The higher the difficulty level, the quicker it seems that the enemies will take over nodes and fallen ruins/dungeons. This takes away from a lot of the fun that I have because part of what makes the game enjoyable is going into the nodes and hoping to get a nice retort, items, or even spellbooks. I just finished a game up on impossible where I was only able to conquer about 2-3 nodes and maybe 4-5 ruins/dungeons/lairs etc. because everything was simply gone by the time I got strong enough (was bombarded quite early). Of course I could attempt to negotiate better to allow me time to wander around but that is far from guaranteed (and I shouldn't need to do that to enjoy the ruins/dungeons/lairs). I have even tried to put the magic on 0.5x to see if the computer will turn its focus away from nodes, but it does not have any affect (at least on impossible).
Does anybody have ideas here? Of course I can go the whole 11 book summon rush route, which dominates on any difficulty but that is boring and far too easy.


Is there a way to switch between melee/ranged? I notice a topic below (the Malleus one) mentioning Warrax and that one benefit is he can melee/ranged but in my experience the unit must shoot all of its ammo before going melee. There are many examples, one that comes to mind are the Nightblades from the Darkelves. The Nightblades seem like they would be a decent unit, until even after I get them up close to the enemy, they still shoot them with the weak magical attack rather than use the powerful melee attack they have.


Last one.. Is there a way to upgrade the sound? I noticed the in-game soundtrack available with the purchase. It sounds much better than the current 8bit in-game sound.

1) Enemy wizards are drawn to nodes as a source of mana; whether the node contains anything of value is almost incidental to their AI. (This also applies to towers; it's more about controlling planar access and less about spells. And they tend to clear nearby lairs to eliminate rampaging monsters, not for the loot.)

That being said, there are usually a lot of island nodes on Myrror (and to a lesser extent, Arcanus) that are too far from any cities for their wizards to have bothered taking them over. You could try starting on Myrror and seeing where that takes you. Don't expect too much, however; the setting is called "Impossible" for a reason. ;)

2) As far as I know (others may come along and correct me on this) units will always choose ranged combat over melee, until their range attacks are exhausted. (And some units may have only the barest of melee attacks, not adding up to much more than the ability to defend — usually poorly — against an opponent's charge.)

In the case of someone like Warrax, as long as he has spell points he will prefer to use his magic attack over melee, even at point blank range. Same goes for the other magic-inclined heroes; but you can at least equip them to be melee-ready. Whereas bow-based heroes like B'Shan and Shuri are at a distinct disadvantage once all their arrows are gone; they can't even drop their bow in the middle of battle and pick up an enchanted sword.

3) I'm gonna leave this one for someone else. I've never tried to fool with the system settings that way, so I don't have an answer.

NO. There is no way to deliberately initiate a melee attack with a unit that still has ranged attack ammo left.

NightBlades don't actually have a ranged attack btw. They are 1 of 3 Dark Elf units that don't have a ranged attack, the other 2 being Settlers and Trieme.

Now as to why Warrax is mentioned that way is because even though he may not initiate a melee attack while he still has 3 or more mp he can still be attacked. Therefore his melee abilities will protect him then as well. Remember also there are some pretty expensive Rare spells that your Heroes can cast to quickly empty that mana pool as well so that he can fall back on his melee attacks.

I kind of replied to this in this thread

So yes, there is. Some basic knowledge of runnning programs in DOS (in DosBOX) and configuring dosbox is required. I'm not going in depth here. In case you want more help, ask, and I might try to make a short howto when I have time - unless someone else beats me to it =).

First try GM, and if you are happy with it, you are done. If your Windows (or any other OS) has poor GM emulation, I'd recommend GUS emulation. To save some Googling:

1) A thread about setting the ULTRASND folder

2) MoM GUS game patch (Among other GUS support patches for games).

I believe there are better GM emulators / softsynths for Windows (and OSX for that matter) than what come with the OS. I'm using Linux, and use the GUS emulation currently for MoM, but I've also tried Timidity++ and Fluidsynthh, and both give quite good results.

EDIT: There's also this thread which outlines the configuration file editing. Also it mentions the slower load times when using GM, which is true - I believe the game does some GM initialization in emulated DOS which is slow. But I haven't noticed any slowdown with GUS emulation. The music is better but not that mind-blowing, so denepding on your comfortability level on configuring this kind of things, it might or might not be worth it =).