resistance of its garrison considerably, and closing off potential use of my tools against it - at least not without killing him off!



On the diplomacy front, things remained quite cheerful, Merlin's war aside. My scouting spirit got me in touch with another Death wizard in the distance, Resheph, and while there was no meaningful interaction possible, he was quite glad to meet another wizard with a real passion for Death magic, and traded him Shadow Strike. Kali meanwhile traded him this, which is an unassumingly powerful instant death spell. Yep. You heard that right. It's "balanced" by keeping the target alive for the duration of the fight, and being capable of being dispelled, but it's still exceptionally strong for what it does.

With that, we end this session. Here's a look at the map in its current state:



Our empire has grown considerably, hasn't it? The western part of it is a bit vulnerable, as it's close to Merlin's core territory. There's also considerably more of the world that needs to be uncovered. Hopefully, it shall keep growing and being prosperous, and hopefully there shall be fewer roadblocks going forward. Until next time!
 
Merlin was, as you'd expect, furious at the loss of most of his territory. He marched a decently sized army to my westernmost cities on his continent, and they were quite threatened, as ghouls, who had been used to strengthen their garrison, had now firmly fallen off as combat capable units.



Thankfully, I had the tools to quickly get my two heroes there, with wraithform letting them freely cross terrain, and blocking his spiders' web, to boot! Wraithform is carefully calibrated to counter a fair few effects from the Nature realm, and as such, is a huge source of frustration for Nature wizards, and a huge boon while fighting them.



The heroes held for a while, but unfortunately, they were eventually done in by Merlin's own mercenaries and armorer's guild units! These units then attacked my westernmost city and mercilessly slaughtered its garrison. I was running into a serious bind, that of facing a Life wizard's regular armies without powerful summons of my own.



Luckily, I soon researched Lycanthropy, which allowed me to convert spearmen to werewolves. Werewolves are an interesting unit, being essentially souped up halberdiers with fewer immunities than other Death summons, but capable of regenerating themselves out of most wounds, including the complete destruction of their unit! Further, they also gained attack power as they took damage. Sadly these units were not capable of fighting Merlin's stronger forces, but they stopped any further incursions. And with my wizard's ally, Kali, declaring war on him, his resources were exhausted, and he sued for peace.



With peace came the time to rebuild, and also to seek a solution to Merlin's stronger armies. This is a common downside of Death - towards the mid game it starts to fall off in power, as Ghouls become outdated thanks to their early game-y stats, and Werewolves aren't great for going on the offensive against well defended cities. I tried to find a solution for this by creating another band of heroes and making them hunt lairs alongside werewolves.

Sadly, aside from two Sorcery nodes, every other lair was too potentially dangerous to risk attacking. Nodes are interesting though, because they're a very unique kind of lair. They are attuned to one of the three elemental realms, Sorcery, Chaos and Nature, and they randomly block spells that aren't from their realm. They also boost the stats of the units belonging to those realms, making them considerably harder to fight. As such, they tend to be tougher than most regular lairs. In exchange though, they provide a solid source of power, with tougher nodes giving considerably more power.

However, harnessing this is not as straightforward as simply clearing the node. It has to be assigned a spirit that melds with it, channeling its power to the wizard's reserves. This is an irreversible process, and as such, the spirit is destroyed and can't be reassigned to do anything else. Furthermore, once the node is cleared, it becomes a "free" tile which any unit can step into. This means any wizard can claim the node for their own if it's undefended. Thus, nodes require guards, which can add considerably to micromanagement demands and put additional strain on an empire. In most cases, though, the power generated is worthwhile, and offsets the upkeep and clearing demands.



Research on new spells continued steady progress, unlocking this powerful defensive spell! Not only did it put a magic countering field in the enchanted city, it also provided a decent bit of gold and boosted my wizard's combat casting skill! And that wasn't all; trade provided him with Spell Lock, a powerful spell for protecting enchantments and summons, as well as a few Life Commons. He also got to meet another wizard, Druk'gyalpo, through exploration, though sadly this wizard was too far to meaningfully establish relations with.



At long last, I finally found something strong enough to mount another offensive, albeit a smaller scaled one. Wyvern riders are normally considered to be subpar flying units, as by the time they're unlocked, many units have too much resistance to be affected by their poisonous strikes, which is their main defining feature. However, this was certainly not the case for Merlin or Ariel's troops, and so preparations were made to attack the former again.



