"Variety" and "Balance"

[drake178]

I think this discussion has been long overdue. I took the liberty of quoting what I felt relevant from the other thread, and am hoping to continue the discussion here instead. If you think I missed something you posted that you feel is also relevant, I apologize. Feel free to repeat it here too.

Originally posted by The Big Tuna:

From those of us who played the original, the "rebalanced" gameplay is hard to get into. Heroes are 1/2 as powerful as they used to be, or even less. Even with full loads of magical items, buffed to the gills, they get swarmed and taken down in the first two rounds by mid-level mobs. It's not that the game is now "harder" it just isn't fun to me. You end up grinding down nodes by throwing waves of units at them - instead of fighting a smart battle.

Originally posted by Erotic Violence:

Yeah, I like CoM but definitely think Seravy fell into the "overbalancing" trap, in the process nuking a lot of variety from the original game.

Originally posted by prokolyo:

What "variety" in the original?? You rush paladins, or rush Torin, or whatever color your poison is, and game over. Now there are many, many different ways to go, and def no such OP strats like paladins, Torin, etc.

Originally posted by drake178:

Originally posted by prokolyo:

def no such OP strats like paladins, Torin, etc.

That "variety". For me, what was removed is the feeling from the new game creation screens that "if I choose this, this, and this, I'll start with an advantage as compared to if I choose that, that, and that". Mind you, to be able to tell, at some point, I do have to choose "that, that, and that" too, otherwise I will never know. There are people out there - and I can state this with certainty since I am one - for whom this is half the fun.

I think in CoM, this is no longer the case, but correct me if I'm wrong, since as you probably know, I don't play CoM. Yet, my impression is that in CoM, I would know right off the bat that no matter what I choose, I will not have an advantage, unless I get some lucky rolls on the neighbours, and they happen to be specifically weak against what I chose. Except, the chance of that happening does not depend on my choices. I may be able to make intentional sub-par choices, but I could only go out of my way for a bad start, because the good ones are all equalized.

The end result is that these choices become meaningless to me unless I happen to want to try out everything anyway. I think this may be one of the main reasons why some players like CoM, while others don't. The problem is, if you are a completionist, and naturally want to check it all out, then there's a non-insignificant chance that you will not even be able to comprehend this argument. "Variety", to you, simply means something different than it does to me. In my case, there need to be better or worse choices in general, as opposed to better or worse choices against something specific, that are equally balanced overall.

If there are better and worse choices, I likely won't rest until I have tried everything to figure out which ones are which. On the other hand, if the initial choices are fully balanced, then the game will get tedious to me very quickly - and the more "variety" there is, the more disappointing the experience will be. Simply because I had high expectations that were unmet in the end.

Originally posted by Hobson:

I highly encourage anyone to voice their opinion but I suggest you include some of these things like what was experienced, how it made you feel, and a suggestion on what you think could help improve that experience. I also highly encourage no negative replies against those people, but feel free to be like hey did you try X, Y and Z. We all play games to get difference experiences out of them, all of us have reasons to love MoM and everything its spawned to be talking about it this many years later.

Originally posted by Seravy:

There definitely are better and worse choices, the gap between them is smaller but they do exist. Picking a few Death books for early undead creation is powerful. Picking Alchemy is powerful for almost every build. Picking Werewolves or Giant Spiders as early research is very powerful as well. Then there are those "2-3 books of everything" strategies that Sapher plays, those are still the top tier even despite the balancing. Picking 6-8 books and 4-6 picks worth of retorts is still better than picking 12 books without a retort.
On the other hand, picking 1-2 Chaos books is generally not so great. It's not useless but you don't get as much value as you would by picking 2 Nature or Death or Sorcery books.
But the power level gap between the worst and best choices is roughly 2-3 difficulty levels wide (assuming the same player with same skill is playing both) while in the original the best builds were easymode on Impossible and the worst ones were borderline unplayable. Whether this is better or worse than the original is really up to personal preferences.

Also, one can argue the current game makes those initial choices much more important. In the original you found so many books and retorts in treasure that your initial choices were...not that important. "I'll find 3 Sorcery books and summon Sky Drakes anyway" was the usual ending I got regardless of what I started with, only variety being that sometimes it was 3 Nature books for Colossus or 3 Chaos for Great Drake. In CoM, finding many books is a possibility but it happens less often and can't be relied on consistently so you actually need a late game plan in your initial picks.

