"I think we're going to do it" I am too stunned after reading that statement, have waited a long time for a developer to remake MoM. Best of luck Stardock. I extremely happy that I signed up for Dengrin net now.
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| I'd be happy to see the overall number of races whittled down to 8 or so... then make that the max number of players per game, and you can concentrate more on giving each one a unique, GalCiv-type AI... |
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Uh.. but the other players were based around the Wizards themselves, not the races. Sometimes I would start with a single town of lizard men and never build another one because the other races had much better city building.
I think I see where you're coming from though. As cool as MOO2 was, the race creation system generified the abilities too much and made it too complicated for the developers to limit race comprehension of specific tech types or give them prejudice against each other where morale was concerned. A good example of more options, but less personality where races were concerned.
It sounds like you'd prefer to play the game from the perspective of a single race rather than the wizard conquering all, whereas I prefer a mixed and matched fantasy empire where I'm mounting expeditions to Myrror simply to capture a town of Trolls so I can get those handy regenerating Shamen.
I'd have to say I prefer the multitude of races, at least from my current MOMthink perspective, but the question of how to give races more personality is an interesting one.
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'Doh! Sorry. Clicked twice because I thought my free wireless connection had completely crapped out. (I live right next to a coffee shop - life is good)
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#178
by Citizen DaveV - 8/11/2004 7:11:05 AM
My vote for "most annoying thing" about MoM: micromanagement. It would make life a lot easier if extra hammers left over after a unit was built were carried over to the next project; that would remove the temptation to revisit all my cities every turn and switch workers to farmers and vice versa so I don't waste any production. Ditto for research.
Although the concept of each unit eating food is a great part of MoM, it also causes some micromangement headaches. I try to run with a minimum food surplus; when I build new units I usually have to switch some workers to farmers somewhere. It takes a lot of time to check which city can best afford the lost production, while still providing the necessary food.
A better overall city management system would be great: being able to sort cities by food/mana/gold/production would be very helpful. Build queues would be handy.
As to the design philosophy, put me in the "build the same 15-year-old game with new graphics, better AI, and fewer bugs" camp. The game could certainly be better balanced, but I think the imbalance is part of its charm. Adding new planes, spells, etc., has the risk of unintended consequences. I'd definitely vote for a good editor, though, and a graphical system that makes it easy for end users to add new units, terrain, and buildings. You only have to look at Civ 2 to see how much talent there is in the user community. If Stardock does their work right on the game engine, the user community can do some amazing things to keep the game interesting for years (thus generating more sales).
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Huh? Towns don't do research. That's just a factor of your mana slider bar. I also don't see any easy solution to the issue of food micromanagement short of having a better town sorting system like MOO2's where you can easily find cities that don't need as much production.
Amen on build queues though. I always wished they would just let you set up several predetermined build queues for every possible structure in MOM and MOO2 that automatically ignores unavailable structures due to race (or research in MOO2). For a town that's just being built for the sake of resources rather than units you could simply select a queue from the list that you've set up to ignore all non-mana/food/morale/production structures. I always liked tweaking my town builds at first but once you get twenty cities under your belt, it gets to be a serious pain to have to constantly start new projects all the time. Even MOO2's ten item queue lists weren't sufficient to force you to attend to a dozen planets a turn once you'd captured most of the galaxy in that game.
This would have to work more like a priority list though. Otherwise you'll run into trouble when structures get demolished due to combat or spells and prerequisite building requirements are no longer met. That way if something suddenly becomes available to build again that is higher on the list, the AI will automatically switch projects over to it when it's done with the current project or is forced to stop.
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#180
by Citizen nazrix - 8/11/2004 1:18:02 PM
Lets not get too far ahead of ourselves. What's the news from Stardock about MoM2?
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#181
by Citizen DaveV - 8/11/2004 2:25:45 PM
| Huh? Towns don't do research. |
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I meant that leftover research should roll over to the next project, the same as I'm advocating for leftover production. Again, this would remove the need either to fiddle with the sliders if you don't have a convenient number of research scrolls, or to waste some when you make your discovery.
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I certainly agree with having production queues, as well as rolling over unused production/research. Both simple, and not huge changes from the original game.
| I also don't see any easy solution to the issue of food micromanagement short of having a better town sorting system like MOO2's where you can easily find cities that don't need as much production. |
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Well, I have a simple solution... military units don't eat food. If they do, it's on a *much* smaller scale... if a single 'farmer' produced say 10 units of food, then having each military unit eat 1 might not be bad (better yet, if each farmer produced 100 units, each troop could eat a variable amount, averaging around 10, or whatever).
[Edit: In keeping with the same goals, military units should be *much* cheaper/faster to build IMO, compared to buildings. It should be possible to build up a reasonable garrison in a new town within a few turns, and feed them, while still getting some long-term benefits out of the town. A GalCiv-style approach, with separate queues for military and social production, might help here...]
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Just to add my two cents, I would instantly preorder this game. MoM made by Stardock . . . 
