Ive been waiting for someone to do another MOM for some time now. If you did go ahead with this, I would pre order it in a heartbeat. Anyway, theres my two cents worth

BTW, just as an interesting note, the person who did the Age of Wonders music is the same person doing the Galactic Civilizations II music and likely our "fantasy strategy game" music.

Good score! (no pun intended... )

There was some fine music there...

i would pre-order master of magic 2 in a second, and i suspect so would more than 5000 other people who don't know about this obscure message board or have the time and patience to deal with creating an acct, in order to post. if the developers are serious, why not create a seperate website just for the poll thats a little easier to find and a little more user friendly (ie. its quick and easy to vote).

They've already said they will if negotiations go through. Jeez, you'd think a guy could be bothered to read all 228 previous postings before making redundant suggestions.

J/K

Recently I've been splitting my game time between GC and MoM. Since I never played MoM until a couple of months ago, I searched for strategy guides on the internet and found a site that suggested that beginners start with Horus and High Men. I've been successful with those choices up to the "easy" level, but could use some help on playing on harder levels. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

~SDC~

That question will probably generate a thread all its own... if not a forum...

My quick 2gp is that I always found High Elves to be the easiest, with Life magic especially. Chaos and Sorcery won't hurt either.

Longbowmen are incredible, as are Elven Lords. Pretty much everything also gets Forestry, which is nice if you pick up some dwarves (the combination with Mountaineering gives Pathfinding to the stack). The extra mana income is always nice, and the Elves have a pretty decent selection of buildings, etc.

Others will likely recommend Halflings, for various reasons. I never used them heavily myself, so I'll let those people make the case for them...

I saw that suggested elsewhere, based on them having 8 figures per unit and slingers. But their buildings seem to be seriously limited compared to High Men. I haven't checked out High Elves yet, thanks for the recommendation.

On the easy level High Men Paladins and Magicians just seem to roll over everything. It takes quite a while to get to those units, of course.

~SDC~

High men are very easy to play. Build, wait. Get pikemen in order to defend. Get paladins. Cast a spell to defend them against missiles and flyers if needs be. You won. If you need, you can add a few magicians, but an army of 9 paladins is just able to trample anything since your opponent cannot cast spells at them...
Nomads are cool too. Griffons are strong, nomads get extra gold, and their rangers move very fast strategically.

Will there be a MOM2 Metaverse?

The metaverse issue raises the question of scoring. As an MoM newbie with no access to documentation, I haven't figured out how that works. Clearly higher dificulty levels, more opponents, more spells researched and higher population add to the score, but does finishing the game sooner also add to the score?

~SDC~

I'd suggest customizing your wizard as soon as you're comfortable with the game. Until you want to shoot for the top level of difficulty, choosing the Myrran pick is pretty powerful. If you're lucky, you have the plane to yourself for a while, and you have access to some potent races and better goodies.

Try Myrran/Chaos + Draconians once if you are usually slow to explore and expand, their fly really helps you scout early. Also look at Dark Elves if you want well rounded cities and good mana income... and shoot for a stack of their mage units early, doom bolt cleans house when you can throw several per round.

Yes. Time counts. Can't remember/find the details, though.

Yes but they grow sooo sloooooowlyyyyyy... Lizard men are good explorers too, since they swim, and dwarves great because they get 2x as much money, which means you can rush buy more city improvements and thus get a faster start than most races.

Yes, I've noticed that when I've captured some Dark Elf cities in past games. They have problems with rebelling also, I think.

Thanks for the posts! I didn't realize that elves gave you more mana and dwarves gave more gold.

~SDC~

Another question for you MoM veterans: do roads increase your gold? If so, does the road have to connect to another city to activate the gold bonus?

~SDC~

Roads between cities increase gold; see the FAQ for the gory details. In a nutshell, cities of other races generate 2x the revenue; bigger city = bigger bonus.

My advice for success at the higher levels: attack as early as you can. Build troops and go out and take over neutral cities ASAP (there will be lots of them if you play with large landmass). Halflings are my favorite, because slingers are available very early and they inspire the least unrest in subject races. My experience with the builder strategy is that Tauron will be burning down my buildings with Meteor Storm as fast as I can build them before I can field a significant number of paladins.

When I want a quick, relatively easy game, I will usually play with all death magic and any race. Choosing wraith as the rare spell will let you get out one of these monstrosities quickly. If you are still alive by the time the wraith is cast (a very real concern at impossible difficulty) about 30 turns later, you will have a relatively easy time conquring the entire light side.

Since most early troops have almost no resistance and non-magical weapons, the wraith becomes a nearly unstoppable killing machine. With life-drain, most troops will become undead versions capable of garrison duty (and not much more), which will keep out most of the odd attacks by wandering monsters and enemy wizards.

A similar degenerate strategy works for life by taking all life magic and getting torin early in the game. Although that is less of a sure bet since torin starts off too weak to take out 9 stacks of normal spearmen/swordsmen/halberdiers.

As for the scoring question, finishing earlier will give a larger bonus. However, this is offset by a reduced amount of time to grow your population. Typically the population growth per turn at the end game more than offsets the penalty for playing another turn.

Thanks again for all your posts. I finished my first game with Horus and High Elves last night. I have to say that compared with High Men I'm impressed with the Elf Longbowmen, and the Elven Lords are much better than High Men calvary but not as good as Paladins. Pegasi were a big disappointment. The mana bonus was a help, though.

Another question stimulated by that game: Is what you find in each node completely random, or does it somehow vary with how you took it? For example, I had a great deal of trouble with a sorcery node with Air Elementals. They kept killing my longbowmen and heros. I finally sent in a force of 4 Elven Lords, who couldn't attack the Air Elementals, but defended themselves rather better. When I was "triumphant" I found "absolutely nothing". The general impression I had from past games was that the harder it was to take a node, the greater the rewards. Is that incorrect?

~SDC~

Rewards are random, but generally the value will usually be around same, even though the specific reward (items/hero/gold/mana) are different

http://www26.brinkster.com/kadirclan is a MoM website with lots of info. Also, you can try these MoM forums:

http://www.masterofmagic2.com/
http://george101.demon.co.uk/mom/
http://www.ageofmagic.org/forum/index.php

Thanks for the links, nazrix. Unfortunately the first one you gave, http://www26.brinkster.com/kadirclan doesn't work for me (page cannot be found). Was there a typo in it?

~SDC~

Here is the correct link I think.
http://www20.brinkster.com/kadirclan/

Nice! Thanks, Gunner 243. I had seen that page a while back but is seems that it's been significantly enhanced since then.

~SDC~