ping

I'd even say that a certain degree of railroading is a good thing in itself. With rather few exceptions, I want to move towards a specific goal in my games. Some distractions to get a look around the world are fine, but I find it very tiring when the acutal plot just stagnates over hours of gameplay. This is a general complaint about Final Fantasy, by the way. I never really look forward to the airship-riding just before the very final boss. When there is a meteor floting in the sky about to erase all life from the planet, I want to see how the game fucking ends, not how the mechanics of chocobo breeding work. And at the same time, I hate just ignoring all the content and I tend to lose my motivation at that point until I force myself to just go for the final boss and call it a day.

A Wind forge is stronger and more accurate than Tornado, a Fire forge only loses to Bolganone in might by one point, same goes for Thunder forge / Thoron (althogh Rexbolt is a thing for the final map). Honestly, the only tome rank that really matters is the C-Rank for long ranged tomes and maaaybe an S-Rank in thunder magic. Everything else doesn't really help outside of transfers to RD. I guess the A-Rank tomes' animations look more impressive? ;) €: Oh man, sorry about the derail, Irony. To write something more productive: You might want to keep an eye on Ike's strength grow. He's currently at -2 and not capping that by the endgame will make things more difficult. Not unwinnable as a whole (you do play on normal, don't you?), but you might have throw an optional fight. The Energy Ring on Mist might be somewhat of a misinvestment. In my opinion, it's usually more helpful to improve a character's strengths even further instead of trying to salvage a weakness (the one exception: use Angelic Robes to make squishy units not die to a thrown ball of yarn). Even with the ring, Mist will still not be a great fighter with non-magical swords. Ayama Wirdo gave you a good advise for Gatrie: The Knight's Ward increases the speed growth dramatically (I think 30%). If Mia or Nephenee have trouble one-rounding enemies, just give them some forges. Money isn't an issue. But as a whole: Lookin' good! ;)

I'm still not entirely sure. There's still another job hidden behind the fighter, but I personally like the fighter better. I prefer my debuffs ranged, thank you very much. Also, it's a bit weird that every scrub can become a holy paladin while the fighter job is hidden away by a secret order of slightly mystic fighters.

Topical: Bob Dylan - Don't Think Twice It's All Right Not Topical: Nick Drake - Time Has Told Me

OK, but that's still why i don't like the quote.

Gotta go with Clarine talking back to Narcian. My favorite badass quote comes from Jagen in FE12: I'm a bit bothered by the context of that quote. While this is an accurate description of Gatrie, Shinon in that scene is disgusted because Gatrie is swooning over a laguz girl, making that line kiiinda racist...

I agree with that 100%. My only real grief with FFX are the godawful minigames (Blitzball, Chocobo Racing, Butterfly Catching) that you need to beat in order to get some of the ultimate weapons. I like how Tidus interacts with Spira, calling out the questionable parts of its culture and, as you said, occasionally just asking what the hell is going on. I do like how Yuna starts to question the religious dogmata after Tidus points out their flaws and i don't mind her character too much in general. But the romance is absolutely terrible and the story (as well as X-2's) would probably be better off if it was just cut completely. X-2 has an amazing battle system, but even if I ignore the silliness, I don't like its structure with 90% sidequests and 10% plot, so I can't really enjoy it. -- To give a unpopular opinion: I don't think there are any unpopular opinions on any main game from the FF franchise. It's just that every opinion is extremely contested because everyone (myself included) seems to have at least one game in the series that they absolutely despise. And quite a few of the fans are just so annoyingly vocal about it and can't accept that there are valid reasons to like Cloud/Squall/Zell/Steiner/Tidus/Rikku/Vaan/Lightning/Snow. [i think all of these are reasonably controversial?]

