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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
 
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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!
 
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