It's pretty big. I've finished exploring two large islands, each of which had maybe 7-8 dungeons to explore and 3 or 4 towns, and I've just started on a third. I'm pretty sure that's the last island before the finale. Mostly it's long because there are lots of battles against large numbers of enemies that take a long time. The game is primarily about tactical combat between your party of eight and hordes of opponents. Exploration is a mixed bag; some locations are interesting with lots of secret passages and cool stuff to find, others are boring repetitive caves. The later parts of the first island were especially bad for this. Combat is pretty fun though, although I did end up using similar strategies most of the time.

Character progression is a bit weird. There are no character levels. Character skills only improve through use, and there aren't any random battles or repopulating areas, so players have to fight everything they can in order to improve. Character stats can only be increased by training in towns or through very rare potions. Since the trainers are in specific locations, that happens in spurts. Having just traveled from the second island to the third, I got a big bump in stats when I stopped to train everyone.

The magic system is interesting, because characters don't "learn" spells like in other RPGs. Instead, all spells are constructed out of three magical "syllables" that define the spell. This means that in addition to finding spellbooks which give the words for a spell, you can often guess at them. For example, if I know the spell spark ("throw small fire") and I then discover the spell for major healing ("heal large wound"), then I can probably guess that "throw large fire" will give me a more powerful attack spell. Whether or not I can actually cast it depends on my characters' magic skill, which improves through use like anything else. So after enough battles of throwing weaker spells around, I can start successfully casting more powerful ones. Early on, spells fail a lot.

So in the end there's little choice in how characters progress. It's also important to have good starting stats because those determine how good starting skills are. This is especially important for magic, because if you can't cast basic spells at the start, you won't get anywhere. My first attempt at making a party had this issue, but I restarted in short order to fix it. You then "roll" skills based on starting stats, so you can pick which weapons you want to be good at. Most loot is random, but since there's some high-quality stuff that's NOT random, it can be bad if you have no one that's good with certain weapons. Fortunately I was advised to take someone who's good with 2-handed swords, so I was ready for this. I did feel like I couldn't viably try out some of the weirder weapons though, like fencing weapons or brawling weapons (think iron knucles and the sort) or polearms. There are lots of weapon categories but I needed to specialize, so there were lots of things I couldn't try. I would have preferred just choosing 1-handed weapons vs. 2-handed weapons or something.
Good to have some MM3 discussion after I've been horribly derailing this thread for so long! I actually haven't played MM3 yet, but I intend to. I have played the Xeen games before, and, more recently, MM1 and 2. Are robbers in MM3 able to equip more stuff than ninjas can? I had a robber in MM1 and MM2 but that was mostly because I imported my party into MM2. But I kind of have a soft spot for robbers just because I like the idea that they focus on thievery and doing it really well, even if they're not that useful in a fight.

Also, thanks for the advice for Swords of Xeen, which I haven't played either. Hopefully there's a way to learn thievery in that game, if I don't have a ninja or thief in my party?

Swords of Xeen is a little odd. In particular, the game isn't what one would call well crafted, and many aspects of it are not well behaved. In any case, here is some advice if you do decide to play that game:

* Play on Adventurer difficulty, not Warrior. The game is poorly balanced, and playing on the easier difficulty will help when the game becomes unreasonable.

* Do not trust the game. For example, Clairvoyance (I think that's the spell's name) isn't to be trusted. If you refuse to drink from a barrel, it might still get used up. On the other hand, there's at least one permanent stat boost that does not get used up and doesn't have a once per character limitation.

* There are a couple fountains to watch out for. One fountain lowers a character's age, but if the character is at least 19 years old and is at her natural age, the fountain will make the character's unnatural aging underflow, resulting in the character aging 255 years. Similarly, there's an HP fountain that ignores your maximum; getting over 32,767 HP this way will cause it to overflow and become negative (but your character will still be alive unless hit).

* Speaking of the game not being well behaved, Mr. Wizard behaves oddly. It takes you to a different location depending on whether you are in combat at the time, and one of the locations is not a place you are meant to reach early. (This game is actually a bit more linear than the rest of the series, in that you are meant to complete certain sections of the game before you head to the next, but the barriers are porous, if you know what I mean.)

As for your question about thievery:

* You can learn Thievery for everyone just like any other skill.

* You do not actually need Thievery; I am not sure if there is any point in the game that actually checks that skill and is too difficult for a character without the skill.

Yes, my archer did this (bow and crossbow) and it's not been too bad. But at the time I thought I needed to specialize to be effective. Now I wish I'd had my axe fighter also use maces.

Thanks for the Swords of Xeen advice! It will probably be a while before I get to it (I'd like to play through MM3 and World of Xeen first) but when I do play it I'll keep this in mind.

