Slitherine

I've been playing MoM off and on since the late 90's. It's one of my favorite games and its appeal has been quite enduring.

I am so glad there's a remake that adheres to the basics of the original, but updates the art, UI and includes general quality-of-life improvements, like the city production queue and city border outline.

I do have a few bits of feedback from a couple of play-throughs I've managed to eek out over the last week.

Map:
1. Full screen map - It would be nice to be able to either zoom out on the overland map all the way, or explode the minimap on its own screen.
2. Make cities more identifiable - It's hard to distinguish cities from other things on the minimap.

UI:
1. Too many clicks - Another poster mentioned this and it rang true to me. There's a lot of duplicative clicks to get through menus.
-- a. Caves/Dungeons/Etc. - Join the initial visit screen with the description of what's there. And if there's "something more", just show the choices, don't make the player click to open the list of choices, then click on their selection.
-- b. Casting spells - Here's Earthlore for example:
----- 1. Click "Cast Spell"
----- 2. Search through the spellbook (could be several clicks)
----- 3. Click on the spell to select it
----- 4. Click "Cast"
----- 5. Click on the notification that the spell is ready on the right-hand side of the screen
----- 6. Click on the desired hex to actually cast the spell
-- c. Notifications about both a building/unit being completed and that a queue is empty - Reacting to both ends up clicking on the same city a second time.
2. Too easy to select an entire city's garrison when a new unit is created and end up vacating the city - When a new unit is built or a fantastical create is summoned, the notification takes me to the city and then I click to move the new unit, but accidently move the entire garrison...leaving the city defenseless.
-- a. In the original game, the selected units' entire tile would glow blue. In the new game, it's just a faint golden outline...much harder to distinguish. Make it easier to tell which units are selected when you are looking at the garrison.
3. Timing of notifications - Notifications of spells being researched, ready to cast, unit/building completion, etc. appear at the end of the turn, but then the player cannot respond to the notifications until the enemy turns are complete. I get a big "spell researched" or "spell cast" screen as I end my turn, but then the cast and research buttons at the top of the screen still show "1" remaining until the enemy moves are done. I recommend delaying the popup of the notifications until the beginning of the next turn.
4. Allow follow-on buildings to be added to the city production queue - I want to build the builder's hall, smithy, granary, marketplace and farmer's market as the first thing in any city I build. Or say someone wants to use a city to produce troops; they will need to build a sequence of buildings, each a pre-requisite for the next. In both of these cases, the player has to interact with the production queue at almost every stage. Usually only two buildings can go in the queue at any time. Change the check to see whether a building is buildable or not to include whether it's pre-req is built OR in the queue. If for whatever reason the pre-req is not there when the building's turn in the queue comes up, remove it from the queue and throw a notification.
5. Change farmers/workers on City List screen - Allow players to adjust the worker ratio for each city while in the city list screen. Seeing the real-time effect on production and harvest and fine-tuning in the the individual cities would be a lot easier if you could do it all from this screen.

Combat:
1. Identifying spells in combat - Without knowing what animation goes with what spell or looking at the log, I can't tell what the enemy Wizard is casting in combat. Maybe put a floating text saying "Oberic cast Resist Elements on Halfling Swordsman" on the screen.
2. Allow "no spells" during auto-combat - Similar to Caster of Magic, give options for auto-combat, like prohibiting the use of spells during combat.
3. Make "no spells" apply to Heroes as well - Whether Familiar-led or auto-combat, make it so that the Heroes can be prohibited from casting spells, too.
4. Order of Battle - As others have mentioned, the order of battle can end up being quite chaotic, in a tactical sense, with frontline melee units behind ranged attackers. I presume this is tied to the order the units appear in the tile grouping. Allow players to reorder this, or run an algorithm at the start of combat that puts units with higher melee attack power in front of lower if there are enough to make two lines.

Spellbook:
1. Provide more ways to organize your spellbook - As mentioned in the Earthlore example above: it could take several clicks to find a particular spell.
-- a. Examples: "Buffs", "Direct Damage", "City Enchantments"
-- b. Create a "Favorites" list where you can put spells you know you'll use a lot in that particular match.

Performance/Speed:
This is obviously subjective and always has room for improvement, but these two spots in particular pull me out of the game:
1. Enemy turns take a long time, even with "track enemy moves" turned off.
2. Units take a long time to walk/travel on the overland map.
3. "Move Army" seems to pick different batches of armies to move on any click. Sometimes I have to select the stack and click on their destination again to get them moving.

