Do you ever wish you could wield the power of magic? Have you ever dreamed of casting spells, manipulating energy, and creating illusions? Well, now you can! Join others online and embark on a journey to become the master of magic. With the advancement of technology, the world of magic has expanded beyond books and movies. Through online communities, forums, and platforms, you can connect with like-minded individuals who share your interest in the mystic arts. These virtual spaces provide a platform for learning, practicing, and perfecting your magical skills. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced practitioner, joining others online can enhance your magical abilities in numerous ways. By interacting with fellow magicians, you can exchange knowledge and experiences.
By interacting with fellow magicians, you can exchange knowledge and experiences. You can learn new techniques, discover different styles, and gain insights into the world of magic that you may not have otherwise been exposed to. Moreover, online platforms offer a wealth of resources and learning materials.
So you wanna get into Master of Magic.
DISCLAIMER: This is a post I made four years ago that I'm copy/pasting for the release of the remake, so some elements might not be relevant. Anything related to gameplay, mechanics, or strategy should still be true, but specifically UI references are possibly out of date (e.g. I have no idea if the remake still has you press F1 for Surveyor).
Master of Magic is close to 25 years old, and yet to this day it casts a massive shadow over strategy gaming. Every single fantasy 4X game to come out in the last twenty years (with the exception of HoMM games) has, at some point, either billed itself or been described by others as a spiritual successor to MoM. I don't think other genres have anything even remotely analogous for this. MoM is big. And if you've had any interest in fantasy 4X games, or 4X games in general, you've probably heard of it, and you've probably at one point or another considered checking it out. If so, then this post is for you.
The simplest way to describe MoM is it's a cross between Civilization and Magic the Gathering. You're a wizard wielding incredible power from one or more of five schools of magic (which are almost identical to the five colours of MtG). You use your spells and your cities and your armies to conquer two worlds: Arcanus, the default standard fantasy world, and Myrror, which is kind of like a dystopian fantasy world with turbocharged magic. Each is chock full of different fantasy races for you to use (or abuse), magic nodes you can conquer to boost your arcane powers, and different dungeons you can loot for gold, mana, spells, magical artifacts, heroes, and even spellbooks and retorts that directly boost your power as a wizard (more on that later). Once you've crushed all the enemy wizards (between 1-4), you win the game. On the other hand, if total domination doesn't appeal to you, you can also win the game by researching and casting the Spell of Mastery - functionally this game's equivalent of a Space Race victory.
So what's the deal with magic?
Magic is the backbone of MoM (surprising, I know). Slinging spells is constantly satisfying, and the incredible amount of combinations you can make and the way they radically change the game is what keeps the game feeling fresh after 25 years. Spells fall into 6 different categories:
- Summoning. Exactly what they sound like. Summoning spells conjure up magical creatures to augment your armies. The creatures you can summon are almost always going to be stronger than the armies your cities can build, meaning that summons play a huge role in this game. There's also a few summons that are exclusive to combat. These are automatically unsummoned once the battle ends, but the ability to directly increase your army size right on the battlefield is incredibly powerful.
- Enchantments. These for the most part are global spells that once cast affect everyone everywhere. The majority of these spells are late game, but they have a huge impact, from conjuring up a perpetual meteor storm that slowly but surely pounds enemy units and buildings into dust, to giving you total sight over the entire map, including enemy cities and armies, to actually stopping time for everyone but you. A substantial part of this group are combat-only spells, enchanting an entire battlefield to boost your units, weaken enemy units, and even things like calling down a constant rain of lightning bolts.
- Unit Enchantments. These are spells that mostly buff up your units (although occasionally they'll debuff enemy units). You can either cast them on the overland map for a permanent boost, or you can cast them on the battlefield where the cost is much much lower, but the spell will end when combat does. Despite being the simplest and least glamourous category, many of these spells are among the most useful and powerful in the game.
- City Enchantments: Like unit enchantments, except for cities. Almost all of these spells are overland-exclusive, and almost all of them come relatively late in the game, but they offer you powerful economic bonuses or magical defenses, and sometimes even allow you to seriously harm an enemy's economy or garrison.
- Combat spells. Combat-exclusive spells that mostly revolve around harming the enemy. This is where you'll find your direct damage spells like Fireball, Ice Bolt, Lightning Bolt, that sort of thing. A lot of the debuff-style unit enchantments end up in this category as well.
