Choice of guaranteed spells seems totally off

[sIg3b]

I just saw something very disturbing in a gameplay video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Assj22JVM

This guy takes 8 Chaos books, so should get to choose one rare and one very rare guaranteed spell, with *all* lower tier spells guaranteed. Instead, he gets to choose 7 common spells. What nonsense is this?

[mshih01]

You're remembering wrong. If you play the OG -- it's exactly the current behavior.
7 starting commons.

Caster of magic introduces guaranteed rares and very rares.

[Morgian]

You start with less spells now,

You needed 11 books to start with a rare spell and never had a very rare from the start, btw. CoM might be different, and you come from there?

[Mqz]

This is mostly Master of Magic 1.31 rules.
So starting with 7 spells when you have 8 books are correct. You can read more on the Wiki:
https://masterofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/Spellbook

[drake178]

I guess an explanation session is in order. Guaranteed spells and starting spells are not the same thing.

Each spellbook selected at the start of the game (or found during it) contains a fixed amount of spells. How many, and what rarities, depends on the amount of matching books already possessed. For instance, in the original game, the first book has 3 common spells and 1 uncommon one; while the second grants another 2 commons (for a total of 5), 1 uncommon (total 2), and 1 rare.

However, which exact spells these are is not fixed, but random. Unless the player possesses at least 10 books of a given realm (color), where all spells of that realm become available, there will always be at least some that are not in their books. Once the game begins, the spells in the books gradually become available for research (again, at random, although there are some predictable rules). Any spells that were not included may not be researched however, and can only be acquired through trading and looting.

This is where guaranteed spells come in. They allow the player to set, at the start, some of the spells in their books. Using the original game as the example again, at 2 books, the player can select 1 guaranteed common spell. The books will still contain 5 common, 2 uncommon, and 1 rare spell, but the player gets to actually select one of the commons, leaving only the other 4 to random chance. They don't actually get the spells immediately, they are just ensuring that at some point, they will be able to research them.

In contrast to the above, starting spells are exactly what it says on the label. They are spells that the player starts the game with. No research is required, although they still count towards the amount of spells in the book. Continuing with the same example, selecting 2 books of a realm in v1.31 MoM allows selecting 1 common starting spell from that realm. The remainder (4 c, 2 uc, and 1 r) are not only left to chance, but will also require research as well.

Contrary to the apparently popular belief, guaranteed spells are not a Caster of Magic invention. Prior to v1.2, MoM only had guaranteed spells, as indicated by the table in the manual (excluding the 11-book scenario, of course). They were removed and replaced in favor of starting spells in v1.2, allegedly as a result of a large number of player complaints that the guaranteed spell system is very confusing and feels unrewarding.

Which kind of makes sense too, I can imagine if the remake shipped with guaranteed spells only, without starting ones to highlight the difference, every other thread in this forum would now probably be about this topic.

The only really confusing thing here is the spell rank table in the manual, which somehow sneaked over from the original manual, completely unchanged. But I've already created a bug report thread about that.

[sIg3b]

Ok, apparently I remembered the original MoM before 1.2. So you are saying there were no guaranteed spells from 1.2 on?
In that case I take back my complaint, even though I personally would prefer the guaranteed higher level spells to the choice of starting spells.