I believe the guaranteed spell system is generous enough to offer a lot of "best" choices, such as Flame Strike, Time Stop, or Armageddon.

Originally posted by hernang.ortiz:

I tend to agree that some choices are simply better than others and some strategies are particularly very powerful. Once you adjust to the new unit and spell info, you can exploit things to a high degree. See player Sapher for exhibit A of exploiting the game

The difference is that you are less punished with useless units and spells (so that they might see some use for variety) and the original particularly has too many spells adding nothing to the game because theres no reason to use them. but there are clearly below average (but not useless) and above average elements to Caster of Magic more noticeable than modern multiplayer-ready 4x games. You will have more success in some things over others and high men continue being such a powerful race

@Seravy: With all due respect, I think you didn't understand my argument. If the power gap between the worst and best choices is 2-3 difficulty levels, then somewhere between 33% to 50% of them will have very little gap within their group. I think it also stands to reason that the distribution is likely not linear, but instead, the majority of combinations fall on the same power level, with a few above (such as those with Alchemy, based on your description), and a few below (those with 1 or 2 Chaos books in your example). Based on these premises, I'd find it easy to conclude that from the point of view of an average player, the practical difference between the choices is close to zero. It will take a very skilled player to even notice that they exist, much less be able to evaluate and exploit them.

The Death books, Werewolves, and Giant Spiders argument also seems flawed, since according to the manual, Death and Nature are meant to have a strong early game, for which they pay for later. In the original game, you can sacrifice mid-game potential for a strong early game with any color. Typically, by taking 11 books which, conincidentally, prevents you from ever finding 3 of another color to do your "summon Sky Drakes anyway" thing, since the overall book limit is 13. But what I think is the most intruguing part of your argument is, supposing that "summon the very rare of your selected realm and overrun the map with it" would truly be the final stage of every game of MoM, how would that differ from an end-game of CoM? Aside from the "I win" button, of course, which I believe was added as a result of too many games (un)ending with wars of attrition that are less than enjoyable?

Guaranteed spells don't make a difference either. Both them, as well as the removal of retort requirements, serve to increase "variety" from the completionist perspective, and they do this outstandingly well. The choice of initial selections is probably magnitudes higher than it is in the original game. Yet, without a difference in power, I have to circle back to my original statement. They are essentially meaningless to me, and the more there are, the worse this situation becomes from my perspective. I can choose whatever I want, it just won't make the slightest difference in how the game plays out. Ultimately though, I agree with you in that whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is personal preference. What I don't like is people being seemingly disrespectful to those who are of the "other opinion" and are not afraid to voice it.

@Zitro: Exhibit A is not illustrative of any part of this discussion (apologies to the afore-mentioned). For someone who can win a game in an artificially constructed worst case scenario, the starting choices are meaningless by definition. As for the "useless spells and units" argument, I can no longer count the amount of times I have read that. What does seem to be rare though, is backing it up with actual examples. I was hoping maybe you could rectify this if I ask nicely enough?

[spiralout]

Removing game breaking combinations = removal of fun = no meaningful choices?
I personally don't agree but I certainly can see how people enjoy discovering and/or applying overpowered strategies.

The balance is completely changed in CoM imo primarily because of Seravy's unbelievably improved AI. You can really get immersed in it and play the game diplomatically. I love it.
I'm thankful the most powerful combinations got the axe, at the least because the AI would certainly use it against you, which would be no fun either. :D

[hernang.ortiz]

I'm sorry I have not provided examples of the many units and spells that are very subpar in the original game.

