Hi!
I have been listening to some of the DGC podcasts (great stuff!). As a fan of Jagged Alliance 2, the one on UFO: Enemy Unknown motivated me to finally check out this classic and I’m loving it so far, also playing the 2012 XCOM (on iPad) again to see how they compare.
While I could spend many more hours on UFO, I decided to play January’s game of the month. Since my time is limited (in contrast to when I was a kid), I looked up the average playthrough time on https://howlongtobeat.com/ – some 10 hours for the main story. I can manage that! However…
I thought UFO was quite overwhelming at first. But, oh boy, it’s nothing compared to Master of Magic! I read the first couple of chapters in the 150-page manual, but that still leaves me bewildered! I don’t remember playing any other 4X strategy games except for Civilization IV (IIRC), but I don’t think that required any manual reading at all. Nor have I played Magic: The Gathering, which Master of Magic apparently draws much inspiration from.
Tired of reading, I just dove into the game, exploring the area around my starting city. It quickly became obvious that my initial troops are vastly underpowered to defeat any of the nearby baddies, so I’m assuming I need to focus on other things first. I guess that includes city building and spell researching?
Looking for pointers online, I found this Reddit post: So you wanna get into Master of Magic…. I haven’t gotten around to reading all of that yet.
Then something about the technical aspects of running the game. I got the GOG version, which runs the game through DOSBox. After changing the configuration file to use my preferred scaler (rgb3x), I’m happy with the way things look. However, I noticed the music often stutters. The default cycles set for the game seems to be very high. I have tried to tweak the core/cycles settings, but the stuttering seems to remain. Are you folks experiencing the same issue? See also Master of Magic DosBox Tweak Master Guide on the GOG forums.
Cheers!