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Master of Magic (2022)
Cheat Codes:
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Submitted by: David K.
Countermagic Explanatory Guide:
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It is RNG, so not matter how much you pump it, there is a chance for something
to get thru. And you could get bad RNG where it does not block anything, or
good RNG and it blocks everything.
Playing as Lo Pan, with no access to buffs or anything decent to cast, counter-
magic is about the only option. I’ve found it blocks a fair amount even with
just overcasting to 20’ish. Plop it down on turn 1 to get the most out of it
and pray to the RNG gods.
When fighting against a death mage, it blocked Weakness most of the time, and
Life Drain a fair bit. When fighting against Merlin, it blocked a fair number
of buffs. I’ve never had it stop Web, not sure if Web cannot be blocked by
counter-magic, or if I’ve just had particularly bad luck in that regard.
Tips for New Players:
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Written by Farmer Fool
Some tips for players new to Master of Magic, by someone who has been playing
for a long, long time.
-=Introduction=-
The original Master of Magic came into the world 28 years ago, as of the time
of this writing, which is a few days after the re-release of Master of Magic in
December 2022. It’s a game I played a great deal of at the time, and it’s a game
I’m still happy to be playing 28 years later. Why? Because of – and this is
something that the many later imitators failed to fully embrace! – the incredible
depth the game; it was astounding in it’s time, and still impressive today. This
is why Master of Magic has been so dearly loved and celebrated for almost three
decades, over which time many other fine games from that era have fallen into
obscurity. 200+ spells, 5 schools of magic, 18 retorts, dozens of creatures, 14
different races with around a dozen units each, 50+ unit abilities – all of which
add up to a vast number of ways to approach the goal of becoming Master of Magic!
One playthrough may rely heavily on the special abilities of a given race and it’s
units, and their synergy with one or more schools of magic, to produce “killer
stacks” of empowered normal units. Another might regard race choice to be a minor
matter, and instead seek to dominate through the summons in the chosen school(s)
of magic – and the buffs that school or schools provide. Still another might seek
battlefield supremecy through the spells that can be thrown in combat, and your
units are merely the vehicle which gets you to the battlefield. Another playthrough
could focus on assembling a crew of the most powerful heroes, and supporting them
with powerful artifacts. And any number of strategies could be based on combining
one or more of the approaches above. This is truly a game where there is no one
“optimal build” which should be followed; many are the paths to ultimate power!
And with that introduction out of the way… here’s 10 tips for new Master of Magic
players!
-=Starting Out=-
For the brand new beginner who just wants to play their first game without having
to read too much, pick either High Men or Halflings as your race, and go with
Divine Power + 10 Life books, 10 Nature + Nature Mastery or 10 Chaos + Chaos
Mastery, and then for those later two, either Conjurer or Archmage as your last
pick, depending on whether you want to try using a lot of summons or try casting
more spells during battle.
Why these choices? High Men have an almost fully complete build tree, with the
excellent Paladins, quite possibly the best normal unit, at the end of it.
Halflings start with 3 food per farmer from day 1, and have the excellent slingers
at the end of their shorter build tree. Both also tend not to provoke too much
unrest in conquered races – halflings especially, who provoke less unrest than any
other race. Life has a lot of spells that enhance units, spells that improve cities,
and a powerful Hero in Torin the Chosen; Nature also has good buffs, a few handy
utility spells (hello Earth Lore!) and some very sturdy summons. Chaos is,
unsurprisingly, the king of direct-damage magic, has some interesting unit buffs,
and has some odd but often powerful summons.
-=Units=-
Unit abilities are important. No, really! Take the time to look at the abilities
of your units and think about how you can use them – and then look at your foes,
and their abilities, and what weaknesses you might exploit. For example, the above
mentioned Paladins have First Strike, which is a big part of what makes them so
dangerous – they can kill figures in an enemy unit before that unit retaliates –
normally, the attacker and defender strike each other at the same time. The thing
about First Strike is that it requires the Paladins be the attacking unit; it doesn’t
come into play if something attacks them. So that means you need to think about how
you manuever your Paladins so that they get the opportunity to be the attacker as
often as possible.
Likewise, Breath Attacks and Thrown Weapons are resolved before First Strike –
which means that those Paladins lose some of their effectiveness if they have to
attack units of Draconians or Barbarians, which have those abilities. (OK, the
Paladins will *still* probably win, because they’re made of pure awesome, but they’ll
get more banged up than you might be used to seeing.)
Number of figures in a unit matters a great deal. In most games, a unit that is at
full health and one that is at 25% health both strike with equal force. In Master
of Magic, if you’re down to 25% of your figures remaining, that means you only get
25% of the attacks you would have gotten at full strength! Note, however, that this
rule only applies to multi-figure units – a full health Sky Drake and it’s 25%
remaining Sky Drake buddy hit equally hard. This has a couple of implications: First,
as multi-unit figure suffers damage and loses figures, it loses combat effectiveness.
I try and have any unit that falls to half strength fall back, so it can live, gain
experience, heal, and fight again another day. The exceptions might be if I need to
sacrifice the unit to buy time or tie up an enemy unit, or I’m in a do-or-die
situation, like defending my fortress, or if it’s a unit I care little about and can
easily replace, like a basic swordsman or spearman. Secondly, it means you should
try to use units with abilities like First Strike, Thrown Weapons or Breath Weapons
as much as you can on attack, rather than letting them be attacked.
As an example of how this all plays out, consider the following scenario: you face
two enemy units, one at full strength and one at 25% health. You have a single unit
that can strike these units for about 75% of their health. Which enemy unit do you
attack first? In most games, you’d hit the weakened unit first; in Master of Magic
it’s often better to hit the full strength unit first! You’ll take more damage by
getting hit by one enemy at full strength than two enemies at 25% each.
