My Balancing suggestions

Anything else to do with the original Master of Magic
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asbesthund
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Mar 14, 2007 2:37 pm

My Balancing suggestions

Post by asbesthund »

Hello everyone,

i noticed your project as i read the articel about MoM at the german Wikipedia. I'm realy excited about the work you've done already and can't wait to play a game of mom multiplayer against friends.
I loved to play this game since its release but there are some problems that frustrate me more and more eaxh time i play it!
I decided to write them down nad would like to hear what u other MoM players think of them.
As u may have noticed i'm not a native speaker so excuse my intricate wording ;) ....

1. The speed of the game feels to slow. At the start the development is to slow and if the game moves on, it feels slow because there is soooo much micromanagement to do.
At the beginning you have nothing to do for many turns because its not possible to build settlers in a appropriate time until 3-6 buildings are ready, same for good units. With slow growing races often the first settler appears after more then 40 (granary 8 + market 10 + farmers market 10 + settler 8 ) rounds. Maybe the costs of the early buildings and settlers should be lowered.
The problem with micromanagement could be solved by adding queues for building, sumoning and spell research. But i think explode is trying to do this already!?

2. combat is not balanced. i can't prove this but it seems to me that there is something like thresholds or levels concerning combat strength of units. A unit above one threshhold never loses to a unit of a level below. its not that the better unit just regularly wins, units of a higher level tend to not lose a single heart even if they defeat 9 units of a lower level. For example veteran Beserkers defeat 9 swordmen easily, both dragons, torin and other good heroes defeat everything but one of the others, etc....
This makes it impossible to defend every city. If i have a few nodes, i make a few dragons and make a group with my 3 best heroes and take every city i like. Not even the cheating AI is able to defend more then two or three citys against something like that.
It would be nice if the "overall combat strength" of all Units could be closer together. Maybe its possible to make some kind of city defens bonus like most other TBS Games have. (My impression is that Walls are not realy good) puhhh...its hard for me to describe this in english, i hope you get what i mean.

3. Balancing of colors is not good! I agree to implodes opinion he has written in this thread. White is to strong, red to weak, the other three are more or less ok. The overall strength of the colors is not a big problem for me as long as i play against the Ai because i like the chalenge. What makes some colors unfun and uninteresting for me is the fact that there are so much spells that have no use in the game. I never use black spells that hit enemy cities because they are useless against cheating ai and even against human enemys they would be not worth the mana they cost.

4. The Map editor will be a big problem in Multiplayer. Of ten starting locations 4 locations are ok, but 4 are impossible to play and 3 are much to good ( like 2 deers, deer+gold+big river, etc).
If you have 4 human players, one or two have no chance to win and two will sit there and hope that nobody has the "good" start.
Maybe it is possible that no starting locations are generated on small islands or in the middle of huge deserts!

Keep up this good work!!

Greets, asbesthund
Zephirus
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2009 10:40 pm

Re: My Balancing suggestions

Post by Zephirus »

here are my sugestions:

Colors:

Arcane

Replace magic spirit for enchant item, and enchant item for firebolt.

Magic spirit should not be a summoned unit, because it´s just annoyng to have to wait until you finish to create your staff os ultimate destruction with 4 charges of flame strikes, +20 to spell +6 attack and -4 spellsave or to cancel it to cast magic spirit to occupy that just vanquisehd node. I think magic spirit should be a normal unit, that you can build from the shrine. Since every race have shrine, all races will have access to Magic Spirit.

I think also that enchant item should be available right from the begining, because heroes wthout itens are just useless, and with this all wizards may enchant a lesser item in order to put them to good use right from de beginig.

Finally, i think that firebolt is such a weak spell that it should be free for all.

Life

Paladins should become a white creature instead of a normal one. They are just too powerful to be normal creatures
Heroism should be renamed to Blood Thirst and become a chaos spell
Life Wizards have nothing to fear from death ones, since their dispel evil spells make toast of undead creatures.