[spoiler=Update 03]Time to murder something! And since Jafar didn't seem to bother building up any kind of defense (which is a bit unusual at this difficulty) I in turn don't bother to be subtle about my offense. Attacking another wizard's troops does not count as a declaration of war, although it does piss them off (and breaks a wizard pact if you managed to sign one). The engineer is hardly worth mentioning as a combat unit - they're the only unit weaker than spearmen. Their only real job is building roads, reducing the movement cost of the improved tiles to 1/2 point, regardless of terrain. They do have the ability to break down city walls, but they have to get into melee range to do so, making this a completely worthless gimmick. More interesting is this spell Jafar throws at the swordsmen: Psionic Blast is the basic damaging spell of the Sorcery realm. It deals 1.5 damage on average for 5 mana (much weaker than Star Fires), but ignores enemy defense and can be boosted by spending additional mana (0.3 damage for 2 mana, up to 40 mana). The turn after, Jafar throws all three of his heroes at us. It looks like he spent all his mana enchanting them, probably with the protection spell against ranged attacks and/or a small boosts against spells and magical attacks. As I said in the last update, I forgot to check, but those are the two favourite spells of a AI Sorceror. To try and hide my forgetfulness, I'll at least steal the heroes' portraits from the MoM-Wiki. From left to right: Abdul Shaza the Dervish is a very weak archer who doesn't take maintanance and gives his employer 10 GPT instead. Salkirg the Beastmaster is a equally weak melee fighter with a little bit of mana to cast spells on his own. Outside of battle, he (and the stack he moves with) can move though forests unhindered and has an increased sight radius. Lauren the Bard is another weak melee unit who can cast a few spells in battle, but with a support ability that boosts the (physical) attack of every unit in her stack. Quite handy compared to the other heroes you can get this early! Here's the not-so-flashy attack animation for bow users, perhaps made a bit flashier by using a very short (5 frames) loop. The result of the fight is a bit surprising. Not that the unexperienced heroes are no match for basic, but more experienced halfling units, but that Jafar decides to see the fight through at all. Usually, the AI will flee if they have any hero face an unwinnable fight (and it should have recognized this as one) and because the AI is a fucking cheater, their heroes to my knowledge never die during retreat. This can get annoying if they have a single hero running through your lands - you can't kill it unless you block every possible retreat tile on the world map with your troops. Moving on the Jafar's cap, he has actually recruited a few units as garrison. They also ruin his infrastructure even further because he has to assign every citizen as a farmer, just to keep them fed (unless the Hard AI also has some food bonuses that I'm not aware of). He opens the fight with the Counter Magic spell, another AI favourite. It will attempt to dispel every spell I will try to cast during this fight, slowly getting weaker if I attempt more than one spell. 2nd turn, he casts Dispel Magic True on my swordsmen; basically a much more potent version of the arcane Dispel Magic False spell. It's not the end of the world for me (or the hobbits) - they have collected enough EXP by now to reach the Elite rank (the 2nd highest for a Warlord's unit) and the difference to Ultra Elite actually isn't that huge. Case in point. That gif seems to show a lucky roll, though, because my units get beaten up a bit by the next two opponents. So this Healing spell not getting blocked by the Counter Magic might have been another important streak of luck. The rest of the fight is pretty one-sided, though. In general, I dislike razing cities (it reduces my fame!!!) and I do keep this one, too. Klackon cities are the only ones that might make me reconsider, but in this case I'm actually happy to get a few engineers out of it. But that's the first wizard down! And honestly, that also means that the game is pretty much in the bag. We're now pretty isolated, probably alone on our island, and the AI can only be dangerous rather than annoying if they can march their troops directly to our capital. But frankly, winning never was the main objective of this game - it's all about making overpowered hobbit units and in that regard, we still have some way to go. Jafar unfortunately doesn't have any spells for us to plunder. Capturing an enemy fortress can net you up to two spells from their repertoire and I was silently hoping for some basic arcane spells. Looking at our conquered city, it sucks. It also give us indication for another settlement to the north (it shares three tiles with it, giving both cities only half of the yields), but this city will never be any good, even though its placement isn't terrible. The reason are the inhabitants, of course. The Klackons are a gimmicky choice for your capital, but the gimmick works against us because we conquered them and it wouldn't even make the Klackons any good if it worked in our favour. You see, Klackons are a bunch of racist bugpeople probably supposed to have some kind of hive mind, reducing unrest by +20% in their own cities, but increasing it by the same amount in every conquered (non-Klackon) city. I'll admit that this seems like a pretty sweet bonus, and Klackon cities can indeed pump out quite a lot of gold (because you can raise taxes without creating rebels) and production (because their workers produce 50% more hammers). However, the tech tree of Klackon cities is fucking terrible - they can only build the most basic mana and science building, something gold and hammers cannot replicate. And because cities of other races will have crippling unrest, the Buglord will have trouble trying to earn these two (really important) resources in captured cities. Because increased unrest in conquered cities is symmetrical, captured Klackon cities get the same +20% unrest, unless the conqueror has a Klackon capital, of course. So yeah, roads are literally the only thing that this city is good for. I will get its infrastructure up, though, to at least get some GPT out of it. Finally, the military options for a Klackon ruler are pretty limited, too. Their basic units get an OK bonus of +2 defense, although I don't think that's really stronger than the hobbits' defensive boosts (not even mentioning the increased offense). They're also twice as expensive which is ridiculously overpriced, considering that another race gets +2 melee strength for free. My main grieve with klackon units is their total lack of ranged units - the combat system heavily favours those over almost every melee unit. So basically, their basic units are overpriced, no ranged units is a Big Deal and even their unique unit (which I'll probably build at some point anyway, just to show it) isn't very impressive outside of its decent tankiness. When a wizard's capital is lost, he gets banished, but may start casting the Spell of Return, a rather costly spell that does exactly what you'd expect. This prevents you from overthrowing a 20-city-empire just by winning one fight, but since a wizard can't cast any spells while in the otherrealm, it would make taking the remaining 19 cities much easier. Jafar had only this city left and probably not much of a manapool, so he didn't bother to try and recover. As a result, his city became neutral which in this game basically means 'barbaric' in Civilization terms. You can conquer it without any diplomatic penalties with anyone and you should, too, because neutral cities will occasionally send out small groups of soldiers trying to free one of your cities from your tyrannic rule. This particular city is even more horrible than Jafar's cap (it has mostly tundra and ocean in its borders, both being absolutly worthless), so this time I rather suck up one point of lost fame and just burn the city down. Around the same time, the first hero appears to apply for hire. B'Shan is actually the same hero the late Abdul Shaza in Jafar's ranks had been - there is one (potential) dervish/sage/bard/whatever the hell the other 32 heroes are called, so killing enemy heroes doesn't prevent you from hiring them yourself. So as his counterpart, B'Shan is a fairly useless fighter, but since his ability will pay for his hirement cost in ten turns, I'll get him anyway and just park him in the capital for the rest of the game. Thanks to my Warlord trait, he instantly promotes into an overrated swordfighter. Heroes have 9 Experience Levels to gain (including the basic one) compared to only four on normal units. They also gain more stats per level (the first normal level-up nets only +1 attack and +1 magic resistance) and tend to have special abilities that get stronger with increasing XP, making high-leveled heroes quite powerful. __ Reywind and Theria soon follow, although I pass on the latter. She can become quite durable - Agility increases her Defense by one each level and Charmed makes her immune to most harmful magic that doesn't directly deal damage (we haven't seen such, but it'll become more and more common). I would have kicked Reywind too, if it wasn't for his randomly chosen ability. Most heroes have at least one of those and Reywind got pretty lucky. Leadership doesn't have any effect right now, but as Reywind levels up, it will grant every unit in his stack up to +3 melee strength. Other than that, he's not very good, even though he's a bit more expensive than Theria is and B'Shan would be without his Nobility. He does have a small mana pool to cast some spells in battle from, but neither his melee attack nor his magical ranged attack are particularly strong. Our first own expand, Sacred Vale is founded and will hopefully gain its first real population point soon. An outpost has a chance each turn to fill up those housing symbols by 1-3 (modified by its maximal population, special resources in range and the settling race), but also a (fixed) chance to loose 1-2 housings. If it reaches 10 housings, the outpost grows into a town; if it falls to zero housings, the outpost is lost. For some races (including Klackons), this mechanism makes settling new cities in non-optional spots quite the gamble. Hobbits are tied for the best outpost growth in the game, though. Sacred Vale does get its first population point pretty fast. As you can see, cities have a very slow start, simply because the first citizen usually must be assigned as a farmer since food doesn't get shared between cities. As such, it's helpful to have some gold ready just to kickstart a city by buying at least the Builders Hall and the Granary. The Granary's food boost allows the first two citizens to work hammers, allowing the city to get to libraries and shrines faster and actually contribute to the empire with their science and power output. In this case, I keep hurrying building just to get the necessary buildings up to use the mithril faster. It's too expensive to just buy one building each turn, though, so I'll keep this city's development in the background unless it'll overtake the cap at some point. Meanwhile, the cap detours a bit from improving its infrastructure. The Armory doesn't have any yields itself, but it unlocks the Hobbits' unique unit, the slinger. (little fast forward here) Their raw stats don't seem particular impressive, but I think they might be the best all-around unit in the entire game. They're available pretty early (the Armory only requires Barracks and a Forge, both of them are prebuilt in the cap), they're lucky (one of the best unit abilities in the game) and they're 8 slingers per unit, making offensive bonuses (though XP gain, mithril and/or magic) more powerful. So basically, they're great both to mass-produce and rush an opponent, but if you can stack a few offensive boosts on them, they can also be a terrifying endgame unit. And guess what kind of spells I'm waiting for? And with a little overview of the known world, I'll close this update. At this point, it's almost certain that we won't find another wizard or even a neutral city on our starting island. This means that I'll probably fill up possible city spots with Hobbit cities, something that I usually avoid. I prefer cities that can build Universities, simply because they not only provide a sizable science boost, but also unlock a few building to further enhance gold output. It's not at all crippling, though. Hobbits do at least have access to all the mana building in the game, so their cities turn out quite alright.