Direct damage is always fun, but is sometimes not the best use of your magic points
in battle. The common Nature spell Web can immobilize extremely dangerous enemy units
for a low cost, and can make enemy fliers hittable by your walking melee units.
Confusion, a common Sorcery spell, can likewise take a dangerous enemy unit out of
play, or better yet, cause enemy units to fight amongst themselves. A well-timed
Healing can restore a dangerous unit that has lost many figures to attrition back to
it’s original dangerousness.
Sacrificial units can turn the tide of battle, and make early exploring much more
profitable. Nature has Earth Elementals, Chaos has Fire Elementals, Sorcery has Air
Elementals, Phantom Beasts, and the wonderful Phantom Warriors. The Phantom Warriors,
in particular, are a real gem. They die to a stiff breeze, but they typically do a
lot of damage when they hit, since their Illusion damage ignores enemy armor. Combine
this with #3 above, and you can see how this is useful – imagine an enemy swordsman
vs one of your spearmen. Normally you’d lose, but if you soften the swordsmen up with
an attack by phantom warriors, your full-health spearmen will likely win against the
swordsman missing several figures. They can also be used as a lure, to make one or m
ore enemy units chase them to take heat away from other units – although heroes with
artifacts that grant bonuses to movement often serve this role even better!
This also allows you do map scouting with small forces, by being able to beef up your
scouting party during battle.
-=World-level Strategy=-
There’s no getting around it – the game starts slow, pretty much every time. Use this
time to scout! You know a handful of simple spells, have little unit production capacity,
and a pitiful mana budget. That said, it’s still worth your time to scout around. As the
tutorial points out, Magic Spirits are quite useful for this task. Cavalry isn’t too far
up the production tree, can usually win 1v1 fights against neutral city defenders, and
isn’t too expensive, and is a good second tier scout and attacker for lightly defended
targets. Remember that you can investigate a node to see what’s there without having
to commit to battle, so you can find lairs and nodes to attack, cities to conquer, good
sites for your own future cities, and of course, the other delusional, upstart conjurers
of cheap tricks you share these worlds with.
Don’t neglect defending your own cities, though – I recommend at least two units per
city, and I recommend keeping them fairly up-to-date. Nothing stings like losing a
city that can produce end-tier units because you only defended it with a pair of
spearmen!
Think about what you want to trade to other wizards. I’d recommend never trading
direct damage spells, for example, unless there’s absolutely no chance they could be
used against you – for example, Life’s Star Fires, which only harms undead. Summons
are probably OK, as long as it’s a summons that wouldn’t totally ruin your day if it
was fielded against you. Trade any spells from the Arcane school freely, since you’re
not giving your adversary anything they couldn’t have gotten anyway. The AI seems to
LOVE summoning creatures and champions, and as long as they’re doing that, they’re not
spending mana on more immediately-destructive things.
Resist the urge to overbuild cities. Think about what role each city plays and build to
that. For example, if you have two halfling cities, one near coal and mythril and one
without those resources, it makes more sense to have the city with special resources
become a soldier factory, and not build many of the later soldier-focused buildings in
the second city – have them stick to farming. Likewise, if building a Shipwright’s Guild
doesn’t unlock anything useful for you, there’s no need to build it for completeness’
sake. Likewise, if you don’t have unrest trouble, consider skipping the oracle. If you
can rely mostly on nodes as your source of power, Cathedrals can likewise be skipped.
-=Intro to Advanced Shenanigans=-
Think outside the box! Sometimes combining powers in non-obvious ways or on certain units
can produce entertaining and useful results. For exanple, consider the following ideas on
how to work around the limitations of Undead units. Undead, both summons that are naturally
Undead, or made Undead by being killed by Ghouls or Life Drain, or hit with Black Channels,
don’t heal. Ever. This can sharply limit their usefulness, which is a shame, since they
can be quite powerful and have a lot of natural immunities.
However, there *is* a way around this!
Regeneration can heal even Undead. To gain access to this, either the base unit needs
to have been a Troll, or you need to have cast the rare Nature spell Regeneration on the
unit, or if the unit is a Hero, needs to be equipped with an item that provides Regeneration.
The spoiler below has a more extreme gambit. Consider if you want to know this information
or not – it’s widely known, and widely known to be overpowered.
Flying Invisible Warships. Warships have a powerful, long-range attack and effectively
unlimited ammo. Being ships, they’re confined to the sea… unless you give them the Flight
spell from Sorcery! Now they can roam the land, blowing things up! Stack Invisibility on
top of that, and most enemy units now cannot even target them with ranged attacks or spells.
A few of these units can easily subdue almost any neutral lair or node in the game,
barring certain ones which may have units that can see through your invisibility. Your
rival wizards may also have some Opinions about this tactic, especially if they know
Dispel Magic.
Casting Skill Guide:
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Written by Hobo Elf
* Casting Skill adds to an “XP” bar. Each time the bar fills up your casting skill
goes up by 1.
* That means that you can cast 1 extra point of mana each turn.
* If your casting skill is 10 and you cast a spell that costs 20 mana,
it’ll take 2 turns.
* If you keep pumping your Casting Skill and build it up to 20 then that 20 mana
spell will need just one turn to cast.
* But you have to constantly invest into the Casting Skill for it to slowly improve.
* It’s not something you just turn on when you suddenly want to cast big boy spells.
* On the top right corner of the mana allocation tab you see can the CS bar, how much
“XP” it’s getting per turn and how much you need for it to level up.
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