Fixing spells that were buggy in the original MoM

[Lupinedreams]

when comparing the spells of the different colors in the original MoM you must remember that a lot of the spells were very buggy - either they didn't work at all, or had hidden benefits, or even (death magic, I'm looking at YOU) worked in REVERSE

in my humble opinion, perhaps it's best to make all spells work as intended before trying to balance them....though I'm sure that's part of Implode's vision anyway, just thought I'd mention that the original MoM was very buggy, even after the 1.31 patch, and many strengths and weaknesses stem from that

also, it would be an excellent idea to allow the server to choose whether to use these new balanced spells, or a set that more fits the originals, since Implode seems intent on preserving the original game in as much as he can, and has easy server settings to allow you to customize your game, or play just like the original, in almost every other aspect

[Implode]

when comparing the spells of the different colors in the original MoM you must remember that a lot of the spells were very buggy - either they didn't work at all, or had hidden benefits, or even (death magic, I'm looking at YOU) worked in REVERSE

in my humble opinion, perhaps it's best to make all spells work as intended before trying to balance them....though I'm sure that's part of Implode's vision anyway, just thought I'd mention that the original MoM was very buggy, even after the 1.31 patch, and many strengths and weaknesses stem from that

Hmm, interesting idea. Actually I'm not really sure which 'buggy spells' you're talking about - the only bugged spell I knew about was Raise Dead, which corrupts the game & eventually crashes it. Everything else I'm trying to reproduce faithfully - so if there's any spells/anything else you think is actually wrong in the original, could you let me know, or is there a FAQ or similar with the info in it?

also, it would be an excellent idea to allow the server to choose whether to use these new balanced spells, or a set that more fits the originals, since Implode seems intent on preserving the original game in as much as he can, and has easy server settings to allow you to customize your game, or play just like the original, in almost every other aspect

That's my intenion - when you do New Game now, there's a drop down box to choose the database, just currently there's only one choice, "Original Master of Magic 1.31 rules" - eventually I'll make a 2nd server XML file with recommended improvements in it, even if this only amounts to tweaking the cost of spells to balance them more.

Implode.

[Lupinedreams]

apart from playing the game and seeing them yourself (keep an eye out and you'll notice things) the best list of bugs I've seen is in the very comprehensive FAQ by Dan Simpson and Bryan Jacobson for master of magic floating around the net....you can find it at most MoM shrine type sites, and of course gamefaqs....

I had linked the FAQ directly but I am told gamefaqs dosn't like getting linked to from external sites, so whoever is curious, just hit www.gamefaqs.com and run a search for "master of magic". Sorry bout that.

To list a few off the top of my head...death "fear" type spells work in reverse in the original MoM (test it yourself and you'll see what I mean) in that instead of the enemy unit being unable to fight back if it fails its saving throw, YOUR unit is the one unable to fight...which means if you have a cloak of feared unit fighting an enemy with terrible resists, you'll never hit it! (worse resists, more failures) and if it has good resists, the best you can hope for is that cloak of fear does nothing.

Quite a drastic bug.

Same for terror, and for magic items enchanted with cloak of fear.

Additionally many of the higher up death magic offensive enchantments didn't quite work as intended (there are a slew of them, generally they reduce production in a city or cut off its magic or food) though even if they did work right, they wouldn't be terribly efficient unless you managed to find someone's capital..they have expensive upkeeps for what they do. But I'm talking about bugs; I digress.

I remember the "mind control" spell, forget it's name, that blue magic has, didn't quite work - your opponent would still get to use that unit on its turns. Quite a shock if you don't expect it, if you mind control some massive beasty, and have it fighting side by side with your hero - only to have it turn and have it's way with your poor healer.

There are many small glitches or exploits, and that FAQ lists most of them. There were also a lot of times MoM would contradict itself - tooltips for the same spell or unit would have different stats on them. I seem to remember dark elves getting 1 power / population but not having it mentioned anywhere in the race comparison screen in the beginning of a game (so that just from the stats you can see, there seems to be no reason to play them, since you can't see what unique units they can build from that screen either, they look like a terrible choice!)

