Might and Magic 7

I don't foresee myself re-playing M&M 7 again anytime soon either, but I might check the dark side in a few years down the line.

I really need to get around to actually finishing a Might and Magic game someday.

I own the entire collection on GOG, and I've played all of them, but for some reason I've never found the time to do a complete playthough.

Those who have money problems: GM merchant combined with enchanting allows you to make unlimited monies. Just buy rings and crap, enchant them, and sell them back for profit. It's tedious but money shouldnt be a problem.

Money wasn't a problem at all, even with just expert merchant, I got 900000 at the end (but then I don't buy much in the stores).

I first decided to stay in the M&M franchise for my next game. I considered HoMM3/5 and 6, but, to make a long story short, I decided on king's bounty from gog It barely runs on my laptop :s Is there any difference in difficulty between choosing might, mind or magic (and is it feasible to do primarily might + some magic spells) ?

Mind (paladin) is generally speaking considered to be the weakest of the classes. The class specific things in the might/magic tree are better than the mind ones. Also, warriors are better at utilizing the rage spirits than paladins, while mages are better at using magic. The paladin never gets to excel. Also, the mind tree is a bit lackluster at points.
Inquisition, Diplomacy, Reserve, Tolerance, Trade & Trophies never really felt worth it. And Keeper of Light & Holy Anger were questionable choices at best. Glory scales poorly, but is at least very useful early on.
That being said, the game is still fully playable as a paladin, and it will only be a little bit harder if you pick that class.
You will spend some points in all trees by the end of the game, a warrior should not totally ignore magic, nor should a mage ignore might.

Money was becoming a problem in M&M7 during the late mid-game, but once past that point, I started to get a huge influx of gold again. I only had one point spent in merchant though (that is one of those skill types that I almost always skimp on in CRPGs).

Fnord said:

Mind (paladin) is generally speaking considered to be the weakest of the classes. The class specific things in the might/magic tree are better than the mind ones. Also, warriors are better at utilizing the rage spirits than paladins, while mages are better at using magic. The paladin never gets to excel. Also, the mind tree is a bit lackluster at points.
Inquisition, Diplomacy, Reserve, Tolerance, Trade & Trophies never really felt worth it. And Keeper of Light & Holy Anger were questionable choices at best. Glory scales poorly, but is at least very useful early on.
That being said, the game is still fully playable as a paladin, and it will only be a little bit harder if you pick that class.
You will spend some points in all trees by the end of the game, a warrior should not totally ignore magic, nor should a mage ignore might.

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Is it strange that I have no idea what is being said here? Is this in reference to some other game than M&M7?

Yes, to King's Bounty.

mndrew said:

Is it strange that I have no idea what is being said here? Is this in reference to some other game than M&M7?

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Yeah, sorry bout that. My fault

Thanks Fnord, I have decided to go with might but I am having some graphical problems. First an annoying flicker (only on ATI it seems) which was solved by a driver update, but that introduced polygon corruption (polygons of trees and monsters extend over the whole screen sometimes, and after a while my hero is just a bunch of polygon spikes). Annoying, but playable.

I also decided to continue with the Might & Magic series, though in the form of M&M 8. I've got past the beginners island, and I've noticed something: There are less enemies in this game, thus resulting in less drawn out combat. That is quite nice actually, and I'm actually enjoying the early game.
Also, I've decided that my party will look like this:
Dark Elf, Dragon (for the sole reason of it being a dragon), cleric, necromancer & troll (because knights are so last year).

I've moved to MM8 as well and I generally keep the starting party and just use a cheat to change the vampire into a 2nd dark elf. I go with Dark Elf, Cleric, Mage, Dark Elf, Knight. I never use dragons in MM8 because they're basically a cheat. Way over-powered. I also never switch out to the over-powered hirelings that you can get later, but that's just my style. MM8 isn't very challenging compared to all the other MM games, so I keep it simple. I'm seriously considering letting my 2nd dark elf die and just go with a 4-being party. However, if you have 3 master-level fireballs to fling around, it can be a lot of fun

A note to Fnord, make sure to stock up on personality for your Dark Elf. She needs it for the merchant skill, if you go to master level.....

