Three cheers!

I'm sure the introduction of a few new spells won't hurt if they are done right.
* More summoning spells, maybe 1 to 3 in each school, including an Incarnation for each colour. Nature should be able to summon a greater variety of forest creatures.
* Raise Volcano + Change terrain could change Tundras into other terrain. How about a new spell (rare, Nature) to make this change directly?
* I have always wanted a negative spell like Change Terrain to make opponent's terrain worse. How about a spell (Death) that can turn grasslands into swamps (1 mana upkeep) that can be removed by Disenchant Area or Change Terrain?
* Meteor strikes happen as random events. This would also make a cool Chaos spell, or even just a spell with the corruption effects of a meteor strike.

But if in doubt, don't change the spells.
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There is a chaos spell that has the effect of a meteor strike, its called "Call the Void". It does 10 hits of damage to any units stationed in the city regardless of defence (kinda like hitting all units with a doom bolt), each building in the city has a 50% chance of being destroyed, corrups surrounding land and some other effects I cant remember.

In addition to call of the void, there is the raise volcano spell and the one which transforms the whole world into a nest of volcanoes (except your country). So there already are spells that destroy opponent terrain.

Armageddon causes 3-6 volcanoes to rise up each turn, Great Wasting causes 3-6 squares of land to be corrupted each turn. The caster's cities and surrounding lands are immune. Both these spells cause great distress to opposing wizards, and will usually lead to all-out war. Unfortunately, there is no way to change Tundras.

I would hand over the money now to anybody that was to undertake a good revamp of MoM

I personally would pre-order MoM2 the moment it became possible to do so, and I would most likely buy a spare copy as well just for a backup in case the original became damaged (as I did with the original MoM). Not to mention try to peddle the game to all my friends like some kind of perverse drug dealer.

I think that anyone who played the original would be ready to buy the game at the drop of a hat. When my friend told me that stardock was thinking of making MoM2, but was currently working on purchasing the rights to the game, my first response was “who do they need killed?”, simply because my desire for a sequel to MoM is that strong. (don't worry Atari, I'm just kidding) (Frogboy, confirm green light on target Alpha, I repeat: confirm green light on target Alpha.)

All joking aside , here are some suggestions for the game, although I'm sure I'll have more once I dig out my ol' dos box and play some more MoM.

Balance the races a bit more: Some races are simply far more powerful than others, although this isn't much of a problem single player, on multi player it would be best if all races were viable. Although keep the Myraan races stronger to compensate for the extra cost of being able to choose them.

Balance flight in certain situations: I love draconians, but I can see why having them all fly can be a problem with exploiting nodes and the like. Instead of taking away their flight, or making some units not fly, id suggest making it so any monsters killed in nodes when the node isn't conquered come back, and remaining units heal. This will keep the 3 draconian bowmen from taking out high lvl nodes. Also, Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic had a nice arcane spell called double gravity, which was a nice balancing tool for flight in pvp.

Make klakons not suck.

Make multi-player games customizable with number of spell picks and what-not.
Add more races/spells/skills/planes.

Maybe add a arcane version of a terraforming spell, not as good as change terrain, mabye more costly, but this would allow terraformers from not being limited to nature only. Also add a raise terrain spell.

Find a way to speed up turn time, in turn based strategy games, having 3 or 4+ people can become tedious waiting for your turn, so speeding up things would go far. Possibly allow others to see combat like in Age of Wonders: Shadow magic, which helps keep things interesting on your downtime.

Balance certain spells: I love the spells of MoM, but some in multiplayer would be just broken, like dark sleep. Keeping these spells in the game, but maybe tweaking their resistance would be a good plan.

Make Toren the Chosen look really hardcore. Your paying like 20 mana a turn for the guy, he better be cool.

Keep the same heroes in the game, but add more for each tier, There was only like 5 of the top tier heroes in the game, which would be way too few in big multiplayer games.

No game should go by without Brax the Dwarf visiting each wizard at least 5 times, lets keep the plucky, love starved Dorf alive!

Certain races cannot build higher level buildings, like ones that reduce unrest. No race should have all his unrest buildings built and still have unrest if they were the starting race.

Make sure Draconians can still fly.

When Brax shows up his caption should read “Hello, I love you.”. Because only the need for love would bring that poor dorf back so many times...

More buildings and Race specific units, people love their Airships and paladins.

Make it so Draconians do not have to be next to water to build Airships.

Customizable wizard pictures, also the ability to premake wizards and save them, so you can just click on their picture and go.

Make summoned creatures for some spell types better, Life for instance.

There should be at least one artifact called the Scepter of Frogboy.

Possibly add the ability to immigrate towns to other races, as per AoW:SM, although balance issues could arise since stronger, more disliked races like the dark elves could circumvent other races dislike for them.

