Master of Myrror Fantasy Mod 2.0

[Drift]

@Jaime

- Civilopedia is a work in progress, but it's a low priority as it doesn't affect the game itself. We'll see whether I can really work on it before the deadline (in case anyone is wondering, the deadline is in early June as I get married in 12th of June and then hit the American highways for six weeks for our honeymoon.)
- Enchantments and such aren't possible with Civ3 engine. A pity.
- It's possible in theory to make duplicates of units and make them require mithril, but it's unfortunately a bit too much hassle at this point.

@azzacanth

Yup, I know of the governor. I often use him too. Still the WW doesn't feel like a good idea. Besides, these are valiant defenders of light, would they start revolting because their government is fighting forces of evil? (of course, they may as well be fighting against their kin, but that's not the point. )

@Everyone
I'll add the icons for next patch and see what people think of them. Not all of them are first class, but I really like the way I now can see at a glance what techs give which wonder.

 

[Jaime Lannister]

argh this brings back old memories....they really need to remake this game, without changing it one bit , merely updating the graphics and sounds, throw in some more spells, and id definately throw down some money. I used to love when you'd cast the big badass spells and you'd get that nice animation especially the spell of mastery. damn. In the old game, nobody could beat me once i got some good high men and high elven cities as a life mage. You'd get a group of paladin and elf lords, cast lion heart, holy arms and armor, endurance, all those buffering and bonus to hit life spells on them, send about 9 of them out with Torin the Chosen in command, and pratically nothing could stop them

 

[Psyringe]

@Drift: While the scroll graphic for the wonders looks nice, I'd prefer the more diverse icons you provided. It helps me recognize the wonders in the tech screen.

@Klyden / azzacanth: A good alternative to the abandonloader / vdmsound combo is dosbox. Sound emulation is better with dosbox imho. From time to time I play the original MoM, it's always fun. Too bad they never managed to write a decent AI for this game, it's the only thing that's really missing imho.

@Jaime: Spells and mithril bonuses like in MoM are unfortunately not possible in Civ3, for several reasons. There is a crude workaround, but it's probably not practical to use. You could, for example, add a technology (i.e. spell) called "Iron skin". This technology could give the player access to tougher units (e.g. a unit "Shadowman Iron Skin", which is only available if you can build shadowmen, have researched "Iron Skin", and have a nature node). But as I said, this is very crude, because you'd have to add "iron skin versions" of *every* other unit too. You could implement mithril attack bonuses the same way, but if you want a unit with mithril weapons and iron skin, you have to provide another unit type especially for this combo, and again one "mithril iron skin shadowman", one "mithril iron skin devil", one "mithril iron skin curdes legionary" and so on. You still couldn't add or dispel spells after creating the unit, and upgrade chains will be complicated.

Theoretically this should actually work (although there might be an upper limit of unit types that will be reached very soon), but in practice it's probably too complicated, for mod creators as well as for the players.

 

[mrtn]

...Yup, I know of the governor. I often use him too. Still the WW doesn't feel like a good idea. Besides, these are valiant defenders of light, would they start revolting because their government is fighting forces of evil? (of course, they may as well be fighting against their kin, but that's not the point. )...

A bit like the monarchies in the WH mod... They have WW, and I don't think they get crippled by that. This way you can also add a couple of wonders that reduce WW, which could be nice.

 

[Drift]

Sorry, I don't think the WW will be going in. It just doesn't feel quite right.

In other news, I played a little game with the new tech tree and rules. I'm now at the beginning of the second era and it has went pretty well. Tech tree needs some adjusting still as do tech costs, but all in all it's playing rather nicely. I'm a nature mage and I'm in the lead followed closely by Merlin and Ariel. Vlad, Tauron and Oberic are the middle pack. Tlaloc was doing good as long as I decided to destroy him. Mordja started in the middle of a desert and never got going.

There was one problem with the tech tree though. As I've spread the goodies more thinly, there aren't always very good incentives to research outside your own branch. I found myself racing for my own higher level techs and trading for the techs from the other branches. I can help this to some extent by reorganizing some stuff.