Yea, the Dragon is feeling a bit overpowered, though it is not dealing that much more damage than my other party members. On the other hand, it has no fighting skills to spend points in, so it can become the ultimate utility character, and still remain a top fighter.
I was planning to let my Cleric do most of the shopping, like I did in M&M7. Their manapool is dependent on personality, and I fear that my dark elf will spread himself too thin if I add more skills.

Clerics work great as shoppers. I have two elves, so I can make one a merchant and the other my traps/perception character. Each elf heavily specializes in one magic skill and just keeps one other mage skill as a backup in case of immunity. Having two priest casters is good too, but I try to make do with alchemy if the priest goes down. I keep a few raise dead and resurrection scrolls on hand, just in case too.

Fnord said:

Yea, the Dragon is feeling a bit overpowered, though it is not dealing that much more damage than my other party members. On the other hand, it has no fighting skills to spend points in, so it can become the ultimate utility character, and still remain a top fighter.

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The part about the dragon that's totally out of whack is the 100% hit breath "arrow". Extreme range, big damage, and never misses. A party with a couple dragons, with proper tactics, will never melee.

Almost as broken as dragons is the level 50 dark elf you can pick up early in the game. Any of the too-high level hirelings I pick up I just loot and leave in the guildhouse. I also make sure to add a dragon to my party last, and use the low-level one.
I do love being able to do both light and dark magic though, makes for all kinds of fun.

Due to the reports of overpowered later characters, I think I'll stick to the ones I have right now for the rest of the game. The Cleric, Necromancer & Knight that you get on the starter island, my Dark Elf and the lowest level Dragon.

I did by the way make a lot of progress yesterday, I managed to upgrade most of my characters (the cleric was by mistake, I found the book far earlier than I found the upgrade quest). Babysitting a computer that does calculations gives you a lot of time over for other things, if that computer happens to be my laptop... Today my laptop will be doing even more work (if this was a semi-modern computer, it would have been done by now).

Man, that is a bad score… I think. Anyway, I was starting to feel way overpowered for everything, so I just pushed on towards the end, to avoid the last bit being a joke. It still was. With day of the gods, my characters speed was so high that in real time I could not physically push the attack button fast enough to keep up with my characters recovery time. While my dragon was overpowered, so was my Dark Elf, who with his artifact bow shot two exploding arrows, that dealt around 40-50 AoE damage, per arrow. This can be compared to my dragon, which dealt ~80 damage per attack. In melee my knight would deal well over 130damage/hit, and my dark elf was no slouch there either, often crossing the 100damage line (one artifact sword/hand did the trick)
Sadly, the end game still turned out to be incredibly easy. They really should have upped the damage of most enemies, that would have made the game more interesting. Still not a bad game though, just far too easy.

And this was without any of the better characters that were introduced later on, I ran with the starter group - vampire + level 5 dragon all the way through.

Also, the random name generator made my character share name with this handsome fellow:

You finished M&M 8 in three days?

That's entirely possible. MM8 is significantly shorter than MM6 or 7. Once you pick up a Dragon, you can pretty much fly through the game in no time.

The only way to make MM8 challenging or lengthy is to not pick up Dragons.

No dragons and a party of four works great. It makes the fights a little more challenging, but 8 was too easy. There is a monster tweak that doubles their hitpoints and increases the drop rates on corpses that might be fun to mess with.

JDR13 said:

You finished M&M 8 in three days?

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I actually started it one day before I posted that I was going to play it, and I had two days where I was basically babysitting my laptop that did most of the work for me, so I had plenty of time to finish it

crpgnut said:

No dragons and a party of four works great. It makes the fights a little more challenging, but 8 was too easy. There is a monster tweak that doubles their hitpoints and increases the drop rates on corpses that might be fun to mess with.

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I would rather see an increase in how much damage enemies deal than how much damage they can take, though a bit of both would probably be ideal. And if I ever replay the game, I'll probably do it with just 4 characters, and no dragon (though the game seem to have less in the way of replay value than 7).

Maylander said:

That's entirely possible. MM8 is significantly shorter than MM6 or 7. Once you pick up a Dragon, you can pretty much fly through the game in no time.

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Indeed, and you can pick up a dragon very early. All you have to do is train its dragon skill to 7, so that you can make it a master dragon.