Well, it was a pretty tough battle, but as you can see, I succeeded! Black Prayer, a spell that knocks down all stats except resistance and HP by 1, and resistance specifically by 2, had been researched by this point, and proved to be a great help in conjunction with Cloak of Fear. The werewolves were a bit blunted against his Prayer boosted units, but were still strong enough frontliners, and thanks to their regeneration, all of their fallen resurrected themselves back after the fight. The wyvern riders definitely proved effective, with Black Prayer making their poison outright deadly, and Cloak of Fear stopping them from ever landing a good hit!

Sadly I did lose two heroes, but with time, they will be replaced, and with the continent now finally in my wizard's hands, with one corner occupied by his ally, I feel a lot more confident. Here's to hoping for continued success, and a permanent solution to the current stalemate. Until next time!
 
I am restarting the playthrough to better cover the game. It turns out that making the computer randomly pick wizards isn't great for Expert difficulty, which, despite its name, is intended to be the "default" difficulty for regular players of the game. So let's go about picking a new wizard.



I pick 5 Sorcery and Death books each, and then pick the Conjurer and Cult Leader traits. Conjurer makes summons cheaper to research, cast and maintain, and given that Death is reliant on summoning, this only makes logical sense.



The other trait, Cult Leader, buffs the effect of religious buildings. This is nice when used in conjunction with races capable of building a wide range of them, and also synergizes well with a Rare spell in Death that buffs them ever further!



Having this ample selection of books gives my wizard 4 Common spells to start with, and 1 Uncommon spell to guarantee in the spellbook. I pick Resist Magic to offset the bad resistance of Death's summons, Floating Island to have a reliable and less vulnerable source of transport for my armies, Phantom Warriors to deal reliable damage to enemies pulling close to my units, and Nagas in case my Ghouls run into anything too sturdy to directly damage. For the Uncommon, I pick Confusion, as, with Black Prayer available at roughly the same time, it's going to be extra effective at getting rid of threats.



Here are my Death spell picks. It's pretty hard picking Death Commons since they have quite a fair selection of good spells, but I ultimately went with Weakness to cripple enemies in the early and midgame, Cloak of Fear to similarly render melee enemies useless, especially in swarm situations, Ghouls as my main summon and Wraith Form to take advantage of weapon immunity and freely cross bad terrain, if needed.

One thing to note about buffs here - barring the creation of a "doom" stack, an exceptionally strong army that can easily take down most of its opponents with either no or minimal casualties, buffs are best used either in combat, or on heroes. Needless to say, aside from Resist Magic, the buffs here do not enable a doom stack, and so are only going to be pulled out when the opportunity arises.

The Uncommon is Black Prayer, which is a fairly obvious choice, considering how much Death relies on targeting resistance. I could pick Shadow Demons, but truth is, their ranged attack is pretty mediocre too, they only out damage Ghouls because of their high hit rate. With five books in two schools of magic, we're likely to find a good Uncommon summon when the time comes.

As for the race, I picked orcs, partly because neither Death nor Sorcery care too much about regular units, and partly because orcs have both pretty good economic infrastructure as well as some decently robust regular units should it become necessary to rely on them.



This game started my wizard out on a tiny island, with a wizard staking their claim to a continent nearby. Luckily, he had a weak claim over it, being severed from his capital by a string of neutral cities and having little that could stand up to a mass of ghouls.



That being said, he wasn't one to be taken lightly. The combination of Life and Chaos realms is extremely potent in the late game, allowing the wizard to turn their regular soldiers into demigods, while also spreading general destruction throughout the world.

Thankfully, getting there would take him considerable time, and Death is at its best in the early game, where it can prey with near impunity. As such, it didn't take very long for my wizard to exert his authority and capture his cities, and then most of the (known) continent for himself.

The Dervish, Sage, Druid and Rogue all joined my wizard's employ. While my wizard didn't have Benefactor nor Life spells, and thus couldn't make them as powerful as they were in the first game, they were still welcome as capable defenders of the capital, freeing up ghouls to garrison other cities and farm undead from the rampaging monsters that sought to throw themselves at them.

I did mention how Wraithform could come in handy against weapon immunity, and how Cloak of Fear could further no sell melee units with bad to mediocre resistance. Well, here's some examples of that. Check out this lopsided victory, where three skeletons handled a gnollish garrison on their own:



Or what about this one, where a single coatl took on a Hawkmen city all on its own? And before you ask, yes, ghouls raised it as an undead unit. In fact they got quite a good variety of undead, with sprites, wargs coatls and nagas all rising up in service of my wizard.



