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Let's Play: Master of Magic. AKA Boss of Spells
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Inspired by the recent thread, Let's Play 1994's best game!
I'll get this out of the way: This is my first LP. Post. Be gentle. I'll try to monitor it throughout the game for tips, or the awesome lol you effed up. If you've got the game, please Simulcast your Let's Play within.
What is Master of Magic? It's the best 4x style game ever in my never so humble opinion. You can catch the wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Magic
I'm holding myself to a few rules. Most important, and easiest to articulate would be the defeat rule, I'm playing the game expecting to lose. Which means I'm not going to game saves (e.g. reload if things don't shake out my way). If I go into a node and die there, then goddammit I'll die with dignity, and I'll catch a screen shot.
Expect me to restart on failure, which means this LP could turn a while. Though this is the nature of the game.
That said, let's get started:
The Parameters and difficulty settings: I went with hard, mostly so I'd lose I guess. I also decided to turtle, hence fewer opponents. Exploration is half the fun in this game and it's easier with fewer enemies.
For the first round I chose life:
I figured life would be the easiest to play through with an audience. Plus in all my time, I've never played through as life. My buddy always did, and I always called him a punk.
We're a Warlord, and an Artificer. Warlord gives each unit a level up, and Artificer allows us to make artifacts for half cost as well as giving us the create artifact spells from the get go. Pretty invaluable.
I forgot to take a SS of the race chosen and the flag, but we're high elves, with the blue standard.
Let's see what the gods gave us...
Not a bad starting zone. Gold and Nightshade within reach. Not seen in this screenshot is the mithril just under the gold vein. Oh well, that's why we have settlers.
What should we build first?
Why food storage my good man!
Study you say?
My strategy for choosing spells is just to go down the list, for now. Until I see a spell that jumps out at me that is. The first spell we learned was Bless. Now we're learning this one.
Finally, who are our neighbors? Two nature nodes: Stacked with danger.
And
In case you were wondering, I clicked no. Both times.
We just completed construction of the Granary, and followed it up with a Marketplace.
I'll upate as regularly as possible. With screenshots where things get awesome.
Expect stories, cursing, restarts, and regalia.
Let's Fucking Play.
P.S. For shits and sprinkles I decided to make use of our Artificer Talent early, to build a weapon before we have a hero to weild it.
Behold: Wang.
Our first hero will hold this wang with pride.
I'll get this out of the way: This is my first LP. Post. Be gentle. I'll try to monitor it throughout the game for tips, or the awesome lol you effed up. If you've got the game, please Simulcast your Let's Play within.
What is Master of Magic? It's the best 4x style game ever in my never so humble opinion. You can catch the wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Magic
I'm holding myself to a few rules. Most important, and easiest to articulate would be the defeat rule, I'm playing the game expecting to lose. Which means I'm not going to game saves (e.g. reload if things don't shake out my way). If I go into a node and die there, then goddammit I'll die with dignity, and I'll catch a screen shot.
Expect me to restart on failure, which means this LP could turn a while. Though this is the nature of the game.
That said, let's get started:
The Parameters and difficulty settings: I went with hard, mostly so I'd lose I guess. I also decided to turtle, hence fewer opponents. Exploration is half the fun in this game and it's easier with fewer enemies.
For the first round I chose life:
I figured life would be the easiest to play through with an audience. Plus in all my time, I've never played through as life. My buddy always did, and I always called him a punk.
We're a Warlord, and an Artificer. Warlord gives each unit a level up, and Artificer allows us to make artifacts for half cost as well as giving us the create artifact spells from the get go. Pretty invaluable.
I forgot to take a SS of the race chosen and the flag, but we're high elves, with the blue standard.
Let's see what the gods gave us...
Not a bad starting zone. Gold and Nightshade within reach. Not seen in this screenshot is the mithril just under the gold vein. Oh well, that's why we have settlers.
What should we build first?
Why food storage my good man!
Study you say?
My strategy for choosing spells is just to go down the list, for now. Until I see a spell that jumps out at me that is. The first spell we learned was Bless. Now we're learning this one.
Finally, who are our neighbors? Two nature nodes: Stacked with danger.
And
In case you were wondering, I clicked no. Both times.
We just completed construction of the Granary, and followed it up with a Marketplace.
I'll upate as regularly as possible. With screenshots where things get awesome.
Expect stories, cursing, restarts, and regalia.
Let's Fucking Play.
P.S. For shits and sprinkles I decided to make use of our Artificer Talent early, to build a weapon before we have a hero to weild it.
