Non-RPG General News - The current State of Master of Magic (2022)

Couchpotato spotted a blog-post about the current state of the Master of Magic remake:

The state of Master of Magic (2022) after 12 months.

Master of Magic (2022) developed by Muha games and developed by Slitherine Software was launched in Dec 2022. Given a mandate to modernize the base game with quality of life features followed by an expansion of the game via DLC how has the game progressed in the last 12 months?

To anticipate the conclusion, Master of Magic (2022) has improved tremendously since it's shaky start at launch in Dec 2022. As such, if you were eyeing this game for a while or bounced off initially but am waiting to come back, this might be the right time....

A troubled launch - Dec 2022

Many of you may have heard it had a troubled launch, but in its defense a lot of flak came from fans from other fandoms who disliked that it was not Age of Wonders X or Caster of Magic, groups that would not have realistically liked the game no matter what.

To be fair, even among fans of Master of Magic classic who wanted the game to succeed, there were reasons to pan the game at launch in Dec 2022. While views on aesthetics could be subjective (some players preferred the charm of 2d pixels) there was no doubt the state of the game at launch was bad.

During the first few iterations, the game was extremely slow to load and had serious memory leaks. Moreover, the game lacked many standards expected of "modern" features like customizable hot-keys, full screen and window mode and had many serious UI missteps including extremely poor pathfinding. Even features that were newly added like build queues were somewhat disappointing as they did not allow you to add items that had prerequisites.

Muha goes to work - Roadmap (April 2023) and extended Roadmap (May 2023)

Fortunately, Muha did not abandon the game but steadily worked at it.

They announced two separate roadmaps to address all the problems I mentioned and more. For details, see roadmap 1 and roadmap 2.

As a beta tester from the earliest days, I was impressed by how Muha addressed practically every reasonable feedback given and then some. Here are IMHO some of the big improvements....

1. Address city spamming with various settings to both control frequency of neutrals and rules that control minimum distance between cities
2. Quick load/save
3. Steam workshop (there is one major mod and several minor ones and a active modding community on the discords but most people are waiting for all the official DLCs to be out I think)
4. City lists are sortable by multi-criteria
5. Improved display of information both in city screens and combat logs
6. Remappable hot-keys, edge scrolling
7. Build queues now allow items with prerequisites
8. Spellbook save spots
9. Additional options for combat simulator (e.g. turn on/off Wizard spell casting but allow other spellcasting units)
10. Cartographer , remastered og song tracks and even better new ones.
11. and many more I take for granted now ...

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