Comparing Fun Factor: FE Beta 3 vs. MoM

I'm probably sitting at 1.5 right now. It's less fun for me than MOM, but modding brings it up half a point. 

I think that while it is fun, its not nearly AS fun. So I would vote 1.

Reasons why:

1) Races/Heroes/Items are not unique enough

2) Almost everything is unbalanced

3) Not enough variety

So once all the bugs are fixed, and the game is more polished, I think the core mechancis are fine. They just really need to take it up a few notches on the design side and allow you to play the game really differently... and have equal chance of fun/victory with different playstyles. 

around 1.5 for me too.  FE as is won't hold my attention as long as MoM did -- last played in in Jan 2012.

I'm enjoying FE more. 3.

I still kinda wish WoM was getting support, at least 1 more patch, a last hurrah to make it more "complete", but I understand Stardock has to choose it's battles.

It's 1. I just keep quitting FE for whatever excuse I can find. The world itself doesn't pull me in, I feel disconnected and annoyed.

I would also like a 1.5. FE is "not as fun as MoM", but that is not to say that it isn't "fun" generally.

Where FE Succeeds:

1. Faction Differentiation. MoM has various races, but because you can get any race by conquering one city, any differentiation you start with is really watered down over the course of a game.

2. Some semblance of a reason not to just vomit cities everywhere. In MoM, there was no strategy to compete with expand. Always best to have more cities over less.

3. Designable Units. Now, I don't particularly NEED to be able to design units to be happy, and I do in fact believe that the ability to do so significantly damages the ability of the game to be balanced in terms of units (possibly irreparably), but it is a neat feature and is important to the character of what FE IS.

Where FE needs work.

1. The Magic System. Not just more spells, but the system itself. It is fundamentally boring. There is no particular reason to develop the casting of your sovereign over a champion and the same selections in game creation will ALWAYS yield the same set of options for you over the course of a game. ALWAYS. Opposed to the way that Magic was handled in MoM, I could just as easily have FE with no magic whatsoever and be just as happy with the game.

2. The City Building. Being addressed in Beta 4.

3. Spells. WE. NEED. MORE. SPELLS.

Another area where Fe needs work is hero-differentiation.  In MoM, Zaldon was very different that Gunthor and both were different from / inferior to Roland or Warrax.  In FE you can level anybody into anything you want (same weakness as AoW:SM).  With enough use of the paragon spell, you can level everybody into everything you want.

I'm at a 2 I think. Magic isn't as fun, but hero development is good, and the LOOT is awesome. Such a variety of gear with enough randomness and always the chance to find an item that will change your game

Right now FE is too buggy and "rigid" for me to enjoy, and the thing I Crave from Master of Magic is  the vast magical accessory to the game. and not just alot of spells, but different ones with all kind of weird effects (and side effects for some).

What I miss when playing MoM is... Graphics and User Interface. that is why I wish for FE to have a more solid User Interface, because that really does alot in the long run. (and changes the first impression too ;))

Right now I would rather play Master of Magic due to the low amount of bugs, and quirks in a "well improved" game, but would play FE to help squash a bug or 3, and give more fodder for ideas of improvement.

Final score is: 1

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

4.  I really haven't played MoM in forever, but going back to it was pretty horrible.

I'm a 3.  FE Beta 3 is more fun than MoM.

3 for me. Mom just is not great when I play it now. Not to belittle anyone's opinion, but people really need to take off the glasses of nostalgia. Graphics and AI are painfully bad. Balance is horrible (what balance?). The world setting is still great but that's because I prefer more distinguishef high fantasy. 

This isn't about which game is "better", in which context one really need remove glasses of nostalgia. Obviously, FE has higher production values and its graphics are far from painfully bad. You are right. (While I don't think the AI is much worse than FE's.) But that doesn't mean that MoM can be as much or more fun (for some people). This is supposed to be purely subjective. There's no need to remove any glasses because we are not judging which is "better", this shouldn't be mistaken for some kind of very short "review".

Fun is of course completely subjective but it is also a fact that people forget the minor poor details and remember the larger swathes of greatness until it becomes all glory in their minds. What I meant with my comment was that I have a suspicion that people don't know this. When I read comparisons between mom and any game, they describe a very different level of quality than what I see when I open the game today. 

So yes, the term fun is subjective but I urge everyone to consider that your memory (and mine) simply do not represent reality.