I'll go compile a list if you like, but I remember it being extensive - but then I'm not busy at work today. I'll go through and post a list of what I remember, and what I found in faqs (and what I've tested myself to confirm it's existence) and try to sort them by importance (a small graphical glitch, for instance, is hardly game breaking)

[Lupinedreams]

I apologize in advance for bringing something up that might make more work for you - but as you mentioned yourself in the suggestions thread, fixing the original MoM and adding features it didn't have, etc, is something you may get to after you've got the MoMIME up and running smoothly....improving the original is gravy on top, not the meat and potatoes themselves.

that being said, here we go..

alright, concerning spells specifically, there's this tidbit from the FAQ:

2.16) Spells to Avoid
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Spells the player should NEVER throw:
Famine (absolutely no effect)
Cloak of Fear (works backwards, ENTIRELY against the player)
Subversion (works backwards, or at best is worthless)
Suppress Magic (supresses a Spell of Return)
Spell Ward (ONLY keeps out creatures, has NO other effect)
Flying Fortress (only hurts the player)

Spells the player should never throw under these circumstances:
Word of Recall / Recall Hero on a regenerating unit (no effect)
Word of Recall / Recall Hero if you need to use the hero soon
(it ends up with 0 or even negative figures left)
Chaos Channel on barbarians (you lose the thrown weapons)
Doom Mastery while producing new barbarians (lose thrown weapons)
Metal Fires while all units are chaos channelled (no effect)
Confusion, Creature Binding, Animate Dead on *all* of the
powerful creatures in a battle (you'll get no fame)
Animate Dead on any dead enemy units (they come back on his side
after the battle is over)
Water Walking on a unit with Wind Walking (it overrides it)
Path Finding on a unit with Wind Walking (it DOESN'T override it)
Enchant Item / Create Artifact enchanting any of the following:
Cloak of Fear (works backwards, against the player)
Doom (cuts attack strength in half)
Invisibility (no effect in combat)
Wraith Form (only gives you water walking)

Spells the player should throw only with great caution (crashes the game):
Magic Vortex (don't throw too many in one battle)
Call Lightning
Raise Dead
Animate Dead

[Lupinedreams]

there's a "known bugs" section in the FAQ with some of the more famous (and less known) issues in the original MOM - too long to post here, just open the FAQ and copy and paste the chapter name from the table of contents into a search field, ctrl-F. If you're bored or curious I highly recommend reading that FAQ in it's entirety, there is a LOT of good information there, not just on bugs, but on basic mechanics of MOM itself, which may even help with issues in writing MoMIME. How multi figure combat rolls work, hidden benefits on spells (like Just Cause reducing unrest in all your cities by 1)


and many, many other tidbits. The FAQ has pointers from a lot of different people included, it's more of a collection of knowledge than the musings of one guru. Think of it as something of a MoM encyclopedia?

at any rate, hope it sheds some light into otherwise gray areas

edit: Drain life's resistance reduction works backwards (yet another black magic spells that is detrimental to it's caster) a hero casting life drain with -resist magic items will actually have the spell function as if it's target had ADDED resistance. so loading up a hero with -spell save gear will make their life drain spells fail nearly every time.

I like black magic, and so it makes me a little bitter that so many of the black spells are worse than worthless, to the point of being detrimental to the caster.


There are a number of spells that only function for the CPU correctly, too. I remember in fact that the original manual for MoM included a "illusional visage" spell or something for blue, that would make a unit look like a more powerful summoned unit (trick your opponents into thinking your spearmen are death knights! etc) but the manual stated that "computers are never fooled by this and so the spell is limited only to your opponents" I've never been able to trade for this spell, so I assume it was their way of explaining either a bug, or a CPU player "feature" - CPUs tend to cheat a lot, especially on harder difficulties

[Implode]

I apologize in advance for bringing something up that might make more work for you

No really, I'm glad you did... the point is I'm busy working away on MoM IME (fixing my broken PC at the moment actually!) and don't have too much time to be digging through FAQs and such unless there's something specific I'm looking for. So you posting this list was really useful - I didn't know about 95% of these bugs!