Behold: Wang.
Our first hero will hold this wang with pride.
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Potentate of Potions.
Executive of Enchantment.
Bottom Bitch of Bewitching
Honcho of Hexes
Chief of Curses
CEO of Conjuration
Jefe of Jinxes.
What I mean to say is I thank you for this thread and will follow it faithfully.
Oh ho, but you delivered!
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
Taking warlord is kind of broken as it nearly guarantees you get Fang, king of all badasses.
I figured a Wang was better to hold, than to live in.
Yes. But I am on Hard, and was a virgin when last I played this game (Last year !) So I needed the warlord edge. Also, I took life, which guarantees the chosen.
More photos soon.
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Agreed. I also like the deathknight.
Working on the follow up now.
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Of course, on turn 7, some peon up and decides he won't fucking farm anymore:
Which for the uninitiated means I have to grind the war machine to a halt and build a goddamned shrine. But it offers a research bonus, so it's not all bad.
Hard is hard, and almost right away we're hit by rampaging halberdiers, and lo our first fight:
It's fucking cool. I crushed them.
Impressed by my prowess at ruining halberdiers' shit, a hero approaches. He's got to get on my jock. Cause I'm a warlord you see?
More like lolunther, mirite?
So like I said, hard is hard, and not 10 squares from my new little village I see this:
Which prompts a phone call:
This aggression will not stand, man!
Bitch is angry. We should probably run. And we do, losing a spearman unit in the process.
Stupider like a fox. I fled into a cul de sac.
and Fuuuuuu
For some reason she only sent in a small detachment. Which I easily crushed.
Not pictured is the follow up, where she sends in all the troops.
Meanwhile back at the ranch:
I'm going to rain hell upon Kali! Wooden hell. Long shafts of anger.
Other developments. A second hero arrived, Rakir the beastmaster,
He's nothing special, so no photo. Things are going steady, I lost my scouts to Kali but we're not in too much trouble. The home base is well defended.
I'd spoiler these images, but that ruins the fun of Let's Play.
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It's been years since I played this; nostalgia alert! (Far too many hours spent on this in college.)
Done. The OP stands, since it is the HOOK!
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So awesome.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Oh man, I feel so great that I did get to play this.
This was so back in the day that my brother had to have a boot menu that modified memory allocation so it would run. So good. I might have to see if I can get a copy just for old time's sake, now! It's too bad that GoG doesn't have this and the MoO series.
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Candy Is dandy, But liquor Is quicker
At Kali it seems. Here a a few of the things that befell her.
Must. Resist. Joke.
We build town!
Which pissed off the gods,
I didn't even know meteors were in the game. Look at the havok they wreak.
Some bullshit. The gold and silver that were near Boner, nay the reason Boner existed are ruined by corruption.
So I do what any normal psuedodeity would do. Fucking rampage!
After this, city I took the city Gronk, remember it? Way back from first post? Well it's ours now. We needed engineers for roads.
I made a new item.
Meanwhile the war with Kali rages. Her forces break against our walls, yet she is persistent.
Really? Misty? That's your hero?
Also Kali, you're an idiot.
See that boat there? See where it is? Yeah. Way to build it Kali.
I cast Just Cause. It basically makes me famous.
In addition I started construction on some roads. I'll take a picture when it's done. I also began to expand. (Now that my starting towns are secure, thanks to ultra elite longbowmen.)
Finally. The game ender. The crash. Hopefully it didn't corrupt the save game. One of my heroes doesn't have a sprite anymore, so it's not looking good. But Starting over is the fun part.
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Time to start again. This time, I'm going mixed magic arts. Thinking Myyran, Sorcery, and Chaos.
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I went with Artificer as well because gosh darn it, making magic items is fun. I also picked up Alchemy, which allows me to turn gold into mana or vice versa at a 1:1 ratio, which can come in really handy (other wizards can do this at a 2:1 ratio).
Not shown previously, when making a custom wizard with lots of one book type you get to choose which spells you start with. Maxed out books allows you to choose uncommon and even rare spells, which are powerful as hell to start with. Of course doing so means your wizard gets no special abilities.
We're going to go with Orcs, who have the distinction of being able to build every building in the game, and absolutely no other special traits.
And the red banner, of course.
Starting position isn't terrible, but isn't great. Notably, I am lacking a maritime border, which means a bunch of buildings are unavailable to Wangtopia, oh well.