Lots of things to do for the patch still, but this in-between game showed that it's coming along nicely.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Is there anything wrong with buying the orther branches' techs? Sounds quite sensible to this Master of Magic neverbie ...

 

[Drift]

Is there anything wrong with buying the orther branches' techs? Sounds quite sensible to this Master of Magic neverbie ...

Nothing else, but that it's a little boring to focus just on one linear tech branch. I want tech research to be varied and force player to make choices. It's not a biggie though. I can work it out.

BTW, current setup for nature mage early footmen is that Beornings are 3.2.1 at 30 shields and Ents 4.3.1 +1 HP at 45 shields. Seems to be working ok so far.

 

[azzacanth]

So I've been playing the real masters of magic and there are a couple things I have noticed...

chaos nodes seem to be exclusively on mountains, nature nodes in forests. I haven't seen life or death nodes yet I believe.

You're missing the entire sorcery chain of spells, units etc. Maybe, without adding any sorcerer civs, you could throw in sorcery nodes and a sorcery chain of research? Maybe a wonder that produces phantom warriors every 5 turns, if you have a sorcery node... etc. That also might help flesh out your thinned tech tree.


looking forward to seeing your next great patch btw

 

[Drift]

Life mages were originally sorcerers, but they resembled life mages more and life was a more interesting concept so I changed them.

I'm sorry, but there really isn't any chance of the sorcery making it to the mod in any form. I don't want to complicate things at this point and I don't really have any room left in the tech tree screen either. Also, there aren't really any units for sorcerers available. It would be cool to have all five types of magic, but I don't see any way of doing it without complicating matters too much.

 

[Psyringe]

Hi

Just found a minor bug, although I'm not sure whether it's in your mod or in the game engine. I just entered the second era and chose to research "Death VI" next. Being scientific, I also get a free tech at era start, and got Death VI. However, the message that infomed me about that read that I just learned Death II from Mordja. Now I actually *did* learn Death II from Mordja, but that was some centuries ago.

I don't recall this happening in unmodded Civ3, but maybe I just forgot it. I'm not sure, unfortunately.

Btw, my game still goes fine, although not as smooth as I expected. After crushing Ariel and driving Oberic off the continent, I got overconfident and attacked Sssra without building my military up before. Although I was four times bigger than him, vastly outproduced him and had better tech, he dragged me into a long war. He had built the firewall wonder, this and the bonus hitpoint of his defending devils made his cities a tough nut to crack. He also counterattacked with chaos knights, and I had nothing to stop those. Three times in a row I underestimated his defenses and wasted a lot of death knights. I finally attacked with a large stack of death knights and cursed legionaries, only to find out that Sssra dragged Lo Pan into the war. For a while I was close to losing a city. A while after that, Tauron joined the two and attacked me. I managed to bribe Lo Pan into attacking Tauron, solving two of my problems. Then I pop-rushed military units in all my cities, put a stack of 20 units together and crushed Sssra's capital. Without the firewall, his other cities were easier to defeat, although this bonus hitpoint still has one hell of an impact, especially when defending cities.

I then took on Tauron, thinking that he would be easier, as he didn't have the firewall. I was wrong, Tauron had dwarves and defended with hammerhands. Chaos offense and dwarven defense makes a strong combo, I was lucky that Tauron had to divide his forces between me and Lo Pan. However with 10-15 cities producing cursed legionaries, I slowly took over his cities. The legionaries died a lot, but I produced enough to flood the land with them. (I should have built catapukts instead, would've been a better strategy, as I wouldn't have wasted so many resources.) Right now Tauron is defeated, and I'm taking on Lo Pan.

I lead the score table, behind me are the three nature mages. Freya and Raven started together with Rjak on another continent and recently crushed him. Tlaloc started on his very own island, large enough for some growth, but he doesn't sem to be able to launch an offense on the larger continent. The only other major force is Mordja, who had a strong start, but then somehow stopped. He didn't take on the chaos mages and liked me too much to attack me, although my border with him is only weakly defended. Merlin has grown a little, but will never be a power factor in this game.