I'll start with spells (I'll skip commons because they could be argued they should be weak)
*heavenly light - 150/2 cost just to get true light in a single city, an underwhelming spell that boosts the generally weak life creatures (and slightly weakens undead/death).
*cloud of shadow is slightly better due to the relative strength of death creatures, but is 'Rare'!
*eternal night is slightly better due to it being global, but would you spend 1000+ cost and casting skill and research cost of a very rare just for 'darkness'?
*demon lord isn't bad, but balanced poorly against death knights.
*Angel - 550 cost and high upkeep for a unit with statistics comparable (if slightly better than) to elite armorer guild units and a situational ability to kill 'create undead' units that would be made obsolete with 'holy word' or even the pretty good 'dispel evil'
*Astral Gate (not useless but very rare! high cost?)
*two very rare globals that target a single realm is not exactly fun, and redundant.
Life is surprisingly good at not having many useless spells, but it gets worse in other realms.
*Nature's eye just grants some city vision.
*giant spiders are very underwhelming and one could argue at the very least that cockactrices are very situational due to their fragility
*petrify is pretty useless, especially considering the resistance levels in the original game
*the nature global spells are not exactly noteworthy, but maybe not useles
*Blur is 10% damage reduction, hilariously bad.
*Immolation is extremely weak, reads as 4-strength magic attack and is only marginally useful if you exploit it with arrows.
*Flame Blade costs 125! for just 2 attack
*Pretty much all uncommon and rare chaos creatures range from subpar to garbage, and are very expensive. Why should I use efreet? gargoyles? doom bat?
*Metal Fires is +1 to all, hilariously bad.
*I said I wasn't going to mention commons, but death has a handful of resistance-based clunkers in there.
*Drain Power against AI with resource advantages is a net loss even 1vs1, because you are using casting skill better used elsewhere
*There are lots and lots of spells that are often not worth the cost, but I think the ones above particularly stick out. There are also spells that are so powerful, that you wonder - why use anything else?


Normal units is also a problem, easy to exploit to be more powerful than even rare creatures. And within races, some units are just way better than others to a way that doesn't give much flexibility:
*Why get war mammoths when you have the superior in every way war trolls that require only fighter's guild? (less jarring, but one could argue the same of hammerhands vs golem)
*Races with cost multipliers of units have halberdiers becoming unusually expensive and not scaling properly, adding 20, 40, or even more cost just for that same + armor hp, melee. Halberdiers as a result are very disappointing for the cost, especially for myrran races.
*A normal unit (paladin) carrying magic immunity is such a cheap mechanic. It doesn't help that it fights as well (if not better) than griffins.
*so so many units are so sad, like centaurs, manticores, rangers, etc.. compared to the possibly balanced units like griffins, stag beetles, javalineers, etc.

Some races are much much weaker than others in almost all circumstances, so why play them? Why play gnoll when other races can also have good early units and have more to offer? why play orc when you have high men with better magicians and top-tier unit (tho wyverns don't require cathedral).

[Gandalf]

Seravy, would it be possible to integrate this game with the Steam Workshop, so that people can mod it, thus making your towering achievment live forever?

[madocs]

I hear what you are saying!
I am more happy with CoM than MoM myself.

There are a number of ways to play the game both CoM and MoM, but often I found in MoM I would rely upon uber heroes to mince everything up! Sure I felt powerful, but it made other units inconsequential, and IMO reduced immersion due to Heroes being unrealistic with their power.

Seravy has been very good with giving so many options in the initial settings!
If you want to be OP, then you can be... just pick different options, or difficulty levels.

There is good variety on how you play now: It is not just about hero rush, but focusing on summons, or maximising resources, or combat spells, or overland spells, etc are very good options now!

I said this before: Maybe rename easy to normal, and normal to hard, simply to appease our egos lol (partly tongue in cheek)!

Also I think Seravy could look at how spells are chosen more though. I think an option (again options!! lol), to give you more guaranteed spells would be very good! This would allow people to focus on playing how they like. (Increased based guaranteed spell choices at start of game maybe?)

Or maybe choosing certain retorts would give more chances of certain types of spells (ie. channeler gives you more chances of actually getting combat spells, or guardian more chance of city defence spells, etc)

That would make your choices more pertinent, rather than just relying on chance alone or spell trading. (There are always ways to improve things).

I wonder if you could make a hero buff that you could adjust (via options or game settings). To make them either stronger or weaker. It might be nice in some ways to play a game without heroes.