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Oh, and additionally, the weakest part of MoM was the AI. The game, despite its wonderfulness, was too easily beaten on the hardest difficultly level, even when I was ten years old, when the game came out. The game had such incredible depth of options that actually had significant effect on your gameplay. If Stardock were to redo the game, as Frogboy is hinting, that would marry what is essentially the almost perfect game with its one missing piece, that is, the AI. I think we can all see from Gal Civ that the people here know how to make an effective AI. I love being challenged on sometimes even the normal difficulties (before you really learn genuine strategies), instead of like Civ 3 where the other side is cheating sooo absurdly badly on the highest level and is still getting slaughtered by the same slightly altered tactics you used in Civ 1. And I use the terms tactics and strategy on purpose there, as you can effectively defeat Civ 3 on the highest levels of difficulty on spur-of-the-moment ideas, whereas Gal Civ actually makes you think strategically.
Seeing MoM with an effective AI would make me very happy. Age of Wonders: SHadow Magic, which is much much much better than Age of Wonders 2 (especially with the random map generator), is the closest thing so far, but it really lacks charm, and again, the tactic is not so much that your enemies are smart, but that they have a whole lot more stuff than you do and they know much more about you than you know about them. Also, again, it really lacks . . . I don't know, that makes me want to play it again and again. It feels too much like a pale imitation of MoM instead of a genuine sucessor. And I think maybe that is what Frogboy is looking for: a genuine sucessor.
That said, Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic is really a nice game, significantly better than the previous additions. It goes to show you that even a pale imitation of an incredible game can be good. I think the hardest thing any MoM2 developer would face would be getting that perfect balance of options and gameplay that made us love the first. It would probably be a make-or-break for Stardock, either making it much bigger than it is (is that a good thing?) or crashing it to the ground. The nice thing about incorporated companies, however, is that nothing would stop a sucessor company from forming.
The question is, do the folks in charge want to risk Stardock over the chance to make what would possibly be the best game ever?
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#185
by Citizen nazrix - 8/12/2004 2:05:50 AM
*drools on moodgiesanta*
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#186
by Citizen DaveV - 8/12/2004 9:09:49 AM
Imagine what we could do on a fantasy game if we had nearly twice the art resources?
Or more to the point, which would generate more sales? The licensed name or the additional features/content that would come with having a larger development staff? |
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The advantage with going with MoM is that you could save a lot of man-hours on design and playtesting. You have a game design that's widely acknowledged to be in the "greatest ever" category, and is extremely well-documented. Instead of spending months defining and refining your concepts, you can just jump right into coding and artwork. So you'll get some of the license fee back by saving design time on the project. Just don't tell Atari...
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Someone told me on another message board that Sid Meier acquired the rights to the Microprose licenses. Anyone have information on this? Not much use in thinking about asking Atari for the rights to a game if they don't own the rights . . .
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#188
by Citizen rgd72 - 8/13/2004 8:19:21 AM
Master of Magic is one of my most favourite games ever and have waited years for a sequel with the same charm as the original.
I'm a computer games artist with over 10yrs experience and would love to be involved somehow!
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Sid didn't get MOM Moodgie. He did get X-Com though (woohoo!) and the new Pirates is supposed to be out soon. Looks really cool.
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*gives Frogboy a gigantic hug*
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| Stardock diabolical plan is to bring turn based strategy games back to the norm. And one way we think that can be helped is with a new Master of Magic done RIGHT. |
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Whoo-hoo! 
          
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#193
by Citizen nazrix - 8/18/2004 1:56:59 AM
i've been waiting 10 years to hear that. yay!
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#194
by Citizen DaveV - 8/18/2004 6:41:22 AM
| #190 by Avatar Frogboy - 8/17/2004 4:04:15 PM ...it's oaky to talk here about what you'd like in there. |
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*raises hand*
1. An iron-man mode, to discourage all the strategies centered around "reload saves until you get xxxx".
2. Some way to discourage a flying ranged attacker (e.g. sprites, draconian bowmen) from beating a node/lair/city over multiple turns by killing one defender then hitting "done" 50 times. I suggest that you lose 1.5x the fame you'd gain by winning if "all units retreat exhausted".
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#195
by Citizen Alstein - 8/18/2004 6:47:10 AM
One solution, perhaps flying units get tired about x rounds, and collapse/becoming walking units, so they'd have to retreat or die/captured.
Another option is flying units cannot capture anything on the ground.
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#196
by Citizen Kingswood - 8/18/2004 6:49:52 AM
| But for those people looking for a radical change, that's not going to happen. |
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A good plan ... but I'm sure that people would like to see Master of Magic with extra stuff that doesn't change the basic game.
* Multiplayer. (Hotseat MP is easiest to implement)
* More AI wizards in a game.
* A few customisable game rules. (eg: wizards not defeated until last city is taken)
* More ways to win - and the ability to pick the victory conditions apply in the current game.
* Scenarios.
* Ability to choose additional parameters when creating the game world, such as the world size (small, medium, large); number of neutral cities (few, several, many); Race distribution in neutral cities (uniform = 75%, average = 50%, diverse = 25%).
* For multiplayer games, the number of picks should be configurable.
None of these would change the fundamental structure of the underlying game, but provide greater playability to the original game.
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#197
by Citizen izaqyos1 - 8/18/2004 9:38:39 AM
I'm a long time fan of MOM. It is the best game I've ever played. and I've played quite a few.
I'm very happy that stardock will create the sequel.
It's great to know the devs actually love MOM and do not want to change it radically.
***crossing my fingers***
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You guys rule. So uh... who's going to write the manual for you?  I've done guides for Prima and Game Informer.
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I would pre-order 3 copies. The original is still very playable even with the graphics they way they are. I would love an update of it..
I would be giving the 2 other copies to my friends who equally love this game as I do.
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