Some observations on gameplay (no criticism here, just some thoughts that crossed my mind while playing):

- The locked magic type and the random factor of available species resoures can lead to some very interesting constellations (e.g. chaos/dwarves). I love these concepts. They should add a lot of replay value too.

- Attacking cities in midgame seems harder than in unmodded Civ3. In Civ3, I usually attack spearmen with knights and pikemen with cavalry. I almost never use bombarding units before cannons come up. In MoM, a 3-point-defense is available to all wizards relatively early, but I was stuck with a 5-point-offense (or a 4-point fast offense) for a long time.

- Tech lead in midgame doen't give you as many military advantages as in Civ3. I concentrated on death spells. I was outresearching all of my opponents, yet I couldn't get better units than the death knight or cursed legionary for a long time, because I had to "catch up" on the other magic types before I could learn new death spells.

All in all, it's a lot of fun. I especially liked the surprises, e.g. finding out that Tauron defended with dwarves etc.

 

[Psyringe]

Just found another minor issue. Tobacco is flagged as a luxury (not bonus)resource - is this intended? If yes, then there is a display bug in the city screen: Under "luxuries", the tobacco icon is not shown. May be due to the fact that tobacco is the ninth luxury resource, perhaps the game can handle only eight luxuries correctly?

 

[The Last Conformist]

You can have nine or more luxuries, but only the first eight count wrt happiness, IIRC.

 

[Gladi]

Bright day
I am just playing on Monarch as Mordja. I am on my own continent and ocean surrounding me is at thinnest just five tiles wide . Just enough to sank my cogs, Veni Vidi Concidi , I have lost over thirty units to waves and have been able to transport only dozen, fortunately dozen of trolls soon-to-be ettins . Trolls are one of more usefull races, elves are weak in my games though- their attack is not enough to really allow them to attack twice.
Now some issues- Is it just me or Essence of Death does not decrease unhappiness in city it is built? Also Tlaloc is transsexual, he tried to sell me an alliance and refered to himself as her.

 

[Drift]

@Psyringe

- Don't know why that message was displayed when you got the free tech. Luckily, it doesn't seem to do anything else, but confuse the player.
- Interesting game you have there. Chaos does have pretty strong lineup of units and when combined with a correct race resource, they get even stronger. I was a little hesitant when making their unit list as I wasn't sure if I was making them too strong, but so far I haven't received direct criticism about chaos being too tough.
- You are right about the more evenly matched defenders and attackers in mid game. This is something else I was worried about when creating the units, but so far people seem to be able to cope with it. It can be tweaked if it starts to frustrate people and hinder the possibilities of offensive warfare.
- The tech tree does really stop the military research for a while in the mid game. However, racing your own branch means you get your military units "earlier" than you're supposed so the wait for the new ones is also longer. Of course, there is no right way of advancing in the tech tree so talking about "earlier" and "supposed" is a little silly. There really isn't a way around the fact that focusing on your own branch only gives a temporary military advantage as others probably catch up with their own branches before you advance to next age. It can be a little frustrating.
- At one point tobacco had a problem that it didn't show up in city screen, but I thought I fixed that. If it indeed was your ninth luxury, I guess TLC's comment clears this one up.

@Gladi
Sorry to hear about the fate of your sailors.

Trolls are strong, but a bit expensive. Towards the end, elves get pretty nasty too. Essence of Death should decrease unhappiness in all cities. It's set to add 2 happy faces to all cities.

I'll talk to Tlaloc, he's probably having just an identity crisis.

 

[Psyringe]

- Chaos units: I, too, think that Chaos units are not *too* tough. they get tough units early, but that's their strength. What's strange in my game is that none of the Chaos mages actually used this strength, none of them started a war. But this may be due to the geographical situation. Since all three of them sat together inthe south, there werent't many opportunities for them to conquer others. Tauron could've attacked Merlin, but there was nothing to be gained there but some desert cities. Sssra could've attacked Mordja or me, but both of us were larger than him and already had a large military.