If you want heroes to be strong again, just modify the save games (I have been doing this more for fun figuring out what does what and where... I know strange what people do for fun!). I could post my document file on how to do that, but I have no idea how or where I could do that.
I think you can also alter the hero base statistics, but even then, supernatural creatures will still damage you (which is good IMO... you do have to think a little more carefully how you are going to approach things).

I like CoM the way it is!

[Seravy]

Originally posted by Gandalf:

Seravy, would it be possible to integrate this game with the Steam Workshop, so that people can mod it, thus making your towering achievment live forever?

I don't know what that is but there will be support for modding in INI files.

[Gandalf]

The Steam Workshop is a Steam account-based hosting service for videogame user-created content.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(service)#Steam_Workshop

[Gandalf]

It's a nice place to share mods :)

[drake178]

Originally posted by hernang.ortiz:

I'm sorry I have not provided examples of the many units and spells that are very subpar in the original game.

I'll start with spells (I'll skip commons because they could be argued they should be weak)
*heavenly light - 150/2 cost just to get true light in a single city, an underwhelming spell that boosts the generally weak life creatures (and slightly weakens undead/death).
*cloud of shadow is slightly better due to the relative strength of death creatures, but is 'Rare'!
*eternal night is slightly better due to it being global, but would you spend 1000+ cost and casting skill and research cost of a very rare just for 'darkness'?
*demon lord isn't bad, but balanced poorly against death knights.
*Angel - 550 cost and high upkeep for a unit with statistics comparable (if slightly better than) to elite armorer guild units and a situational ability to kill 'create undead' units that would be made obsolete with 'holy word' or even the pretty good 'dispel evil'
*Astral Gate (not useless but very rare! high cost?)
*two very rare globals that target a single realm is not exactly fun, and redundant.
Life is surprisingly good at not having many useless spells, but it gets worse in other realms.
*Nature's eye just grants some city vision.
*giant spiders are very underwhelming and one could argue at the very least that cockactrices are very situational due to their fragility
*petrify is pretty useless, especially considering the resistance levels in the original game
*the nature global spells are not exactly noteworthy, but maybe not useles
*Blur is 10% damage reduction, hilariously bad.
*Immolation is extremely weak, reads as 4-strength magic attack and is only marginally useful if you exploit it with arrows.
*Flame Blade costs 125! for just 2 attack
*Pretty much all uncommon and rare chaos creatures range from subpar to garbage, and are very expensive. Why should I use efreet? gargoyles? doom bat?
*Metal Fires is +1 to all, hilariously bad.
*I said I wasn't going to mention commons, but death has a handful of resistance-based clunkers in there.
*Drain Power against AI with resource advantages is a net loss even 1vs1, because you are using casting skill better used elsewhere
*There are lots and lots of spells that are often not worth the cost, but I think the ones above particularly stick out. There are also spells that are so powerful, that you wonder - why use anything else?


Normal units is also a problem, easy to exploit to be more powerful than even rare creatures. And within races, some units are just way better than others to a way that doesn't give much flexibility:
*Why get war mammoths when you have the superior in every way war trolls that require only fighter's guild? (less jarring, but one could argue the same of hammerhands vs golem)
*Races with cost multipliers of units have halberdiers becoming unusually expensive and not scaling properly, adding 20, 40, or even more cost just for that same + armor hp, melee. Halberdiers as a result are very disappointing for the cost, especially for myrran races.
*A normal unit (paladin) carrying magic immunity is such a cheap mechanic. It doesn't help that it fights as well (if not better) than griffins.
*so so many units are so sad, like centaurs, manticores, rangers, etc.. compared to the possibly balanced units like griffins, stag beetles, javalineers, etc.

Some races are much much weaker than others in almost all circumstances, so why play them? Why play gnoll when other races can also have good early units and have more to offer? why play orc when you have high men with better magicians and top-tier unit (tho wyverns don't require cathedral).

Thank you very much for your time! Your list is interesting, although I only see 3 items on it that I don't recall ever having used in a meaningful way: Efreet, Metal Fires, and War Mammoths. I will readily concede that many of the entries are situational, some much more so than others.