Balance:
This is not a quality-of-life issue and would be a departure from the rules of the original game, but it really sticks in my craw.
1. Dispelling/Disenchanting unit buffs is too powerful. There's a reason buffs exist in the game. Making them fall off immediately upon encountering an opposing Wizard is a real feel-bad experience.
-- a. In one play-through in the original, my plan was to use a single 9-stack of super-buffed normal units with Warlord and Crusade. I had a bunch of buffs on my units: Holy Armor, Holy Weapon, Flight, Invulnerability. I even made sure to put Spell Lock on them. It took a lot of time to cast all those enchantments and cost a lot of mana, but I figured it would be worth the investment to have a powerful army. Then I attacked an enemy Wizard's city and he cast Disenchant; nine notifications of Spell Lock being dispelled. The next turn he cast it again: 20+ notifications that my spells had been dispelled. It actually had a "Flight and several other spells were dispelled" pop-up since there were so many. I quite that play-through and have never used a unit buff aside from Flight or in combat, since.
-- b. At the very least, make dispelling during combat only suppress the buff until the end of combat and return it at the end of combat, just like Web removes flying for the duration of the combat.
c. Better would be not allowing Disenchant to be cast during combat and only allow Dispel Magic to remove one buff at a time.

Thanks to the developers and publisher for updating such an awesome game for a new generation!

Agree with almost all of this, except the last note about Disenchanting. I've noticed a few things. #1 the AI is way too obsessed with disenchanting. It will prefer to disenchant Water Walking over casting anything reasonable that might help it win the fight. Yes, this is absurd. However, #2 it does appear that "sometimes" the buffs will remain after the fight in the new version, unlike the original.

But I disagree about allowing the use of Disenchant area in combat. It has to be allowed, as there are just time when its really necessary. For example, when all units are invisible. The issue with buffs is true, BUT there are ways to deal with it that should be taken into account. #1 the Masteries make it harder to disenchant your spells. #2 Archmage also makes spells harder to disenchant, at least in theory, I don't know if it is properly implemented. If you want to rely on unit enchantments then choosing those options should be a part of your strategy.

Everything else you mentioned was spot on.

It really all comes down to getting the chance to dispell correct. It seems like it was about right in the original MoM. But the AI also has to properly choose when to disenchant, not just constantly do it. It becomes absurd and annoying when all the AI does is disenchant, even when they should be doing stuff like trying to buff their own units or attack you.

It also seems that a part of the difficulty, and this goes for Crack's Call too, is that the AI tends to have resource advantages, and thus has more mana and more spell power than the player (when playing on hard modes). They also produce more cities and more units. Thus, the player has to interact with the AI very frequently, which gives the AI many opportunities to wear down the player with "cheap" tactics, (actually inefficient and costly tactics).

For the player, Crack's Call is rarely worth it, but for the AI, who is throwing spearmen and bowmen at you and has an endless mana pool, they can just keep forcing you to fight trash units while Crack's Calling your heroes and buffed Ultra Elite Paladins. Same goes with the disenchanting. Human players tent to make efficient stacks of strong buffed units, while the AI swarms with waves of trash. But all of that trash makes tactics like Crack's Call and Disenchant annoyingly effective. Yes, these are all low probability tactics, but they can wear down a player with fewer resources, which the human player usually has.

Also, I noticed a bug in that the AI even tries to disenchant buffs granted to heroes via items. So even though my heroes had no enchantments on them at all, the AI keep casting Disenchant to try and dispell the effects granted to them via items.

Interesting points about the nature of the AI's strategy. Especially in the early-to-mid game, I'm at a severe resource disadvantage to the AI, so every unit is precious. If I lose even one, that's time and resources I can't get back and have to replace.

Meanwhile the AI is just shoving another nine-stack at me. I'd got to make sure my units are durable without having to cast a ton of spells each combat.



Questions for the devs:

I've noticed some changes from the original game and am curious if they're intentional:

1. When I banish a enemy AI, I don't recall getting half his mana. And there's no notification when he's returned or to what city. I certainly appreciate the crown symbol to indicate which city is the capital, though. Beats having to click on each of his cities to look for a tower.
2. According to the wiki (https://masterofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/R ... he_Paladin), Roland is supposed to have Super Might, but when I just acquired him last night, he only had regular old vanilla Might. He had the other standard powers and his random pick went to upgrading Legendary to Super.
3. In the old game, enchanting a magic (or guardian) spirit with Endurance doubled their move and they could not take advantage of roads. Being non-corporeal, they only cost .5 to move, so they can move twice with a move speed of 1 and can enter any terrain for that cost. So Endurance would give them a move of 2, which means 4 moves. In the new game, they only get one more move (2 going to 3) and they seem to auto-route to roads. Does the non-corporeal trait work differently in the new game? Would a unit or hero with Wraith Form work like a spirit?

Have you compiled a list of the things that are different from the old game? Whether they were bugs you fixed, or purposeful changes?

