Removal of dependancies was, IMHO, a good thing that much improves the game. One problem that MoM runs into is that quite a few buildings offer a very poor return on the investment you put into them, in terms of production, opportunity cost, and upkeep. The general response to this sort of gameplay is to specialize your cities. The dependancies, however, made this worse as it made it difficult for cities to specialize - if you had a city in mind to be a cash cow or a military base, well then you'd better make sure you also build a Library and Sage's Guild and University so you can get access to that Bank and War College. Want a food city? Make sure you pick up a Shrine, Temple, and Stables as well. In other words, it limited specialization and it forced every city to be, to one extent or another, a generalist city that did a little bit of everything, which isn't very fulfilling gameplay.

The golden rule of any 4X that's conquest-oriented (like MoM) is that you need to get lots of military power, and you should only get buildings over units if those buildings will enable greater military power than the units you'd otherwise build would. i.e. if my High Elf city takes a break from cranking out Longbowmen to instead get some buildings, will that leave me in a better or worse position? 90% of the time, the answer is "worse." By reducing the dependancies and making it less expensive, again in terms of both production and opportunity cost, to get more advanced buildings, IMHO CoM adds more interesting strategic decisions to be made.

Speak for yourself, as I very much liked it. ALL CITIES SHALL BE MAX CITIES!!! :D

Posted this elsewhere but figured I'd cover all bases haha, if Slitherine devs are reading this then I just had an idea on the missing long lost source code issue that may be a long shot but probably worth having your office investigate!

I've just posted about it on your new official MoM forum here:
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=590&t=97130#p832647

But basically for those unaware of it, Civizard - Majutsu no Keifu is the Japanese playstation conversion/remake of Master of Magic (for all you know you guys may now legally own that too haha??). ASMIK did the conversion, not Mircropose, so presumably Micropose sent them MoM's sourcecode to build Civizard from as Civizard is identical in MoM in every way mechanically its just the graphics and rendering engine that's been replaced. All the background gameplay mechanics code should be the same. A good sign of that is the fact that all stats in the game are still English while only titles & descriptions have been changed to Japanese. ASMIK is not a dead company, they are still going today, so it might be a long shot but its possible they still have backups of the source materials used to convert MoM to playstation. Slitherine's office might want to make some calls and emails haha.

Ehm, but can I use the CoM distributive (that I purchased as soon I saw it here) with MoM classic installation?

I use WinXP desktop for oldgaming, and Slitherine distributive doesn't run on XP. So does Slitherine CoM package have the same structure as the old free CoM distributive had so that I could just copy it over my classic MoM installation?

Yes, after the installation the files you get are the same as usual and you can copy them to a different folder or different computer.

Ha-ha, the trouble is that CoM installer doesn't recogonize classic MoM installation and requires having Slitherine pack installed.

So I now need to install classic MoM, Slitherine MoM (thanks God, GOG installers still run on WinXP even if the game itself doesn't run) and CoM, then copy CoM to classic MoM and then delete Slitherine MoM...

Maybe it would be more handy to have CoM as a separate installer in EXTRAS section and not attached to Slitherine launcher.

Just a little warning here. I don't want anyone to be as stupid as me.
I own master of magic on GoG, and I bought caster of magic on slitherine's website.

These do not work together at all, the slitherine files won't unlock without having a copy of both purchases from slitherine. Maybe it was stupid of me to think that I could just merge the files and make them work. However the fact these don't work together isn't mentioned on the slitherine store, and slitherine doesn't offer refunds for any reason at any time and they also don't provide troubleshooting assistance for products that aren't their own. So, basically I'm fucked, and slitherine steals 3$ from me because I'm dumb and they're incompetent.

When I was wondering if this would work, and I googled my question, this thread came up, and the above previous post made me think it would in fact work. So, hopefully, at least one person in the future, will have the same dumb idea as me, and this time they'll read this post and be fair warned.



tl;dr
No one should ever use slitherine's website.