At the same time, I can't help but notice that you factor cost into your judgement, and pardon me for stating this, but that does not strike me as sound logic. When contrasted with effect alone - or maybe call it gain -, I believe cost can only be meaningfully evaluated in the context of an "ultimate solution[masterofmagic.fandom.com]". In all other cases, I think cost may only serve as a comparison to something similar in nature - either on its own, or combined with gain to form a ratio of the two. Except, the way I see it, for such a comparison to be valid, the presence of one compared item should guarantee the availability of the other. In other words, I don't think it's reasonable to compare two things between which one can't actually make a choice.

But, suppose I look past this obstacle. The followup question that pops into my mind is whether the items on the list would be "useful" if they cost less resources, or would they have to be "stronger" to qualify. If it's the former, then their fate would need to be decided by the first question, creating a paradox that I can't resolve. Only if the answer is the latter, could I really accept that these entries may indeed be "useless", possibly indicating a genuinely bad idea. It the case of your particular list, the items that seem to fall into this second category are Heavenly Light, Life Force, Tranquility, Nature's Eye, Petrify, Blur, Immolation, Efreet, Gargoyles, Doom Bat, Metal Fires, Drain Power, War Mammoths, Centaurs, Manticores, Rangers, Gnolls, and Orcs (barring the Death commons). Some of these I think I could argue in favor of.

Take Heavenly Light, for instance. Without the case-fallthrough bug, nearly half of all land-based encounters (i.e. that are not on an island of their own) are intended to have Death creatures in the original game. That means almost every other rampaging monster group consists of Death units. Ignoring cost, I don't think that debuffing these, along with negating enemy wizards' Darkness, is a meaningless effect at all. Nature's Eye also makes me wonder. I use this pretty much every time I have it. I find being able to spot the enemy 2-3 turns in advance to be quite useful. There isn't a unit in the original game that is able to get past this spell without being noticed unless it is invisible or enchanted for movement, and even then, there are only a handful.

Personally, I don't consider using Immolation with ranged attacks to be an exploit either. It's a quirk of the system. Coincidentally, it's the exact same quirk that allows Stoning Touch and Poison to work with Focus Magic in CoM. Granted, one could propose that Immolation should not be handled as a Touch Attack in the first place, but until they come along and implement it differently, I think documenting the quirk is a more appropriate resolution than removing it, especially if, as suggested, the spell is too weak otherwise. But I disagree with that too. The effect may indeed not be very strong, but it's the only Chaos enchantment that can be cast on fantastic creatures to improve their damage. I've seen that make a difference many times.

I also have a very fond memory of Gargoyles, from a Warp Reality Chimeras game, where some nearby nodes just happened to be guarded by Nagas that I couldn't take out any other way. Granted, I'm not sure I ever used Gargoyles outside of this scenario, but by itself, this experience was enough to never call them "useless" myself. Neither can I agree with Doom Bats being on the list. They are one of the fastest units in the game, that also happen to be tough enough to take on most neutrals. I'm not sure what the problem is with them. I've used them multiple times in different situations. They are also among my favourite scouting units, but that probably doesn't count, since it's just personal preference.

Then there is Drain Power, for which I think ignoring the opportunity cost of catching the enemy without mana is effectively missing the point of the spell. In the original game, it can even be used to cut short an attrition war, since conquering an AI fortress when they are out of mana means they are automatically defeated instead of being banished. Finally, from the second list, Rangers are the only non-hero unit with Pathfinding. It requires Nature or Death magic to duplicate this trait without taking up two units' worth of stack space. I personally also find Gnolls to be pretty cool, as long as the land size is at least medium in v1.31, or large in v1.52, so they don't get stuck on an island.

As to why I would choose a race when it is evidently inferior, that's simple: because I want to. At the very least, after the first time, I am quite conscious of the shortcoming(s) that I am accepting by doing so. It comes with the territory, and I actually like it that way. In fact, I find this preferable over making the same choice from an even perspective, where I know that the relative power of each race is designed to be equal. That feels artificial and less meaningful - in other words, not worth exploring -, particularly if I get the impression that some aspects of one race or another have been toned down to satisfy a need for "balance".

But anyway, I think there is at least one more over-arching theme here that has yet to be mentioned. The available evidence suggests that the original designers of Master of Magic considered flavor and immersion to be far more important than game balance. This is not the case in either Caster of Magic, or any of the MoM "clones" I have ever played. Given that most of these were abandoned and forgotten fairly quickly, yet Master of Magic is still active nearly thirty years later, wouldn't it stand to reason that maybe, just maybe, the original design priority was actually better?