Spells that are obviously bugged (e.g. no effect) I'll definitely fix. I more wondered if you were going to say that perhaps the damage calculated for some spell was "not what was intended" which would be very difficult fix. So:

Famine (absolutely no effect)
Cloak of Fear (works backwards, ENTIRELY against the player)
Subversion (works backwards, or at best is worthless)
Spell Ward (ONLY keeps out creatures, has NO other effect)
Word of Recall / Recall Hero on a regenerating unit (no effect)
Word of Recall / Recall Hero if you need to use the hero soon (it ends up with 0 or even negative figures left)
Enchant Item / Create Artifact enchanting any of the following:
Cloak of Fear (works backwards, against the player)
Doom (cuts attack strength in half)
Invisibility (no effect in combat)

All these will definitely all be fixed.

Suppress Magic (supresses a Spell of Return):
Wouldn't that prevent banished wizards from coming back? That's a good thing isn't it?

Flying Fortress (only hurts the player):
I have actually never tried to use this and, when the time came, was going to experiment with it to find out how it works. By the sounds of it I shouldn't even bother testing it in the original MoM and I should just write it as I see fit.

Chaos Channel/Doom Mastery on barbarians (you lose the thrown weapons):
Heh, interesting. I can tell you the reason behind that - the data format the original MoM uses, thrown weapons, breath attacks, gaze attacks etc. are stored just the same as "ranged weapons", just like bows/slings/etc. They just appear slightly differently on the unit info screen. Because there's only one data item for "ranged attack strength" and another for "ranged attack type", one unit cannot have two types of ranged attack, so it can't have a Thrown attack & a Fire Breath attack. In MoM IME, thrown weapons, breath attacks, gaze attacks etc. are stored as "unit skills", just like Scouting II, Wind Walking, Create Outpost, etc. This was just a personal choice I made early on, but in this instance it sounds like it was the right choice, since you will be able to have Thrown + Breath attacks on the same unit :) In fact, a side effect of how I've done it is that experience/mithril/adamantium/etc in MoM IME *doesn't* increase the power of Thrown (etc.) attacks, because they're unit skills, not actual ranged attacks, which is something I have to fix at one point. Also I know getting things like that dodgy +6 axe to add +6 to a hero's ranged attack is going to be a swine to write, so I had been wondering if I would have been better sticking with the way the original MoM handled this, so I'm really glad that a reason has come up which points that I did do this the right way after all :)

Metal Fires while all units are chaos channelled (no effect):
This is due to what I consider being a bit of a cock up in the original MoM around when units are considered "normal" or not - in some cases, Chaos Channeled units are considered "normal" and sometimes they're not. I will be sorting this out... just haven't yet decided how

Confusion, Creature Binding, Animate Dead on *all* of the powerful creatures in a battle (you'll get no fame):
I actually need to do a lot of reading up on how fame works before I write it, so I'll bear this in mind. Should be no trouble to fix.

Animate Dead on any dead enemy units (they come back on his side after the battle is over):
How's it supposed to work? You actually permanently claim the unit? Or like Phantom Warriors, where they disappear? I suppose its the death-equivalent of Raise Dead, so they *should* be kept after the battle?

Water Walking on a unit with Wind Walking (it overrides it)
Path Finding on a unit with Wind Walking (it DOESN'T override it)
Enchant Item / Create Artifact enchanting any of the following:
Wraith Form (only gives you water walking)

I did a shed load of work, for 0.8.8 I believe, in testing all combinations of movement special abilities in the original MoM and writing a horrificly complicated (but totally customizable :) ) movement-rate-calculation engine in MoM IME to match, so I will check later, but I expect I've exactly reproduced all these :) I think it'll be debatable which of these are considered bugs, but some things really did surprise me (like that by casting Flight on a unit with Wraith Form, it then takes the unit MORE movement points to cross any type of terrain, except for Enchanted Roads which it is suddenly able to use when it couldn't before... which makes zero sense but I've set up the rules in MoM IME to work the same way!)