Man, fucking tinkers. :D I guess the Power of Restart can make them awesome, but screw that. I only used that job if my moogles didn't have any useful skills to learn and I wanted to grab their actually good growth rates. My Fire Emblem Senses tell me that this is clearly the angelic face of a recruitable character.

They still put in some romances (or something resembling romance - Bastian and Lucia), but it's a relatively minor part of the supports, compared to FE7 and 8, and even neglectable compared to Awakening and Fates. ;) Re: Princess and Knight: Looking at their social status, you're right. But it's Ike who spends most of the game fighting for Elincia's crown and protecting her honor (e.g. the scene with Sanaki and the senators). So Ike does what a knight is supposed to do, while Geoffrey honestly doesn't really do anything much at all.

Flame Whip is absolutely disgusting. I think there are more enemies resistant to this than in FFTA, but Disable is just such a broken status. My standard Viera build was Elementarist/Summoner, but I ended up spamming the Elementarist's spells most of the time. Removing a dangerous enemy just seemed more useful than the big AoE summons. It's probably my weird sense of humor, but I always found funny how the fantasy RPG tells the player that escapism is bad. @FFTA2: Maybe somewhere in Lezaford's history sidequests? I can't remember, either. :D Oh yes, I remember one of them being kind of a bitch even on normal. I think my only offensive mage (dunno if it was a black mage or one of the viera classes) died after I broke the law, putting the whole fight into a stalemate in which neither side could significantly outdamage the opponent's healers. Those bangaa are really tanky on the physical side.

I honestly don't care that much about Elincia's and Geoffrey's love life, but I'd still like to note that PoR has quite a few man/woman interactions that seem to set up as some kind of clichéd romance, but ultimately don't. We have Elincia and Ike (the princess and her knight), Boyd and Titania (the hot teacher), Mist and Rolf (the childhood friends), Mia and Rhys (energetic girl and silent guy) or Lethe and Ike (Tsundere²). I'm note even starting with all the supports that don't even do that and that are just interactions between two people who happen to meet at camp, realize that they have something significant to say to each other and develop mutual respect and/or some kind of friendship over that. I really like that PoR doesn't try to force multiple romantic options on every character and chooses to go rather low-key with all the shipping business altogether and just puts in a few romantic sidestories that they find are the most interesting or plausible for the given characters.