- Offense to defense ratio in midgame: No doubt that players can cope with it. Question is how the AI reacts to these changes, could be that it plays more passive in midgame now. But seeing that Freya and Raven combined forced and crushed Rjak on their continent, and now are at war with each other, it seems that the AI still takes its chances.

- Tobacco luxury: Sorry, I didn't provide a clear description. Tobacco is not my ninth luxury (actually it was the first or second I encountered), it's the ninth luxury in the editor. When I looked at my city screens I saw that one luxury was listed without an icon. I then checked the biq in the editor and found out that this luxury was indeed tobacco. So there still might be a bug in luxury icon display in the city screen. I can provide you a savegame if you're interested, although it's not a serious issue.

Since you said that you already fixed a problem with tobacco, there's also the possibility that I made a mistake while installing / patching the mod. I can try reinstalling it. Btw, what do you think about putting a version number in the scenario info (that which you can easily access from within the game by typing "I")? Might avoid confusion with patches and patch updates. (Some people, like me, are easily confused. I'm *pretty* sure that I installed beta 9 and the first update for it, but this was some time before I actually started playing, so something might have gone wrong without me noticing it.)

- Military research gap in midgame: This is not a problem, just something I have to get used to. Also the effect might be mitigated if you have one or two race resources in your territory (I didn't have any). The only thing that was a little frustrating was that I didn't have a choice in midgame ... a couple of my cities already built everything they could, so I had to build military units, while at the same time I knew that their offense was a little too weak. It would have been more fun if I had to make I choice between building up my cities and building units. But this efct depends on research taking so long; research will be a little faster in the next patch, and then I will be forced to make these decisions.

(I also did have two choices that I just didn't realize at this time; one is to build catapults instead of cursed legionaries; the other was to build up my military without attacking and then upgrading the cursed legionaries to vampires as soon as I can. Both strategies would've probably been better than the crude "flood the enemy with units until he is washed away" approach that I took, but as I was already in a very strong position, this didn't really matter.)

My game is running fine btw, I defeated Lo Pan, Merlin and the last city of Sssra. The advent of vampires made my military considerably stronger. The feature that vampires create other vampires is very cool - I doubt that the AI recognizes its potential (unfortunately), but it's a very interesting feature nonetheless. Recently I researched shadow demons; i think that I'm now in a position were I can just steamroll the remaining players. Carrion beasts also proved very useful, as they enabled me to relocate my (relatively slow) vampires from the western to the eastern front in no time. They also enabled me to put defenders into an undefended city near which Sssra suddenly shipped three chaos riders. Poisonous Clouds however have not been of much use in this game. They could be great to weaken city defenses, but out of 12 cities I attacked, only two have been in range, most cities were exactly four tiles away, one too much . I could use the clouds to sink some ships though.

Okay, back to winning my game now.

 

[Klyden]

To update on my game as Lo Pan

Morja has been removed from the realms. It was a tough fight all the way and Morja insisted on fighting with Oberic as well (or the other way around). At any rate, they had weaken each other quite a bit. I used two short wars to finish off Morja (extracting tech for the first peace). I am up to 24 cities now.

I have Oberic to deal with as well. He has 6 cities left on the island and does not have his improved defenders yet, so I still have an offensive edge with my 5 point knights against his 4 point defenders. He seems greatly weaken by the onslaught of the Morja troops and has taken a lot of infrastructure damage. (Morja destroyed improvements any chance he got). Morja was assaulting him again when I struck and finished off Morja. I am currently consolidating and getting ready for the assault against Oberic to take over the island for myself before he can recover too much.

I have been fortunate in that one of the Morja cities I captured had the wonder that gives you 2 free techs, so I was able to catch up a bit in that regard and also in some dealings for peace. I am currently working on Chaos 5 with minimal science (more on that in a sec).

My economy is still pretty puny for a 24 city civ. (Income 293). I do have the dark tower up to help with corruption and have been building wizard towers as well to help with science and markets as well to help with happiness and cash. My military stands at 125 units (6 workers, 1 army, 5 beast, 11 fanatic, 4 Chaos warrior, 38 Chaos Knights, 3 cogs, 7 war galley, 49 devils) and I have to pay 26 support for them. It has gotten better on this front because I have been able to get more cities and also been able to get many over 6 pop with improvements.

