I tried it , not my thing.
It put's MoM in the AOW mold by eliminating some interactions and putting you in a more linear and narrowly defined
set of avenues to play.
I want games more like MoM, not MOM more like other games.

What do you mean? It opens up strategies that weren't even possible before, like e.g. being peaceful. Or full black being viable. If you mean you can't do cheesy 11 book strategies, Halflings of utter doom or infinite mana any more than granted different play style i guess.

How do you define "peaceful"? Never getting in a fight?

How is full black not viable?

Depending on the personalities of the AI, peace is a possibility to the end. Spell of Mastery might end it for certain I'm not sure.

Just compare vanilla black and white. White is still better but the mod closed the gap a lot and there are a few more options available. Seravy has a (4book) black play through on YT were he shows a few. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp4Lc8ltkTcvh1nT0tZpe_PLtApkGMW5z
(the anime theme is opt in optional btw)

edit: One major change the mod does is faster movement for almost all troops. This changes the balance around a lot compared to vanilla. In vanilla ranged>melee. In CoM they are more en par. Mixed troops are a lot more useful now. A good change imo.
Oh and heros are a lot more potent at the beginning. You can actually use the starting melee heroes now. The leveling will grant less bonuses than vanilla so leveling evens the difference out.

edit2: Concerning the vanilla Patch 1.5x - Seravy stopped working on it because he's pissed off at some idiots in the Realms Beyond forums. He did it as a favor to the community and certain people made offensive posts which let him rethink his priorities. The last patch should still be on his site.
There was none before him who had this level of grasp of the game engine and shared his work. I'm really happy he still has fun modding the game. It's absurd how many bugs he found that no one ever knew existed before.

I've got to say, I did an 11 black book game once, and it was the most overpowered build I've ever tried. By summoning wraiths ASAP I obliterated all my enemies before they could even get started.

There have also always been several other fun and powerful black book builds, like casting Black Channels on War Trolls.

I also tried Seravy's 1.5 patch, and I liked it. I see what you mean about diplomacy being more sane. The AI doesn't act like a paranoid psychopath all the time.

Unless the Caster mod added new victory conditions, then you only win by eliminating your rivals. Military might is the default choice, and the Spell of Mastery eliminates any remaining rivals as soon as it is cast.

I've always kind of wondered about the power gap that Life is said to have. Sure, Slingers spelled up with all the Life buffs are tough, but to put it in perspective, each slinger costs an amount of mana equivalent to a Sky Drake or Great Wyrm. That doesn't include any portion of the cost for Crusade or Charm of Life.

Death has very different options, but some pretty amazing ones are available. To me, Death's biggest obstacle has always seemed to be high resistance values.

In vanilla, GOOD ranged > melee. Usually. For example, I generally regard bowmen as free experience, and B'Shan is only there for the money.

Several of the starting melee heroes work just fine, in my experience; you just need to be careful with them for the first 2-3 levels. You don't send a single figure halberdier into combat and expect him to clean house.

On this one, I'm just picking at you: if no one ever knew these bugs existed, then did they matter? ;)

Two ways to win: eliminate every enemy wizard's last town, or cast the spell of mastery. The first is easier than the second, but the SoM victory is always there so if the computer players run away with the game, there's still a way to win.

For sure life is the best power. It has all the "generic" unit enchantments like +1 to hit, +2 armor, +1 movement, etc. The other colors have one or none of these. I used to view life as "almost cheating" since it was so easy to win with. You don't need slingers, life happily enhances any ordinary unit like bowmen into death dealing machines. Who cares if the mana is the same as a sky drake, that is a very rare spell that isn't uncovered until the end of the game. With life enchantments I can have the same in dribs and drabs, as much or as little as I want. The good life spells are all commons. It's so hard to pick one as the best when you've got spells like heroism and healing in there.

Yeah, a lot of the bugs fixed are of the esoteric variety. There was one recently for making more than 256 gold per city. I mean, jeez, if my cities are making that much money then I probably should have gone for the win a while ago. I get the idea some people just like to build a winning position and then just play it forever, instead of knocking out all the other civs and winning the game.

