Old man, you seek the Spell of Mastery!
2019-Aug-08, Thursday 14:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
This is from a few days ago, but I opened up my RSS feeds and found an article about how Slitherine was thinking about making a new Master of Magic game after buying the IP.
Master of Magic is my favorite strategy game of all time, mainly because it completely ignored the concept of balance. There are five different schools of magic--Life, Nature, Sorcery, Chaos, and Death; I'm sure the resemblance to Magic: the Gathering's colors is a total coincidence--fourteen races, two parallel worlds, a bunch of possible "retorts" like Artificer (making cheaper artifacts) or Myrran (start on the parallel world of Myrror) or Nature Mastery, dozens heroes with special abilities, and all of this combined into a huge stew of cheap strategies. But there were so many cheap strategies that it was possible to use another cheap strategy to counter particular one. Enemy is massing elite halfling slingers? Use dark elf warlocks to Doom Bolt them into oblivion. Rushing wraiths? Summon fairies to blast them at range and avoid their life drain attack. Mass paladins? That one's harder, but go to Myrror and recruit trolls so you can hurl wave after wave of bodies at them and heal back to full after battles.
There have been plenty of attempts to make a spiritual successor to Master of Magic, but all of them fall short. A lot of them forget that MoM's massive imbalance is part of what made it fun. Some don't have tactical combat. Some focus too much on tech trees and city-building, when the magic was really the only progression method in MoM. But they all fall short.
The IP is meaningless--other than splitting the races into the mirror worlds and putting dwarves, dark elves, trolls, beastmen, and draconians together in the mirror world instead of the main one, the setting isn't anything special--but I'm excited to see someone try again. And through the comments on the article I learned about Caster of Magic, a Master of Magic mod that tries to fix some bugs and make the AI actually interesting to play against (MoM's biggest problem), so even if this goes nowhere the news was still invaluable to me.
Master of Magic is my favorite strategy game of all time, mainly because it completely ignored the concept of balance. There are five different schools of magic--Life, Nature, Sorcery, Chaos, and Death; I'm sure the resemblance to Magic: the Gathering's colors is a total coincidence--fourteen races, two parallel worlds, a bunch of possible "retorts" like Artificer (making cheaper artifacts) or Myrran (start on the parallel world of Myrror) or Nature Mastery, dozens heroes with special abilities, and all of this combined into a huge stew of cheap strategies. But there were so many cheap strategies that it was possible to use another cheap strategy to counter particular one. Enemy is massing elite halfling slingers? Use dark elf warlocks to Doom Bolt them into oblivion. Rushing wraiths? Summon fairies to blast them at range and avoid their life drain attack. Mass paladins? That one's harder, but go to Myrror and recruit trolls so you can hurl wave after wave of bodies at them and heal back to full after battles.
There have been plenty of attempts to make a spiritual successor to Master of Magic, but all of them fall short. A lot of them forget that MoM's massive imbalance is part of what made it fun. Some don't have tactical combat. Some focus too much on tech trees and city-building, when the magic was really the only progression method in MoM. But they all fall short.
The IP is meaningless--other than splitting the races into the mirror worlds and putting dwarves, dark elves, trolls, beastmen, and draconians together in the mirror world instead of the main one, the setting isn't anything special--but I'm excited to see someone try again. And through the comments on the article I learned about Caster of Magic, a Master of Magic mod that tries to fix some bugs and make the AI actually interesting to play against (MoM's biggest problem), so even if this goes nowhere the news was still invaluable to me.