There are issues with science. I am currently spending 20 per turn for the minimum. I have to ramp all the way to 50% (spend 129) to get it to go down 1 turn. Because of my limited luxaries (2 and unable to trade for more), I have been running 10 to 20% on the happy bar to keep the population happy. It appears I am going to be stuck most of the game doing tech at the lowest rate and trying to trade for what I can. This is despite the fact that Lo Pan has science as an advantage.

I have noted that Rjak has also been destroyed someplace else, so that is now 3 civs out of it. I still have only met Oberic and Freya for other civs, so not sure where the rest are. I am now the point leader, but that is only among the 3 of us. Freya has been pretty in-active for the most part.

One thing scary of note: Morja actually had a catapult next to Oberic's capital!

 

[Klyden]

I was looking over the advantages of the race resources:

They are currently:

Dark Elf-level 2- Dark alter +1 culture
Lizardmen-level 3- Breeding pond +2 pop growth
Goblins-level 2- Fishery + food in water
Dwarves-level 1- city fortress
Elves-level 2- Life tree +25% production
Orc-level 3- Barracks
Troll- level 2- +2 happy citizens
Men- level 3- reduce corruption

Almost all of these improvements come with no upkeep cost, so in the case of the orc barracks, it is worth the time to build it and sell back the old barracks as an example.

Some of these are extremely powerful and some are sort of wimpy. The DE one in particular is pretty weak. The elf one is one of the strongest. I also think several of these should be moved up in the tech tree.

Some suggested changes:

Dark Elf - level 2 - A research bump instead of a cultural bump. (Makes sense as magic is very integral with dark elfs).
Lizardmen - Probably ok as is, but won't get used too much I think. Will have to give this one some more thought.
Goblins - Level 2 increase production. Goblin units are weak for the most part, so need a stronger advantage.
Dwarfs - Walls good where they are. Very powerful units make having a small advantage good.
Elfs - level 2 - reduce corruption. I think the life tree is too powerful in combo with what you get as units.
Orcs - Barracks good. Perhaps level 1 would be a better spot for this.
Troll - Good as is.
Men - Fishery level 3 (option also to increase trade and/or shield production from water as men units are not very impressive, perhaps they should get a stronger advantage). I think Men are more thought of being associated with water than Goblins.

 

[Drift]

Loads of great feedback again. I'll respond later tonight or tomorrow, when I have more time. Don't want to rush this.

 

[Gladi]

Bright day
I have to disagree about fishery being weak, fisher+harbor=> coast as good as irrigated grassland! But I have to agree it would fit amphibious humans more.
Elves- I still think their units are not anything extra, and their effect is not all that great, especially when you run high science.
I agree with rest.
One thing can it somehow be done so that AI do not lose time with unneeded race techs? I was able to almost (one tech) catch up with AI where they were for 40-60 turns ascended and I only on fourth tier.

 

[The Last Conformist]

A cosmetic detail: Having dates in BC and AD seems somewhat odd!

Finally got some time to actually play again. Despite some dastardly lack of luck (three fortifed Ents with Catapult support went down to three attacking Ents), I managed to kill off enough of Raven's hordes that he accepted peace*, and I'm now about to finish off Ariel.

* It amused Mr Raven to run around in my territory with (1.2.2) Centaurs. Annoying, since it forces me to defend in depth, but they're breakfast for Ents and Shades.

Addendum: Just took Ariel's last mainland city, just to find that the bastardess had a couple of island colonies just south of the north pole. I accepted peace in return for a pile of techs. She's far away enough now that I don't have to worry much about flips, and her culture is pretty weak anyway.

Left on my continent now are Lo Pan, Raven, and Merlin. Merlin is pretty weak, while Lo Pan and Raven are chasing me for points, and both have significantly bigger armies than me. I'm considering smacking Merlin. I'm feeling a certain premonition of a two-front war with Lo Pan and Raven, however ... which could get ugly.