Master of Magic – the Community Patch

Today’s post is for all you Master of Magic fans. (From the comments on the last time I talked about Master of Magic, I know you’re out there!)

I’ve been playing Master of Magic with the Community Patch version before I try Caster of Magic, and I have to say the Community Patch improves the enemy AI by a significant degree.

An example: I’m playing a game as Rjak, a master of Death Magic, and I’m currently fighting the enemy wizard Lo Pan, who uses both Chaos Magic and Sorcery Magic. I have complete control of a small continent, but Lo Pan has a much larger continent and population, and I couldn’t get an army across the ocean without his fleet swarming my ships.

Instead, once I had built up my magic power base, I summoned several units of Wraiths, which can fly, and sent them across the ocean and attacked. This proved a highly effective strategy, as Lo Pan’s conventional troops couldn’t stop the Wraiths. I overran about a third of his continent and almost reached his capital city before the AI settled on a counterstrategy for Lo Pan. He cast the Death Ward spell on all of his remaining cities, which meant my Wraiths couldn’t enter them to attack, since they are creatures of Death Magic.

So the war has stalemated. I can’t attack any of his cities at the moment, but my Wraiths can tear up any troops Lo Pan sends to try and retake the conquered territory. What I need to do is have the Wraiths defend the conquered territory long enough for me to build a powerful enough conventional army from the occupied cities, which I plan to use in a decapitation strike on Lo Pan’s capital.

In the original version of the game, the AI wasn’t nearly this clever.

I look forward to trying the Community Patch version with other playstyles.

That was the fun part about Master of Magic, and which it’s still so replayable nearly thirty years later. The sheer number of creatures, units, and spells can combine to create wildly different tactics and playstyles. Like, do you want to play a Life wizard leading an army of dark elves? You can do that! Or a Warlord commanding legions of gnolls? You can do that too!

Of course, since the map is randomly generated with every game, sometimes the most fun games are the ones where you fail catastrophically in the early game due to sheer bad luck.

All this enjoyment, and the base game only takes up 39 megabytes of space on my hard drive.

-JM