Intelligent Game Reviews

Impressions, a subsidiary of Sierra, have returned with the third game in the “Lords of” series. This time it’s Lords of Magic, a Tolkein-esque strategy game that combines turn-based movement with real time combat.

Basics of Play

The story is one familiar to an fantasy reader… an evil mage has come to conquer the fragmented world and plunge it into the pit of despair. Your task is to stop this from happening. And yet, who are you? A hardy adventurer with a small band of loyal followers, alone, unloved. That’s about to change!

The world has eight Faiths. Each has a Great Temple which is the focus of the faith. As the game begins each of these temples has been corrupted by the forces of Death, throwing the good citizens into a funk. Should you liberate a temple the people would undoubtedly be very pleased indeed. And that’s your first task, to liberate your Faith’s temple. When you do the people swear fealty to you and you can then control the capital city and train soldiers rather than hire pricey mercenaries.

Your task then is to build an army strong enough to kill the evil Balkoth. You will also find that some of the other Faiths view you with distrust, even hatred, so you’ll have to watch out for them as well. Should you kill Balkoth the game is over and you win. Should your Lord die you automatically lose, even if you have an otherwise mighty army.

You do this in two ways, fighting to gain experience and upgrading your training facilities to allow you to recruit more powerful and experienced troops as well as to research powerful magic spells.

But this is hard to do in practice. Your beginning troops will be overmatched in nearly any combat situation. It is therefore possible to lose the game quickly and spectacularly. It’s all too easy to lose your Lord well before you can even find the Temple! This isn’t a game for the easily discouraged.

It’s also not a game for those that can’t live with bugs. From difficult to select units on the map and hard to target units in tactical combat to a rash of game crashes, this is not the most stable game ever produced. The 1.02 patch helps somewhat, but it’s still more unstable and quirky than you’re probably used to. You’ve been warned.

Champions and Followers

Your army is composed of Champions and troops. Each Champion is either a Fighter, Mage or Thief, with various abilities. All units gain experience by defeating others in battle. Higher level troops are far more effective. It is vital to build a cadre of seasoned troops and guard them from death at all costs. They serve as your backbone in any engagement.

Fortunately, damaged units heal over time, either by resting, or for certain Faiths, through the spells of your mages. You can also pay crystals at a temple in one of your cities to heal troops, if you have the crystals of course.

An army (it moves and fights together as a unit) can be composed of at most nine normal units and three champions. Thus the largest army in any combat engagement is 12 units to a side. And that is a pretty good sized army. Many of your engagements will be with smaller forces, as it is certainly expensive to recruit troops.

Resources and Artifacts

There are three resources to manage in Lords of Magic: Gold, Ale and Crystals. These are needed to pay upkeep for your troops, train new troops and hire mercenaries, and upgrade your cities and buildings. There is also a meta-resource, fame. The higher your fame the more followers will be attracted to your cities to work and to be trained as soldiers.

And resources are hard to come by. Depending on the size of your city you can put from 8 to 32 workers to producing each resource. That will be your primary supply. You can also liberate mines, breweries and crystal formations in the countryside. These will provide resources each turn you own them.

Finally, winning a battle will provide you with a few “spoils”. These are hardly worth the effort in most cases, but they can come in handy. Winning a battle may also net you an artifact. These are magical devices that can be used by Champions to increase their powers, although not normally by all that much. Generally artifacts are usable only by a single class or by a particular Faith. So, some artifacts will be useless to you. But, you can always trade them off to another Faith, perhaps currying favor with their leader in the process.

Cities and Towns

As mentioned above your cities are the hub of your economy, producing the resources you need to build and keep an army in the field. They can be upgraded in two steps to allow more workers to work and each upgrade also improves the cities defenses should an army attack it.

Towns (villages) are located along the borders of each faith’s realm. The owner of a village (they start out non-aligned) can place a single training center near the town. This can be of either faith that the town abuts. This can be quite useful as it allows you to train and use units from other faiths.

The Faiths and Classes

You have your choice of 8 faiths to play. These represent the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) along with Death, Life, Order and Chaos. Each faith has distinct unit types, magic spells, and cities. The choice you make will greatly impact the way you need to play the game. For example, Order has powerful in close melee troops and weaker, relatively short range missile troops. Life has exceptional, long range missile troops and very weak melee troops. Your battle tactics are thus greatly impacted by your choice of Faith.

You are also faced with choosing a class for your Lord. You can choose to be a Fighter, Mage, or Thief. This isn’t as vital, since after liberating your temple you’ll also get one of each other type of champion. Still, it has a pretty big impact on the early game before the temple is freed. Generally I found it was useful to choose a Lord who was the most powerful type for that Faith. Thus a Fighter for Order, a Mage or Thief for Life and so on.

One of the nice things about having all of the faiths and leader types is that it greatly helps replay value. Playing each faith is totally different.