Sad to hear that.
I'll replace the link on my site to point at the GoG version then. I assumed their site to be the best option but it seems it isn't.

To be clear, the way it works on gog is that you literally cannot buy the dlc if you do not own the base game on gog.
On steam this is also how it works.
On slitherine this is not how it works.

The way the slitherine installer works is that BOTH master of magic and caster of magic have the SAME download file.
This file is an exe but what it really is, is that it's like a zip file with two passwords, those passwords being a valid serial number.

Presumably if you enter a valid serial number for master of magic it gives you the master of magic files. However if you enter a valid serial number for caster of magic it tells you that the base game cannot be found, because you didn't enter the serial number for the base game.

This is in no way a flaw of slitherine's technology. It is however a flaw in slitherine's advertising practices. The slitherine store page should say that in order to buy caster of magic you need to make sure to already own master of magic purchased specifically from slitherine.

A customer support rep told me that slitherine couldn't put this information on their store page because it would be "negative advertising". The thing is though, EVERY OTHER (steam+gog) store lists this information on the store page. Why? Because telling people how things work isn't negative advertising.

I downloaded what is essentially a zip file for which I do not have the password for, and in doing so signed away my rights as a consumer. Thing is, yeah, this was all stupid of me. I should've definitely assumed slitherine worked just like gog and steam, because that's common sense. I showed a large lack of common sense, that's on me. However now that my lack of common sense has exposed an extremely minor problem. I personally feel like the burden is on slitherine to include one sentence about this on their store page.

If they're going to tell their customers they were warned in advance, then they need to warn them in advance.

tl;dr
Slitherine is in no way broken, I'm sure it works (if you do it right). But yeah, I won't be recommending them to anyone ever because their best practices are circa 1999. Yeah I want my video games to be circa the golden era of the 90s, but I'd rather my customer service and store purchasing experience be circa 2020, not 1999.

edit: Another thing here, I assumed that slitherine would get the most money if I bought the dlc from them instead of GoG. Furthermore I would've happily paid 6$ for caster of magic instead of 3$. What upsets me about all of this is that I'm going to pay 6$ for caster of magic, despite everyone else paying 3$, AND slitherine does not intend to add four or five words to their store page to explain the basic common sense of how DLC works (as you might've guessed by how dumb I've acted here, I don't often purchase DLC, I reckon a lot of fans of a 25 year old game also don't tend to typically purchase DLC either).

Presumably this is a true issue for all game DLC sold on slitherine, and of course they can't change their entire business practices because I'm an idiot. The thing is though, all the other stores disclose this information clearly.

So in summation dear seravy, thanks for a great mod, and feel free to continue linking to slitherine's store page. I just recommend that you add to your OP a single short sentence telling fans to make sure to buy caster of magic only on digital storefront's they already own a copy of master of magic on.

Honestly the greatest negative advertising I see is me having to tell people who OWN Master of Magic - the original physical disks- to either buy it again or go and start pirating. I'm not comfortable with telling them either.
I sent a mail to the producer yesterday asking for a solution on that, so far no response, nor the version 6.01 update I sent on Thursday. I guess with the Coronavirus affecting their country especially bad that's not too unusual but I'm worried nonetheless. I'll try to be patient and wait another week or two.
The fact the FREE community patch also requires repurchasing the game makes this even worse.

Yes, I also assumed Slitherine's store gets us the most money (albeit they never mentioned this), which is why I had that link posted first.

I will add the warning message on my posts.

Edit : If this is already common sense, the game industry is doomed. There is no way you can compete with piracy by imposing restrictions like that on paying customers.

Yeah I still have my original manuals. My original cd-rom likely disintegrated by now. GoG's base price of 3$ for the base game was so reasonable that part of the deal didn't really upset me at all. I've done the same thing for heroes of might and magic 3, I've still got the original, but I rebought it on GoG for convenience.