Implode.

[Lupinedreams]

I could compile a list of bugs / features and email it to you if you're too busy to check out the FAQ in its entirety. I'm going to have some free time to burn for the next few days. If that interests you, let me know - I can even take the time to verify each of the bugs myself in game as well, and copy save games to demonstrate them, but I likely won't be able to get away with doing that at work so that part would take considerably longer. I have time to kill here though, so no problem there. Much like the old snickers slogan, not going anywhere for a while.

[Lupinedreams]

A word of caution: herein we delve into secrets that, once learned, cannot be unlearned


I remember there being another bug, where you could cast combat only summons (phantom beast!) and then word of recall them out of the battle, they'd end up at your summoning circle, and viola! a permanent phantom beast (or fire elemental, etc) with no upkeep! making phantom beast + word of recall extremely overpowered - for less than the cost of summoning unit of ghouls you get a phantom beast! Forget creating undead to use as free garrisons, free phantom beasts in every city!

broken. self restraint must be used....

artificier and sage master combine for another broken trick: the cost reduction for making artifacts from those two retorts stack with each other, allowing you to make artifacts for only a fraction of the cost! (25% I believe) which works as intended..BUT, when you turn and smash that artifact on your anvil for mana crystals, you get 50% of the FULL cost of the artifact (gaining a free 25% of the item's value) essentially you just doubled the mana you spent to make the artifact.

yay!

[Implode]

I remember there being another bug, where you could cast combat only summons (phantom beast!) and then word of recall them out of the battle, they'd end up at your summoning circle, and viola! a permanent phantom beast (or fire elemental, etc) with no upkeep!

Hah, hadn't thought of that, it sounds fun :)

artificier and sage master combine for another broken trick: the cost reduction for making artifacts from those two retorts stack with each other, allowing you to make artifacts for only a fraction of the cost! (25% I believe) which works as intended..BUT, when you turn and smash that artifact on your anvil for mana crystals, you get 50% of the FULL cost of the artifact

Yeah, I know about that, it doesn't particularly bother me. I mean, when really do you get time to waste turns casting items just to get a bit of free mana? Whenever I'm playing I always find I'm always desperate for more power base to get more mana, more skill, and more spells researched - if someone really wants to waste 20 turns creating an item just to get some free mana, I say let them do it :)

I could compile a list of bugs / features and email it to you if you're too busy to check out the FAQ in its

I appreciate the offer but don't bother just yet, sooner or later I'll have a minute to read & digest the FAQ properly to see if there's any other oddities I need to know about :)

Implode.

[Implode]

Chaos Channel/Doom Mastery on barbarians (you lose the thrown weapons)

Well I just had to try it to prove it worked properly :D
Chaos Channeled (Fire Breath) Barbarians in MoM IME

Re: Dodgy movement skill combinations, I checked how I've got these defined in the MoM IME movement rules:

1) Water Walking on a unit with Wind Walking (it overrides it):
Water Walking is actually the very last (lowest priority) rule - so it won't override anything, ever, so this will be fine :)

2) Path Finding on a unit with Wind Walking (it DOESN'T override it)
MoM IME works the same. Thing is, Wind Walking increases your movement to a minimum of 3 (I've not written that yet though). So if you got the benefits of both skills - movement 3, and half movement point on any terrain, you'd be able to move 6 squares, which is a bit excessive. I'm happy enough with this...

3) Wraith Form (only gives you water walking)
Works in MoM IME (and I'm pretty sure it works in the original MoM too from when I was experimenting with it).