Tactical Combat

When two armies come into contact they may either parley, which allows you to trade items, goods or units with the other army or battle may ensue. All battles are resolved using a real time tactical combat system.

A few words of warning here. First, if you intend to play the game you simply must get the 1.02 patch. Otherwise you’ll be waiting an eternity each time you go to or from the tactical combat. Even with the patch the transition isn’t exactly speedy. Second, you’ll want to know about the (conveniently undocumented!) keyboard commands to slow or speed up the pace of the real time combat. ‘<’ will slow down the speed and ‘>’ will speed it up. This is important because in the default speed things happen far too quickly to effectively control your troops.

Tactical battles take place on a variety of maps representing the terrain that the armies met on. These have both navigable and unnavigable terrain. Unnavigable terrain can be used to your advantage if you have missile troops, they can shoot over it. It may also create choke points that can reduce your frontage against a numerically larger foe.

You can direct your units to move, defend a location or attack. You can also have your mages cast spells, providing they have any mana left for that turn. The tactical combat is relatively deep, modelling flanking and mob attacks. Your thieves can also subdue opposing champions to take them as POWs to interrogate for information at a later time.

You can also allow the computer to automatically play out the combat. This is a good idea to save time in a situation where you know you will win easily. Otherwise it is important to play out yourself, as yo
u should after a bit of practice be able to perform better than the default would allow.

Enemy Artificial Intelligence

This isn’t a game where the AI really stands out. By that I mean that making it harder or easier doesn’t seem to impact the AI so much as the toughness and number of opposing monsters that roam the world and inhabit caves and dungeons.

That being said, how smart is the AI? Well, in the tactical combat the computer can certainly outfight you on open ground, at least initially. But, the path finding algorithms are laughable. There are certain configurations where your ranged troops will simply decimate a huge opposing army because it can’t get around some obstacle. If they can get to you, they do a good job of ganging up on your units and especially like to destroy your Champions.

On the strategic map the other players don’t seem to do a very good job of liberating their temples, with the exception of Death. Maybe that’s because they operate on the same settings you do, which make any encounter pretty tough, at least initially. But I kind of doubt that. In any case, opposing armies seem to randomly wander and attack you rather than make a concerted invasion if you are at war. Now, partly that’s because there are never that many units in the game and the spaces between cities are vast (several turns for even the swiftest units). But, mostly I think it’s just an oddness of the AI. If I can go on a concerted campaign into enemy territory why can’t my sworn enemy with a larger army?

Multiplayer Features

Lords of Magic is decidedly unstable in multiplayer games. A beta patch, version 1.03, is recommended by Sierra if you want to play multiplayer. Says a lot when a beta patch is more stable than the production version doesn’t it? Even with the patch you’re liable to have troubles. In addition, with the pace and length of the game, this isn’t the best multiplayer experience.

Map Editor

Included in the game is a fairly extensive map editor that allows you to create your own scenarios. It has all the features you could want to allow you to create detailed 3D terrain, add towns, cities, caves, and dungeons. Since the game normally plays on the same map each time, adding a map editor is a good idea to increase replay value. That said, a random map creator would have been even better.

Graphics, Sound, etc.

As you’ve undoubtedly noticed from these screens the graphics are lush and gorgeous. Done in a 16-bit color palette they are perhaps the prettiest graphics yet seen in a strategy game. Different cities all have unique, interesting looks. The graphic design team deserves kudos on a job well done.

In the sound department things are nearly as good. Your units each have distinct voices, some humorous, others deadly in earnest. Selecting a new unit type or entering a new building is a little adventure in itself as you see what they will say. The music also does not disappoint, with nice symphonic mixes and dramatic battle themes.

The manual is lengthy, 160 pages, and tells you next to nothing of what you need to know to play the game. There are indeed lengthy sections on the various factions, sections on the map editor, etc. But, the fundamentals of how to build units, how to fight effectively in combat are either touched on only briefly or not at all. With a game of this level of complexity I expected more. Don’t get me wrong, the manual is nicely written and stays in the spirit of the game perfectly, but it just didn’t tell me what I needed to know. There are “tutorial” maps to load that go with a few pages of the manual, but these don’t adequately cover the basic game mechanics.

The Verdict

Lords of Magic is a stunningly beautiful, but flawed, creation. With regular crashes and glacially slow transitions between tactical combat and the main map you may want to look elsewhere for something a bit more polished. And, with a manual which doesn’t remotely explain how to play the game, unless you’re willing to invest a lot of time or are a strategic game whiz you’re better off with something else. Too bad really, the basis for an excellent game is there with deep tactical combat, varied Faiths and a nice blend of strategy and role playing, but the execution is well off the mark.

Lords of Magic Screenshots

My capital city is bustling with industry..	The area around my capital.
These Air worshippers will be cast to the winds!	Elves have excellent bowmen.

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