[Second Duke Revier]

Originally posted by drake178:

...But what I think is the most intruguing part of your argument is, supposing that "summon the very rare of your selected realm and overrun the map with it" would truly be the final stage of every game of MoM, how would that differ from an end-game of CoM? Aside from the "I win" button, of course, which I believe was added as a result of too many games (un)ending with wars of attrition that are less than enjoyable?

Pretty good post drake178, but I especially agree with this bit. I've noticed that a big pattern in CoM(either version) is that I figure out a strategy that lets me outdo my opponents, and this keeps the game interesting as I'm able to effectively counter their resources. But then comes the Myrran wizard(s in CoM 2), one of whom invariably expands to a ridiculous degree and commands a huge lead in terms of resources. And thanks to how the game is structured, I can't really counter them short of whittling them down with cheap tactics or hurling tons of my own troops, which inevitably leads to a dull experience. I know that Seravy also often has quit games in the past thanks to them boiling down to large wars of attrition against many enemy stacks.

I think that the fact that this situation consistently comes up so often is a sign that there's something wrong with the game's structure, and that instead of bandaid fixing it with a "Win" button, it needs to be looked at more thoroughly. I enjoy outwitting opponents with my superior strategy and tactics - I do not enjoy fighting an AI that churns out pointless army after army of halberdiers, magicians, some uncommon summons and what have you. Yet it often feels like endgame battles in CoM invariably end up against hordes of mediocre troops, which is rather distressing.

[hernang.ortiz]

Originally posted by drake178:

...But what I think is the most intruguing part of your argument is, supposing that "summon the very rare of your selected realm and overrun the map with it" would truly be the final stage of every game of MoM, how would that differ from an end-game of CoM? Aside from the "I win" button, of course, which I believe was added as a result of too many games (un)ending with wars of attrition that are less than enjoyable?

I also agree with this sentiment and it is one of the aspects of Caster of Magic that could be drastically improved if the end-game vision changes from being 'I got even better stuff with very rare to slowly turn the tide' to ... having more and more powerful tools to achieve certain victories.

What I believe is the solution is rethinking what winning is and have players and AI attempt to strive towards those winning conditions. Game is now universally decided by the 'win' button, but we could do better:

My 2 favorite options:
*Be first player that conquers capital city of every opponent (or banishes every wizard at least once)
I'll explain why this is a good victory condition. You have 1000+ spell power, you start researching the most powerful spells, and you can create multiple formidable stacks of doom. It is no longer about attrition, it is about having the capability of winning what is statistically the toughest fight that each wizard puts out. If you have what it takes to do that, you deserve to win.
This victory condition is AI friendly because AI could be adjusted to be more into attacking capitals after a certain year. We could also improve the rewards of getting a capital

*Spell of Mastery research cost reduced to about ~50,000 but not reduced by spells you research. Combat spells cost 4X mana as if you were banished. Other rules: Rampaging monsters go crazy on wizard cities. Being banished of course stops the spell.
I'll explain why this is a good victory condition. I don't think Spell of mastery works great as a super-late spell as a way to finally put the neverending game of attrition to an end. I think it works as the 'defensive' victory with strength in number of units (my other suggestion being the 'offensive' victory, focusing on strengths of top unit stacks). You play on the defensive with some imposed challenges, such as rampaging monsters going wild and added combat cost rule as many of the battles I assume will take place in your territory. If you can handle everything the wizards throw at you and the rampaging monsters, you deserve to win. Otherwise, you really don't want to waste your time crippling yourself casting this.

This victory condition is AI friendly because AI could be adjusted to play defensive once spell of mastery is being cast.

The unsure victory ones:
*The win button (currently in place)
*Be only remaining wizard (currently in place)
*Have uber-powerful kind of auto-win summon spells, maybe only 1 option per realm and spell realm choice chosen using same criteria as 'specialist', costing 200,000 research points. Use a altered graphic of efreet, djinn, archangel, demon lord, and colossus, give them very high speed and incredible stats to function as one-person armies. I think all 5 could be a 'quick casting' 500mp unit with 50 melee, 20 armor, 20 resistance, 100 hp, 6mv teleporting unit

[madocs]

Do you think maybe the more uber summons should be more expensive?