[spoiler=FFTA]FFTA's setting is literally the wish fulfillment dream of a nerdy kid (not the protagonist), with himself as the prince and his dad as the head judge. So the laws spawn from the brain of a not entirely stable child and the populace of his imaginary kingdom does feel oppressed by them. Some Guy Who Will Make A Cameo Here even sells cards that disable specific laws during a fight and he can demand a pretty steep price. Nerdy Kid will at some points of the story make his dad strenghten the law even more, which results in more active laws, eventually three iirc. I don't believe it's explained why the prince thinks that rotating through random laws will keep him and his illusion save, but I might just have forgotten. Ehh, the joke "Head Editor is full of himself but in truth completely incompetent" gets old after a fifth or sixth time. I might remember this worse than it was, but weren't quite a few of his jobs escort missions? I just dislike protecting stupid, weak and/or suicidal NPCs. =/

I do like this line. :D Man, I forgot how ridiculous the auctions can get if you just skip ahead to get to the big prizes. I do remember how amazing the Faerie Shoes are and how incredible annoying some of the newspaper missions can get. -.- One question because iirc I played this on normal: How much difficulty comes from hard mode? I did all the sidequests as soon as they were available, so I was hilariously overleveled, making most fights pretty easy. Although there was still some BS to be found in the trials or in the Cleaning missions...

I was wondering if there is any meaning of Elincia holding her hand over her chest in her portraits? It always kinda bugged me, although it might just be to showcase her more demure character in PoR. And although I haven't commented here in a while, I'm still happily following your great work, Kirokan. :)

European medieval setting, so it wouldn't even be unrealistic. Keeping the bloodline pure is a good thing, right? :D Eliwood/Ninian is really heavily suggested, too, starting with the Rescue Romance setup and Ninian pretty much confirming that she's fallen for him in Unfulfilled Heart. Still, given the history of Fire Emblem, kissing cousins isn't really out of place for IS.