Never have any Drizzt references in the dark elf descriptions.

In jokes, everyone loves in jokes.

Cool animations for units during strategic combat. Only allow quick combat against computers.

Ok, this is all for now, ill be back with more once I get refreshed on some of the races.

P.S. PLEASE MAKE Master of Magic 2!

I'm not sure this a workable approach... You'll only get preorders from people knowing/trusting Stardock, and you plan to make a larger-audience game, published by a "big" company (Atari), that will put it on shelves all over the world.
If things go well you'll sell 100k+ of the game. Even if they don't you can count on maybe 20-50 k. These figures mean you'll have to get cash for the dev, but you can't count on preorders to get much of it.
I know this is a problem for any small company trying to make a "big" game : you need to have cash first and be able to wait for sales, so you have to loan it from the publisher, which then will keep the sales profit, the dev company getting mostly praises. No easy solution, in our world you need money to make more !

One more request for a minor change: two uncommon spells and one rare is *way* too big a bonus for picking 11 books in one color. You already get an extra 10% discount and one additional common spell, compared to 10 books. I'd argue that this is enough to make 11 books attractive, and that the higher-level spells should be acquired the hard way, by researching them (at the aforementioned 40% discount).

Let every race build high level buildings? That's a major balancing point. Some races were built to conquer other races, not colonize and build massive cities. They trade off getting nastier units quickly whereas the others gain the benefit of improved resources at the cost of slower development.

I've already discussed my take on racial balancing in another thread. Basically, "Don't." Some races are much more challenging to use or are better captured than started with. It keeps things interesting. It won't bother me if in multiplayer people only pick from 5 races to start with all the time as long as there are plenty of barbarians to mix it up and keep the specialty unit armies interesting.

Why would you give non-nature magic mages the option to change terrain? Nature and life are great for city developers. Making arcane versions of their stuff would just water things down. If you want to make your cities pretty, pick these books. If you want to make their cities ugly, pick chaos and death. To have an arcane option would completely break that theme.

The Dracs flight was powerful, but balanced by the fact that more powerful nodes typically had at least one really nasty flying creatures and other players will have plenty of magical options vs. the Dracs. I rarely used their units in my games.

Yeah
There should be races (at least on I say) which are not pickable, having one is only possible through conquering barbarian towns. And it shouldn't be able to produce settlers
Now that would make the game interesting, conquering a town because of having a new race and not because of another darn micromanagement issue
You should put in stuff like that, for example conquering a town because it was built on some special place and it has some kind of bonus like a wonder thingy in civ.
Or conquering a town because one of your heroes got captive.... yeah, that sounds cool... somehow they capture your hero (some kind of battle spell, eg: paralize and they win without killing him), and before they torture him to serve them, you should get him back.
And then you should also let barbarians have their own special heroes, whom you could try to capture and turn them on your side....
Whohooooo, sounds good, I'd love these features! It's give conquering a new meaning
Nagypapi

I just want MoM updated with a few bells and whistles thrown in. No overhauling of systems or "balancing" or anything like that. And please no tweaking of the game for the sole purpose of helping multiplayer people. The solo game should come first and foremost, with a multiplayer option available for those who dare.

And a hero CariElf? and a Mace of Kwilas? and Draginol's Bow? LOL LOL LOL

~SDC~

I think you can assume that we have a passing understanding of the game industry.

Must... Bump... maintain interest...

Because if this thread falls off the front page people will probably lose interest in MoM2. LOL

Earlier ... unless I am mistaken Frogboy hinted at a masterofmagic.com, is there any ETA on when this might happen? I think it would generate a lot of interest across the internet once the web site was set up.

At a guess, I would say it will have to wait on final negotiations with Atari. Aside from trademark issues, it would likely worsen Stardock's bargaining position if they publicly committed to making the game (however qualified such a commitment may be) before settling on a price for the rights.

Bah. We should just go kidnap a few Atari executives and hold them for ransom til MoM2 gets done LOL

If I thought that would work, I'd have tried it to make sure MOO3 got done... LOL

Maybe all of us should act like MOM was really bad so that Stardock can get it easier.

-Bump-

Let's us not forget Atari is not Atari, it is and always will be Infogrames. They merely bought the Atari label to dupe folks who have fond memories of the old Atari. I would like nothing more than for Stardock to make this happen but Infogrames has a horrid track record, one need only look at the MOO3 debacle, and the botching of the highly anticipated Temple of Elemental Evil.

I just started dating an actress who did voiceovers for Infogrames. Maybe we can convince her to do some espionage. You know, get into some files, whiteout a few zeroes here and there, forge some signatures and BOOM! Stardock gets full creative control over MOM and first rights of refusal for any upcoming sequels for $5.00 hmm... no let's not be too obvious. $50.00.
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LOL LOL