In fairness, some of us like to challenge ourselves as to who can achieve the most points at game's end. You do so by building or taking over as many cities as possible, growing them as large as you can, learning as many of your opponents' spells as you can (preferably by defeating them, letting them return, and defeating them again, until they have nothing left to teach you), acquiring fame (including legendary heroes), and only then casting the Spell of Mastery.

My personal best is over 8,000 points (see screenshot), and there's still room for improvement. 9K isn't unreasonable, though 10K might be stretching it a bit. But hey, what's life without goals?

Can you explain how this is exciting? If you're doing this, you long ago passed the point at which you could easily defeat the computer opponents. You're basically just toying with them. Why not just knock them out and finish the game instead of extending it another 8-12 hours? There's no doubt of winning. It sounds like an exercise in tedium to me, moving units around and micromanaging dozens of cities, but maybe someone can explain the attraction.

MoM's score screen was bolted on with an arbitrary 8000 points as "full score". Earlier versions didn't even have it.

Some people like to grow their empire, not just bash the computer to death as efficiently as possible.

If your goal is simply to win as fast as possible, 11 Death is better than anything else. As soon as you finish summoning your wraiths, the game is over. It's not even that fun, frankly.

The next most powerful is probably 11 Chaos books. You'll have armies of Hellhounds swarming everywhere in no time.

After that I'd say some of the Artificer/Runemaster builds, which are indeed very powerful.

Then there's a morass of many different builds which are all viable. I think I've tried most of them at one time or another.

Nobody's talking about speed builds. Just choosing any custom wizard, and playing the game according to its rules. I'm trying to figure out what is so attractive about clearly having the power to win the game, and instead not do that and spend hours and hours managing dozens of cities and hundreds of units. I don't know, MoM's micromanagement can get really tedious after about 6-8 cities, I can't imagine hitting the next turn button and having to deal with 30 of them.

I am trying to learn what is so compelling about this. It's a one player game so if you want to play it long past the point at which you won, who cares? I'm just curious.

It doesn't matter to me that it's single player; like I said, I enjoy competing against myself. Can I manage my cities and my troops even more effectively, or can I come up with a superior build? Can I win on Impossible against three or even four wizards, instead of just two?

If I didn't enjoy this game so much, I wouldn't keep replaying it. And if that were the case, then tbh I wouldn't have any incentive to spend much time in this sub-forum.

You prefer a different playing style, and that's cool as well. Some people enjoy speed runs; others, trying to win from as disadvantageous a starting position as possible. (Klackons, anyone?) Everyone's mileage varies, and fortunately for all of us the game allows that.

I like growing my empire, developing my cities to their max (more or less), and clearing both worlds of everything. Sort of like playing SimCity, I guess.

I don't always push for the throat as soon as I can. Sometimes, I like to hit them with "overwhelming force", instead of "just enough force".

There is also a sense of putting all my ducks in a row, as cities finish buildings and move to unit or trade good production.

When the power difference is big enough, then I'm not managing hundreds of units (they are mostly on patrol).

I think you're missing the point. It' s not about a "speed run" or hustling through the game as fast as possible. Nobody's talking about that.

It's just that, when you reach a certain point in the game, you can see you've won. You have enough armies to crush all the computer opponents and nothing can stop you. This is the fourth X of the "4X" genre. Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. Having attained this power, which was the point of starting the game in the first place, you go and wipe out all the enemies and you're done. Put a W in the record book and go on to the next game.

At this point in the game, you're managing a ton of cities and units. The MoM interface starts to really grate because they didn't design it around this kind of thing. There are no building queues, for example. You have to make tons of decisions every turn, plus you get to build up the crappy cities you took from the computer. Moving stacks around to garrison new captures, defending against counter attacks, it's all very tedious. And what I call "tedium" is apparently what you call "fun" and I'm just really curious to know what it is that appeals about having to manage the clunky interface over and over.