[spoiler=Update 02]So the last time, I hurried a bit ahead to include at least some actual combat. In this update, I'll start slow again and go over the 'Magic' aspect of the game. I already went over Heroism (awesome spell earlygame, keeps being useful to have throughout the game), but I ignored one thing about unit spells in general: Most of them can be cast either during the battle for the lower mana cost, only lasting until the end of the fight. Casting a unit spell on the worldmap is more expensive (I believe it's always 5x the cost) and also requires a litte bit of mana per turn, often making it less cost-efficient than just re-casting it every battle. However, MoM has a rather neat system to prevent you to blast out all of your mana at once. First: During combat, a wizard can only cast one spell each turn. Second: Other than your total mana, your 'Casting Skill' also limits you in your spellslinging. I start with a Skill of 16 (visible in the lower left corner - this is turn 2, so my total mana is only 3 and I earn 8 Power each turn from my fortress), so I can only spend 16 mana each battle. That's not much - I couldn't cast even one Heroism spell in combat. Increasing your Skill is one of the three uses your power base has. It's a rather slow process: to increase your Skill by one point, you have to accumulate twice your current Skill in Power, so even though I completely neglect my science game, it will take eight turns to gain my 17th Skill point. Neglecting Science is how i start most of my games. While leaning more powerful spells is obviously very important, the spells I really want cost about 1000 research points, making the initial research via Power mostly irrelevant. Right now, the faster increase of my Skill and my mana pool seem much more important. Later, I might change my power distribution, but even then Libraries (and their upgrades) are a more efficient way to gain research points. One last thing: Skill also limits the mana per turn I can put into spells outside of combat. Heroism costs me 90 mana (I get a 10% discount for having 8 Life spellbooks), so even if I had the necessary mana, it would take me 90/16 = 6 turns to enchant a unit right away. So let's go through the spells I chose during wizard creation: Holy Armor is a decent spell early on, but I tend to ignore it in favour of more Heroism casts. Defense boosts are even more effective against units with multiple figures (read: most enemies you'll face right in the earlygame), but it's hard to justify using it while Heroism is available at almost the same price and while Mana is actually a scarce resource. +1 Movement is obviously helpful on the world map (keep in mind that foot units start with only 1 Movement), but it's also surprisingly powerful on the battlefield as soon as ranged units come into play. Reaching them twice as fast means only half the number of shots in the face and that sure is helpful. It's worth noting that Endurance is one of the few Unit Enchantments that can't be cast in battle. Bless is a very strong defense boost for its price, but of course it's a bit situational. It'll trigger more often than you'd think, though, since quite a few magical ranged attacks are chaos-based, even if the user himself isn't connected to the Chaos realm otherwise. The Magic Spirit is the first spell we encounter that is part of the 'Arcane Realm'. There are 14 Arcane spells in total; a few basic anti-magic spells, a few basic summoning spells and a bit of utility. It also contains the 'Spell of Mastery' which is basically the 'science victory' of this game, being extremely expensive both to research and to actually cast, but also instantly winning the game when finished. The Magic Spirit is slightly less powerful, but at the same time a lot more useful: While it's basically worthless in combat, it can meld with magical nodes (a special kind of monster lair) to extract their magic power (as in 'the resource that can be refined into mana, research and skill'). I have no idea why the Guardian Spirit's summary is longer without actually mentioning its advantage over the Magic Spirit. When melded with a magic node, it also protects it from being captured by another wizard. A Magic Spirit can just be kicked out by another spirit as long as there are no units (left) to defend the node in combat; a Guardian Spirit has a 75% chance of killing the 'attacking' spirit instead. It's nice when it works, but a Fire Emblem player should know better than to rely on a 75 in a game without true hit. Fame is usually gained by winning large battles (at least four enemy units), capturing cities and beating opposing wizards. A +10 boost is OK early on, but nothing too special. Fame does have some nice effects, though - it reduces unit maintenance and attracts higher numbers of more powerful mercenaries. More impactful, however, is another hidden effect of this spell: Just Cause reduces the number of rebelling citizens in every city you own by one. If you don't mess around with your tax rates, every 5th citizen spawns as a rebel but can be pacified by 2 military units stationed in the city or by (mostly religious) buildings. Just Cause might enable you to roll with a higher tax rate without losing productivity, but I personally don't bother min-maxing here. And finally, my spearmen stumble across another Arcane spell in an unprotected monster den. It's a 2nd-tier spell (out of 4) and my bane as a dedicated Life wizard: It can also be cast during combat and will attempt to dispel each and every unit enchantment the opponent has active. The chance of any Dispel variant working goes down the more expensive the targeted spell is, but can increased by pumping more mana into the Dispel. The despelling power gets down for every spell after the first targeted with a single Dispel. And finally, the monster den cleared out by our Ultra Swordsman at the end of the last update nets us the Summon Hero spell which Summons a Hero, but is (at 300 mana) a bit expensive at this time. We will meet some heroes shortly - they're basically units with unique abilities that can accumulate way more EXP than regular units do, potentially making them the most powerful fighters in the endgame, but pretty terrible when they first join. Meanwhile, our capital finishes its granary, recruiting two spearman units afterwards. They offer decent protection (for this point in the game at least) because they're hobbits, but more importantly, they'll pacify the fifth citizen that will pop up in the near future. Next up is the Marketplace, giving us one whole gold per turn, but more importantly unlocking the Farmers Market, the second (and last) food+growth building. It's basically 50% stronger than the granary, providing +3 food, +3 max population and (despite the game telling otherwise) +40 - +50 population growth. Meanwhile, the spearman explores further to the west, backing out of every monster den without a fight. While it is possible to enter the dens and then flee immediately, doing so puts the scouting unit(s) at risk. There is a random chance for every unit fleeing a battle to just die and I'm pretty sure (even considering confirmation bias) that the odds are rigged terribly against the player on higher difficulties. Between the monster lairs, he stumbles across what is probably the most valuable ressource he could find. Other than the (very minor) power bonus, every unit built in a city with mithril in its borders will gain a +1 bonus to melee attacks, physical ranged attacks and defense, as soon as the city has constructed an Alchemist Guild (a mid-tier building). Hobbits appreciate mithril even more than any other race, thanks to their units having 8 figures and each figure gaining said +1 bonus. I'll scout around the area first, but securing the mithril as soon as possible is definitely a top priority right now. The swordsman's currently running around in the cap's vicinity, mostly to clear out some weaker monster dens. Here, he discovers that I overlooked an undefended dungeon (technically, dens/temples/abandoned keeps/dungeons/... all have different possible inhabitants, but it's really not that important) with the Star Fires spells inside. The spell isn't impressive at all and I deselected it from the default spell selection at the start of the game. It's a comparatively cost-effective combat spell, dealing 4.5 points of damage (minus defense) on average against creatures from the Death or Chaos realms, at a cost of 5 Mana. It's 3x as strong as comparable combat spells of other realms at base, but unlike those, you can't pump more mana into Star Fires to increase the damage, making its damage per turn rather pitiful. After that, he gets interrupted, though: The spearman just found troops of our nearest opponent northwest of our captial. Their threat level only reaches 'angry caterpillar' level though: two unexperienced heroes and one summon that isn't even made for combat. He did put a spell on Salkirg - probably Guardian Wind (protects agains physical ranged attacks), but I can't check that in this screen (and forgot to check later). You will not be allowed to infringe upon my territory! He's super happy to see a fellow practitioner of the art. The 'Magic' screen doubles as this game's diplomacy screen, giving us a quick overview of the AI controlled wizards, their mood towards the player and their diplomatic relationship with any other (known) wizards. Pre-rolled Jafar as the player's choice is the Sorcery specialist of the game, having all of his realm's spells in his library (and the Alchemy trait for his remaining pick). On hard, enemy wizards get two additional picks that he filled with two Death books. Since I'm playing as a Life mage this gives us a quite relevant diplomatic penalty, setting his initial mood to 'tense'. I'll say this right now: Any effort to try and reason with Jafar is completely wasted. In theory, there are a few diplomatic options available: A wizard pact (basically a peace treaty) or an alliance as signable treaties, gifting gold or spells to placate the AI, bully a weaker AI into giving tribute, exchanging magic spells... But even though there are a lot of Numbers dictating AI behaviour, it mostly boils down to this: Choose number 1<N<50. Wait for N turns. Declare war on the player. N might increase if the wizard in question has a peaceful nature or if he shares a few spellbooks with the player, but in general, it'll save you a lot of frustration if you just try to exchange a spell or two as soon as you meet a new rival and just assume he's about to attack you immidiately afterwards. So I'll just start moving my Ultra Swordsman northwest (I suspect there is a land connection in the fog NW of him) and just attack him myself before he can say 'self-fulfilling prophecy'. Around the same time, the capital finishes its Farmers Market, starting to build a swordsman... ...to escort the settler it'll produce afterwards (and to protect the outpost the settler is going to create). This is going to be the expand's spot, having both the mithril and some useful terrain inside its borders, even though the population cap isn't too great. I was kinda hoping to get mithril and silver (+2 gold; the resource to the northwest) into one city, but both possible tiles for that are water tiles. Oh well! In hindsight, I still chose the wrong spot, though. Settling one tile to the Southwest would give room for a second city to the north of the mithril, possibly allowing me to the mithril-boosted unique units of another race. Also oh well! I might find some other mithril sources, though. The cap goes back to building up its infrastructure after finishing the settler (which by the way cost one citizen upon completion). The info text about the Sawmill once again blatantly lies to us - the building gives a flat +25% production, but can only be built in cities with a forest in range. It's a nice and rather cheap building that unlocks another (more expensive) +25% productions through the Foresters Guild, making forest a very helpful terrain. The spearman made contact with Jafar quite close to his capital, so I find it very fast... ...just to be sorely disappointed. Not only by Jafar's ability to do anything (seriously, he hasn't built any building in his cap, despite his big production boosts), but also by his capitals' inhabitans. Klackons (Master of Orion player might recognize the name) are close to Wendy-tier, being the worst race to either start with or conquer. Well, at least they'll be able to build roads between my cities... Speaking of roads - following the one Jafar built reveals not only that there is indeed a shorter route between our capitals... ...but also one of his expands... ...and the opportunity to abuse some mechanics. Outposts are what settlers initially create, basically zero-pop cities that can produce nothing and only wait until they create their first citizen. For some reason, the AI doesn't count them as proper cities... ...allowing us to just waltz in and raze it to the ground. Jafar's AI won't even recognize this as an aggressive act, while accidently walking into an opponent's troop (the pathing in this game is pretty terrible) would give a major penalty. Abusing this is quite strong on impossible difficulty, allowing the player to (mostly) shut down his neighbors without declaring war. In this case, it's not as big a deal, since I plan to just march into his capital anyway, as soon as the swordsman arrives. The powermeter might consider his troops stronger, but I don't expect too much resistance. Killing Jafar before meeting another wizard has the additional advantage that this won't upset anyone - for some obscure reason, the AI doesn't really appreciate if the player runs around murdering capitals. But since I plan to go into detail about combat mechanisms, I'll close this update with a false cliffhanger and start murdering in the next one.