Curiously, Druk'gyalpo was willing to trade my wizard Bloodlust for Darkness after the end of their little war. Though, sadly, he declared war at the end of the session because he disliked that my wizard had grown considerably more powerful, especially since it came at the expense of his territory. I'm not too worried about him though, the map makes his limited influence pretty clear:



Already this session is going considerably better than my earlier game. I feel great about it, here's hoping this game sees a definite success! Until next time.
 
I think I misunderstood and thought you'd show off the base game and then talk about the differences. My bad!
 
Heads up that I'm putting this LP on hiatus for a bit, as I'm currently testing some modifications of my own to make it play better. There was discussion elsewhere about some rough spots of balance, and how best to fix them. Good news is, from what I've tested, my fixes seem to be working pretty well! Hopefully I can complete comprehensively testing them soon and return back to the LP. Apologies for the delays.
 
So, I’ve been playing Master of Magic on and off since the mid-90s, when a friend of mine let me borrow his disks to install it on my parents’ PC. (Amusingly, I didn’t realize that the artifacts were customizable and that he’d added a bunch of items relating to our friend circle’s in-jokes. I just figured they were bigger references to something I didn’t get.) Then I played a cracked version of this on DOSBox, and once Good Old Games was a thing, I bought it through them. I also tried out the Caster of Magic mod that is one of the base mods being used here. I’m going to dig out my reviews of them and post them here for your amusement.

Master of Magic – Caster of Magic Mod

25 years after the original game came out, there’s an enhancement mod that redoes the enemy AI, adds quality-of-life improvements, changes some of the buildings and racial modifiers, removes some of the broken bits and generally makes it a better game. And GOG just happened to advertise it to me.

I played a couple of hours of the new game as Horus, ran into trouble a bunch of times, and then went back and I actually played a quick game of the original on Easy to refresh myself. Then I used the same setup (an all-Death custom wizard) to play the new mod. Among noteworthy changes: You can’t take a full suite of a single color (and the high-level spells it imparts); which means I couldn’t just cast Wraiths and use that to streamroller every town in my path. Classic MoM included a lot of empty caves, dungeons and ruins that you could just snag some gold or mana from. In CoM, everything has monsters in it, though your scouts are better at reporting “a few” or “many” monsters. I also felt like my units (especially heroes) were weaker and enemy units (especially fantastic beasts) were stronger, which meant clearing out those ruins (and towers and nodes) was not an early- or even mid-game task.

The enemy wizard AI is dramatically improved, but then again, so is in-battle AI of all enemies. Wizard Pacts and alliances actually seem to mean something, though how close your units can get to their towns (accidentally or otherwise) seems to be highly variable. Also, they’ll happily march their troops into your territory without regard for treaties and then complain that you have too many armies. Wandering/rampaging monsters seem to come in much bigger stacks and aim for poorly-defended towns. (If I did a save/restart after they destroyed a town, then summoned troops to defend that town, they’d veer off and attack somewhere else. “Rampaging,” my ass.) You need to build and maintain bigger armies than in Classic MoM for defense, even deep into your own territory. For that matter, troops seem to get less XP for just existing, which means that the early troops parked in your capital won’t slowly become Elite just by existing.

I did appreciate that though the enemy heroes had items (and used them), I got to claim those items after killing the heroes. I also really liked that the Colosseum building that was added to the tech tree gives you Fame and also quells unrest. It seems like there are more buildings that give you power, but money bonuses were clearly also boosted, as I ended up with a ton of cash with very little to spend it on. (Admittedly, I was turning most defeated enemies into undead to guard my towns, so I wasn’t paying to build or maintain troops. I suspect too much money wouldn’t be a problem for most other strategies.)

I found this “a fresh take on an old favorite,” but it also fixed some of my favorite broken strategies, so that was a mixed blessing.
 
Sounds about right, CoM was originally conceived as a difficulty mod, and I know that he tried to fix any strategies that appeared "broken", regardless of how strong they were. Warlords was made to attempt fixing some of CoM's oversteps, and my mod atop Warlords goes in the same direction.
 
Master of Magic (2022 Remake)

There’s an official remake of the classic 4X game, as opposed to multiple unofficial mods and remakes I’ve played over the years. This one keeps very close to the original (including allowing you to take max Death books and start with Wraiths) but upgrades to a 3D map and adds a bunch of new variety and quality of life features (like your “familiar” who can fight battles for you, who gives a percentage chance of outcome that you can see before starting each battle; or a series of autosaves of previous turns). There are a handful of new buildings, units, and spells, but nothing really major unless you add an expansion pack. It does seem like cities are forced to be farther away from each other, which slows down your ability to settle areas. Lairs/caves/ruins are much more interesting, with a better variety of prizes and sometimes the option to “explore further” for a potential second battle and more prizes.