Sorry I've been so long winded about this, I wanted to make sure I complained the exact right amount about slitherine. They're games library honestly looks amazing, their storefront though is woefully out of date with their competitors. I'd probably buy more slitherine games in the future too, but I'll be darned sure to always use GoG or steam, both of which are idiot proof.

Well, it seems I'm forced to refuse using CoM now (and forever?)

What do I have?

1. GOG classic MoM distributive
2. Slitherine new MoM distributive
3. Old CoM (5.75 IIRC)
4. New Slitherine CoM (6.0 and possible further versions).

Classic MoM works perfectly on my WinXP desktop.
Old CoM works perfectly with classic MoM.
Slitherine MoM doesn't work on WinXP.
New CoM in Slitherine MoM doesn't work on WinXP too (logically).
New CoM copied from Slitherine MoM into classic MoM works poor and requires DOSBox tweaking but I was unlucky to copy DOSBox from Slitherine CoM folder into classic MoM folder (together with new CoM files) and now classic MoM GOG configurators don't work with Slitherine DOSBox.

It would be cool if there were any way to get clean CoM distributive (with no Slitherine files) for a person who can confirm the buying of Slitherine CoM (me). But I realize that no one will bother to have such troubles so it will be easier for me to give up and play unmodded classic MoM.

Why do Wargaming (actual owners of Master of Orion rights) let modders continue to patch MoM2 freely, and why Slitherine are like they are?

Why in the Hell's name there was a need to ruin the normal classic installer of an old-like-hell game running in DOSBox?

After installation, CoM and MoM should work just like it did previously without the Slitherine installers. The files inside are the same thing after they are installed. It's also possible to move the files to other folders or computers without a problem.
The CoM installed does not need to be copied "into classic MoM", as it contains all the necessary MoM files. You only need to copy the installed CoM folder as is, and find a dosbox configuration that works on your computer. In worst case you can try running dosbox first and start the game from the command prompt.

I would be happy if Slitherine provided a "no installer" version as well, as is, players owning the original game disks cannot buy CoM or access the Community patch. But after installation, the unpacked files should be 100% identical so if there are any problems, the only possible reason is the configuration files.

What exactly does not work? You can't run Install.exe to select the sound options? Have you tried from a DOS prompt?

Hm, well, when I used the free versions of CoM I copied the whole GOG MoM folder into another location, paste into it the content of CoM archive, and changed the paths in shortcuts, that's all. Everything always worked perfectly.

So now I did just the same. But now the content of CoM folder is different than the content of old free CoM, there are more files there.

Oh, if it also works like that, it's cool.

Exactly. It would be ideal. I sincerely don't understand why they shove their launcher in every GOG release?

There are visual artefacts aplenty now, black shapes all over the screen that vanish if I 'wipe' them with mouse cursor. They appear on any newly opened menu and every time I open that menu again it reappears. GOG 'classic' release worked like a charm, I never had any problems or bugs. Now it's almost impossible to play.
The world generatiion is very slow now, and a couple of times the game lagged forever while doing it.

So I think it's because of some Slitherine-release files that are now in CoM folder, configs or something.

I replaced two DOSBox conf files in CoM folder with two files from classic MoM folder but to no avail.

"There are visual artefacts aplenty now, black shapes all over the screen that vanish if I 'wipe' them with mouse cursor. They appear on any newly opened menu and every time I open that menu again it reappears."
That sounds really bad, I have never had a problem like that. I can only say it is most likely a DOSBOX config issue.
Try changing the graphic settings, the main suspects are
output= and scaler=
maybe this guide can help?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1146370
Either way it sounds like your computer does not work well with whatever type of rendering was selected so try a different one (surface,overlay,opengl,openglnb,ddraw) are the existing options. I know one of these caused my game to crash when I moved the game window within the first few seconds after launching the game, that went away when I changed it to another.