Per the UI, your point on too many clicks per Spells is noted.
I can say, however, the bulk of this game per the UI is superb. imho
Easily one of the most smoothest per managing towns, armies, & even magic that I have encountered.
At least in comparison to the many 4x games I have played...that includes CoM for windows.
Being able to sift through ones towns is a breeze & keeping track of ones armies/heroes is just as easy.
Per AI turn speeds, I play on Very Small maps (which are plenty large enough for my tastes) & the AI turns are extremely fast...& I am using 'gaming' laptops.

as an original game player since the 90s my feedback is: a complete graphics overhaul is needed - compared to the originaly this is a flavourless, soulless, empty something - as if a german cook tried to make a proper curry.

wont buy this one obviously.

I'll have to give a small map a try. I usually play the largest map so there's more to do, but then clearing out 70 enemy cities is a bit of a slog.

Switch the overall beige/sandstone UI to a darker brownish/grayish stone/artefact shade - As for the UI, I can't really grumble about the general aesthetic. I'm no expert on that. My one critique, and this is probably too much work to do anything about, would be to make the UI a little but darker. But I understand this could be too dark if it's everywhere.

I'm impressed with the music. It's on-theme and not distracting/painful to hear it for hours-and-hours on end. But I do miss the old music.

A couple of other hero-related items:
1. Review Hero descriptions when employed by another wizard - I noticed while reading the hero bios on the other wizards, the replacement names didn't work 100%. I think on Theria, my opponent's "The Thief" mentioned her alternate name one place but "Theria" somewhere else. I'd recommend having a writer do a once-over on all the heroes write-ups and see how they look with an enemy wizard's version of them.
2. Change Torin's art to make him more divine/avatar-like - I envision Torin as a avatar/godlike being, not just a guy in armor and a sword and shield with a third eye/jewel in his forehead. I'd rather he look more like he's dressed in just a prophet's robe kind of get-up. Like he uses his divine power to fight. Again, this is aesthetics and that's not my specialty, so take it for what's it worth. Does he even need a horse? Could he just be a floating dude?

AI:
1. AI city defense - The AI is really good at building 9-stacks to roll around to attack with, but their city-defense is sorely lacking. As others have mentioned, the enemy's capital has only a handful of normal units. Is this just to keep unrest at bay? In the original game the enemy's capital would be filled with Storm Giants and Behemoths and Shadow Demons.
2. AI doesn't like Engineers - Why does the AI hate Engineers? Not only does the AI hunt down my poor overworked Engineers who are doing no harm simply laying down a road, but the AI doesn't even build their own Engineers to build their own roads.

Overall, I love the game. I've loved it for a long time and I really-really appreciate the quality-of-life improvements. Even just being able to alt-tab without crashing the DOS emulator was worth it.

Pacing - Really, the only thing that needs to be addressed is the pacing. A lot of clicks and a lot of slow moving units. Every stack takes their moves sequentially. This can adds up to a lot of time just watching you army march about. Having a unit with a decent movement traveling along roads takes multiple seconds for each stack to make it's journey. In the mid-late game when you've got units moving to the front lines, multiply that by a decent number of of stacks and it can take a while. That and the enemy moves time-out really pull me out of the game. The 4x speed on the tactical screen is nice, I'd like to see a 5x or 6x to see if that wouldn't be too fast. Can we get a 2x or 4x for overland map unit movement, as well?

I finished my first play-through. So, there's spoilers from here down, if you want to be surprised by what happens in the end-game.

Review awards for defeating wizards - As I mentioned earlier, I didn't notice anything happening when I banished an opponent wizard (vs. defeating him entirely), aside from his inability to cast spells during his exile. In the original game, you'd get two spells from him each time you conquered his tower. This time, I only got something upon defeating him entirely, a retort of Mana Focusing (or ability, they're called now?). I don't recall ever getting a retort for banishing/defeating a wizard in the old game.

Review conditions for defeating wizards - Another funny thing was that when I got him down to his last two cities, I conquered one, then the second went independent. But he was still in the game. He had one magic spirit floating around, but he persisted in the game until the turn after I finally decided to finish off the spirit. Are wizards not defeating while having units remaining, despite not having a city? That doesn't seem right. And I didn't get the "Master we found this in the ruins" message until the turn after eliminating the spirit. Again, the timing of announcements in the turn order could stand to be looked at. And he didn't technically have a tower at that moment, as he was banished at the time.

Really spoilers:

Review game ending - After defeating that wizard, I figured it was time to end things and cast the Spell of Mastery. Upon completing it, I got the cool graphic of the wizards bubbles popping, but then the victory cinematic was....a static scroll with a congratulatory message. Quite a let-down. I was expecting something on par with the Tauron vs. Merlin cinematic. Or at least the closing animation from winning the old game.

Add score summary - And the score screen doesn't break down your points (X from population, Y from spells, Z from fame, etc.). It would be really nice if this summary was visible on the Hall of Fame as well, maybe click on the entry to see the score summary for that play-through.