Yes, it's finally time to start the best Might and Magic game of all, that one classic everyone keeps praising.

As usual, I'd like some high level general advice and would be happy if anyone could offer a tip or two. I'll be playing my CD version with community patch 1.3. This should be same that GOG's offering (I do have the game on GOG too).

And I'd just like to reiterate that as always on my first run I'm not looking for the most powerful party. Just a nice balanced one. So no 4-mages or highly powergaming advice, please.

Well, for starters, the manual seems to be very light on more technical in-game info regarding spells, skills and classes. Did something else came with it, that's not available on GOG (my CD version is a second-hand, jewel-case only off eBay)? I have absolutely no idea how, say, an assassin is different from a gladiator skillwise or why should I choose one over the other.

That said, I plan on having one of each of the 4 secondary classes and then choose one of the specialities for each. Since lich seems to be the only one capable of learning Dark (is that so?), I think I'll choose Lich, and then have Paladin/Ranger learn Light. Is this a good idea overall?

Does the game have Good-Evil paths like MM6 and to a greater degree MM7?

Any skills I should concentrate on? Merchant worth it? What about Learning? Those 2 being non-retroactive I'm most concerned about, should I quickly try and get GM?

How do companions work? Is it like MM6/7 in that they get bonuses but cost you less gold?

Any other general advice?

Hey!
Great choice! This is by far the best MM game and in no way so buggy at launch I had to restart the game twice, once for each official patch because I had hit bugs that broke the main quest and couldn't be fixed retroactively by the devs.

Keep in mind, the following are memories from many years ago:

First time I finished the game with a paladin, assassin, priest, lich party. It had pretty much everything you could need. GM repair and merchant on the Paladin, GM disarm trap on the Assassin, GM Light+Spirit for good heals on the Priest and GM Elemental+Dark for good damage on the Lich.

Because of the way the spell schools work in MM9, you can easily replace the Lich with a Mage and keep most of the offensive power, with a dash of extra utility and defense from GM Light. This also translated in the Priest being a pretty good damage dealer as well, spell wise. I think he could get master Elemental magic, so he could pack a wallop as well in a pinch.

GM merchant is about as useful as in the previous couple of games, meaning it's good at the start, but eventually you get so much gold you'll stop caring about it. For a first timer, I'd say you should get it. Being able to work around the Merchant skill requires you to know in advance where to go to get good loot.

I have a very strong impression that chest traps were particularly deadly in MM9, so I strongly encourage getting at least 1 class that can go to M disarm traps - I went with the assassin specifically for GM disarm.

The followers in MM9 are more like mercenaries. They don't give you any extra skills or abilities, like in MM6 or 7, but they do fight with you, as sort of an extra character you can't customize. I have no idea how good they are, as I only ever used the ones you get for certain quests, which were adequate.

Learning is...bugged, I choose to believe. There is no other explanation for why my GM Learning Lich got 50 more levels than the rest of the party in the last 1/4 of the game. I think it multiplies the previous level of bonus instead of the base. So instead of having 50% extra XP at skill lvl 10, as in the previous games, you get 10%(base) * 2(expert) * 3(master) * 5(GM) for a total of 300% extra XP.

Stay tuned for a quick description of how magic works in MM9, since it's very different from the other games in the series.

Regarding this, it's not bugged. According to the manual the formula is:

Base + (base * skill * mastery)

where mastery is 10% normal, 20% expert, 30% master, 50% GM

Note the multiplication by skill, which was absent in previous games.

A grandmaster with 10 skill points would get 10 * 50% for a total of 500% of base XP.

My advice - if you find this game hard in turn-based mode, try real-time. For some reason MM9 gives you much more turns in real-time than in turn-based mode, so the game suddenly becomes quite easy (and I speak it as one who is very bad at playing 3D Action games).

Be very careful with promotion quests when choosing who is going to be on the quest and be promoted. If you decline promotion by miss-click or something, that character will be screwed FOREVER. I learned it the hard way.

Note I said "I choose to believe" :)

I know that's how it's meant to work in this game, but I feel that it's pretty bad design. The benefits are far too large IMO. Using an all Lich/Mage party you can get to ungodly levels in pretty quick order, and just flatten anything that gets in your way with your 50+ points in all skills :P

Anyway, on to the magic:

As you've probably noticed from the manual, there are only 4 magic types in the game: Elemental, Spirit, Light and Dark.
All the spells in the game have at least 2 magic schools associated with them. The most powerful spells have 3.
Most have different effects depending on the level of mastery you have in the associated magic schools.

For example, and this is completely made up, since I can't remember details anymore:
The spell "Curse" needs Light(L) and Dark(D) at normal level to learn.
At this level it'll last for L x minutes and decrease a monster's attack rating by D.
Once you get expert Light, it'll last L x 10 minutes, while getting expert Dark will decrease attack rating by D x 10, but also decreases monster walk speed.
Getting master Light might cause it to affect everyone on your screen, and master Dark to also decrease attack speed.

I hope you get what I'm trying to explain here. Getting GM in a magic type no longer makes all the spells related to that magic type automatically work at their maximum efficiency.
It's perfectly viable to cast an elemental spell as a Priest, for example ( and in this game they can get access to Lloyd's Beacon and Town Portal or even Chain Lightning) or a Dark spell as a Mage, even if it won't have the same effects as if it were cast by a Lich, the fact that you have another associated magic class raised can still provide a sufficient benefit to make it worth it.