The enemy wizard towers fight in battle when you assault their home base, which makes those battles harder (I ended up with one enemy wizard squatting on a single town for half the game, because he couldn’t do anything but I didn’t have an army nearby that could actually survive assaulting his tower.) As with the original, the later game comes down to your heroes loaded down with awesome artifacts and roaming the map clearing everything out.

This maintains the feel of the original while sanding some of the rough edges and making it prettier; I thought it was a pretty solid remake.

This video also offers some comparisons:
 
I did buy and play the remake, and perhaps it is because I am oldhead but I find the map style for 2022 feels busy to the point of being tough to read the map.
 
Worlds of Magic

I backed a Kickstarter for this and it was released back in (checks notes) 2015…and it sat on my backlog for more than eight years. (I think I had built it up in my head; but I’m also terrible about actually managing my backlog.) It’s a fancy, juiced-up version of the 4X classic Master of Magic.

They added a lot of new overworld features and tweaked a bunch of mechanics, but the majority of the actual gameplay (including unit types and tech trees) is identical. Magic was expanded and the variety of schools of magic were reworked, but many of the spells remain. They did do heavy revisions on undead units by all accounts, but I didn’t use them in my play-through so I didn’t get a sense of how they worked. This is rather buggy and a bunch of the mechanics are a bit janky (and not just in that they fight my muscle memory), as units tend not to move along set paths you make for them and need to be micromanaged. There are also graphical glitches in battle to the point of the game freezing if you bring a magic spirit into a battle on water. Even more importantly, Hero inventory is a mess where things appear and disappear at random.

But the biggest change and the biggest problem I found was that units don't gain experience over time at all, only in battle, and the battles that you can beat at any point are very limited. Which means leveling up your heroes is a mammoth endeavor (of micromanaging!) and that really changes the power curve of the game. That said, the game is also clearly intended to be much longer than classic MoM, because instead of just two planes (Arcanus and Myrror), there are seven (Prime, the four classic elements, Paradise, and Shadow) and your enemy wizards can be spread across all of them.

I think it’s also interesting that most of the achievements—including the really basic ones you can get in the first few hours—have a very low percentage of players who have them. That implies that a lot of people who bought this barely touched it. (And reviews from the people who played more of it complain that it’s unfinished and prone to crashes in the late-game.)

I gave it the ol’ college try and played ten hours, conquering the Prime Plane (and covering it in settlements) and meeting the enemy wizard who was entrenched in the Water Plane before I decided I’d gotten the experience and my money’s worth. This was a very ambitious game, trying to remake and expand MoM but without actually having the money/skill/development time to really make that work.

I couldn't find a lot of videos of the original Worlds of Magic; they did a pseudo-sequel I'll post about tomorrow. The one decent one I found is this:

 
Planar Conquest

This off-brand Master of Magic remake was made a year later by Wastelands Interactive, the same folks who did Worlds of Magic; apparently it was a half-port, half-sequel that they ended up porting back to PC when it became different enough to be a separate game. It has a very a similar setup and a similar (or perhaps even worse) jankiness.

Particularly annoying with this version is that apparently they expect you to have an enormous monitor to play it on, because on my 16” laptop the building and unit descriptions are so small as to be barely legible. (And the units themselves are very hard to distinguish, both on the map and in battle.) There’s also a lot of non-intuitive clicking and I saw a review that speculated they were optimizing the UI for mobile devices, which would make sense up to the point where this would be illegible and unplayable on a 10” tablet.

This switches around some of the setup, expands the magic types even further than Worlds of Magic, and changes some units and buildings; and most noteworthy is that it changes the overland features to make it clearer what is just a prize to collect and what’s a challenge guarded by enemies. They also kept all seven planes, of course.

Like Worlds of Magic, this was clearly hobbled by bigger dreams than they could actually fulfill; and other reviews say it’s absolutely riddled with bugs and the AI is terrible. (Both the enemy wizard AI and the combat AI are really bad, and apparently water battles are forced into autobattle and break fairly often.) Some spells and items do nothing or crash the game. But even worse, it seems there’s an undocumented unit cap that just quietly deletes your old units after you hit it, so your heroes could just vanish as you try to expand your army.

I think it says something that I played for half an hour and got 6 achievements, all of which were held by roughly 10% of players. This had big, big dreams but clearly turned out to be a barely-playable mess, which is a shame.

 
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