- Special spells: Kind of just a catch-all for spells that don't fit anywhere else, so it's hard to describe.
Now that we've got this sorted out, we can actually look at the spell schools. Aside from Arcane, you'll notice that every single one of them is exceptionally similar to their respective MtG colour, and frankly I sometimes wonder if the degree to which the game cribs off of MtG is one of the reasons why none of the many attempted remakes have borne fruit. (Hi! December 13, 2022 poking in here just to say guess I was wrong about that one)
Arcane (Grey): There's no such thing as Arcane spellbooks - all wizards get all Arcane spells no matter what. Arcane magic gives you your bread-and-butter spells, like the ability to dispel enemy enchantments, the ability to see what other players are casting, and of course the Spell of Mastery.
Life (White): Life magic is all about buffs. This school has Global, Unit, and City Enchantments galore, and revolves around taking your regular soldiers and turning them into incredible super soldiers. It has extremely few summons, and the ones it does have aren't amazing fighters and are better for the buffs they provide to the rest of their stack. Combat spells are also extremely limited and revolve entirely around nuking summoned Death and Chaos creatures. In fact, Life has quite a few spells that specifically focus on countering Chaos and Death magic. Finally, Life also has all the planar magic - it has spells that allow you to automatically send units between Arcanus and Myrror, and even cut off all access between the two worlds entirely.
Play Life magic if: You like the idea of turning your heroes and mundane units into unstoppable forces, you enjoy a "builder" style and enjoy using magic to turn your cities into economic powerhouses, or if you just really don't like Chaos or Death magic and want to be able to hard counter them.
Essential starting spells: Heroism, Just Cause, Guardian Spirit.
Sorcery (Blue): Like its respective colour in MtG, Sorcery is all about control. It offers triple-strength versions of all the Arcane dispelling spells, it allows you to block enemy spells in combat and eventually worldwide, it allows you to destroy a summoned creature and again eventually do so worldwide, and eventually you can even take control of enemy summoned creatures and global enchantments. Beyond that, Sorcery has the most plentiful and most useful combat summons, and even though like white it has very few global summons, all of them are very powerful, with the Sky Drake being almost universally considered the best unit in the game. As if that weren't enough, it's also the second best school, after Life, for unit enchantments. Sorcery is really, really good, and is going to be incredibly useful no matter your playstyle. It's hard to say what is the "best" school, but Sorcery is by far the most versatile, and the most useful in the widest variety of situations. This also means that it's a school that combos well with every other school.
Play Sorcery magic if: You like the idea of having a lot of tools to limit the magic of other players, or if you want a school that allows you a lot of flexibility.
Essential starting spells: Phantom Warriors, Counter Magic, Confusion. But note that every single first tier Sorcery spell is useful, so there's no real wrong choice here.
Chaos (Red): Chaos is all about damage. The amount of combat spells you get access to dwarfs any other school, and you've also got some pretty punishing overland spells. You've got a lot of summoning spells, and while they aren't always the strongest, they're often among the fastest and most maneuverable (ironically, your top tier summons are incredibly strong but also painfully slow). They also have a lot of special attacks that damage the enemy before they can retaliate. You have very few options for unit and city enchantments, and you have almost nothing to boost the survivability of your units. You do, however, have some opportunity to ruin the terrain around enemy cities, hurting them economically, as well as eventually the fantasy version of a nuke (literally - it works the exact same way as a nuke in Civ, except it's a spell you cast instead of a unit). You have no Global Enchantments at all until late game, but they're well worth the wait - turn the world outside your empire into a volcanic wasteland pummel by meteors, while significantly amping up the power of your own units.
Chaos' big problem is that when you're spending every battle blasting enemy troops with Fireballs and Lightning Bolts, you go through your mana in a hurry. Its summons can also be a bit tricky to use and often require some fancy maneuvering to use properly. It also doesn't really have any cheese tactis. Because of this, Chaos is often considered the weakest of the schools overall. But it's also an incredibly fun school, and it's not as though the AI in MoM is so smart that going all Chaos will doom you.
Play Chaos if: You like using magic to blow things up.
Essential starting spells: Hell Hounds, Fire Elementals, Warp Wood. Seriously, Hell Hounds are amazing, and you can easily conjure up five or six of them and use them to conquer your entire continent.
