Official release date is December 13th 2022, wait for it!
Working towards the Gold Q&A excerpt:
Q: Is there a plan to make finding good settler locations easier, like a map filter/lens that shows all nearby hex values instead of needing to hover over each one?
A: Yes, we do have some ideas and plans for this, but we will see if it can be done before release, or future updates.
Q: Will unrest modifiers per race be included as I feel this is hidden info currently?
A: We don’t currently have plans to display those, but race tension is implemented in the game and can even be modded.
Q: Loss of fame when a town is taken seems to be missing, will you implement it?
A: You do lose Fame when a city is lost, however, this information is not currently displayed. It is on a list for possible future updates.
Q: With the final release almost upon us, could you share what have been the biggest challenges and the most difficult decisions you had to take?
A: Faithfully recreating the spells, because they are so custom made, it has been a real challenge attempting this. And this leads directly to the other one, the AI, because all of the game’s mechanics are so irregular (in that they often have exceptions and special rules, rather than unified systems) teaching the AI to act with intelligence has been all the more complex.
And of course, just juggling expectation vs reality. So now coming up to the release it was hard to say stop to adding/modding features and just focusing on making what we have great.
Q:The game seems mostly very faithful to the original, and you took only minor (tasteful) decisions, like the hex maps or the refined events. Would you share what drove you to this path, are you happy with it?
A: I think it is safe to say that you, that is, the passionate fan base of the original game, have really steered us in this direction. When we were first approached to do this project, we weren’t convinced if we were going to stay as faithful. But, upon research, playing the game again, and just interacting with the fans, we decided to go all in. Are we happy we did it that way? Ask me again on December 13th!
Although, on a more personal note, I [Yuuki] actually am very happy we did it this way, as I dislike remakes and adaptations that don’t try it.
Q: Will there eventually be more than two ways to win?
A: We do not have plans to expand the game in this direction at the moment. Although back in the day of initial design talks, we did indeed ponder about the possibilities. So perhaps in the future we may revisit those ideas.
Q: Performance: is the beta slower than the final release is going to be? Even on relatively fast modern hardware, I sometimes notice stuttering or slow response times. Nothing dramatic, but I imagine that lower-end machines might struggle more.
A: The development build does tend to be more resource demanding than release builds, so we hope the answer is yes, and we are working towards that goal. Additionally, we plan to invest additional time in memory management which may also positively impact the final performance.
Q: On a completely more facetious note, what are the dev team favourite wizards or heroes?
A: I [Yuuki] play a custom Wizard almost every time now, I use Kali’s portrait the most, and I like Alchemy, Warlord, Channelling and mostly Life magic (I know, probable a terrible way to play, but I like it... them boosted paladins, love’em!) To further display my inaptitudes as a strategy player, I actually like getting B’Shan, cause he’s free :P
SirPi tells me Merlin is his favourite Wizard, although it is a love/hate relationship. Merlin is the first Wizard on the list, thus for quick tests, we tend to click on him most often... and then Brax is Szymon’s favourite hero as he loves dwarves.
A’vee singled out Jafar as her favourite Wizard, because of the mana - gold flexibility. And she likes MysticX but her reasons are Unknown… (must be the menacingly glowing eyes).
Shell, like me, likes to play custom Wizard. His BadBoy uses the Raven portrait and has Warlock +Myrran+Channeler+Alchemy and two Life books. His favourite hero is Mortu the Black Knight.
Khash did not poke his head from under the code to answer and Obi, being Khash’s padawan probably felt he should do as his master does...
Q: Will Master of Magic have the same compile at execute style modding as Thea 2 did? Because that was fantastic.
A: Both MoM and Thea2 share the scripting system, where a fair share of the gameplay is already exposed to scripts you can modify and which are loaded when you start the game and no tools except notepad are needed.
Both games have large databases in XML format, relatively easy to read (we hope ;) ) and both games have the event editor, with possibilities which can be extended in many aspects by scripts and database.
More modding features will likely join those above following implementations similar to what Thea 2 offers so yes, we hope you will be satisfied.
Q: How many things/what can be modded?
A: At the moment, the moddable areas are:
- Adding/Modding Skills (but not the art atm)
- Adding/Modding Traits (not the art atm)
- Units (although not not 3D models, and not 2D art atm)
- Resource distribution
- Lair rewards
- Building bonuses
- New buildings (but they will not show on the map, as you can’t add the 2d art to the map, and no new icons atm)
- Change/add spells (including sound effects but not art atm and not special effects)
- Adding music (by adding an Ogg file to the assets)
- Adding sound effects
- Race tension stats can also be modded in the database
- World events via the event editor
- Some AI behaviours will be moddable
- Treaties in Diplomacy can be adjusted in terms of values
Things we plan to add when possible:
- Adding custom 2D art and icons
Things that are less likely to become available (we’re not saying they are impossible, but those would require a lot, so we can’t make any promises here):
- 3D models
- Visual effects