I think FE is a great game on its own, and its difficult to compare with MOM. I like both games, but they are from different eras. I also have high hopes for FE to become a real classic that other games will be compared to in the future. If they only include Umber it will be perfect

Hopefully they will release the missing factions as PART OF (;-)) an expansion.

0 - a lot less fun than MoM

I constantly quit games only a few turns in. There are always some Escaped Juggernauts or other high level creatures nearby. Eventually they will start to go on a rampage and there is nothing that can stop those guys early game. The deal high 3-figure, sometimes 4-figures worth of damage which seems way of. I thought about cheating and create a sovereign with a couple of thousand HP for balance but there would be no fun in that either.

I think I liked the very fist beta of WoM better than anything that came after it. So far FE might share the same fate. Although I still hope that it will turn out fine....

4. I have more fun in FE because I can alter the game to my will. MoM has some nostalgic hold, but the game is just not as interesting anymore. FE feels new and vibrant. There are always new boundaries to push and mods to test. I can't think of a better way to spend a day off. Of course my opinion is extremely subjective because I am not playing vanilla. Vanilla is probably a 3.

Right where I sit.

Though, with beta 4 I can see FE jumping to a solid 2.

My View exactly ... Call me a 3 too!

BTW, I  love  Polls ! ( data, data, data ) ... so Thanks for starting this one, Onomastikon !     

I'm amazed so many here remember MoM enough to make a comparison!  Heh, my memory must be terrible, because I only have the vague impression of having fun and getting lost in the strategy/puzzles/exploring combo for hours; on top of that, I'm much changed as a gamer (and person) since then.  I can only compare FE to recent releases (Civ4 and later), and most importantly, I compare it to the ideal of what FE can be.  The balancing and variety of viable play is top on my list of what to look forward to in future versions.

I actually played MoM for 50+ hours earlier this year. I play that and Master of Orion 2 pretty frequently... but I like playing old classics more than the watered down "next generation" games that come out these days.

1.  No, I don't have nostalgia colored glasses.  I understand the AI and the graphics are dated, and I freely cede those points for MOM.  However, on the plus side, I see a simple, intuitive system for city building in MoM that gives me a clear production/food/mana choice in the city, and how to improve those things.  Yes, at the end game, all my cities built out pretty much in one of two ways: troop production or gold/mana.  But in the end, how I got there felt much different, depending on who I played; faction differentiation is still far superior in MOM than in FE.  Troop differentiation, and how you used them, was better in MOM; I would use a troll mammoth rider very differently than a dark elf spear, and I don't feel that I would use a Ironeer foot any differently than I would use a wraith foot.  Maybe I don't understand the subtle differentiation between the two, but if that's the case, then I don't shoulder all of the blame for that lack of understanding; FE is harder to intuit the right thing to do from the unit itself, and to understand its unique benefits.  The combat statistics were easier to understand in MOM; I think, as part of trying to givem themselves shades of gray to define subtleties between units, they've made the gradations too fine.  In FE, there are 50 shades of grey; it's hard to tell if I'm looking at shade 36 or 37.  In MOM, there were 5 shades of grey, it was easier to tell what did what.  Magic was better in MOM, in my opinion.  I could pick what I wanted to do for spellbooks, and understand what I'd be able to do after researching the spells.  Somehow, the current FE system to me seems lacking, either in spell choice or spell application.

So, city development and uniqueness, faction differentiation, magic systems, unit differentation all have a way to go before FE matches MOM.  Much better graphics and AI, though.

Don't be surprised. a large contingent of the people who are actively Beta-ing FE are here because we bought E:WoM, sight unseen because Stardock said it was making "The Spiritual Successor to Master of Magic", and we are hoping to make this apology for WoM as good a game as MoM.

I, for one, still enjoy several MoM-benders every year. The only things at all that I would change about that game are adding building queues, fixing some of the spells that don't actually work, and bringing the graphics up to 2005 standards. Everything else is still about as good as any game has ever been.

I like MoM better not because it is balanced (balance is worse in MoM than FE). But the one thing about MoM that still makes it more fun is that it feels more like playing in a Fantasy world. The constrained maps of FE just feel like "level design" and have the artificiality of "game level design" schools. The AI needs to have more personality and act it out. FE needs more meaningful choices in terms of strategies.

Don't get me wrong. FE is closer to MoM than it is to WoM. But even Master of Magic isn't a totally high bar to hit. The list of complaints one could seriously levy against Master of Magic are manifold. It is just one of the best in the limited genre of Fantasy TBS games. Stardock needs to make FE a game where each game is an epic story of its own.