Nature (Green): Nature has the most summons in the game, and while a few of them are clunkers, most of them are incredibly powerful. Aside from that, though, Nature's thing is being the "balanced" school. It's got some powerful unit and city enchantments, as well as anti-Chaos and Death spells, though not as good as Life; it's got some nice damage spells both in combat and overland, but not as much as Chaos; and it's got quite a few spells that are unique and reward creative thinking, though not as much as Sorcery. Unique to Nature, however, is control over your landscape: you can change the terrain of a tile to boost the output of your cities and you can change the resources found on a tile to something more suitable to your needs. Also, Nature is arguably the best school when it comes to healing.
Nature's only real struggle is that while it has a lot of spells that are very powerful and useful, almost all of them are tiers 2-4, meaning that it can have a very slow start. It only really has one standout T1 spell, and even that generally only becomes really handy later on.
Play Nature if: You want to be able to do a little bit of everything while summoning some big bruisers.
Essential starting spells: Web, Sprites, Resist Elements. But note that Web is the only one of these that's really remarkable.
Death (Purple): Way to throw off the MtG colour scheme at the last minute, guys. I'm just kidding. I'm assuming black wouldn't really work well in a 32-colour setup (or whatever MoM is).
Anyway, Death magic is big on a more subversive playstyle (there's even a spell named Subversion). Death's big thing is "curses." You know how above I mentioned that there are some Unit and City Enchantments that debuff the enemy instead of buffing you? Yeah, 90% of those are Death spells. Your library revolves around severely weakening enemy units (and eventually outright killing them), ruining the economy of enemy cities, and even harming other wizards outright, blasting their mana reserves, casting ability, and even diplomatic status. Death also has some great summons - it's middle of the road in terms of quantity, but quality is just amazing. You'll conjure up powerful Undead units that will carve their way through enemy armies - often causing the enemy soldiers to be reanimated in service to you, to boot. This power comes at a price, though, and Undead units can't heal. Higher tier summons have workarounds for this, but for your basic summons, once they're injured, they're injured.
Also, while it isn't as bad as Nature, Death still has something of a slow start, so be warned.
Play Death if: You like the idea of severely crippling enemy units and cities before sending your legions of the dead in for the kill.
Essential starting spells: Ghouls, Black Sleep, Terror. Also note that Mana Leak is a great spell, but is only useful against other players, and so isn't good at the start when you're mostly fighting neutrals.
Creating Your Wizard
When you create a custom wizard (note that you have to be at least on Easy difficulty to do so), you get eleven "picks." You can spend these on two things:
- Spellbooks. Spellbooks are what determine the spells available to you. The more spellbooks you have, the more spells of that school will be available to research for you. If you have eight spellbooks in one school, you'll start receiving a discount to the research and casting cost of those spells. This discount increases for every additional book. Ten spellbooks will give you access to every spell in that school. Eleven spellbooks allows you to start the game with every tier 1 spell, two T2 spells and one T3 spell, and eleven book strategies are common ways to cheese the game. You can mix and match spellbooks as you like, with one exception - you cannot have both Life and Death spellbooks. Of course, the more schools you mix, you'll have a lot more options, but you'll get to research a lot less spells. You can still get all the spells in trades and encounter sites, though, so you gotta ask yourself: Do you feel lucky?
- Retorts. Retorts are passive benefits to your wizard and/or empire. They do things like making it easier and quicker to create magical items, improving your ability in a certain school, or making your research faster. They last the whole game and can't be lost.
Recommended retorts for beginners: Warlord, Alchemy, or Nature/Sorcery/Chaos Mastery, depending on which is relevant (if any). Probably don't take more than one of those. Retort-heavy wizards can be very powerful, but they're also very unconventional and probably not a good introduction to the game. A word to the wise: While Retorts vary in terms of power and usefulness, most can be good with the right setup. Mana Focusing, however, is totally useless and should never be chosen.
Again, mixing and matching here is half the fun of the game, and causes every new game to feel different.
A quick note about power
"Power" is the term the game uses to describe raw magic income. It comes from three sources: city buildings, nodes, and (very rarely) population. With nodes, you need to clear it first, and then summon a Magic Spirit (or Guardian Spirit if you're Life), move it to the node, and tell it to meld. This will cause some sparkles in your player colour to appear on the screen - the more sparkles, the more power in generates.
