I logged in to reply to this post. I am deathly afraid that this is the factor all of gaming is boiling down to, making your game 'balanced' so everyone is equal. This is not the world we live in at all though it is so shallow. America and France, for example are not equal, neither is one person and another.

I think we can see the quality go down as long as this factor is not addressed.

MOM was awesome because there was a feeling of real in that aspect of not so balanced. I absoutely cannot stand playing anything that goes down the cookie cutter balanced road. For example: Starcraft, is awesome because the zerg and protoss are nothing alike! of course there are some similarities, but I would love to see Elemental break out of this pattern and bring us truly unique styles. Balance is subjective. It is relative to whatever you are 'balancing' it against. What about instead of unit by unit balancing, the focus is on overall balancing.

 Bottom line for players is that each person enjoys playing a different way, that is ruined by trying to micro-balance your game. If there is a super powerful enemy, fine, but dont tell me its unbalanced - Instead tell me what strategies would work to take that enemy down! If there exists no way, then it is more a bug then unbalanced because the point is to be able to overcome your opponent by strategy however if no strategy exists due to the system then fix it!

I'll go a step further and say throw out balancing all together. Have some factions that are so gimp it is ahrd to win single player on Easy setting. If it becomes a big deal in MP and they all want to be perfectly balanced, let them all play the same faction or their own customer faction.

Do not try to balance all the factions, neither unit by unit nor even over all.

With 12 factions there should be plenty of variety, some that are well balanced and some that are gimpy.

I am with the people who feel that too much concern for balance absolutely kills this kind of game. It's kind of like socialism for entertainment = bland experience.

Oh I love this idea. I'd love to see gimped factions that could barely win on easy. I'd be happy with a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 type of faction balance. Where 10th is nearly impossible to beat, but, i could still play it if I had a mind to. When you have this type of unbalanced balanced you can find your middle ground that area that is challenging by YOUR standards of play. You might be a player who could take a level 2 faction and beat the game on impossible difficulty, but at least you would find that fun and challenging. Get my drift here?

Why not have difficulty settings instead? Then you can play with or against any faction at any difficulty setting you choose?

Pssh! Don't tell me that you don't appreciate the differences between white and black or black and red.

It's a bad analogy -- chess and checkers aren't fantasy empire building games. Expectations about faction diversity are much different. I guess you've never played any of the blander titles that came after Master of Magic.

The thing about Master of Magic (and I still play it to this day) is that each wizard felt different. They had different strengths, weaknesses, and traits, yet each one is viable to win.

About balance... balance is nice in games, but balance shouldn't automatically mean the same thing on every side. Diversity is definitely the key to replayability in a game. If you can make each game "feel" different, while technically it's the same (like MoM), then you've got a winner.

Well it would be different if this were going to be a major multiplayer game, but, it isn't. It's just going to have multiplayer ability and those that MP it are just going to have to accept it the way it comes as far as balance goes. They can make up their usual house rules to gimp someone or make someone more powerful.

Main thing is the main game must not be balanced to a 100% margin for all factions. I want to be able to overcome the all powerful from the beginning of the game not be the same as him.

Any of you familar with Lords of Magic SE? That was another kewl game I enjoyed (except for the real time combat and the path finding was horrible sometimes and it had no random map generator) as it had a Dark Death Lord in the beginning thay was more powerful than all other races. You had to build up over time a powerful army to defeat him and you couldn't play his race until you did. That is my 2nd favorite fantasy wargame next to MOM right now. Warlords IV in as a close 3rd.

Warlords IV post 1.04a patch is one of those games that starts off hard as hell, but, once you find 3 artifacts that pretty much prevent all damage and regeneration out the ying yang if you do take damage it becomse a cakewalk and pushover. This is what I DON'T want to see happen in Elemental that if a player finds 3 or 4 specific artifacts he becomes practically invincible. I had a Warlord just like this and I could basically just take him and march from castle to castle and defeat any and all things inside it as these 3 artifacts he had made him 99% invincible.

You act like you can't ever play it again?

http://www.abandonia.com/en/search_abandonia/Master+of+Magic

Surely you have DOSBOX or know about it right?

http://www.brothersoft.com/dosbox-(0.65)-config-editor-60516.html

Now you can play to your hearts content again.

It's not pirated it's abandonware and 100% legal.

that might be true.   However, Stardock has already made it clear that they cannot allow for it here.

Here is a quote from another thread where this came up.

quoting Zoomba...

the other thread was locked.  I'd suggest any links be removed to prevent risk of the same happening to this thread. 

For me MOM was not about Nostalgia (as I STILL play it to this day via dosbox, I own the original on floppy)

There's just something about the diversity and customization that gives personality to the game.

Sure the races are unbalanced, but the way the races are unbalanced leads to some interesting and diverse play styles.

Take for instance - the lizardmen/klackons/gnolls, they don't have a lot of buildings, therefore they don't provide as much bonuses as some other races . Some players may view this as a weakness (indeed the lizardmen barely have any production bonus buildings at all!), but personally for me - less buildings simply mean that I can quickly get to the race's end tier unit.

Dragon turtles, Stag beetles and wolf riders are overwhelmingly strong on the early game, as they can easily be cranked out in a few turns, while races like high men who starts slowly would still be stuck with their puny swordmen .

What I like about MOM is that I am not stuck with a particular "faction" or "race", I get a starting race and from that starting race I can conquer and assimilate races into my empire to aid in further conquests. So if I use the lizardmen, I will have a strong early game and if I conquer other races capable of producing strong end game units and bonuses, I will have offset the weakness of the lizardmen that I started with at the beginning.

Balance tends to be "relative", as some races fare much better on certain landmass size settings.

Ex: Swimming Lizardmen, Flying Draconians fare much better indeed add to their advantages when the world landmass is set to small. Other races would have to tech up to build ships to expand to other places.

One player's perspective of weakness is another's perspective of strenght is my 2cents.