The state of Master of Magic (2022) after 12 months.

[axioms_slith]

Master of Magic (2022) developed by Muha games and developed by Slitherine Software was launched in Dec 2022. Given a mandate to modernize the base game with quality of life features followed by an expansion of the game via DLC how has the game progressed in the last 12 months?

To anticipate the conclusion, Master of Magic (2022) has improved tremendously since it's shaky start at launch in Dec 2022. As such, if you were eyeing this game for a while or bounced off initially but am waiting to come back, this might be the right time....

A troubled launch - Dec 2022

Many of you may have heard it had a troubled launch, but in its defense a lot of flak came from fans from other fandoms who disliked that it was not Age of Wonders X or Caster of Magic, groups that would not have realistically liked the game no matter what.

To be fair, even among fans of Master of Magic classic who wanted the game to succeed, there were reasons to pan the game at launch in Dec 2022. While views on aesthetics could be subjective (some players preferred the charm of 2d pixels) there was no doubt the state of the game at launch was bad.

During the first few iterations, the game was extremely slow to load and had serious memory leaks. Moreover, the game lacked many standards expected of "modern" features like customizable hot-keys, full screen and window mode and had many serious UI missteps including extremely poor pathfinding. Even features that were newly added like build queues were somewhat disappointing as they did not allow you to add items that had prerequisites.



Muha goes to work - Roadmap (April 2023) and extended Roadmap (May 2023)

Fortunately, Muha did not abandon the game but steadily worked at it.

They announced two separate roadmaps to address all the problems I mentioned and more. For details, see roadmap 1 and roadmap 2.

As a beta tester from the earliest days, I was impressed by how Muha addressed practically every reasonable feedback given and then some. Here are IMHO some of the big improvements....

1. Address city spamming with various settings to both control frequency of neutrals and rules that control minimum distance between cities

2.Quick load/save

3.Steam workshop (there is one major mod and several minor ones and a active modding community on the discords but most people are waiting for all the official DLCs to be out I think)

4.City lists are sortable by multi-criteria

5.Improved display of information both in city screens and combat logs

6.Remappable hot-keys, edge scrolling

7.Build queues now allow items with prerequisites

8.Spellbook save spots

9.Additional options for combat simulator (e.g. turn on/off Wizard spell casting but allow other spellcasting units)

10.Cartographer , remastered og song tracks and even better new ones.

and many more I take for granted now ...



Why should I pay for this if I already own Master of Magic classic?

Though the game is very faithful to the original, it does borrow a couple of things from Caster of Magic including fortress bolt defenses, faster default movements etc.

They also added a ton of available starting settings that gives the game a ton of replayability. Besides the standard MoM settings you can set, here are some

1.Strength and density/frequency of Neutral towns and/or lairs

2.Strength of neutrals (from "beginner" to "master")

3.Number of neutral towns (from "none" to "many")

4.Strength of Lair (from "beginner" to "master") * Lair density (from "none" to "normal 100%")

5.Initial economy you start with (easy, medium, hard)

6,Starting gold

7.Wizard Picks (10,11,12)

8.Minimum distance between Towns

9.How early you get threatened by Soultrapped from turn 100 to turn 300.

10.Population growth of yours vs AI wizard

11.Population growth - yours (from 1.0x to 1.5x)

12.Population growth - enemy (from 1.0x to 1.5x)

The first set of settings can drastically alter how the game plays. One of the hardest settings, in my opinion involves playing with NO neutral cities, NO lairs which makes average rush strategies harder. Setting Soultrapped to attack as early as Turn 100 ups the difficulty level even more and totally changes the way you play.

With the upcoming DLC - Scourage of the Seas, we are posed to see setting that affects the seas....



New Wizard retorts and options enhance the quality of the game

Moreover, if you feel the quality-of-life improvements are not worth paying for consider that even without paying another cent, you currently get the following for free

Though the Myrror - 6 new Wizard retorts (Fantastic Warlord, Stonemason, Lifebringer, Nature Summoner, I need a hero! + 1 free Myrran race (goblins) + 4 new default Wizards

Halloween update - 3 new Wizard retorts (Orcmancer, Necromancer, Death Eater) + 1 default Wizard

And if you are willing to spring for new DLCs, you get the following options

Rise of the Soultrapped - 5 new Wizard retorts (Techmaster, Demonologist, Myrran Refugee, Veteran Warlord, Might makes right!) + 1 new race (Soultrapped) + 3 new default Wizards

Newly announced - Scourage of the Seas - <info under embargo as at time of post>

These are each optional DLCs you can turn on or off, but they all fit into the game very well and feel MoMish. From the surprisingly versatile "Fantastic Warlord" that upgrades your summons to the bonkers crazy "Might makes right!" that gives your normal units a weaker form of regeneration called Combat regeneration at the cost of 2 maximum spellbooks, they are all playable and quite balanced thanks to the developers listening to the beta test community.