It is a very good idea to play World of Xeen before Swords of Xeen. World of Xeen is a sanely designed game (though the point about permanent stat boosts getting used up if you don't use them is occasionally an issue on the darkside); Swords of Xeen, as I mentioned above, is not.

One thing about WoX: If you want to fully enjoy Clouds of Xeen, do not use any pyramids before killing Lord Xeen; the pyramids take you to the darkside, and the rewards you get from combat and quests will break Clouds.

No time like the present. Sounds like the longer you wait on this, the harder it will be to advance.

True. But unfortunately I've already sold the good maces I found. I suspect it may already be too late to train up a second skill anyway. In the end it doesn't matter that much, since my spellcasters are far more important than my fighters at this stage, and my other two fighters are good enough to help. I'm also holding out hope that I'll stumble upon a decent axe that's worth enchanting, which would make my axe fighter useful again.

I've played World of Xeen before, long ago, and loved it. But it's been so long that I want to play it again before trying Swords of Xeen, and I figured since I have the six pack I'd play the whole series in order. So far I've only played MM1 and MM2 from the pack, but soon I'll tackle MM3 and then World of Xeen. And when I played before I did Clouds then Darkside, and I've seen your advice repeated by many on this forum, so I'll stick to that order again this time!

My interest in Swords of Xeen is more as a curiosity. It does sound like it's pretty weird, but that could also make it interesting, if not necssarily as fun as the other entries in the series.

I know nothing about this game beyond what I've gleaned from this thread, but this sounds like a scenario where you just grab any old mace, hand it to the axe guy, and tell him to get practicing. Your description indicates he doesn't need to pull his weight at the moment, and indeed can't because his current axe is terrible, so it seems like any practice he gets with any pathetic mace you can lay hands on is basically free XP for the skill.

Depending on how well you are controlling the battles (and how the skill system works), maybe you can level his mace skill with something equivalent to FF Tactics "throw stones at each other"? Crowd control the mobs and just let the guy take swings until he (slowly) finishes them off?

Well, he's not entirely useless, it's just that ideally I'd give him a weapon that does extra damage to demons, and I haven't found an axe that does that. It's not really worth enchanting an axe (which would allow him to deal more damage and be much more useful in combat) unless it has a special property like that, because enchanting is really expensive. So he's currently doing less damage than my other fighters.

I could give him a crappy mace and have him start practicing, but that's not useful unless I know I'll have a really good mace to give him later. Since I already sold the ones I found earlier in the game, that will depend on future loot. Most loot is random and I have no way to predict what the non-random loot will be, so it would be a gamble.

So I guess I'll see what I find. If I find a good one-handed weapon (I don't want him to give up his shield) I may just give it to him and start training. In the meantime, his axe is as good as any other "basic" weapon at the moment, and he's good enough with it to aim his attacks for a little damage boost.

That's an interesting detail in this game: blunt weapons vs. slashing weapons vs. piercing weapons have different damage properties and different damage multipliers. So while the base damage of a blunt weapon may seem good, it will have a lower multiplier than other weapons, and will not benefit as much from "aiming" attacks at different body parts (e.g. eyes, vital organs, brain). From this standpoint, piercing weapons are best (Bows in particular can do lots of damage if the archer is accurate enough), but most of the good non-random loot have been slashing weapons which are the middle ground. I heard somewhere that this system is similar to GURPS, but I've never used GURPS myself so I'm not sure.

This is theoretically possible. At this stage most battles are tough enough that unless my spellcasters eliminate enemies quickly, I'll be overrun, and there are no repeatable battles to be found. But I could in principle leave an enemy or two alive and just let my dwarf attack them over and over to boost his skill. If I find a different class weapon worth using, I may try this.

If loot is random, then just pick a weapon class that no one else has as primary (or secondary) and have him start using that class of weapons. Sounds like you won't be much worse off if you never find a weapon of that class, but it does double the number of weapon classes that could provide usable upgrades for the axe guy. If everyone skills up in different weapons, then you've got greater chances of being interested in any given piece of loot, and no one is using second best of a given weapon type. I've only been talking about maces because that's what you've been talking about. If there are lots and lots of weapon classes, this might not yield as good a result; as I said earlier, I'm unfamiliar with the details, so what I'm saying might be mostly nonsense for this particular game.


If you can't afford to leave enemies alive for target practice, then go ahead and murder them as they deserve. The axe dude can just fit in whatever practice he can get while things aren't dead. If he wanted to be better, then he should have rolled higher. ;)

For anyone interested, I did finally finish Nahlakh, and wrote about it on my blog:

https://waltorious.wordpress.com/2017/11/25/history-lessons-nahlakh/

I actually finished it a while ago but it took a while to get the post written.