This is by far the best feature of MM9, I feel. It added a depth to the magic system that I found interesting.

Heh...all this explaining has made me nostalgic. I think it's about time for me to finally make that all Druid party I kept planning to make and punch everything into submission :D

Good luck on your playthrough!

Sounds like Learning might be a bit *too* powerful. Of course, this leads to a few extra questions:

1. What does the XP curve look like? Does the XP required to level up eventually top out (like in at least MM1-5), or does it keep increasing?

2. If you have a character focus on Learning to the exclusion of other skills and get GM as soon as possible, what level would the character likely reach by end-game?

3. What's the level cap, and is it feasible to reach it with Learning? In particular, is the level cap low enough that putting too much into Learning will result in it being wasted because of the cap? Also, does anything strange (like integer overflow, for example) happen if you try to level up past the cap?

1. 1000*N*(N+1) / 2
This is the same EXP formula as in MM6-8.
2. Personally, I was at around Level 80-90 when I finished this game I think.
3. Level Cap is 255 in MM9.
If you are interested in integer overflows in Levels and EXP, your games are MM 6 and MM 7 (no level caps in those), but it will take you quite a time to reach those overflows... :)

Again, this is going off of memories from at least 5 years ago, when I last played this, so...grain of salt and all that.

1) Don't remember specifics, but it felt pretty much like leveling in MM7-8. I don't think there was a top out on the curve.

2) The closest example of this I can give you is from my original party. Pally, Assassin, Priest and Lich. Pally and Assassin had expert learning @10 ranks, I think, priest can't remember, Lich was GM @10 ranks, not rushed or anything, but I got it pretty soon after I got my Lich promotion. Let's say about 3/4 of the way in the game. Until this point, the level difference between my characters was a few levels, 5 TOPS.
When I finished the game, my fighters were around level 60 or 70, while the Lich was around 110-120.

3) No idea if there is a level cap.

Which brings me to the question, was there an additional manual/datasheet that gave all these details about spells? If not, how am I supposed to know what does what at which level of skill?

Another question:

According to the manual

"At Grandmaster level for the Paladin class, the skill provides an additional +1 bonus to the character’s combat total per skill level and a +1 bonus per skill level to the damage the character inflicts upon its target (this bonus only applies to bladed weapons). At Grandmaster level for the Gladiator class, the skill
provides a +1 bonus per skill point to the character’s Armour Class, and an additional +1 bonus per skill point to the characters combat total (Bonus applies to only bladed weapons). At Grandmaster level for the
Assassin class the skill provides a +1 bonus to the character’s attack skill for every 3 points of skill when wielding daggers."

So if I'm reading correctly, at GM blade

Paladin gets +1 attack and +1 damage per skill for all blades
Gladiator gets +1 attack and +1 AC per skill for all blades

Assassin gets +1 attack per 3 skill and for daggers only.

Is the Blade skill really really unbalanced for assasins? Not only they get 1 bonus instead of 2, they also get their skill levels divided by 3 when applying it, and can use it for daggers only?

I remember for a fact that assassins get an additional attack with daggers at GM blade, 2 extra if you dual-wield daggers.


As far as I can remember, there was no additional information about what spells did what, except in game.
By which I mean checking the spell description when you add points and when you increase school mastery.

The manual isn't exactly accurate, I'm afraid. You'll have to look for some fan-curated information on the web, but after this long it seems it's quite sparse....
I did find this site: https://camilleb.home.xs4all.nl/MM9/
It seems to give some additional information under spell notes, with no spoilers.

Installed it off the CD and it... just wouldn't run (using Windows 7). No error message or anything; I'd just get the hourglass cursor for a split second and then nothing.
After trying all manner of compatibility settings and running as administrator, as well as applying patch 1.3, I uninstalled and installed the GOG version. I really wanted that particular CD to run, but in the end I guess this will do.

Still in that first tutorial area, and the impression is not so bad. The biggest issue in getting used to the controls is the lack of in-game cursor (why?) so having to press the shortcut keys to access anything as well as the fact that clicking is not used to open doors, pick up items... etc (not a huge problem since I mapped Space to one of my mouse's thumb buttons, but it takes getting used to. Hope I don't attack a neutral by mistake because of this).

But overall it doesn't seem so bad. I'm hoping all the negativity was due to the hype and disappointment when the game came out. But 15 years later an old game is an old game, especially if you're not having high expectations. And I hope I manage to avoid the bugs...

IIRC you can't attack neutral NPCs in MM9.

Thanks. If that's the case, it's not so bad. I definitely couldn't attack Grandpa Tutorial, but wasn't sure if that's because he was in particular invincible or if it was the case with all neutral NPCs.

Minor annoyances:

_How do you "cancel" a spell after selecting it but before selecting a target. I set Heal as a quickspell, but because I'm used to right-clicking on object, I often cast it accidentally. There doesn't seem to be a way of cancelling it after the "magic wand target select" cursor appears, short of leaving to the menu and coming back.

_How do you change the order of items in your backpack. Other than trading them between characters.

_I really don't like the fact that Tab (cycle through characters) cannot be reassigned.

Oh, and I finally realized what it was that I was subconsciously missing. It's that minimap on the main screen (togther with Wizard Eye spell. Mmmm...).