Master of Magic: Caster of Magic

I played Master of Magic obsessively when it first came out. Yes, it was buggy, the AI was moronic, but I have yet to find another fantasy 4x game that has the charm, and sense of growing power that this game had. I have gone back to it many times since, and always had a good experience, albeit a bit empty because I could always rely on tricks that the AI couldn't counter. That all changes now. Caster of Magic rebalanced the game, and while it removed some of the ridiculously overpowered tricks (11 book rare spell starts to win in a handful of turns), it was built with the philosophy of preserving the theme of each magic realm and race, and new powerful spells and abilities have replaced a lot of the useless padding in the original. Most importantly, the AI is hands down the best I have ever seen in a 4x game, anywhere. At the even skill level ('fair'), everyone, including me, is running even, the AI players build doom stacks (and uses boats to raid shores!) to raid weakly defended cities, and diplomacy works!!! You will not survive a multifront war - the AI knows the same tricks as you, and they are relentless. You need to keep friends, and choose war at a brief time when you have an advantage (hitting a research goal, or maybe an early wave of advanced troops). To play at the 'even' level, you need to develop a solid strategy from the start, and adapt along the way. You will never be able to solve every problem (flying, ranged magic, resistance based 'save or die', and of course, magic spells), so you need to find a way to mitigate the worst problems. You lose if you don't have an answer, as you should. Time to try again! There are so many options and so much to explore, and it all feels like it works. This is an absolute brilliant labor of love that rebuilt a fun, but flawed game into a masterpiece. If you can handle the retro experience, and you are willing to learn from your mistakes, you will not be disappointed.

For background I've played the original Master of Magic and Master of Orion II a lot. I do a pretty good job at MoM Classic. I've only been able to win 1 game of Caster of Magic on the normal level. I don't think this game is accessible to average game players. It appears to have been tailored for MoM experts. So I have a game that's boring to play on easy and impossible to play on normal. With 5 more difficult above these 2. I love MoM classic but I cannot find the magic in Caster.

Bad balance, no oversight in features, no grasp of what made the original game so special. This is a terrible example of one fan, with the time and ability to code but no concept of game design, power-tripping his way through features that he dreamed up one night to a chorus of "OH, THAT'LL BE KEWL". Well, the features aren't good, aren't kewl, aren't fitting to the game. They're a mish-mash of barely working, not-at-all-balanced functions that serve only to give bored top-end players new exploits and power-metas, no matter how nonsensical or broken they, or the atrocious AI, are. Avoid. Flee! Run for your life!

I've played this DLC for the better part of 4 years. Don't listen to the folks telling you it is too fast paced or that the AI is too aggressive. They are playing the game as if it hadn't changed at all and it has, a lot. For those of you considering adding this to your MoM experience. please remember that it IS a better version of the original game but with all the fixes and changes some aspects will be different. Diplomacy: The biggest change starts here. It works. Diplomatic relations matter throughout the entire game. This opens up many new strategies and empowers the unusable diplomatic retorts (perks for wizards). This is also where I believe many old fans are messing up. Approaching diplomacy the same way as the original MoM will have you at war immediately. How many cities you own, army strength, power, aggressive actions, wizard personalities and many other factors are all taken into account when enemy wizards consider you. For any who aren't convinced there are a few youtube runs up. Sapher's latest run on the hardest difficulty (Lunatic) hinged on an early game alliance to gain a foothold. Magic: Massive changes here too. You'll notice some redundant spells have been removed and replaced with spells that either adhere thematically to the school or offer something new. Other's have been changed to better fit the time you'll acquire them to help balance various stages of the game. The research cost of spells were adjusted to open up long-play and rushing strategies while synergizing with being able to select researchable spells at spell book thresholds. I often have to think about what spell I want next instead of having a few "go to" spells for each school. I'd go over economy and city building but character limit. Just know that new buildings empower new strategies and time restrictions make summoned units relevant longer. I highly recommend reading the readme to have a better game play experience. Go into this DLC with a fresh mindset and enjoy!

I'm following the mod since the very beginning. I think it is absolutely awesome. I loved MoM but the AI certainly could have been better. Seravy made the impossible possible and modded a DOS game to such extremes, I only ever seen in Dioxine's X-Piratez mod for OpenXCOM. Diplomacy really works, AI is great, spells and troops are relatively balanced. You might argue with some changes and additions, but I can tell you there was a lot of feedback and Seravy did his best to combine creativity and balance. I'm really thankful for his hard work and look forward to CoM 2. CoM deserves 5 stars - BUT - the publisher doesn't unfortunately. I use Linux and the publisher thought the launcher and installer should be Windows only. If you're on Linux you need to install the base game and then use Wine to install the Windows version of the base game and the DLC. Then you need to copy the contents of the DLC folder to the native installation. Then you can play it on Linux without issues. Don't forget to read the Readme and change the Dosbox cycles in the config file, so it plays smoothly.