Zombies in the temple to the southwest, I might be able to take them, but the scouting report is rather inaccurate, and only tells you what the strongest unit visible is, not how many there are, nor if there is anything else. I could take 1-3 units of zombies, but I'm not going to test my luck.
Going with the standard Granary first approach. This is the city display screen, most of it is pretty self-explanatory, but I'm going to explain it anyways to pad out the length of this first update. Up top is the name and state of the city, hamlet being puny and small. Below that is the population bar, I have 4,000 orcs, which translates to 4 workers, currently 3 farmers and 1 worker. Resources are below that, in order from top to bottom, food, production, gold, and power. Food and gold are split with the stuff to the left of the break being needed for upkeep and the stuff to the right being excess. To the right of the resources is the terrain view, not terribly important, but that red 1/2 in the bottom right means there is another city really close by, I'll probably destroy that, hate competing cities.
The buildings screen in the bottom left shows a visual representation of our city, the big thing in the middle is our Fortress, where we do wizardy stuff. To the right of it is the Summoning circle, which denotes in which city our summoned creatures pop up. At the bottom are, from left to right, the Builders Hall, the Barracks, and the Smithy, which are the cornerstone of any city. Your capital starts with all this stuff, any other cities have to build them, which is a huge pain. On the right the two displays show what units are currently in the city, and what the city is currently producing, yay.
We immediately go to our Tax Collector and raise taxes a bit. There are a whole slew of "advisors" you can access from the Info button in the top right, but I'll cover those later.
Here you can see that the common spells you choose to start with are pretty pointless, as the other common spells tend to be the first things you get to research anyways. Ah well. I too will pretty much just go down the list.
Yep, here they are, the bastards. Notably, neutral cities always seem to start with free military buildings, meaning they can recruit Halberdiers while I'm stuck with Swordsmen. Of course, I can call fire from the sky and they can't, so I guess they need some sort of advantage. We'll come back to these guys in a few turns. (Not shown is me reducing taxes again as I forgot that with my policing units off scouting unrest pops up).
Ahahahahaha fuck that. The Fallen Temple to Wangtopias north has Death Knights, which are pretty much the best summanable creatures Death wizards can get. I foresee this dungeon being left alone for a very long time.
War Bears are a lot more manageable, we'll come back to this one when we have a few heroes and a real army.
Yeah, Skulltop decided to test our defenses, you can see in the upper right the info box from me mousing over their Halberdiers. Feel free to compare that to the info box at the bottom of our Spearmen. Yeah, Spearmen suck, a lot. Let's see if we can even the score.
This should do nicely.
Well dang, they resisted, guess we get to do this the hard way.
Damn right I am.
Hmm, DosBox seems to output screenshots in glorious tiny ass resolution, these are resized, and hence appear a little blurry. If anyone knows a better way to do it, let me know.
Episode 2, in which not much occurs.
Episode 3, wherein we do something other than sit around and kill neutrals dumb enough to wander into our town.
Episode 4, in which Knobgobbler turns out to be way better than expected.
Episode 4.5, in which we fiddle with video recording, and then accidentally save over our file.
Episode 5, in which I wish I could think of a good Little Mermaid pun to denote that Ariel dies.
Episode 6, Just one more turn...
Episode 7, wherein we start getting our hands on the good stuff.
Episode 8, wherein it seems like nothing happened, but in truth most of it was boring preparatory stuff.
Episode 9, In which we kill Freya, multiple times.
Special bonus video
This is one of the few games I know that is universally loved.
this is definitely my favorite 4x game as well. So awesome. I used to rock lots of light magic, and I would use it to summon the Chosen One, and deck him out in every beneficial spell possible, and he could singlehandedly take on entire armies without taking a scratch... unless the computer was smart enough to dispel him, and the dispel connected through his spell lock and everything... then I would be sad.
This is why you make sure to give him invulnerability on an item.
I started to like High Men at first due to their units of 6 mages but more units seem to have magic immunity than missile immunity. High Elves with their Longbowmen are the path to true dominance. Take all life books with the Warlord and Myrran kits to give them Champion status and adamantium weapons and they will one shot just about anything that isn't missile immune.
Also if you pick the voodoo looking chick as your wizard then you get to see her pixelated boobies whenever you summon something. Oh the things you remember from games you played when you were 14.
Discord: Dudeman#9279 - Battle.net: Dudeman#1385
Twitch: CrashTestJonny - XBox: CrshTstJonny
Nintendo Switch: SW-4469-1892-0302
...more enjoyable than that sounds.
I'll leave these here though:
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