[chongli]

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!

[0] http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=7751

[listic]

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.

[chongli]

Do you think it is justified?

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.

[sevensor]

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!

[chongli]

Definitely try it out. It fixes tons of bugs. Quite a few entire spells that used to corrupt the game state are now fixed and working perfectly.