On the Magic screen, you can see where your power is going. Every turn, the amount of power you generate is funnelled into three areas: The amount of research points you generate each turn, the amount of mana you generate each turn, and the amount of skill points you generate each turn. The first two are self-explanatory. Skill is how much mana you can use in a single turn - in other words, how long it takes to cast overland spells, and how many combat spells you can cast. Every turn you accumulate skill points, and every time your skill points are double your current skill level, your skill level goes up by one and your skill points reset to zero.
In other words: Divert power into research = get spells faster. Divert power into mana = afford to cast and maintain more spells. Divert power into skill = cast more spells faster.
What race should I pick?
There's a lot of diverse races in Master of Magic, and they all have unique advantages and disadvantages. Races actually work a lot like the civs in Age of Empires 2 - each has a series of baseline unique bonuses, each has a hard limited on how much they can advance tech-wise, and each has one or more unique units. The main difference is that in MoM you can conquer and use cities of other races. Rather than go through them race by race, which would take forever, I've divided them into three categories.
Militaristic races get strong bonuses to all their units, but they're very limited in terms of the buildings they can construct. They won't do much at all to boost your magic, and they don't have much in the way of high-tier units. The idea of a Militaristic race is to use your powerful low-end units to rush neutral cities and even enemy wizards if possible. You'll give yourself a lot more breathing room, and you'll hopefully conquer plenty of high-tech races that can take care of all your economic needs for you.
Economic races are the opposite: They don't get any basic bonuses to their units, and early on they'll probably rely mostly on summoned units to expand. However, they'll have access to most if not all buildings, and so a fully developed city will make you a lot of power, research, gold, and food. They also have powerful late-game units: It'll take you a lot of turns to even produce the buildings they require in a city, but once you do, you'll be getting the most powerful normal units in the game.
Hybrid races don't really fit into either category. Like Militaristic races, they get big bonuses to their troops and don't get access to most high-tier buildings. Unlike Militaristic races, they have a stronger economy, either due to getting more buildings, or natural race bonuses.
Now that we've got this sorted out, we can actually look at the spell schools. Aside from Arcane, you'll notice that every single one of them is exceptionally similar to their respective MtG colour, and frankly I sometimes wonder if the degree to which the game cribs off of MtG is one of the reasons why none of the many attempted remakes have borne fruit.
From instructional videos and tutorials to e-books and articles, the internet is a treasure trove of magical wisdom waiting to be explored. By joining others online, you can tap into this vast collection of knowledge and expand your magical repertoire. In addition to learning from others, online communities also provide a supportive and encouraging environment for your magical journey. Connecting with fellow magicians who understand your passion can be a source of motivation and inspiration. These virtual communities offer a space to share your achievements, seek advice, and learn from the experiences of others. Furthermore, joining others online allows you to connect with magicians from all around the world. Regardless of where you are located, you can interact and collaborate with individuals across borders and cultures. This global network of magical practitioners brings diverse perspectives and ideas, enriching your magical practice and broadening your horizons. So, why wait any longer? Take your first step towards becoming the master of magic by joining others online. Discover a world of endless possibilities, expand your knowledge, and connect with a community that shares your passion. Embrace the power of technology, and let your magical journey begin..
Reviews for "Dive into the virtual cauldron and emerge as a powerful sorcerer"
1. Sarah - 2 stars - I was really excited to try out "Join others online and become the master of magic" as I am a fan of magical games. However, I was thoroughly disappointed with this game. The graphics were outdated and the gameplay was repetitive and boring. It felt like I was doing the same tasks over and over again without any real challenge or excitement. Additionally, the online component of the game was glitchy and the community was toxic. Overall, I would not recommend this game to anyone looking for an immersive and enjoyable magical experience.
2. Michael - 1 star - "Join others online and become the master of magic" is a complete waste of time and money. The game promised an engaging online multiplayer experience, but it failed to deliver. The controls were clunky and unresponsive, making it frustrating to navigate and perform magic spells. The graphics were lackluster and the gameplay was far from exciting. The community was filled with trolls and spammers, making the whole online experience unbearable. Save yourself the disappointment and find a better magical game to play.
3. Emily - 3 stars - While "Join others online and become the master of magic" had potential, it ultimately fell short for me. The game had a decent concept, but the execution was lacking. The storyline was poorly developed and the quests were uninspiring. The magic spells were limited and didn't provide a sense of true mastery. The online aspect of the game was underwhelming, with a lack of meaningful interaction with other players. Overall, I found the game to be mediocre at best and not worth the time and effort invested.