I had a lot of fun trying to see how these new options modified or altered well known decades old strategies like Life+Warlord, 11 book strategies, Runemaster-artificer, Nodemastery strategies

See for example this newly released guide to get a feel of some of the fun interactions between the new and old options
OP Custom Wizard strategies - new strategies beyond MoM Classic



What about AI and Diplomacy?

There's a misconception here that the AI in MoM (2022) "doesn't do diplomacy". In fact, this is far from the truth. While it is true that as of Dec 2023, if you play at Master AI skill , the AI Wizard will always declare war after meeting you, this is something the developers decided to do (extremely high default negative modifier) to increase the difficulty of the game. Let's face it, we humans use diplomacy to exploit the AI for spell trading 99% of time anyway.

The AI does diplomacy the normal expected way at skill levels below Master AI. The developers have pledged to work on diplomacy in the roadmap and beta versions have toned down this hostility at Master AI level.

Similarly, improved Ai is on the roadmap. Even here, I think there is a misconception that the AI is very bad.

I would say compared to classic AI, it actually is better in some ways, to the point we get complaints from people claiming to be "veteran MoM players" failing to win at the easy level even once after a few attempts!

But I'm not going to pretend the AI is extremely tough either, in fact the AI as of Dec release is only good at rush attacks early game and if you sit back to play a tall game you might struggle. But it is horrible at defending its own cities and its spell casting choices both at tactical level and overland level are bad (it loves to dispel and buff in pointless ways), though this can be easily improved in mods and I know of at least one moder who totally changed tactical combat including the AI.

In a way, the remake AI is the polar opposite of the original. The original was passive but if you let it survive to the late-midgame, the impossible level AI would start to wreck you with insane globals, with super armies that was unbeatable and you rage quit.

Again, I guess I am not breaking any big secrets to say the developers are working on AI now that most of the DLCS are more or less fixed and I expect the Jan 2024 releases to have improved AI.



Myths and other odd and ends

I've observed that there are many "fans" who actively want the game to fail. While not all CoM fans are like this, I have seen way too many who actively discourage others away from the remake, despite people saying they want to play a modernised version of MoM Classic and not Caster.

Many of them have not tried the game at all, or maybe at most at launch a year old and are unaware of the vast improvements, and frankly even a "prefect" MoM remake would not be appealing to them because what they want is CoM which despite being built on the same game mechanics, Caster has a totally different game design and to many of us is not a good game they want to play.

Again to forstall people who ask there are no plans for multiplayer or >4 players.

and to forestall the false narrative that I've seen some people try to spread that the game is a bust, that's a myth.

Sitherine has being on record saying during a early steam sale

"Master of Magic went very well, I am happy to share that it has been topping the strategic sales for us in terms of units and revenues generated so the master of magic franchise *is* very vibrant and people are in general liking the DLC...and we are happy that things are going very very well"

https://www.reddit.com/r/masterofmagic/ ... _happy_to/

Indeed, I have noticed that the game has been slowly gathering fans, either people who were disappointed at launch who came back or the much larger group of people who did not even hear of the remake until now (sadly Sitherine marketing is bad)!

To these fans (including me), we can never go back to the original as the remake is so much more superior in many ways and is still improving....

Another Myth, I am not employed by Sitherine, Muha in either official or unofficial capacity. I am just a big fan who has been part of a group of fans helping to beta test.



Conclusion - the game that patient gaming was designed for

I believe, the whole idea of patent gaming is to not jump onto the hottest thing and let others iron out all the kinks before going in at a lower price.

I submit that MoM (2022) is exactly the sort of game meant for patent gamers as after 12 months the game is now great at deep discounts are now available.

And the game is still improving....where the next build is expected to improve AI and diplomacy the main thing left on the roadmap.