No. You'll find quite a few scrolls that teach skills to one unit, but there's none for Paragon. Astrid has a horse, a very powerful ability (which actually makes BEXPing her into relevancy cheaper, too) and can get out of bowlock at promotion (and choosing axes gives immediate access to both steel and hand axes). She's far from the best cav/paladin in the game (Titania, Oscar and Kieran are very defenitely better), but nobody claimed that she was. But she has potential that Rolf clearly doesn't have and her increased EXP gain is a unique trait that is actually great. Rolf has Longbow access, and they're not great. Yeah, this is worth repeating. You can use whoever the fuck you want, the game won't punish you.

Honestly, you don't need the extra damage in Ch.12. There are rarely more than 2 enemies in killing range; it's more difficult to make sure they don't prey on your healer of choice. Also, the basic Wind spell is literally as strong as Thunder against flying enemies (although it's not as heavy and more accurate) - effective damage is pretty meh in this game. So I'd only pump any EXP (either in battle or bonus exp) into Rolf if you actually want to keep him on your team longterm. €: Yeah, Rolf is one of the weakest unit in the game, being bowlocked and not on a horse. I still stand by my everyone-is-viable 'advice', though, unless the unit in question is a certain thief without promotion.

Ike is the only character whose stats really matter, there are two bossfights that are basically 1vs1 (although you can heal Ike). If you're playing on normal difficulty, this is less true, but on hard, you absolutely need a strong Ike towards the endgame. So make sure he doesn't fall behind in levels or gets RNG screwed. Ike has a story promotion after chapter 17, though. He doesn't really need any special attention to reach lv.20 until then. I'd actually recommend checking the map on SF. Even without the recruitable unit, there are a few nice items and a lot of gold waiting for your thieves. There's no need to hoard your gold. During the midgame, you'll drown in money anyway (making the last point partly moot ;) ) Almost every unit in the game is good enough to bring to the final fights - the average stats in this game are great on (almost) everyone. As such, mounted (and flying) units are almost always superior thanks to their mobility, while the Laguz suffer because of their transformation gauge. But you can easily focus on the first sentence in this paragraph and just field whoever you like best.