[hernang.ortiz]

Originally posted by madocs:

Do you think maybe the more uber summons should be more expensive?

Mmm on second thought im not confident uber endgame spells is the way to go. Im still standing on the ‘aggressive’ conquer all capitals/banish all wizards once (similar to a civ 6 victory) and the ‘defensive’ reimagined spell of mastery

[Seravy]

"*Be first player that conquers capital city of every opponent (or banishes every wizard at least once"

This can't possibly work. I had to add the elimination game mechanic exactly because the AI was unable to conquer fortress cities. The defender getting the first turn is generally enough to make the AI need to have a minimum of an entire tier stronger army to win. Uncommon spells come fairly early and almost every wizard in the game reaches them and can fill their fortress with them. So they need rares, but several realms don't have a rare creature that's good at conquering a fortress city. Even if they do the jump from Uncommon to Rare tier spells takes 6 game years, plus another 2-4 to summon and gather these units into a stack and attack the fortress city. By then we are already talking about a delay of 8-10 game years which is half the duration of a usual game. But if the defender has rares or very rares, it might very well have a fortress garrison that other AI players can never beat.

At the same time, this victory condition is easy for the human player. Admittedly, not anywhere near as easy as in the original game, but single cities cannot be defended due to how the game works. The AI cannot do that but a human player can send 8-10 stacks of units into a city and kill the defenders one unit at a time. Expensive, but if that's your victory condition, then worth it. It works against mostly everything except regenerating units, unless you play a realm that cannot deal damage with spells effectively.
Additionally the human player can effectively prevent anyone else from winning this way by properly defending their fortress city. Unlike AIs, the human player can and will attack and destroy incoming enemy armies even before they reach the fortress.

"*Spell of Mastery research cost reduced to about ~50,000 but not reduced by spells you research. Combat spells cost 4X mana as if you were banished. "
The problem with this one is, the existence of very rare spells. If I can research the "I win" spell faster than my very rares (which cost 15k each) then I'll always skip the very rares and go for the spell that wins the game. More importantly, I will also make the AI do that because it's the winning strategy. Why research Great Drake, Armageddon and Mass Invisibility, if in the same amount of time we can have Spell of Mastery and win the game much quicker than if we had to summon those drakes and conquer cities using them?
SoM cost was increased exactly because it came too quickly after researching the very rares, making them have too low relevance to the game. In the current design, each spell tier is meant to stay relevant for roughly 6 years before the next tier outclasses them (assuming medium difficulty) , and this applies to very rares as well, where the next tier is Spell of Mastery.

Changing SoM cost is already possible in spells.ini but I won't make a reduced cost official for the above reason.

The problem with CoM's and MoM's endgame is unit micromanagement. In games like Master of Orion, multiples of the same unit "stack up" into one, basically 1000 ships functionally work as one ship unit with 1000 figures. That makes endgame much easier to manage because the enemy units will be in a few, huge, enemy armies, but in MoM, individual units not only remain separate but also are limited to move in groups of 9. There isn't anything that can be done to solve that because it's a direct consequence of a core game rule that shouldn't be changed - 9 units per stack and one unit per unit.

[Gandalf]

Will it be possible to mod

- upkeep costs
- buildings costs and pre-requisites
- buldings effects
- production/farming formulas

[prokolyo]

Originally posted by Seravy:

The problem with CoM's and MoM's endgame is unit micromanagement. In games like Master of Orion, multiples of the same unit "stack up" into one, basically 1000 ships functionally work as one ship unit with 1000 figures. That makes endgame much easier to manage because the enemy units will be in a few, huge, enemy armies, but in MoM, individual units not only remain separate but also are limited to move in groups of 9. There isn't anything that can be done to solve that because it's a direct consequence of a core game rule that shouldn't be changed - 9 units per stack and one unit per unit.

I was just thinking about this yesterday actually... Would it be possible to allow stacks bigger than 9 units, and if yes, what would be the consequences to the gameplay? Besides obviously having less but larger armies.