Master of Nostalgia

...but you've been playing it since 1993! What else needs to be said?

I think you have missed his point. He was trying to say that its not AI or game stability or lack of exploits that make game interesting to play over and over.

So then it's good game design? How many other 17 year old games does he play?

I enjoyed MoM, a lot. As in played for days on end. Bad AI or not, it was just fun. Sometimes its not about the mechanics but the whole package.

He's totally correct about MoM -- it was incredibly fun to play, but it was also buggy as all hell.  I haven't played it in years because I eventually got tired of restoring old save games because of the frequent late-game crashes.  And there was no game balance to speak of.  I still have fond memories of playing all night, but I also have not forgotten the times I felt like smashing my computer because of the bugs and crashes.

Elemental is its own game.  I'm enjoying Elemental despite the problems; but it is not MoM, nor should it be.  MoM was fun, but at the same time, it was also infuriating.

Probably its personal and different for everyone, but for me its diversity and immersion MoM gives. There are many different ways to play the game. There are many DIFFERENT races, DIFFERENT spells, and therefore numerous ways to combine them.

It was fun to stomp large armies with single hero in top forged gear

After digging out MoM again, I have to say ... memory is a funny thing. I didn't remember many of the issues I had with the game but the cool options you had. In retrospective it seems I filtered many bad things out ... and they just came back and for that I am glad.

It was a fantastic game. Like any of these games, you have to self-limit out the overpowered combos to give the AI a chance.

I could spend an hour or more simply designing my ruler for that game. Once you didn't allow yourself to indulge in the overpowered setups, it became a great balancing act. By comparison, this game's sovereign creator has far fewer real options. It's not about putting 1 or 3 or 11 points into a type of magic... it's simply checking a toggle to give yourself ALL of the spells of that color for a measly 3 out of 50 creation points. Why skip one of the four elements just to give yourself just 1 extra point of STR?

Anyway, despite the bugs (virtually meaningless now) and despite the overpowered combos (which can be avoided), MoM remains the overall best game of this subgenre ever developed.

And hopefully this one will end up even better!

4X games had horrible AI by default at those times. And in MOM, it was worse since it has two layers, strategic and tactical to be bad at.

In fact, first time I've seen challenging AI in these types of games was with Civ3.

My point, I guess, is that if you're going to compare Elemental to MoM (or any other game) you should compare it to the ACTUAL game, warts and all. I think Elemental SHOULD be able to do things better than Master of Magic- computers are literally a thousand times faster, we've got generations of game design knowledge we didn't have then, and so forth- but I saw three, four different people complaining that Elemental was worse than MoM because of things that it did, in fact, better.

I'll admit that I don't have enough experience with Elemental yet to judge it. MoM gave you more meaningful options than any other game I can think of. Doombolt flinging mages! Invisible flying warships! One man army! Teleporting armies deep into enemy territory! Winged wolf riders! They were all in the game, they all felt like something a wizard WOULD do, and they were all a lot of fun. There's a reason it made "Best game ever" lists.

... but that doesn't mean that it was a flawless experience.

Yeah, if you actually install the "fan" patch I think most of the memory leaks are dealt with.  I don't think I've had any crashes in MoM for years.  And yes, you had to dodge about 5 different insta-win wizard customizations.  After that, the game was quite challenging.  The only shame, of course, was the AI, and not in the way that you might think.  In almost all cases, they were guarenteed to declare war on you every single game regardless of how friendly your relationship was with them.  You could be at harmony with them and they would promptly tell you, out of the blue, that you had insulted them and it must lead to war!!

When I first heard about Elemental about 2 years ago, I remember saying that I'd be perfectly happy to shell out 50 bucks if Elemental was just MoM with better AI and multiplayer (hell, screw better graphics.)

Thanks for this post! I was just thinking that to myself recently. I bought Master of Magic (MoM) when it was released, I was an eager young teenager and that game stole many hours of my life. And it's quite true, MoM was bug ridden to the max. And balance was definitely out of whack, with Artificer and Life Magic you could make an invincible stack of heroes that could just plow through anything the game could throw at you. And so many 'exploits' with enchanments and traits, it was crazy.

That being said, the game was still crazy fun. I tried to keep myself away from some of the things I would consider an 'exploit' and voila, the game was still enjoyable. As for Elemental, I'm reading a lot of people complaining about 'dumb AI' and how 'it's easy to rush the AI'. I have a Large Map game, Challenging Map / Hard AI's, and quitely built myself for about 150 turns, after the land rush was over, I started exploring the map and realized that the smallets AI was double my size in both land and army size. So yeah, maybe for those who are rushing, try not to rush and maybe the AI will get a good footbhold. I also read a lot of people are going for max difficulty in oponents & world and max # of oponents. Maybe too many children spoil the broth? Try less AI's? (Maybe they'll spend less time fighting each other and have time to expand?)

In any case, thanks for posting this. My bring back a few skewed memories people have about that good old Masterpiece .

One of the devs from my favorite WW2 Game has this signature:

"Nostalgia isn't as good as it used to be."