Yes! And get the Caster of Magic fan-made patch[0]. It fixes a ton of bugs and rebalances the game in some dramatic ways. The author has had to severely tone down the bonuses the AI gets at higher difficulty levels and it still feels way more difficult than the original game! I've got several of my friends hooked on this new version, we just can't seem to get enough!
From the description, it's a pretty severe revamp of the game. Do you think it is justified? Also, I wonder, how did he go about improving the AI: it's a closed source game, after all.
After playing a lot of it, the answer is: totally! The original game has some pretty severe balance problems: tons of spells are so underpowered that you never cast them and generally avoid researching them. Most of the units in the original game have so much resistance that nearly all of the unit curse spells have little or no effect on them. The disparity between the realms of magic was also way too high on the original game.
Also, I wonder, how did he go about improving the AI
With a hex editor. A bunch of the AI code in the original game is decently well written. The problem is that the game has tables of hard-coded priorities for things like spells, units, buffs, etc. that are way out of whack. His detailed changelogs go over the hundreds of adjustments he's made to these priority values.
He also just fixed a whole bunch of straight bugs with the AI. Some examples: it would cast spells without a valid target (wasting mana and spellcasting skill), build and disband units repeatedly, miscalculate combat odds and then carry out an attack that had no chance of succeeding, etc.
Thank you for this! I love MoM but I'm constantly saddened by the crashing bugs, the units with negative hit points, and so on. I'll have to try it out!
Since we're doing alternatives for Civ-lovers, I really, really enjoyed Galactic Civilizations II. It had the right mix of massive scale, diverse strategy, politics, and an interesting combat mechanic with user-designed units. Endgame is sometimes a bit weak, when it's obvious you've won and have to grind through a multi-hour campaign of genocide, but it's the only game that's come close to that feeling of depth and complexity I got as a teenager from the Civ series.
I tried to like Galactic Civilization II, but in the end, I came back to the first MoO. For example, I don't care enough about micro-management to build individual things on my planets. Give me the sliders. Also, MoO's research system is still without equal: each playthrough different technologies are available (for each faction, and thus for the whole galaxy) changing the character of the game.