I CANT HANDLE THAT PRESSURE! So I guess it's a good thing I already prepared another update. @Integrity: I was thinking of the (minimalistic) battle animations, but I guess that's better than having animations as long as PoR's map animations. ;) Other than that, you're not wrong. The game is very pixel-y, of course, but not ugly and it's easy enough to spot what you need to spot. And that's something many newer games seem to struggle with... [spoiler=Update 01] Alright, let's have a look at our starting location! It's quite nice, all things considered. Unlike in the Civ games, you do not 'work' the tiles in your city borders (the fat cross that is visible on the map right now); instead, every tile contributes to the max population ('food' - grassland and rivers give the biggest bonus here), gives a small percentage bonus to production (woods, hills, mountains mostly) and/or to the gold it generates (river and sea tiles). You can increase max pop by 5 points via buildings and there's no way to get more than 25 population, so this city combined with its nice production bonus is pretty powerful. In addition, having Nightshade in range will protect the city from harmful spells (although not reliably) and the two Iron Ore tiles will reduce the building cost of most units by 10%. Neither of these are gamechanging boosts, but hey - they're nice to have. Capital cities start out with a little bit of infrastructure, as well as the wizard's fortress.Barracks are the basic military building and they're needed to build most of military units. The Forge unlocks Swordsmen (the second-weakest military unit), but it's also needed for some infrastructure upgrades. The Builder's Hall itself is useless to us, but it's needed to unlock most of the non-military buildings. The Fortress itself is obviously unique to our capital. It produces magic power equal to the number of spellbooks (8 in our case). Here are the cities overall yields from top to bottom: Food (the city needs 1 food per pop, the surplus is fed to the military), Production (it produces things), Gold (this city generates 4 gold, but its buildings cost 2 gold in maintenance), Magic Power (I'll come to this later) and Science (which is zero right now). Citizen management is rather easy: You must have enough farmers to support the city and every additional citizen can either be assigned as a farmer (to feed your military) or a worker (to build things). As the city growths, rebels will appear. They don't do anything special except not giving any yields, though, and can be placated by military presence and religious buildings. The (potential) infrastructure of a Hobbit city is somewhat mediocre - no Universities means that they're also locked out of quite a few strong buildings. Their new cities will grow nicely, though: They don't have a growth penalty (those are very common otherwise) and their farmers produce one additional unit of food. The latter honestly isn't that big of a boost. Food is little more than a restriction on how many workers you can afford, so I believe a direct boost to production is more powerful overall. By the way - note the production boost from the city's terrain: Two workers and two farmers produce 5 hammers, so 28% of that gives the city one additional hammer right now. I'll go through all of the buildings as I build (or conquer...) them, hopefully covering all of them eventually. I literally always start my building order with a granary in my cap and will most of the time open with Builders' Hall --> Granary in freshly settled cites. The food boost is more impactful in new settlements (because without it they're stuck with a farmer as their first citizen), but the growth bonus is strong and even better than the game tells us: Granaries (and the Farmers' Market that it unlocks) also increase the population limit. And since the distance to that limit factors into pop growth, the granary actually adds +30 to growth. Other than that, both of my military units start scouting the area. In general, leaving any city unguarded is a very bad idea because of roaming monsters potentially plundering them, but to my knowledge those don't spawn at the very start of the game. So right now, it's time to look for potential city locations and actual (neutral) city locations, while also checking the ruins, dens, ancient temples etc.pp. that are scattered across the map. You start the game with the two weakest melee units in the game, both weaker than any monsters you might find. This also applies here, even though I have a few things going for me:The Alchemy trait actually gives all of my troops magic weapons, allowing them to hurt monsters immune to normal weapons. It also improves their damage output by one third, but I'll put the details off until we'll see actual combat. The Warlord trait improves their EXP level from 'Recruit' to 'Regular', increasing their attack by one point. Given that this is a Small Numbers Game at the start, this is pretty impactful when fighting other non-magical units. Halfling Swordsmen lose one point of attack strength, but have two additional fighters per unit (6 --> 8; Spearmen have 8 fighters in general). Right now, this evens out (6 fighters à 4 strength = 8 fighters à 3 strength), but at higher levels, this will favour Halflings. And here's why Hobbits are absurd: Being Lucky is fucking HUGE in this game. Again, I'll spare you the details for now, but this ability gives the same offensive bonus as the magic weapons do, gives a similar boost to defence AND a similar penalty to attackers in melee. The TL;DR: We'll avoid fighting monsters for now, but if we stumble across a neutral city (which we won't, sadly), we could easily defeat its defenders, even if they were twice our numbers, and do a little expanding that way. We'll still enter the ruins and back out without a fight. Not only to scout what kind of enemies we'll eventually fight... ...but also because some ruins (or keeps or whatever) actually contain unguarded treasure. 50 Mana isn't a huge bonus, but right now, ...we can use oure Alchemy trait to transform almost all of our gold into even more mana... ...which in turn allows us to make our swordsman even more awesome. Heroism is an amazing spell during the earlygame - Elite troops gain a second attack point, yet another of those 33% attack boosts (they add up, unfortunately, instead of multiplying), a defence point and an additional hitpoint (which is pretty strong when you started with a single HP). The Warlord trait boosts this even further, making my Swordsmen officially ULTRA. This gives them a second bonus point on defense, but more importantly adds a final 33% attack boost to the stack. Adding up all of these make the swordsmen hit 2.33x as strong as another unit with identical stats, but without these multipliers. Being a bunch of Hobbits doesn't affect this unit's offence that much anymore, but the two defensive boost out of the Lucky trait are still unique to them (and harder to enhance in general). So - let's put this into use! Unfortunately, your scouts don't tell you anything about the numbers of the monster, just one of the monster types inside of the ruins (usually, but not always the strongest). In this case, our two units might have been strong enough even before the Heroism spell. Anyway, this is how combat works in Master of Magic: Unlike the Civ games, you actually direct your troops during the fight, while also being able to cast spells on your troops/the enemies/the whole battlefield. The starting posisions of the units is alway as shown: the defender to the upper left, the attacker to the lower right, five tiles between the frontline units. Our opponents are the two most basic monsters of the Death realm, both being appropriately harmless. Both have a bunch of immunities that are completely irrelevant to us right now, so the Skeletons are little more than slightly improved swordsmen. Zombies hit a bit harder and can tank quite a lot of punishment, making them stronger than most basic units - at least until those go up in their experience levels. At the start, most fights start with both parties slowly marching towards each other one tile a turn. The fight itself is slightly one-sided... Only two out of eight Hobbits fall and unless the whole unit, they will just respawn as the unit as a whole heals. Now, without context, this doesn't really tell us much about the Hobbits as fighters. Maybe it's just the Heroism spell that does the trick? So to compare, I started another game with the same setup, but with High Men in my capital. Their basic units are basically the default, not receiving any boosts at all. So how do they fare in a comparable situation? ...Huh.

