🦁 Lioness With Mane @Lioness@mastodon.social

it's really weird reading narrative webcomics that reference current culture / memes / whatever

because the fast ones update at like 2x/week, max

so a single "issue" has memes 2 years staler at the beginning than at the end

or like they'll say "we should hang and play ps3 after this weekend at the rich kid's house" but by the time they get home the ps4 has been out for years

my room is a mess and I want to clean it but I can't because the universe is impossible

there's a lot of sub-games in MoM that are supposed to come together - the empire building / city management game, hero raising, PvE dungeon raiding, the whole spellcasting thing, and ofc the PvAI wargame

mostly they do, except, you really don't want to take heros into battle vs enemy wizards, they will always be targeted by whatever kill spell and won't survive 3 battles - but they aren't any good unless you've raided dungeons for magic equipment & been lucky anyway

my mind has been bathed in Master of Magic for, uh, a while now… I should give it something different

w/ the Caster of Magic mod, cranking the difficulty up from "Fair" to "Advanced" is a pretty different experience, the AIs are a lot more aggressive + get even more free resources

should I stay up late reading neil gaiman's norse mythology y/y

lucky - normally each point of attack has a 30% chance of dealing 1 damage & each point of def has a 30% chance of blocking 1 damage. (normal soldiers are 1hp each; unit of 6 = 6hp)

halflings get +1 to all those rolls, giving them 40% success per point. their sword/spearmen have 33-50% lower attack to compensate but slingers are just as strong as archers… except they have 8 ppl / unit instead of 6, and the accuracy bonus…

they chew through dragons, never mind regular army units

Master/Caster of Magic halflings have the weirdest thing… their quirk is that they all produce +1 research, farmers produces +1 food, and they can't build any military buildings except the basic smithy (swordsmen, no archers) and fighter guild (slingers, no halberds)

oh, and they're lucky and likeable

which makes them the most terrifying military race…?

likeable - they generate less dissent in conquered cities
food - they can maintain ~50-100% more troops on the same farm

given the opportunity in any strategic sim game, I will invest 100% of everything into economy and research, 0% into military

the best (?) part is when you get attacked and you scramble to stall & pivot your economy into a defensive army

usually it takes a few losses to work out the timings

(exception being the opportunity to eliminate a neighbor v. early & take their space)

Master of Magic really is Civilization × Magic: The Gathering. There's even another plane you can planeswalk to~

I tried playing 3 books of Life + 8 books of Sorcery and it felt exactly like playing U/W midrange (?) right down to the victory condition being a mass of Pegasus tokens & the endgame having long boring complicated turns as you try to figure out how to spend all that card advantage

Goodnight, everyone ~

Big snuggly lion plush/pillow w/ paws that you can wrap around yourself, sinking deeply into warm fluff under the covers for those who'd like that 🦁🛏️☁️💜

on the other hand… I'm really afraid of Sorcery lairs because it might *look* like "a few Phantom Beasts" but actually be a blender of invisible flying armor piercing Air Elementals

oh, & chance of a unit surviving when fleeing is based on movespeed

(in the mod) Infantry has 2, many summons & heroes have 3, cavalry has 4… and Air Elementals have 5. Units w/ 3 or less speed have a 0% chance of fleeing successfully from them.

Other MoM thing - the map has various monster lairs scattered around that you can fight. Most of them are pretty dangerous… fortunately you can scout them first and learn the rough number & type of monster in there w/o entering combat. Only one tho; many lairs have two kinds of monster.

But there's a catch… your scouts can't spot monsters with the Invisibility buff! Little touches like that go a long way imo

I should go to bed but what I want to do is stay up late(r) & pet people

(it's 3am & my face hurts from still being awake)

but! you can cheat and know which spells are in your library ahead of time because it's a simple substitution cipher!

I think it's a cool system b/c by default, it's an exciting surprise to find out which spells you drew as you research - but if you really, really want to you can restart until a specific spell you want to try is there. It's there for those who want it but not encouraged.

Master of Magic has a system where you choose how to allocate your bookshelf between the five realms/colors of magic, and how many books of each color determines how many spells of each power level / rarity you have the ability to learn. The spell selection screen is a big open book with all of your spells in to page through. What's cool is that the spells you could learn - but haven't yet - have entries too, but in "magic runes" until you decipher them with research points.

the one thing I don't get is - Life has a spell to see invisible, most Death units can see invisible

but I don't think the other 3 colors can, at all? Sorcery can make things invisible + has one invisible summon

& so I'm surrounded by Sorcery nodes I can't capture b/c they're guarded by invisible air elementals w/ fly speed 5 who run away from melee if they don't think they can win

oh noo

the Caster of Magic mod creator added a basic enchantment that gives a unit a weak ranged attack b/c there was no way to do that

the Petrification ability says "if this is granted by a weapon, it only applies to attacks with that weapon"

the AI cast it on a Cockatrice

and now there's a squad of doom chickens flying around & they obliterated my army

& the 2nd, 3rd, 4th level summons get exponentially more powerful. The magic nodes & various caves/towers/ruins you can loot are guarded by fantastic monsters, while your actual opponents will mostly be fielding stick figures + their own low level summons. So it's like there's two disjoint layers of wargaming happening at the same time…? I dunno, feels weird.

(well, I'm playing the Caster of Magic mod, which attempts to balance the game somewhat)

There's two different kinds of units - normal units, which is your ppl with spears, swords, halberds, on horses, etc. You train them in cities and there's a whole tech tree thing. They mostly come in stacks of 4-6 with each individual having 1 hp.

Then there's the fantastic units, which you summon. Some races' most elite normal units can be slightly stronger than the starter Summon War Bear summon.

Been playing the old school "Master of Magic" DOS game (Civ era, not sure when in relation to Heroes of Might and Magic) and it feels like I've found a missing evolutionary link in the "strategic fantasy" genre

A lot of the things in Age of Wonders are lifted straight from it (including "$hero made a level!" instead of "gained a level")

The five realms of magic are exactly the 5 MtG colors renamed, seen the exact same in a recent Android monster roguelite