Sorcery

Relplace aura of majesty with Mass Creature Binding, for balancing. Despite the fact of sorcery to be the a very powerful realm, when death get balanced, the sorcery mages won´t have a chance against them without a way to make the spell turn against the wizard. Creature binding should affect all magic creatures, including undead ones, as well as revived and black channeled creatures.
I also think that spell binding should also steal good spells from enemy units and place them upon your units, and remove bad spells from your units and place them on enemy units.
Resist magic also should be replaced by magic immunity, because this become a commom place on the normal units. All priests and shamans now have magic immunity.
Magic immunity should be replaced by magic mirror. Any unit with magic mirror when targeted by a hostile spell does not get affected, but instead one random enemy unit is affected by the spell. Imagine how Malleus would get screwed if he alone cast a flame strike spell against a stack of magic mirror enchanted normal units defending your town?

Nature

Nature needs a lot of tweaks in order to get balanced.
First, the sprites shoud receive magic immunity and 3 more ranged attacks. They are powerful faeries that are protected by the mother earth herself, but phisicaly very weak
Second, war bears should be a combat spell. A nature wizards may call the animals in the wild to come in his aid, but as soon as the battle ends, the animals return to the wilds
Third, all others nature creatures should regenerate, and regeneration should be an incommon spell instead of a rare one. This would make the great wyrms to become realy powerful, since they can teleport away from the battle to regenerate and return in full charge, and also the popularization of regeneration would protect the nature wizards against the death ones.

Death

Death is the realm that needs more tweaks. I think that death wizards should be like the zergs, have lots of weak units and win by numbers rather than by the quality of their units. The only way a death wizard can have a lot of units is having lots of costless low level death units, like skeletons, zombies and ghouls, that should be common spells and cost no upkeep. Later, as uncommon spells, the wizard can receive death chanells, that just convert normal units into undead ones without any bonus and cost only 1 mana of upkeep and night of living dead, that would replace subversion and should summon a random number of skeletons, zombies or ghouls in every town.
Lately, the wizard may receive Necropolis, a powerfull spell that converts all citzens of one town into undeads. They will not consume any food, and the unrest will drop to 0, and all units created on the town will start at recruit level, but with death chanels, and cost only one mana in upkeep.
And at least, ghosts should be swapped by death knights, and the death knights should receive the same stats as the paladins.
With this the death wizard will be able to raise a huge army, much larger thar their enemies, that will storm the enemy towns in several waves each turn. But will not unbalance the game, since the life wizards will have dispell evil at their disposition and dispatch those pesky undeads with easy, and their cruzading normal units will endure much more damage than the undead recruit units, and the healing spell would make these units ready for another battle quickly
The Sorcery wizards may cast mass creature binding and turn half the enemy undead army against the other half, and tilt the scales with their own forces.
The Chaos wizards may cast the powerful flame strike and reduce the invasor to ashes as long as he have mana for this.
The Naure wizard will win the battle and regenerate before the next wave.

Chaos

the mid and high level chaos spells are just ok, but the common ones just sucks, so i think that if we replace firebolt for fireball, fireball for lightning. Replace corruption by blood thirst and make corruption death magic and swap disrupt wood with bersek. with this, chaos should be a fearful realm

Later I will post my ideas to balance the races.
Iluvalar
Posts: 46
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 8:57 pm

Re: My Balancing suggestions

Post by Iluvalar »

To asbesthund
1. You're right. Micromanagement is too long. I love micromanagement, it should stay.But a queue, or better some sort of way to make preset order of construction. So after you set them you just need to flag a city as "military city" and the building queue automaticly in some order.
2. I don't feel that too much. Some units are a bit more strong, but they also come with a long time to build. When you manage to have some drakes and 3 well equipped hero the game is about to end.This is not really a flaw, it's just normal game experience. By the way, if the AI was just smart enought to make the same thing, you'll be in trouble to.
3. The balance of color is not that bad to... It's more a question of take a wise combo of picks and all the color turn out to be quite deadly. The only real bad thing is the 11 books start that are way more stronger then anything else. I quit taking the, even at impossible. I consider it, like a cheat. This should be reconsidered.

To zephirus,
This is way too much change. Color are specialised not balanced. It's how you play and how you take advantage of those specialisation that make you win. You might feel some color are to weak, it's because you don't know all the way you can play the game.Some spell might be boosted a bit, some be a little less strong. But that's all we need for balance...
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