Master of Magic: Caster of Magic

While many of the additions are welcome (who doesn't want more cool stuff?) a lot of them are quite boring - spells that do damage, spells that heal hp, spells that summon creatures - they are all things that the game had before, but reshuffled to every magic type so everyone has everything. While I appreciate the designers wanted to add stuff, and this was low hanging fruit, it robs the different magic types from being unique. Same goes for changes to wizard customization, which is possibly MoM's greatest feature. You can no longer invest 100% into a magic type. No more elemental mastery vs divine/infernal power, instead there are a number of generic "magic buff" retorts that add bonuses without really changing play style. The changes to Wizard creation unfortunately take away variety of playstyles. Building queue for city development is really nice, but all buildings have had their bonuses reduced and most requirements removed. Instead of growing over time, now towns have almost everything available to them very quickly. I've not had a chance to play through a whole game, so there may be other changes that are good or bad, but I just don't like this game as much as original MoM. Additions are great, changes are clearly made to accomodate the dev's playstyle, as it seems to have streamlined the game into very limited ways of playing. I've played Master of Magic pretty constantly for the past 20 or so years, and its a game that has my heart. So this review is more for old fans than new ones. If you've never played MoM, you might think Caster is better. For the veterans, despite the additions you'll feel there are big parts of the game missing. I doubt I will play it again.

I'll give an example of why I don't like this mod. In battle, the enemy will run for the furthest corner of the map, then essentially run in circles around the perimeter of the map when you approach, stalling for time, trying to burn up 25 turns (when battle automatically ends). It will do this even when it is powerful enough to possibly win. You can't use auto battle, because the AI doesn't know how to intercept a fleeing unit. So most battles are a matter of fanning out and cornering one unit after another. It's very tedious and just dumb. Also, power inflation. The author doesn't know how to really balance things. He just keeps heaping on power here and there, then more to make up for the new imbalances, then more here, then more over there. In no time you're swimming in gold and mana and units. I'm not into quantity. He left out quality.

Very typical for the developer's products, this mod's AI makes for a repetitive dull monotonous playing experience. It's strategy is uniformly aggressively expansive on every difficulty setting, more like a solution to a 2D cutting stock problem. Of course it has disposed of many of the original AI's inefficiencies, however, it had also lost all of it's flavourful quirks that made playing experience all the more interesting and diverse. As for actual modified content, it's fun to play around with at first, but it quickly becomes apparent that new and modified spells alike are oftenly over/under-powered to constraints of a very flat understanding of what 'balance' means, and new buildings while not bad in themselves lack proper build-tree logic even more than in the original title. Overall, an extremely disappointing experience.

They new retorts, spells, and units are a treat, but the AI is frustrating beyond belief. Enemy wizards push aggressively outward, creating cities on literally every available square. Diplomacy, while possible, is undercut by the fact that your allies are literally knocking on your door--so every wizard pact falls apart when you move your own troops around your own cities. If you enjoyed exploring caves and lairs and whatnot, too bad. Apart from the few around your initial capital, the AI is going to grab all the good ones leaving only late-game ones available. The battle AI is nonsense. Even on lower levels, flying units won't attack. They'll just hover there, immune to all your lower-tier units. Build some flying units or archers? Too bad, the enemies will target them first, then continue to hover out of reach. Worse, AI units will actively run away from your troops. This is irritating when you have to march your missile units across the board to finally shoot down an annoying group of zombies, but it becomes even worse if you've lost your missile/fast units. I literally chased a single skeleton around a board for twenty minutes. Sure, its "smarter" for the enemies to prolong battles inevitably. But from a gameplay perspective, it's just aggravating and very much not fun. I suppose players who like to play VERY aggressively would enjoy this mod (which is why I'm giving it two starts), but for me it's a frustrating experience even on the easiest settings. Not because I lose, but because I don't get to do any of the things I like (exploration and focusing on a few cities) before the AI is literally crawling through my lands with hordes of sprites and war bears. If I could just turn the AI back to the original (for all its faults), I would give this mod five stars.

This is what we've been waiting for. Master of Magic was bugged on release, causing the AI to struggle to play it's own game. It was still fun but it took decades for community patches to fix it. Seravy's Caster of Magic mod isn't just a bug-fix, it has completely overhauled the game to remove, change and balance redundant or useless spells, abilities and features without drastically changing the original game. The changes are too numerous to list here. There are loads of new spells, changes to map generation, changes to the way certain tiles work, a change to roads and the number of units you can field meaning that you can no longer just defend your territory with one big army, forcing you to build more armies and hold them in location to fend off theats. The biggest change is that Caster of Magic is now built so that the AI can beat you with the new set of tools it has. Suffice to say, the game is now BRUTALLY difficult on the higher settings: the AI can not only play it's game, but it plays it well. The main complaint about MoM, that it's AI was bad, no longer applies. The other changes just pump this game to the highest level possible, and Master of Magic finally retakes it's crown as best fantasy 4x even 25 years after release.