Let's Play: Master of Magic Do majestic 1994-fireball-animation attract any attention? I sure hope so, because as a newcomer in this forum in general and the LP subsection in particular, LPing a 22 years old strategy game might not be a good marketing decision. Still - I'd like to enter the fray with this oldtimer, hoping that some of you will enjoy its phenomenal graphics and polished gameplay awkward animations and questionable game balance. So what is this game? In short, it's basically Civilization I, but MAGIC! Its mechanics for science, infrastructure and (especially) combat are different enough to make MoM a unique game, but an experienced Civ player should be able to get into this game rather quickly. Like probably every Civ spin-off in history, MoM is all about expanding and developing an empire before you eventually murder your opponents. Is it still any good? Well, yes - I wouldn't do this otherwise. The graphics haven't aged well and the first thing I did was muting the sound, but the gameplay itself is very enjoyable, even by today's standards. 4X games like this usually have a good replay value in general, and compared to (at least the first) civ games, Master of Magic has even more parameters to make every playthrough unique. Unfortunately, it shares another trait: the AI in this game is hilariously weak, so the higher difficulty setting put the player at an equally hilarious disadvantage to make up for it. Is there more of this awesome intro? Yeah, I only sewed together two small parts of it. Here's the whole thing (not my vid). Do you want to get started already? Yes. [spoiler=Getting Started] Just going over the settings real quick: Hard is only the second-highest difficultiy because 1) I am a filthy casual, 2) I haven't played this in a while and 3) I don't enjoy if my opponents summon the Armageddon on me while I teach my guys how to use a halberd. 'Powerful magic' means that the main sources of magic power yield more mana, but are also guarded by more powerful monsters. There are 14 prebuilt wizards to choose from (Here's a list)... ...but being a filthy casual, I prefer to go with a more optimized build. The game includes five magic realms (afaik directly ripped off Magic: The Gathering) and quite a few special abilities of varying power. I'd like to go though those as well: [spoiler=Magic Realms] Somewhat surprising, very few of the Life magic spells are healing spells. Instead, this realm focuses on supporting spells, making the common troops of a Life wizard quite terrifying. Other than that, it has a few spells to improve your empire's economy and some direct counterspells against the Death and Chaos realms. Death magic is the polar opposite and one wizard cannot learn spells out of both of these realms. Death spells do what you'd expect: Weakening the enemy, both in combat and on the world map. The more advanced spells can get really devestating, so a Death mage can be a really annoying opponent. Not by power, but by efficiency, Death also features the best summoning magic in the game. Chaos is the reason why I don't like to play this game on impossible. Most of its spells are combat related: Quite a few Summons (including the powerful but expensive Great Drake), a lot of directly damaging spells and very little else. At the very end of the spell list, however, you'll find a few global spells that can be summed up as 'fucks up the whole world, except the caster's cities'. On impossible, an enemy Chaos mage will grab one of these fast and that's just no fun. Nature is the Jack-of-all-trades of the realms, unfortunately including the Master-of-none part. It has spells of every kind (supporting and damaging, both for combat and for infrastructure), but they tend to be nice instead of powerful, making this (in my opinion) the weakest realm in the game. Sorcery has a few vaguely wind-related spells, but the strengths of this realm are illusion (like invisibility) and meta-magic (starting with powerful antimagic and ending with acutally stealing global enchantments). In my experience, Sorcery gives you a rather slow start, but later not only are some of the advanced spells really powerful, but the AI gets boned hard by invisible and/or flying units. Every realm includes 40 spells, divided into four tiers. The number of books picked determines how many of them you'll find (and be able to study) in your library: ten books give you every spell of the realm, fewer books randomly remove some, starting at the most powerful tier. Even though some of the special traits are really powerful, they're less impactful for the overall game. So I'll just link a short summary instead of going into detail here. I'll just explain my final build: With this combination, I'll get a lot of value out of my non-magical units, hopefully to the point where they're as strong as the most powerful summons (and way less pricey). Alchemy allows me to convert gold and mana without losses in either direction, giving me a lot of flexibility throughout the game. Warlord boosts the experience level of all non-magical units, even giving them an additional combat rank above the usual maximum. The downside of taking both these traits: I can only hope that I will have all of the more important spells in my library. Fortunately, the three spells I'm really looking forward to are only in the second-highest tier, of which I'll only be missing three... Picking 8 books of only one realm also gives me seven of the basic spells at the start of the game. I'll go over them when I actually start playing. And finally I get to choose which race populates my capital. This decision mostly affects the earlygame since you'll be able to capture neutral cities (although occupying a dwarven city as a elven ruler will result in angry dwarves), but the difference can be quite significant. I'm picking Halflings because they have the strongest combat units in the game while also being able to build up a decent infrastructure. I'm not kidding, by the way. Hobbit units are pretty insane. But again, I'll go into detail when I actually play this game - in the next update. This one's long enough, but I hope that I managed to keep a few readers going up to this point. As an addendum: This is only my second LP and the first one was in a smaller forum and in my native language. So I'd really appreciate feedback, especially if some passages are phrased weird or just plain wrong. As long as it's not "EVERYTHING SUCKS!", feel free to be critical. ;)

Yeah, you can actually add me as the third person. The images themselves aren't broken (you can click the filenames to see them in a new tab), but the browser seems to stop loading them after a certain number.

For me, he comes at a time where I don't really need another filler unit, although I suppose he would be decent enough. In Ch.21, I usually fill the gaps with Klein and Igrene for wyvern sniping and Merlinus to get rid of all the trash I always seem to accumulate.

Look at that, he actually backpaddled. There might be a slight difference between a mod in some internet forum about a series and the president of a nation. Also, I like to think of myself of someone who doesn't aspire to genozide a whole religion or any other population group. Sharing traits with Hitler or any other dictator or extremist does not mean I have "a little of them in me". That's just a lazy way to 'prove' that the leftist are actually the same as the right (or that {group I dislike} is a bunch of Nazis/Commies/...).