If anyone is bored, feel free to test any of those movement combinations to actually try it and compare them between the original MoM and MoM IME and let me know what you find out :D I've just looked at how the rules are set up and not actually tried them out!

Implode.

[Lupinedreams]

I'll have to play around with it a bit once I get home!

[Implode]

I could compile a list of bugs / features and email it to you if you're too busy to check out the FAQ in its entirety

I've had a breeze through it... through the VERY LONG bug list, most of it by DP. My take on it is some things are obvious bugs, but many things he's listed as bugs are just that he expects it to work a particular way... and maybe I (and the original game authors) expect it to work a different way.

I'm guessing:
70% of his list of bugs are real bugs I agree with
20% of his list are his personal opinion that certain things are wrong... and I probably agree
10% of his list are his personal opinion that certain things are wrong... and I totally disagree with him and in some cases I think the original MoM is actually correct.

Anyway... my point is there's going to be some sticky points where people don't agree on how something should work, so I'm going to carry on as I was and take the FAQ with a pinch of salt... I actually think if I pay too much attention to detail about this bug and that bug, I'll become too engrossed in minute game semantics instead of getting the important big things done... like attacking cities etc :)

Implode.

[Lupinedreams]

yeah...sidetracking you from the core points of MoM IME wasn't my intention when I mentioned bugs! You're right, the important thing is to get it working first - worry about going above and beyond the original game after that, if you're not sick of the project by then

besides, adding multiplayer and running in windows, and being so much more customizable - you've added quite a lot over the original, to be sure

[Clythoss]

artificier and sage master combine for another broken trick: the cost reduction for making artifacts from those two retorts stack with each other, allowing you to make artifacts for only a fraction of the cost! (25% I believe) which works as intended..BUT, when you turn and smash that artifact on your anvil for mana crystals, you get 50% of the FULL cost of the artifact

Yeah, I know about that, it doesn't particularly bother me. I mean, when really do you get time to waste turns casting items just to get a bit of free mana? Whenever I'm playing I always find I'm always desperate for more power base to get more mana, more skill, and more spells researched - if someone really wants to waste 20 turns creating an item just to get some free mana, I say let them do it :)

Well i don´t think it is a good idea to let this one stay. think about what happens if someone has enough Spellskill, artificier sage master and a TIME STOP spell :) . The Answer is of course: an unlimited Time Stop. Which would be the end for any Multi Player game...

[Lupinedreams]

True.....but how many times have you ever even gotten a chance to cast time stop, let alone gotten the power necessary to upkeep it like that, even with artifacts exploits? if you're in a multiplayer game where that is hapenning the other players must have lost their connection or fallen asleep with their finger holding down the end turn button

I doubt you'll see a ton of multiplayer games where high cost and high tech strategies such as this, or the spell of mastery, etc, are realistic win conditions. more likely you'll find your neighbor at your doorstep with hordes of barbarians or some other rush friendly race - fear spearmen far more than timestop

Yes, Implode is going to be able to let us customize the map size - the only way I conceive of this being a problem is if you set the map to be extremely large and have a minimum of players on it, AND get lucky enough that they dont' see each other quickly. Let's be honest though, in that kind of a scenario, it would still be worthwhile to invest in a flying unit or one cheap boat for the simple purposes of scouting if you don't find anyone on your home continent - if you've been aggressive and conquered your home island, and they're playing simcity in the corner trying to get their unlimited timestop, chances are good you're going to be able to roll them with your military advantage as soon as you find them.

Although the artifact exploit should probably be fixed just because it's a bug - it's not really important and doesn't terribly affect the game. Potential for abuse? Certainly - especially if you're also an archmage and you're dumping all your non-building-research power base into skill increase, and just running you mana needs off this artifact exploit. In the end though I just don't think it'll be a huge deal. Perhaps I'm wrong, and it'll be the premier strategy in multiplayer *shrugs* if it gets to the point that it's a huge deal Implode can deal with it easily enough I'm sure. Basically, yes, the ability combo is probably not meant to work that way, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it :)